Lol. Look Zootl, I know youve often felt that urge to destroy your writing, and actually done that. I am not lying when I say I felt sorry for you (and those that trust you) when you destroyed your forum, and wondered what could be so ... wrong in your eyes to your own work; which I, granted, found to be pointless, but charming. Whats wrong with a little pointless charm? Now I see - you wish to amount to something.
You are already something.
You are nice. You have a style of sorts. And polite you are.
Thats something, several somethings.
Now, be grateful for what you are and love some neighbor. Stick to what you have to offer.
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
I sense there is an element to the best spirit of it that resounds well in N, and in him as the first good resounding chamber, the first one who could make the claim Jesus made as a fool, as a wise man.
What claim is that?
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[edit - why I keep finding small but true connections- there is a noble force emanating out of - not exactly all, some - 'early christianities'. Such forms are always in part the congregation of braving men revering their souls at the solstice, uninitiated into the hideous forms of Paul the epileptic on whom Nietzsche says: "that disastrous wrong-headed fellow must be held responsible. "]
What noble teachings were they - what did you take from them?
One thing I want to make clear is that my written positions can not yet at once reflect the whole of my perspective. I deal in at least three distinct cognitive languages, coherences, value systems. They are progressing toward a similar point; but only in my heart is that seen or known.
A language that flows along-with rather than an orthogonal signification; its like the fylgja [spiritbeing] keeping step with the panther [becoming] - the sovereign And the beast... incidentally, your avatar pic. was mine a couple of years ago on this forum. When the mimesis is cohesive, you have the "metaphysical bone", the fylgja is able to leap when the panther does:
Nietzsche wrote:
"Spirit and character. - Some reach their peak as characters, but their spirit is not adequate for this height, while with others it is the other way around." [JW, 235]
And the word and the world concentrate opening a vortex but only for a brief moment.
Frazer called this sympathetic magic, you would call this spontaneity, Heraclitus would call this attunement, Satyr calls it mirroring (double) or persuasion (peitho) and I see in it the uruz<>algiz concordance.
Algiz: one's spirit and character must be adequate for each other.
"My character is my fate (daimon)." [Heraclitus]
"What fate, what accident could befall me now, that was not already my own..." [N.] - The idea of personal gravity/luck.
"Hoof and horn, hoof and horn All that dies shall be reborn Corn and grain, corn and grain All that falls shall rise again"
"The rune of Algiz depicts a person with arms upraised, elk's antlers, or a representation of the Norse God Heimdall who holds his sword in one hand and his horn in the other -- guarding the divine realm of Asgard. In the old Germanic languages, Algiz means "defense" or "protection". "Elhaz", yet another name for this rune, means "elk" and refers to the four elks that feed off of the World Tree of Norse legend, or Yggdrasil."
Quote :
"The symbol itself could represent the upper branches of Yggdrasil, a flower opening to receive the sun (Sowilo is the next rune in the futhark after all,) the antlers of the elk, the Valkyrie and her wings, or the invoker stance common to many of the world’s priests and shamans. In a very contemporary context, the symbol could be powerfully equated to a satellite dish reaching toward the heavens and communicating with the gods and other entities throughout this and other worlds."
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"Spiritually, it signifies the reaching of the divine. The rune also means success through quest, search or other enterprise. Schemes develop quickly, like a fast growing pine tree. You are protected from any attack, while awareness and alertness guide you. Vision, clarity of mind and wisdom will support your cause."
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"One interpretation of the stave-shape is that it shows a human with head and hands upraised in the Teutonic stance of prayer, or willed and mutual communication between gods and humans. It is the rune by which one may hold speech with one´s own valkyrja, the swan-winged bringer of wisdom and messenger between god and humans. Bifrost may only be crossed by humans when they are guided by the valkyrja, when the increase of dust - that is, the full melding of the highest being of the soul with the living human awareness - has taken place. One may use the original tree-form to draw power from all the worlds. Elhaz may be used to cause woe to those who are spiritually unrefined to benefit from its cleansing fire."
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"The antlers are a symbol of spiritual authority because they grow above the physical head, reaching towards the realm of spirit. They signify regeneration, because they die and grow back, bigger than before. They are worn by Cernunnos, the ancient Celtic Master of the Animals, by Mongol women shamans, and by the rotiyaner or “men of good minds”, the traditional chiefs of the Six Nations of the Longhouse, or Iroquois. Visually, deer antlers suggest the shape of a tree, even the World Tree that shamans climb; the resemblance is in the French word for antlers, which are called thebois - wood – of the deer."
"Deer's medicine includes gentleness in word, thought and touch. The ability to listen, grace and appreciation for the beauty of balance. Understanding of what's necessary for survival, power of gratitude and giving, ability to sacrifice for the higher good, connection to the woodland goddess, alternative paths to a goal
In the Celtic tradition, there are two aspects of deer - female and male. The Hind (the red female deer), called Eilid in the Gaelic language, symbolises femininity, subtlety and gracefulness. The Hind is believed to call to us from the Faery realm, tempting us to release the material trappings of so-called 'civilization', to go deep into the forest of magic, to explore our own magical and spiritual nature. The Stag, Damh in the Gaelic tongue, is also linked to the sacredness of the magical forest. The Damh represents independence, purification, and pride. It is known as the King of the Forest, the protector of its creatures. For time immemorial people have sought to identify with the stag by ceremonially wearing antlered headdresses and imitating the deer's leaping grace.
They can hear a twig snap a very long way off. People with this power animal are often described as being swift and alert. They are intuitive, often seeming to possess well developed, even extrasensory perceptions. Sometimes their thoughts seem to race ahead, and they appear not to be listening, to be somewhere else. Anyone with power animal has latent clairvoyant and clairaudient abilities. They can see between the shadows, detect subtle movements and hear that which is not being uttered.
The set of antlers grown by the male deer are antennae that connect it to higher energies. Called ‘The Crown of Courage’, the antlers are linked to the crown chakra in man. As the antlers grow, the crown chakra opens and widens giving those with this power animal a direct channel to universal knowledge."
Quote :
"Elk... Your antlers reach for the Sun.
Shamans could make this trip without the need of an actual reindeer. Instead, they “turn[ed] into a... reindeer” and flew to the sun on their own, dressed in antlers and a feathered cloak, beating a reindeer skin drum. In a sense, their power was a result of an experience analogous to joining the Wild Hunt — they had previously re-enacted and identified with the death of a reindeer whose spirit lived on in them. Having followed him into death, they were able to fly into new worlds. Similarly, the Huichol Sacred Deer led his people to the site of his own death, where his body had first become the peyote. Re-enacting that death by shooting the plant with arrows, pilgrims could then take advantage of his sacrifice and ride the drug-that-was-the-deer to a new life.
Civilizations developed other ways to get to the sun. In the meditative archery of ancient Turkey and India, arrows were aimed at shining discs, with the imagery of piercing the sun to reach an unnameable beyond. In late Roman times, the sun-god’s chariot bore emperors aloft to the sun, the natural destination of the soul freed from the wheel of fate. But the tradition of following the stag who bears the sun has an even longer history and reflects our inescapable rootedness in the natural world. To be more, to reach higher, we must unite ourselves all the more deeply with the forces of earth and the wild, forces which are always branching outward, rising upward, like a crown of antlers. It is they that sweep us from one world, one state of consciousness, to the next. That is why, for much of human history, the journey of transcendence was not governed by human will or won by human hand, but instigated and led by the antlered ones, those most ancient messengers from the more-than-human world."
The antlers of the deer represented in the rune Algiz symbolized a man with hands upstretched to the vaults of space, an evolution of consciousness branching out from one's fatedness... to become light, create a world of one's own...
Spengler wrote:
"The hand. Here is a weapon unparalleled in the world of free-moving life. Compare with it the paw, the beak, the horns, teeth, and tail-fins of other creatures. To begin with, the sense of touch is concentrated in it to such a degree that it can almost be called the organ of touch, in the sense that the eye is the organ of vision, and the ear of hearing. It distinguishes not only hot and cold, solid and liquid, hard and soft, but, above all, weight, form, and position of resistances, etc. — in short, things in space. But, over and above this function, the activity of living is gathered into it so completely that the whole bearing and allure of the body has — simultaneously — taken shape in accordance with it. There is nothing in the whole world that can be set beside this member, capable equally of touch and action. To the eye of the beast of prey which regards the world “theoretically” is added the hand of man which commands it practically." [Man and Technics]
The horn and the devil - the diablo, the double.
The Luciferian uses his Charisma to persuade others to Re-cognize their innate potential as a Lover would.
Venus of whose sign it is, is the planet of love and love-charms. This involves an opening of consciousness.
Intimacy.
Quote :
"No one can be fully aware of another human being unless we love them. By that love we see potential in our beloved. Through that love we allow our beloved to see their potential. Expressing that love, our beloved's potential comes true." [Hannibal, 2.9]
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"Never touching but guiding them from dissonance towards conversation..." [Hannibal, 2.10]
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"You and I went so long in our friendship without ever touching; yet I almost felt attuned to you." [Hannibal, 2.10]
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"Sympathetic resonance or sympathetic vibration is a harmonic phenomenon wherein a formerly passive string or vibratory body responds to external vibrations to which it has a harmonic likeness. The classic example is demonstrated with two similar tuning-forks of which one is mounted on a wooden box. If the other one is struck and then placed on the box, then muted, the un-struck mounted fork will be heard. In similar fashion, strings will respond to the external vibrations of a tuning-fork when sufficient harmonic relations exist between the respective vibratory modes. A unison or octave will provoke the largest response as there is maximum likeness in vibratory motion."
When one dies, the other carries on the vibration, the poetic notes, the heart-beat...
This was the meaning of the genius. Being in-touch with the Double, the Diablo - that the Protraction of one's vibration even when dead, could stretch even across centuries setting another in motion.
Quote :
"Genius is — literally — creative power, the divine spark in the individual life that in the stream of the generations mysteriously and suddenly appears, is extinguished, and a generation later reappears with equal suddenness. Talent is a gift for particular tasks already there, which can be developed by tradition, teaching, training, and practice to high effectiveness. Talent in its exercise presupposes genius — and not vice versa." [Spengler, Man and Technics]
But intimacy is not always a happy affair, the "breach of individual separateness" is a dangerous one... The antlers protrude and are intrusive and you can't be sure what kind of charged particles enter your blood-stream… Its why the ancients advised to always keep good company.
Quote :
"I sold my soul to the devil… I sold my soul to the Devil, No for a farthing not for a shilling But the knowledge of my own ignorance. And in its place I have but a dull void Of loneliness in this unworthy, miserable world. I sold my soul to the Devil, Because I couldn’t live with it, It has revealed in an awful whisper To me, all that is better left unsaid. I envy ignorance and purity of heart, For me its no use, what’s done will not be altered, The Devil, is my only trusted friend And for my soul he is in my debt. The truth that we would rather not have known Cannot escape from my unveiled sight And I’ll make it my revenge on those who are happier then I, To crush the fortress, To remove the blinds And to present you with the naked, vulgar Truth."
The Naked Vulgar Truth...
Quote :
"What, then, are the basic forms of the speaking? Not the judgment and declaration, but the command, the expression of obedience, the enunciation, the question, the affirmation or negation. These are sentences, originally quite brief, which are invariably addressed to others, such as “Do this!” “Ready?” “Yes!” “Go ahead!” Words as designations of notions are only products of the object of the sentence, and hence it is that the vocabulary of a hunting tribe is from the outset different from that of a village of cowherds or a seafaring coastal population.
The original object of speech is the carrying out of an act in accordance with intention, time, place, and means. Clear and unequivocal construction is therefore the first essential, and the difficulty of both conveying one’s meaning to, and imposing one’s will on, another produced the technique of grammar, sentences, and constructions, the correct modes of ordering, questioning, and answering, and the building-up of classes of words — on the basis of practical and not theoretical intentions and purposes. The part played by theoretical reflectiveness in the beginnings of speaking in sentences was practically nil. All speech was of a practical nature and proceeded from the “thought of the hand.”" [Spengler, Man and Technics]
Yet, from the diabolical point of view,
The weight attached to a fork can also be thought of as an idea or Accentuation we implant in another, to generate a beat, an interaction within specific range.
Isn't that how Strauss and Nietzsche thought too? Displaying only a certain range, and letting the other hear what it wants to hear... Isn't that how even popular democracy works? You find that frequency which evokes maximum resonance possible and extract approval, set them all vibrating to you…
Sloterdijk wrote:
"With Marshall Mc Luhan, I presuppose that understanding between people in societies-above all, what they are and achieve in general-has an autoplastic meaning. These conditions of communication provide groups with a redundancy in which they can vibrate. They imprint on such groups the rhythms and models by which they are able to recognize themselves and by which they repeat themselves as almost the same. They produce a consensus in which they perform the eternal return of the same in the form of a spoken song. Languages are instruments of group narcissism, played so as to tune and retune the player; they make their speakers ring in singular tonalities of self-excitation. They are systems of melodies for recognition, which nearly always delineate the whole program as well. Languages are not primarily used for what is today called the passing on of information, but serve to form communicating group-bodies. People possess language so that they can speak of their own merits [Vorziigen]-and not least of the unsurpassable merit of being able to talk up these merits in their own language. First, and for the most part, people are not concerned to draw each other's attention to states of affairs, but aim instead to incorporate states of affairs into a glory. The different speaker-groups of history-all the various tribes and peoples-are self-praising entities that avail themselves of their own inimitable idiom as part of a psychosocial contest played to gain advantage for themselves." [Nietzsche Apostle]
Quote :
"The word coupling denotes the idea that in a molecule, vibrational and electronic interactions are interrelated and influence each other. Among the many forms of coupling there are also Entanglement, Quantum Entanglement, Sympathy, Sympathetic Association, Sympathetic Oscillation, Sympathetic Vibration. "Norman Lockyer, in his book "The Chemistry of the Sun" says that, in dealing with molecules one feels as if dealing with more a mental than physical attribute - "a sort of expression of free will on the part of the molecules." Also "The law that connects radiation with absorption and enables us to read the riddle set by the sun and stars, is then simply The law of Sympathetic Vibration." The Snell Manuscript"
Armies and their marching beat too must work on this psychic principle...
The blond beast moving as one unit.
Satyr wrote:
To know other is to know self. The best pretenders control the varieties of personality already in them.
When a liar convinces the other, a conman exploits, a magician performs his trickery, the seducer seduces, he is only pulling out of the other what was there all along. He cannot place what he then manipulates there, he must only (re)cognize it, as himself in otherness, and if his understanding of self is precise he can direct it.
There is a psychological equivalent in the tuning-fork example of in-tune vibrations. I think it is called mirroring. The alteration in tone, caused by placing a piece over one part of one of the tuning-forks, can be considered a form of control.
Someone in control of his self, his vibrations, his becoming, can adjust his tone, so as to produce in the other a congruence. The second believes the first is like it, because both vibrate the same, they are in tune. The first can adjust his tone to what is within his ability. Solitude can be the product of this controlled adjustment, where the tuning-fork never allows for the entire breadth of its vibrations to be heard, for whatever reason, and is constantly adjusting to remain within the harmonics of otherness.
The factor here is the common ground. Synchronization only when the participants share a foundation.
A socioeconomic/cultural system provides this ritualized, order; the predictable, solid but (re)active grounding. Language and how words are defined is how this happens memetically, in synchronizing thoughts.
"God" as the representation of this immutable, determining, higher order, residing in the "immanent", the receding past, dies, in this slow falling back. Man can now shape the past - as Orwell described it - taking God's place as the creating "word."
The word is freed from a Being. Man becomes the shaper of his own reality, by taking control over the word. Man becomes the shape-shifter, the doppelganger. And what is shaped more easily than flesh, but inanimate matter: plastic, fabric, metal. To take control is to pull away, to dislodge. The word is detached from the phenomenon, becoming purified....a holy word. Sacred being what is unsoiled by the earthly, the base, the primal = enlightened, made light, placed on a pedestal, on metal boots, for instance, as if floating above reality, detached/detaching from it. The skin feels, but behind the metal it is numbed - the metal is an added padding, a thickness. Sunlight does not burn it...it only heats its surfaces.
The word is its own definition, in the same way God was defined as the Creator of Himself, and of the world. A solipsistic innuendo - the end of the causal chain. A word is what is written, using words, in the dictionary. When used linguistically it refers only to the mental abstraction - abstraction being a form of detachment, simplification/generalization being the cutting away of dimensions.
Dictionary offer a general outline, just as the Bible does. Both are taken literally, rather as representations, an art-form....just as the armor and the arks are taken as literal additions, extensions of the human embodying them. The human becomes spiritualized, the behind the scenes, the masks, animating energy - the ghost in the machine, in the armor, the contrivance.
Behind the word, emotions. The word refers back to human abstractions, or, when it dares, to human emotions. A hint at the primal. But, now, the emotions are stripped of their worldly utilities, the reason they evolved. They becomes expressions of the divine, which is always masked, armored, hidden, in the dark.
The noumenon comes to the forefront, as does the armor. The phenomenon, is hidden, distanced....placed into lethe, forgetfulness: covered, concealed. The armor is human contrivance. It is the new apparent.
Armor was a reaction to the bow and arrow, the crossbow. When anyone could fell a fighter from a distance, or massacre a group of formidable warriors by striking them with quantities of arrows from a safe distance, the armor became inevitable.
Arrows are metaphors for karma, directed by words. Your fate, your reputation, your destiny, now determined by gossip, distant hidden voices whispering (shaping arrow heads, finding rocks), and flinging them to injure from a safe distance.
The armor protected the wearer from these words. A karmic wall. The metal shell was a detachment, a barrier, a discriminating possibility. It kept the rabble out.
The warrior did not have to be a good fighter...because he was a walking talk; a Frankenstein, shuffling towards the other, untouched by arrows, by the masses throwing rocks from the shadows. Like Frankenstein he was made up of many different parts, all connected artificially, creating a monstrosity. The quality of the technique was judged by how well it emulated the human form, how it made the observer forget that there was an intervention artifice between the eye and the moving spirit. Against words a linguistic defense; an iron clad rhetoric - rigid, detached, artistic but unaesthetic, anesthetic.
Two types of modern warfare emerges - dialectics. One was used by the commoner, who found stones, or could artificially manufacture multiple arrow-heads to fling at the other from the safety of a detached distance, amplifying his weakness into a arrow-pointed force. The other used a more refined from of distancing: the outer shell, detaching himself from words, creating an alternative space within space/time.
Both compensate for a lack of artistry. Both types of "fighters" compensate for an absence of fighting talent. Both uses distance, when warrior approach and engage, using the weapon, the artifice, the word, as an extension of their arm: a surgical instrument." [Arms and Armour]
Quote :
"“Wilhelm Reich identified "armor" as the sum total of typical character attitudes, which an individual develops as a blocking against his emotional excitations, resulting in rigidity of the body, lack of emotional contact, "deadness". Functionally identical to muscular armor (chronic muscular spasms)..."
The elk has subtle antennae, roots branching into the nooks and corner of time, drawing replenishment and vigour from old memories;
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"Atavism is the tendency to revert to ancestral type. In biology, an atavism is an evolutionary throwback, such as traits reappearing which had disappeared generations before. Atavisms can occur in several ways. One way is when genes for previously existing phenotypical features are preserved in DNA, and these become expressed through a mutation that either knock out the overriding genes for the new traits or make the old traits override the new one. A number of traits can vary as a result of shortening of the fetal development of a trait (neoteny) or by prolongation of the same. In such a case, a shift in the time a trait is allowed to develop before it is fixed can bring forth an ancestral phenotype. In the social sciences, atavism is a cultural tendency—for example, people in the modern era reverting to the ways of thinking and acting of a former time. The word atavism is derived from the Latin atavus. An atavus is a great-great-great-grandfather or, more generally, an ancestor.
Atavistic regression is a hypnosis-related concept introduced by the Australian scholar and psychiatrist Ainslie Meares.
As used by Meares, for example, his 1960 work A System of Medical Hypnosis, the term atavistic regression is used to denote the tendency to revert to ancestral type:
“The atavistic hypothesis requires… a regression from normal adult mental function at an intellectual, logical level, to an archaic level of mental function in which the process of suggestion determines the acceptance of ideas. This regression is considered to be the basic mechanism in the production of hypnosis.” Meares held the view that when in hypnosis, the higher (more evolved) functions of the subject's brain were switched off, and the subject reverted to a far more archaic and far less advanced (in evolutionary terms) mental state; something which significantly altered the subjects' cognitive processing so that they readily accepted internally consistent, literal logic without any of the normal filters and verifications against the objective facts of the real world."
"Respect thy body: it will again become thy parents." [Austin Spare]
"Retrogress to the point where knowledge ceases, in that law becomes its own spontaneity and its freedom." [Austin Spare]
"The I thinks, the Self doth." [Austin Spare]
"Procreation is with more things than women. ...Do I still need a loin-cloth for my passions?" [Austin Spare]
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"Considered the conscious part of the mind to be useless for this, believing that it only served to reinforce the separation between ourselves and that which we desire. It has been argued that Spare's magic depended (at least in part) upon psychological repression. According to one author, Spare's magical rationale was as follows, "If the psyche represses certain impulses, desires, fears, and so on, and these then have the power to become so effective that they can mold or even determine entirely the entire conscious personality of a person right down to the most subtle detail, this means nothing more than the fact that through repression ("forgetting") many impulses, desires, etc. have the ability to create a reality to which they are denied access as long as they are either kept alive in the conscious mind or recalled into it. Under certain conditions, that which is repressed can become even more powerful than that which is held in the conscious mind." It was a logical conclusion to view the subconscious mind as the source of all magical power, which Spare soon did. In his opinion, a magical desire cannot become truly effective until it has become an organic part of the subconscious mind. Spare also believed in what he called "atavistic resurgence", the idea that the human mind contains atavistic memories that have their origins in earlier species on the evolutionary ladder. In Spare's worldview, the "soul" was actually the continuing influence of "the ancestral animals" that humans had evolved from. For this reason, he believed in the intimate unity between humans and other species in the animal world; this was visually reflected in his art through the iconography of the horned humanoid figures. Although this "atavistic resurgence" was very different from orthodox Darwinism, Spare greatly admired the evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin..."
Muhlmann described the Mask/Armour as the Extra-body forming Aura, intimidating the Other. This is all about Uruz and the formation of the metaphysical bone/organ memories. If Uruz is the abs. gross and phenomenal force, Algiz is the subtle and noumenal one;
Muhlmann wrote:
"Under the influence of stress, noradrenaline, adrenaline and cortisol secretion is increased. This has the following effect; cardiac and circulatory functions are intensified, metabolism, immunity and sexual activity however are weakened. In this way all the organism’s energy reserves are channelled into the skeletal muscles in order optimise their motor abilities. They are used for fight or flight. In addition neural areas in charge of rapid perception and fast reaction are also strengthened. Stress physiology is thus a cognitive process by which a perception is transformed into a flow of energy.
There are three possible results of the fight: dominance, subdominance and submission. The victor is ‘dominant’ his catecholamine and cortisol levels quickly reach their normal levels after stress action. Experiments have demonstrated that after repeated successful stress actions the base values of noradrenaline, adrenaline and cortisol are even lower than they were before the stress success series. This means that the animals have become healthier through the success series. The cardiac and circulatory complex is able to adapt as the low cortisol levels bring healthy sleep and increased immunity. Here we find a phenomenon which we can call the ‘samurai effect’. The successful combatant finds ever increasing inner peace. His fighting abilities create something like an aura. This aura can be perceived by opponents and can result in duels being decided on the strength of this aura and the opponent signalling ‘I surrender’.
This neuronal reinforcement by means of the repetition of activities can also be described as ‘body memory’ or ‘procedural’ memory. The ‘body memory’ becomes active when all bodily movements are automatic, e.g. when driving a car we don’t think about which foot operates which pedal or when playing the piano one does not think about what one’s fingers are doing and when soldiers doing their drill at the barracks don’t have to think about how to handle their weapons.
Enculturation means storage of cultural traits in the biological memory. It is possible for example to speak of the enculturation quotient of a riding a bicycle, driving a car, playing the piano, having a barbeque, eating spaghetti, playing football, tightrope walking, firing a machine gun and programing a computer.
The triggering of an emotion during a learning or perceptual process stimulates the so-called ‘episodic memory’. The episodic memory means that the individual not only remembers the object noticed but also the entire scene in which the object was noticed.
Institutionalised war is the most important cultural result of the MSC effect. It represents the cultural shaping of the separation of conflict and cooperation. The most radical manifestation of the externalisation of the conflict through internal population cooperation is the phenomenon of cultural preparedness to die.
It is closely linked to the system of emotional rule adjustment since cultural preparedness to die is regulated by the principle of ‘honor’ and the principle of functioning of honour differs only slightly from that of decorum.
If an MSC event always separates cooperation from conflict and must trigger off strong stress emotions in order to, by means a positive assessment, create a phase of relaxation and furthermore, if this relaxation is inevitably the result of separating cooperation from conflict and therefore is infused with cooperative behaviour in its entirety, then this complete MSC complex of stress, emotion, relaxation and cooperation is to a large extent memoactive. That means it is excellently suited as a enculturating trait which can be transmitted over many generations in the future. Enculturating traits are units of transmission. They are so to say the atoms of cultures." [Maximal Stress Cooperation Theory]
And what is Cultural Synchronization, but the gravity of maximal stress evened out by a shared experience of maintaining harmony by externalizing conflicts, the participation in a common memory - the Festival.
The Elk may not just be the upraised hands, but also the upraised horns and the terrestrial currents of the lightning rod sweeping across the earth; Pink Floyd's "The Piper at the Gates"... between conscious and the sub-conscious...
Those horns, like root stems exposed to the sun, needy, seeking, intrusion upwardly focused.
The upward signifying mind, as opposed to the downward body.
Does the hypnotist will the "victim’s" hypnosis? No, he manipulates the willingness already present.
Does the grifter invent the other's desire? Does the one selling place the need the product satisfies in the brain? Does the faith healer heal? Does the liar lie? Does the hunter create the hunted? Does the farmer construct domestication? Does the magician conjure up forces that do not exist?
Madness is acting in disregard to the fact that the potential costs (risks) outweigh the potential benefits (pleasures). In this regard Hannibal Lecter, as an artistic device, is either a representation of madness, or – this is the frightening part – a creature so superior that the costs are minimal.
In an age where words, mind, is still permitted – but for how long ? - hunting, killing, consuming, fucking, has been reduced down to "mere" words, and metaphors. Even in this realm of innocuous verbal abuse, we sense something primal; something that may not be permitted to translate into something physical (real), but that it could, it may... maybe it should (the moral dilemma).
Modern man indulges in all sorts of substituted pleasures, to deal with that itch he cannot scratch... that he fears touching, because it is still fresh, still bleeding; he hungers for what he is told is forbidden, vile... uncivilized. Then he denies this deep need, finding clever ways to sidestep them, and to cover them up with words. He mocks them when they are presented to him rationally, knowing that if they were as bold as to express themselves freely he would be the first to run to the authorities for help – thusly making them a form of madness he can stand against, while he is seduced by the possibilities.
Behold the modern hypocrite!!!
The pop-cultural icons accomplish two things:
1- They ridicule, by reducing the idea to a caricature.
2- They limit, by connecting the idea to an image, an appearance.
In the first case, they make the idea marketable, playing on those denied internal hungers, and fears. T They nurture the fears so as to discredit the seductive parts.
In the second, they restrict the idea to an iconography, an image. the real manifestation of this type will have to adhere to this popular image, if it is to be taken seriously.
Unjustified cynicism is, after all, a symptom of deep anxiety.
Seduction tries to hint at the other of his restriction, of his being trapped... it turns this helplessness into something attractive and re-sells it to him. Hypnosis makes quiet inroads into the other by making them feel powerful... the Dream-state is what N. felt was more richer than the waking life we live,, our untapped potential and all that we could not do in daylight, re-plays itself in dreams... Seduction entices, Hypnosis suggests; it is quiet. Seduction captiv-ates, Hypnosis intrigues.
Metaphorical activity fluctuates like the deer... its the quiet way of saying one thing and making inroads into the other with the other meaning... hypnosis works on silent suggestibility. Our penetration is what makes us call the other mesmerizing like we were seized or overtaken in our 'sleep'... Hannibal is mesmerizing because the pun, the gap in the double-meaning provides a respite, a distance from immediate and threatening danger... and you feel the fear and relaxing humour of the other meaning at the same time… The Festival's relation with humour is seen via the 'gap' between the two horns, double entendre, false 'pit' where one falls inducing laughter, festive devouring and the wide-open mouth -
Quote :
"For a fuller understanding of Hannibal Lecter, we need to go to Freud’s writings on the relationship between jokes and the unconscious. Part of Lecter’s enormous appeal to audiences is his ability to make jokes, to pun and play with the victim/viewer. To one of his intended victims he says, playfully, “I’m giving serious consideration to eating your wife.” Eating is, of course, a metaphor for oral sex – a meaning not lost on Hannibal’s audiences. David Thompson suggests that Clarice Starling, the heroine of Silence of the Lambs, understood perfectly: “The rest of the world dreamed of cannibalism, but Foster’s eyes widened with the sudden vision of cunnilingus. No, not even the vision – the sensation”. What we are screened from is the image of Lecter and Clarice as a couple, making love, having oral sex." [B.Creed, Freud's Worst Nightmare: Dining with Lecter]
I am still 'pregnant', the different limbs I speak of will turn out to be part of the same child.
And will your child be born of your thigh or your temple? A son or a daughter?
In lore, it is Pallas that retrieves and saves the heart of the dismembered Dionysos for incubation in the thigh for rebirth. Athena with the shield of the medusa, the "fixed stare/cold gaze" turning to stone. The principle of Isa/incubation when modern stoicism, cynicism has made the body brittle and armoured - like the scene in the Pirates of the Carribean where the crew almost become the part of the ship… how do you extract this gestating core essence without fragmenting it, as a whole number?
I encountered the runes by asking nicely. I was the first one allowed to see this man ( whose last name means 'of the Wyrd'. ) in the process of rune drawing. It makes quite a few people uncomfortable to see the first method, the release of motoric memory. The rune painting begins in the second part.
"Second. The inference that N. was merely filling the gaps and adding flesh to the beast that Xt. crucified is so crude."
Never meant to imply that. Primarily, Nietzsche is a prophet of the wild, but he understood himself to be a direct response to Christianity whenever he wrote about it. Now a 180 degree difference is - what?
In his capacity of a response to Christianity, which by no means is his full capacity, he is someone easer to associate with Jesus than with any of those who tried to imitate him. Like all great men, one comes to likeness easier by attacking than by following.
Satyr wrote:
Tactics evolve with the times, but remain true to the original strategy.
Nietzsche was a direct response to the strategy [priestly ressentiment in the jewish slave revolt], of which Pauline Xt. was merely a tactic.
Black Panther wrote:
In as far as Nietzsche has anything to do with Jesus, I doubt that Jesus would dislike the way he went about it.
Jesus appeared at the heights of power, N. appeared at the twilight and waning of power, and how he went abt. his philosophy is part of it. I cant say what a N. would be in the circumstances of the former.
Whether N.'s Antichrist is an exalted opposition of maximal stress at the cutting edge (<---> abs. repulsion) or domain/dominion/domineering square of cutting it Right at the heart of the matter (---><--- abs. resistance - core value), how one acts and conducts oneself when the energy waxes and wanes separates the noble from the ignoble. How do you behave with excess power in your hands, and what do you teach when you are a low life marks a path.
And even where N is the antithesis to JC, he stands 2000 years down the line of scientific work, which places him in a different paradigm of power as knowledge.
I agree;
Nietzsche wrote:
"To Princess Ariadne, My Beloved.
It is a mere prejudice that I am a human being. Yet I have often enough dwelled among human beings and I know the things human beings experience, from the lowest to the highest. Among the Hindus I was Buddha, in Greece Dionysus - Alexander and Caesar were incarnations of me, as well as the poet of Shakespeare, Lord Bacon. Most recently I was Voltaire and Napoleon, perhaps also Richard Wagner ... However, I now come as Dionysus victorious, who will prepare a great festival on Earth ... Not as though I had much time ... The heavens rejoice to see me here ... I also hung on the cross .." [Letter to Cosima Wagner, Turin, Jan. 3, 1889]
The last remark could also be a pun on Odysseus [N. - "we seafarers, we argonauts"] who bound himself to the staff of the ship which paved the way for 'Christianizing Homer':
Quote :
"Andrew's Cross and Odysseus' Oar.
"According to GE 20, The following night the blessed apostle saw a vision which he narrated to the other brethren:
"My good friends, listen to my dream. I saw a great mountain raised on high with nothing earthly on it, and it so radiated with light that it seemed to illumine the world. And there, standing with me, were my beloved brothers, the apostles Peter and John. Extending his hand to the apostle Peter, John raised him to the mountain's summit, turned, and asked me to ascend after Peter saying, 'Andrew, you will drink Peter's cup.' With his hands outstretched he said, 'Come to me and stretch out your hands to join my hands, and let your head touch mine.' When I did so, I found myself shorter than John. 'Would you like to know,' he then asked, 'to what this symbol you see refers, or who it is who speaks with you?' "'I long to know these things,' I said. '"I am the word of the cross,' he said, 'on which you soon will hang for the name of the one you proclaim.' He also told me many other things about which I can say nothing now, but which will become apparent when I approach this sacrifice."
This story obviously owes a great deal to the transfiguration of Jesus, but it also relies on Odysseus's speech to the Phaeacians about his visit with Tiresias in the netherworld, where the blind savant told him how he was to die:
"Take a well-shaped oar and go until you reach men who do not know the sea and who eat food that is not mixed with salt: they know neither of red-cheeked ships nor of well-shaped oars, which are wings of ships. I'll tell you a very clear sign , and you won't miss it: when you come across another man on the road who says that you have a chaff-wrecker on your shining shoulder, then plant the well-shaped oar in the earth and perform a fine sacrifice to lord Poseidon.... A very gentle death will come to you away from the sea and slay you in a comfortable old age. And the people aroundyou will be prosperous. This is the truth that I tell you."
Behind this passage is a folktale told among sailors to this very day, according to which a sailor, weary of rowing and the dangers of the sea, carries an oar inland until someone mistakes it for a board or a farm implement. There the sailor plants his oar, or builds a house, or settles down to a life of ease. The parable is found here and there in old sea stories, where shipwrecked persons narrate it to their companions as a consolation, and tormented and discouraged seafolk swear to one another to follow its example if they should ever touch foot again on English soil. The point of these tales of the planted oar is to contrast the dangers and hardships of the sea or the caprices of fishing with the safety and comforts of terra firma. Homer apparently knew this same tradition. At the beginning of the nekyia, the soul of Elpenor asks Odysseus to return to Circe's island to bury his body under a planted oar.
In order to understand the relationship of this episode to The Acts of Andrew one must jump ahead to the Passion, where the apostle preaches on his way to the edge of the sea, where he will die. He ends his speech with these words:
This is the end of my speech, for I think that while we were speaking, we arrived at the designated place. The planted cross is a sign to me designating the spot" (Passion S3).
Odysseus would know where to plant his oar because of the sign of the ignorant landlubber. The "planted cross" itself serves Andrew as a sign presumably because on the radiant mountain John had told him about it in GE 20: "He also told me many other things . . . which will become apparent when I approach this sacrifice."
The participle , 'planted', comes from the same Greek verb Tiresias used when he commanded Odysseus to plant his oar. These correspondences can hardlybe accidental. In light of the tradition of the planted oar one might expect Andrew's seaside cross to represent relief from the dangers and weariness of life. This is precisely Andrew's own interpretation in his address to the cross:
He left everyone, approached the cross, and spoke to it out loud: "Greetings, O cross! Greetings indeed! I know well that, though you have been weary for a long time, you too at last are at rest , planted and awaiting me. I come to you, whom I have comprehended. I recognize your secret for which you were planted . So then ... receive me, I who have been weary for so long." (Passion 54)
Andrew recognized the secret or mystery of the cross from its having been "planted" in the earth to symbolize its rest from labor. Nowhere else in early Christian literature does one find an exhausted cross; exhaustion better befits an oar. The weariness of rowing was proverbial in the ancient world, and often was expressed with cognates of the word used of the cross in The Acts of Andrew, 'to weary'. For example, Odysseus collapses in weariness after rowing for ten days. Likewise The Iliad speaks of sailors who "have grown weary of beating the sea with polished oars of fir, and with weariness are their limbs for done." The weariness of the cross for such a long time represents the apostle's own weariness at the end of life's long voyage. Both of them will rest at last. According to Andrew's Passion, the cross is also Andrew's mast for speeding him effortlessly homeward to heaven on his true nostos. It would therefore seem reasonable to assume that among the "many other things" that John told Andrew on the mountain in GE 20 was the meaning of the planted cross at the edge of the sea. It symbolized the weariness of life and the rest that death offers." [Dennis MacDonald, Christianizing Homer]
- N.'s wedding song with the ring of eternity has to do with telos, and perhaps why in the old pagan, esp. Anglo-Germanic custom, the bride was gifted a sword:
Quote :
"An attempt has been made to explain the Telos which means 'end' as the' place where one makes a half-turn in the race or in ploughing' and so the 'end, limit'. This root notion of 'turning round' Telos meant 'circling' or 'circle' , which imply the ' circle of the year', perhaps also in Homer's 'circle-bearing year' - so complete year. Thus, too, when Hesiod speaks it will mean not the 'perfect river' or the 'river in which all others end' but the 'circling river'.
If Telos thus meant 'circle', 'band', we can also explain its use to designate a body of men; which Telos has been treated as a distinct word related to Sanscrit kula-m. We may instead compare our use of 'band', 'circle', 'ring', 'knot', etc., German Bund. That an assembly of men was conceived in some such way is shown by Homer's expression for its breaking up; it is ' loosed'. The early Greeks, when they assembled, did form into a 'circle'. And a circle appears to have been the ritually desirable form for a gathering.
If it thus meant 'circle', Telos when used of a phase of fortune, while conceived thus visually as a circle or band about a man, yet represented a portion of time and was experienced as a process or an event by the person upon whom it was placed. It was apparently, like the fate spun; the different 'bands' or ' circles' were different portions of life and so of time. The band, circle, itself naturally symbolic of completeness and continuity, would represent the complete phase of fortune. Just as 'victory', 'liberty', and the various other phases of fortune were bands fastened upon men by god, so the band, the 'crown' or 'circle' that was put upon the head of the victor in the games, etc., was conceived by Pindar and Simonides as itself the 'deed' or 'victory'. But Pindar seems to speak of this crown as Telos.
The Telos was not given to the god nor was it, as usually explained, a 'making perfect' of the initiate. It was analogous to the Telos of marriage. It was a new state, a new fate received, embodied in a band or wrapping fastened around or covering the recipient. In fact in the classical period the person married and the person initiated alike received such a band or wrapping, and it should according to our earlier argument represent and confer the new state, a new fate. In Homer the maiden is distinguished by a particular form of band, which is 'loosed' at marriage, and on her wedding day Andromache received another band, a 'head-band' from the goddess of love herself, Aphrodite, who carried her peculiar properties about in the form of a band, and passed them on to others in that form. Among the Romans a maiden was distinguished by one form of 'fillet' (vitta), the bride or married woman by another. To such bands there is no lack of parallels. These passages indicate how Telos could come to be interpreted and mean 'fulfilment', 'completion', and so 'end'. The circle, itself naturally expressive of completeness, represented a process.
In English itself 'crown' has developed the meaning 'fulfilment, completion, perfection, end' and 'The end crowns all', finis coronat opus. If we turn to Chapman's translation of the Iliad it is striking to find him time and again rendering a passage with Telos or Telein by 'crown', though thinking that Telos itself means 'end'.
Finally, Telos 'payment' is a quite different word from Telos, 'end', and formed from a different root. It is thus supposed to have meant originally 'what was endured' and so 'toll', 'tax'. But there is no hint of such a word or meaning in the earliest literature and the supposition is unnecessary. A debt was conceived as a bond, which might help this use of Telos. But there is another possibility. For Pindar the victor's crown was the Telos of his victory, its embodiment, fulfilment. In both cases it is an offering to the god, its fulfilment, actual payment. From Homer onwards it was customary in the hour of trial to vow something, to promise to the god, if he would help to victory, the arms or other spoils of the enemy and after victory to fulfil the promise, i.e. to pay." [Onians, The Origins of European Thought]
"The casting of the spool or shuttle through the opening between the warp-threads is still known as a 'shot', a single woof-thread thus cast as a 'shoot' (cf. German Schussfaden), and 'shuttle' itself derives from the same verb. The opening, the passage through which archers sought to shoot, were originally the same. The use in weaving will better explain the sense 'critical time', 'opportunity'; for there the opening in the warp lasts only a limited time, and the 'shot' must be made while it is open. The belief in the weaving of fate with the length of the warp-threads representing length of time may have helped this use of 'Kouros'. In the Agamemnon Aeschylus makes his chorus, foreboding, say of itself (the heart)... 'unwind off the spool', as was done with the woof-thread in weaving.
Our use of 'opening' apart, 'opportunity' appears to have been expressed in English by something like the Greek use of 'Kouros'. A 'nick' means a slot or hollow in anything. It was used thus: 'There are some nicks in time which whosoever finds may promise to himself success.' 'Most fit opportunity—her grace comes just in the nick.' 'He came in the nick of opportunity to beg for grace.'
The 'nick' also is spoken of as if it were aimed at: 'Schol. "Does the sea stagger ye?" Mast. "Now ye have hit the nick."
I would compare also the German einschlagen, woof, 'to strike in', ' to hit the mark', and the adjective einschldgig, 'appropriate'.
Reference to an opening, passage through, appears to explain also the Latin opportunus, opportunitas. The root meaning of porta, portus (angiportus) is 'entrance', 'passage through'. Opportunus would thus describe what offers an opening, or what is in front of an opening ready to go through. The antithesis is importunus, describing that which is 'in (i.e. blocking) the opening' or 'without (i.e. not affording) an opening'. Here too, perhaps, is the origin of the association of the goddess of fortune in Rome's earliest days with a building called porta fenestella, apparently a porta or opening above ground level (as a window is), a symbol or the embodiment of a religious idea rather than for use, a divine or universal 'opening'. Roman tradition explained it as the opening through which Fortune passed, more particularly for Servius Tullius. In speech fenestra was used symbolically in the sense of 'opening', 'opportunity', e.g. quantam fenestram ad nequitiam patefeceris. Tropos, cognate with porta, portus, etc., meant 'passage, way, means'. Akin is also the use of locus, 'room, space', in the sense of 'opportunity', e.g. dare locum with a genitive 'to give room for', so 'opportunity for', something.
She who comes to bind unswervingly, inflexibly, or who plies thus the woof about the warp-threads, weaving the pattern in the tapestry of fate, would be well named Atropos. It is this merciless course of the shuttle which is stressed for the weaving of the Moirai.
The 'Sphinx' of Theban legend can also now perhaps be better understood. Sheis usually explained as the' Throttler', 'Choker', but was rather, I suggest, the 'Tight-binder', the meaning naturally indicated and fitting, as we see, her character of death-demon. It fits also the possibly later version of her as singing deadly riddles. With somewhat similar thought the Greeks conceived of a riddle or trap of words difficult to deal with as a woven rush-basket (cf. Latin scirpus, nodus, solvere).
By the thought traced that a phase of fortune was such a band and might be put about one in that form we can now explain the human custom of binding, wreathing the head with a fillet, wreath, or crown. Thus, of a victor in the games Simonides says: 'Who of the present generation hath in contest of the neighbouring folk bound upon himself so many victories with leaves of myrtle or wreaths of roses?' and of another Pindar says: 'One swift day set three glorious deeds about his hair' and, in life itself, he who receives good fortune receives a crown: We can thus also better understand a number ofother passages. In epitaphs Simonides says: ' This is the grave of that Adeimantos through whose counsel Greece put around her (head) the crown of freedom', and striving to put around Greece freedom (i.e. the band or crown that is freedom) we lie'
The kingship is a band put about a person, who thus becomes king. In fact 'kingship' was used of this physical band; it designated the diadem. So we have the origin of the royal crown and of the importance of 'coronation'. The putting of a crown elsewhere, e.g. upon a ship or a housedoor, can also now be understood as intended to confer or embody a happy fate." [Onians, The Origins of European Thought]
I'll grant you all that sounds desperately pointless. I have no idea what I can help you with or why you post these .... ruminations...(fears? beliefs?) in this thread.
On the contrary, I think what is desperately pointless is the study of this kind of material. What I explained earlier (as my own beliefs) you can consider the practical ends of this kind of metaphysical theorizing. Narrowing it down; mortality and annihilation at death, transmigration of the self-same soul after physical death to a final destination (or state), transmigration of the self-same soul to a next stage in a series without any final destination, or an eventual repetition of the self-same soul.
Now in any of these cases, at no given point would any experience be qualitatively different than any other... you are just 'being' again.
Wittgenstein wrote:
Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.
Be that as it may, whatever you choose to believe is 'true' or 'useful' to you in this process of existing could in fact be false and useless, and you would not know the difference. On the other hand, if you insist on being a Builder you must understand that you can NEVER tell the people what I have explained to you, and it will be difficult for you to continue on knowing it's all silly nonsense.. some nights you will want to commit all your work to the flames a la Hume, and there will be moments when you feel you cannot tell the noble lie any longer. But this is a burden a builder must bear ([You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]).
Since nothing matters, and death is the great equalizer, Sly's own critique is as good as nothing… Why would knowing if its possible to know the difference matter?
Is it only curiosity that keeps him going when he could just arbitrarily off himself, or preach that sort of thing to others? Isn't it a way, or is there a right way?
Heisman wrote:
"If I had no biases I would be dead, rather that sitting here right now, writing about them. To approach the most biasless state of death is to pursue a course of rational selfdestruction through a rigorous elimination of biases towards life. Yet to be value neutral would be to not be biased towards objectivity over subjectivity or vice versa. While objectivity is not inherently self-justified as an end in itself, objectivity could be a means. Objectivity could be a means, for example, of rational self-destruction." [Heisman, Suicide Note]
Heisman wrote:
"How far would one be willing to go in pursuit of scientific objectivity? Objectivity and survival are least compatible when objectivity becomes a means of life, subordinate to life — as opposed to life subordinated to objectivity. If the greatest objectivity implicates confronting the most subjective biases, this implicates confronting those truths that most conflict with the subjective will to live. By simply changing my values from life values to death values, and setting my trajectory for rational biological self-destruction, I am able to liberate myself from many of the biases that dominate the horizons of most people’s lives. By valuing certain scientific observations because they are destructive to my life, I am removing self-preservation factors that hinder objectivity. This is how I am in a position to hypothesize my own death.
So if objectivity is not justified as end, then objectivity can be a means of rational self-destruction through the overcoming of the bias towards life. Rational self-destruction through the overcoming of the bias towards life, in turn, can be a means of achieving objectivity. And this means: To will death as a means of willing truth and to will truth as a means of willing death." [Suicide Note]
Heisman wrote:
"Synthetic processes of life work in paradoxical relationship to analytic processes because natural selection effectually “analyzed” or “chose” certain synthetic processes over others. This implies that the most complex syntheses might incorporate an analytic blind spot related the preference of some synthetic organizations over others.
A living thing cannot incorporate all physical possibilities into itself if it is to remain alive. Life, on some level, is an organization synthesis that contradicts, overcomes, or outsynthesizes the physical probabilities of its immediate environment that would otherwise lead to death. Just as the life processes of an individual bacteria cell could not exist if its cell walls were opened to all the physical possibilities of its outside environment..." [Heisman, Suicide Note]
From a cost/benefit perspective the one who has the least to gain, from the time after his death, will have the least interest in anything deeper than the thickness of his skin during the period of his lifetime.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Last edited by Satyr on Mon Oct 12, 2015 12:30 pm; edited 1 time in total
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37200 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
'Lies' - like mathematics, logic and such approximations help our self-preservation.
For those who see man apart from nature, differentiating oneself would be experienced as a lie. For those who see man as part of nature, differentiating oneself would be experienced as growth, as the expression of life differetntiating itself into higher forms.
Some are so ashamed of being born human, they find man shaping his environment, the Apollonian illusion of creating borders, the shape-forming power in man that has made him the most rich and beautiful creature to exist in the universe,,, a "sin".
In the case of those turkeys like cAnus, its a 'sin', because an original undifferentiated edenic state of harmony as abs. truth is first presumed… and so man shaping his environment is a 'fall' from grace, a hubris, etc.
Without lies, we would be dead. And this is the oldest battle in the world, the oldest conflict in the world. How much truth can you endure?
Nietzsche wrote:
""Man seeks "the truth": a world that is not self-contradictory, not deceptive, does not change, a true world-a world in which one does not suffer; contradiction, deception, change--causes of suffering!
Contempt, hatred for all that perishes, changes, varieswhence comes this valuation of that which remains constant? Obviously, the will to truth is here merely the desire for a world of the constant.
Happiness can be guaranteed only by being; change and happiness exclude one another. The highest desire therefore contemplates unity with what has being. This is the formula for: the road to the highest happiness.
The real primum mobile is disbelief in becoming, mistrust of becoming, the low valuation of all that becomes-
What kind of man reflects in this way? An unproductive, suffering kind, a kind weary of life. If we imagine the opposite kind of man, he would not need to believe in what has being; more, he would despise it as dead, tedious, indifferent- to what extent one can endure to live in a meaningless world because one organizes a small portion of it oneself." [WTP, 585]
There is no truth apart from the whole; we are always implicated, always will be "erroneous", "lying" in trying to form judgements on the whole while being part of it...
That does not mean no truth is ever possible; degrees of it are, as Satyr remarked somewhere, the world in relation to our consciousness doesn't change at the rate we are not able to "fix some portion of it'. Superior and inferior have comparative amoral objectivity.
To deny in man - his cunning, his artistic impulse, his shape-forming organizing lust, is to deny his very evolution, his Human-ity beyond good/evil.
Man is part of that very nature, and he is an environment himself, the on-going inter-activity of life's self-organizing.
Nietzsche wrote:
""Will to truth"--as the impotence of the will to create." [WTP, 585]
A hedonist is someone who needs to be assured of some pleasure, some benefit at some end point.
Its the sufficient condition to not resort to the level of animals and subhumans.
If my life after death is assured no meaning, I will live like the dogs and dwarves… since nothing matters and integrity is just a fancy of the human vanity.
Either there is a god before me assuring me of the integrity of all equally [cAnus], or there is an intelligence after me assuring there is a benefit to acting in such and such way [sLy].
Magic is either rooted in world/nature/past, or it is rooted in human psyche, which is a product of world/nature/past. Man is the proxy towards world, for the magi.
The motive is what is important. A witch/warlock interested in delving into the secret of nature, to find there useful patterns, will suffer the costs of this honesty, and her words will be laconic and profound. The one motivated by a need to be seen, appreciated, loved, to hold power over men, will have no problem conjuring up magical ointments, spells, words of shallow depth to impress and to mesmerize and to affect and infect.
His magic only roots itself in the shallow, the human manifestation of the natural, the past, which goes further back than the emergence of humans. His "potency" and his biggest flaw/weakness will be his desire, the need to have an effect, to leave a mark, to be recalled. His superficiality makes him prone to experimentation, to going form one school to the other, from white magic to black, to red, to green, and back again; he substitutes quality, with quantities, offering a kaleidoscope that mesmerizes and leaves the immature mind in awe. Such a witch will feel no shame. Will shift from hiding, to exposing details, in an effort to throw others off his track. Being shameless, and only hiding his inferiority, he will have no qualms and no inhibitions, just as long as there is another, preferably many, to appreciate, his performance.
I made an interesting "discovery" today, but I'm sure many of you knew this.
I just today all the sudden got an idea that I want to decorate my wall with a "theatre mask" which I remember seeing in many places, but not really knowing what it was called like this:
I tried to find a picture with a really bitter expression [You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]
Then I accidently found out what these masks are called and they apparently are called "Janus masks", then I noticed that Janus was a god with two faces [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Black Panther
Gender : Posts : 164 Join date : 2013-11-26 Location : on your mind
I am honored to be asked this question Lyssa. I hope I will have twins, then. I could not live with a child that isnt Dionysian, but the way Nietzsche sees Dionysos, as the philosopher, a cranial birth is a fitting image nonetheless. The splitting headache from which the future s born.
The 'politics' Im experimenting with is going better than I thought. It is only an ethical form, a way of defeating some elements of cowardice, neutralizing some peoples influences. And increasing that of others. It is slow grinding but I laugh hard often.
Satyrs insight about investment rung true. Great images indeed, the thread is full of quite astounding artworks.
Black Panther
Gender : Posts : 164 Join date : 2013-11-26 Location : on your mind
It is clear to me how the male gods 'feel', what Odins presence feels like (which itself is enough) as well as Tyr, and also Thor. These three distinct reals of consciousness, of will, of honor do I recognize with great clarity and corresponding joy, will, honor. I am a man and it is easy for me to recognize a true god. I recognize that Jesus, for example, is no true god - he is rather a magician with powers I do not comprehend. H has no powers over me, the powers that he grants are fine, but I can only get knee deep into them. Thor reaches to the heart, Odin rises above the head. Both of these are hidden, dark gods, whereas Tyr is a light god, and I can, as a man, a mortal, an earthling hunter-wanderer, not stand in direct comparison, negative or positive. Tyr is rather an absolute standard than an entity, it seems to me. In any case, the runes of each are clear. Thurisaz, Ansuz and Tiwaz. And by god do they do their work.
Freya, on the other hand, I can not see. I o not even see clearly enough to discern between Freya and Frigg, or to decide that they are one. That is not to say I do not notice the effect of a sacrifice to here. On the absolute contrary. A sacrifice to Freya, in 2008, led that very day to a sequence of events that would include finding love, new work, new house, later moving abroad, and there discovery of a philosophy. I distinctly perceive the color of this guiding force, the way color is the same as taste and touch, the magical color - but it is a thing that is always with me, around me, and which, if I call on it directly is elusive. Except by means of the Berkano rune. It is clear that it relates to the loins and hips - Venus. But Wunjo also relates to Venus, and Feoh is attributed to Freya. Feoh to Wunjo, the Aett of Freya in the 24 system - both these are light, forward, along with Ken the torch perhaps even. But what of Berkana, who is this deep?
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
Dragons are hoarders of forbidden treasures. The thorns around the rose that prick your plucking. But whorls of music in eternal wells from some stringed instruments are plucked with a pluck that is like a thorn on the axial string of ancient dinosaurs stemming from the collective unconscious.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.] half above the light, and half below…
Some reflections. Dragons, roses, and maidens, mirrors and music...
"Mermaid shapes that still the waves with ecstasies of song." T. Swan, "The World within the Ocean."
"And fair Ligea's golden comb, Wherewith she sits on diamond rocks, Sleeking her soft alluring hair." Milton, "Comus."
"I
Who would be A mermaid fair, Singing alone, Combing her hair Under the sea, In a golden curl With a comb of pearl, On a throne?
II
I would be a mermaid fair; I would sing to myself the whole of the day; With a comb of pearl I would comb my hair; And still as I comb'd I would sing and say, 'Who is it loves me? who loves not me?' I would comb my hair till my ringlets would fall Low adown, low adown, From under my starry sea-bud crown Low adown and around, And I should look like a fountain of gold Springing alone With a shrill inner sound Over the throne In the midst of the hall; Till that great sea-snake under the sea From his coiled sleeps in the central deeps Would slowly trail himself sevenfold Round the hall where I sate, and look in at the gate With his large calm eyes for the love of me. And all the mermen under the sea Would feel their immortality Die in their hearts for the love of me.
III
But at night I would wander away, away, I would fling on each side my low-flowing locks, And lightly vault from the throne and play With the mermen in and out of the rocks; We would run to and fro, and hide and seek, On the broad sea-wolds in the crimson shells, Whose silvery spikes are nighest the sea. But if any came near I would call and shriek, And adown the steep like a wave I would leap From the diamond-ledges that jut from the dells; For I would not be kiss'd by all who would list Of the bold merry mermen under the sea. They would sue me, and woo me, and flatter me, In the purple twilights under the sea; But the king of them all would carry me, Woo me, and win me, and marry me, In the branching jaspers under the sea. Then all the dry-pied things that be In the hueless mosses under the sea Would curl round my silver feet silently, All looking up for the love of me. And if I should carol aloud, from aloft All things that are forked, and horned, and soft Would lean out from the hollow sphere of the sea, All looking down for the love of me." Tennyson, "The Mermaid"
"She is the German Meriminni or Meerfrau, the Icelandic Marmenill, the Danish Maremind, the Irish Merow and many others, and there are echoes of her story from the East as well. The Matsyanaris, figures sometimes found sculptured in Indian temples, are nymphs with fishes’ tails.
The sea, as womb of creation and the source of unfathomable wisdom has always played an important role in world beliefs, particularly among maritime nations. The mermaid is frequently described as appearing above the surface of the water and combing her long hair with one hand while holding a mirror in the other. Mermaids, in the numerous tales told of them, often foretell the future, sometimes under compulsion.
We were born of the water and lived in its realm for hundreds of millions of years. Our extended transmutation from reptilian form to human form is reflected in the metaphor of the mermaid. This metaphor resonates because it connects us to our watery roots
"The human body is not just the most magnificent form; it is the most mysterious as well. An investigation of the human body can lead to the edge of the mind." [Imboden]
"They are also accredited with wondrous vocal powers, to hear which was death to the listener. It was long believed such creatures really did exist, and had from time to time been seen and spoken with; many, we are told, have fatally listened to "the mermaid's charmed speech," and have blindly followed the beguiling, deluding creature to her haunts beneath the wave… The Finnish Nakki play their silver harps o’ nights; the water imp or Nixey of Germany sings and dances on land with mortals, and the "Davy" (Deva), whose "locker" is at the bottom of the deep blue sea, are all poetical conceptions of the same description. The same may be said of the Merminne of the Netherlands, the White Lady of Scotland and the Silver Swan of the German legend, that drew the ship in which the Knight Lohengrin departed never to return. In the "Bestiary" of Philip de Thaun he tells us that "Siren lives in the sea, it sings at the approach of a storm and weeps in fine weather…"
"I am a creature of the Fey Prepare to give your soul away My spell is passion and it is art My song can bind a human heart And if you chance to know my face My hold shall be your last embrace."
Quote :
"The comb, like the harp, the rune, the "sleep thorn", the "hand of glory", and certain herbals, is a potent sleep-producer, and has, besides, other magic properties. In view of the frequent occurrence in balladry of combing as a mere convention, however, it may be that we have here simply a natural sleep induced by the combing, and not a magic slumber." [Paul Brewster, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]]
Quote :
"The mermaid's hair was her source of power (uncombed, it was useless); the comb, its conduit; the sea, her magical element; the harp, her magical personality (containing as it did her power to persuade and seduce). Most arresting is the image of the tangled hair. The Irish name for a mermaid is murduchu, meaning "song of the sea," or "sea chant." If their caps are stolen, they can no longer sing. The Breton and Welsh names for water spirits are morgen and morgan, respectively. The Lady of the Lake receives her divine power from her water element; Excalibur rises from the waves, forged of unearthly metal. Morgan le Fay accompanies Arthur on his final voyage, upon a great barge. The Mists of Avalon portrays the magical island as shrouded in mist, accessible only across a formidable lake.
Crossing the waters, parting the mist, piercing the veil: both are possible only for the trained witch.
The Mermaid, endlessly perched at the ocean's edge.
She sits upon ancient, sea-hewn rock, combing her long hair, a shell dripping with pearl necklaces and other aquatic treasure beside her. She gazes with intensity at something we cannot see, her eyes (the blue of frozen oceans) fastened, perhaps, upon the waves, awaiting a ship, awaiting a sailor... will she fall in love? Will he? Shall he be dragged, salt-drunk, down and down into her kingdom of coral, her bed of vermilion anemones? Shall he swim at her side, willingly, down and down until his lungs burst, his last thought that he has never seen anything so beautiful as her golden hair? Or will she be the one tempted, to leave the sea, her sisters, her mirrors, her combs, to relinquish her melodious voice, to split her tail in searing agony, so that she may walk beside him on dry, dry earth? What, precisely, is the nature of seduction? What is its price?"
"...detangling my hair is a way of sorting out my thoughts, helping me to think clearly.
Being given a comb, brush and mirror set for a special “big girl” birthday. It would be the finest set a family could afford — expected to be used the girl’s entire life. Ivory, tortoiseshell and silver were the most fashionable materials, valued as much for their dearness as their utility. Today, a comb is not an item of conspicuous consumption, and wooden combs are preferred because they detangle without leaving a static charge. Still, a comb is a very personal object, and most women value one with size, shape and tooth-spacing conducive to her particular hair.
Not surprisingly, women (and sometimes men) were once buried with their combs, and the quality and workmanship of the comb provides information about the status of the individual. The oldest extant combs are carved of bone, ivory or antler, although very rarely, a wooden comb survives the passage of time.
The comb as women’s symbol refers not just to hair combs but combs associated with processing textiles, once exclusively women’s work. The goddess Athena murders her rival Arachne with a loom comb. The comb symbol often appears on spindle whorls. Hittite tablets record a rite for newborns performed by the midwife involving a sheep’s wool comb.
There is a strong connection between hair combing and water. Sea goddesses like Venus are pictured with combs. In folklore, rain can be caused by combing hair. Sometimes pearls, which come from the ocean, are combed out of hair—although a witch can also cause hideous things to be combed.
Pre-Christian and medieval symbol stones from Scotland, called “Pictish Stones,” frequently show a comb-and-mirror combination.
In Scottish lore, seductive mermaids are famous for sitting on rocks combing their hair, a special magic they perform to lure sailors to their death. The Irish goddess Medb, with her legendary sexual appetite, has a comb as her symbol. Perhaps the power of the mermaid combing her hair symbolized the fertility of the sea, offering a bounty of food.
In Germanic folklore, mythic creatures with combs also perform mischief. If a man chances upon a water nymph combing her hair, he must assume she has called him there with her magic and marry her within three days, or he will die. In a Russian fairytale, a cat with a magic comb appears, and this comb is like no other. Drawing on the contrary nature of the domestic cat, this comb tangles instead of detangles. The heroine uses the cat’s comb to create a tangled forest behind her as she escapes her pursuer."
"A comb is also a device with many teeth which of the care serves. With the comb the hair is fixed, – is transferred: One creates order in his instinctual life and thereby wins the heart of the partner."
"There is however a significant feature of mirrors that provides evidence that the Pictish symbols may be astrological in nature; the fact that mirrors have attached to them a considerable folklore connecting them to future events. This folklore is still very much extant and it is still a commonly held belief that breaking a mirror will bring seven years bad luck. If we ask ourselves why the breakage of a mirror would have such dire consequences for the future, the mundane answer would be that, going back in time, the mirror, at least one made of glass, was originally a very valuable and fragile object and of course in this sense it would be ‘unlucky’ to smash one. This doesn’t explain why you would then experience further bad luck for many years to come. If breaking a mirror is unlucky, is there an implication that the intact mirror is somehow lucky or even associated with the supernatural in some way, and if this was true why would this be the case?
The Latin word for mirror (speculum) has given us the verb ‘to speculate’; and originally speculation was scanning the sky and the related movement of the stars by means of a mirror. The Latin for star (sidus) has also given us the word ‘consideration’ which, etymologically, means to scan the stars as a whole. Both abstract nouns which now describe highly intellectual activities are rooted in the study of the stars reflected in mirrors. It follows, then, that mirrors, as reflecting surfaces, should be the basis of a wealth of symbolism relating to knowledge.
The link between divination, the mirror, and importantly for us, the stars and planets, is therefore clearly stated. Similarly, in Jack Tresidder’s Dictionary of Symbols, the entry for ‘Mirror’ states the following, ‘Almost everywhere, mirrors have been linked with magic and especially with divination because they can reflect past or future events as well as present ones. Shamans in central Asia aimed mirrors at the Sun or Moon in order to read the future.’ Indeed the use of mirrors for divination appears to have been widespread, with according to The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, ‘The use of the mirror is one of the oldest forms of divination and Varro says that it originated in Persia.’ It also quotes a story about Pythagoras using a mirror to read the future by pointing it at the night sky; ‘According to legend, Pythagoras had a magic mirror which he, like the Thessalian witches, would turn towards the Moon before reading the future in it.’ Furthermore the entry on mirrors in this dictionary goes on not only to reiterate the mirror’s use by Shamans in central Asia, but also to note that ‘shamanistic robes were often decorated with mirrors’. This practise should also remind us of the stereotypical image of the ‘gypsy’ fortune-teller, whose attire was decorated with small reflective discs.
This same basic theme of mirrors, divination, and magic seems to pervade many cultures, including European culture where the magic mirror appears centrally in the folk tale Snow White; ‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?’
Even in Scotland, it would appear that mirror divination may well have survived the centuries and was strongly associated with Hallowe’en. In The Book of Hallowe’en published in 1919, Ruth Edna Kelley describes the custom of young women who would look into moonlit mirrors on 31 October in order to see their future lovers or husbands.
We should therefore consider the idea of the reflection in the mirror being not simply photons bouncing off the silver layer behind the glass back to our modern eyes, but perhaps as our ancestors saw it, as a glimpse into another place. Water also has reflective properties, and it is interesting that the Celts cast offerings into lakes and springs, perhaps passing these precious objects through the reflective surface into the ‘otherworld’. The mirror may therefore have been almost a kind of portable reflective substitute for water, allowing a druid or priest to peer in to this alternative spiritual world at anytime, now replaced by the fortune-teller’s almost stereotypical ‘crystal ball’.
Combs have been around for an exceedingly long time, and have a dual function as both a tool to untangle hair and also to remove parasites. In European folk traditions they also appear as magical objects, for example as an essential accessory for mermaids; the creature often depicted combing her hair in a hand mirror. The mermaid’s comb is frequently described as golden and provides any human who manages to acquire the object with the ability to control the creature; a recurring theme in Scottish tales of mermaids. In Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, a golden comb when pulled through the victims’ hair makes them forget. In a tale collected by the Grimm brothers, The Nix of the Mill Pond, a golden comb is used by a wife to summon her husband from the mill-pond, where he had been taken by a beautiful woman who lived in the water. Perhaps this is really about summoning her husband back from the spirit world, through the reflective surface of the mill pond, the comb being used to control the will of spirits to do a mortal woman’s bidding. In Ireland, banshees, female spirits whose appearance signals a forthcoming death, also possess combs, although these are silver rather than gold.
If we regard the mirror as providing a portal into the otherworld, with the reflection literally symbolising a window into that world, and the comb or the act of combing as part of the process of divination, then the purpose of these two symbols becomes clearer: the mermaid or banshee is divining the future, perhaps foretelling a specific event using the tools of her trade, passing that message from the otherworld to our own.
Finally, there may also be evidence of further sets of ‘qualifiers’, other than the ‘Mirror and Comb’ on stones in Pictland. On the Abernethy stone (picture 6) what appear to be a hammer and a possible anvil appear on the stone. Blacksmith’s tools and the ability of the blacksmith to work with iron have long been linked to the supernatural and luck and is best manifested in the folklore surrounding horseshoes."
"The planet Venus holds a special place in esoteric lore as she is The Morning Star. Lucifer, translation – light bearer, originally was Venus even though with time Lucifer has become mixed up with Satan and the Devil . Venus is the bringer of the Light.
became identified with Aphrodite, who was born from the sea, and retained close connections with it, but in fully human form again; her fish attributes were transferred to her escorts the Tritons, and more rarely, the female Tritonids. Aphrodite was also a fertility goddess, and goddess of fair sailing, her companion the sacred dolphin. Many of the symbols associated with Aphrodite, subsequently the Roman Venus, have been retained in the mermaid myth. Her mirror, later a symbol of her vanity, originally represented the planet Venus in astrological tradition.
Her abundant, flowing hair, symbolizing an abundant love potential, was also an attribute of Venus in her role as fertility goddess. Her comb, necessary to keep all that hair in order, carried sexual connotations for the Greeks, as their words for comb, kteis and pecten, also signified the female vulva. Thus the mermaid is the surviving aspect of the old goddesses, particularly as the link between passion and destruction."
"The Late Latin word is from Ecclesiastical Greek diabolos, in Jewish and Christian use, "Devil, Satan" (scriptural loan-translation of Hebrew satan), in general use "accuser, slanderer," from diaballein "to slander, attack," literally "throw across," from dia- "across, through" + ballein "to throw" (see ballistics).
In Vulgate, as in Greek, diabolus and dæmon were distinct, but they have merged in English and other Germanic languages."
The dragon looks into petrified images on mirror shards "throwing-across" [dia+bolical] reflections of itself...
"The metaphor of the mirror as matter, an image that has an important function in Marsilio Ficino’s highly influential explication of Platonism. Apart from being yet another powerful metaphor, the image of the mirror is also connected with the image of the materia meretrix. There was, for example, a widely held belief that mirrors belonging to prostitutes had the power to infect decent people with physical disease and immoral behaviour. This belief underscores the idea that mirrors not only reflect images, but can also retain the forms they “catch.” The metaphor also illustrates the specific anxiety that mirrors could reflect these dangerous images back and thus contaminate and corrupt the environment, both morally and physically."
"apparently from drak-, strong aorist stem of derkesthai "to see clearly," from PIE *derk- "to see." Perhaps the literal sense is "the one with the (deadly) glance."
As metaphor, the dragon as the devouring eye, that locks up the sun in mirrors of endless speculations - "chaos" [displacing the whole reality principle, the light of nature]. The hoarder of the treasure, is another way of saying it is what disrupts circulation. Distribution and Free-movement that Is life. The constellation draconis represents the north polar belt, some say, 66.6 degrees above the equatorial belt...
"Astronomer David Pratt confirms this: “The north ecliptic pole lies in the constellation Draco, and has the equatorial coordinates 18h (270°) RA, +66.6° decl.""
The slaying of the Unlimite Dragon with no end to its magni-ficent appetite[chaos], prompting its frighteningly fiery, conflagrant sexuality, released the sun - the Limiter.
Life is a vulnerability. - the warning of the Thorn Rune."
Quote :
Thorn rune or the Devil's rune or the Dragon rune
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.] Thor's cave, Strattfordshire
"The mountain, forbidding, implacable. Thrust up (steming) from the belly of the Earth. Shrouded in cloud and snow, a land impenetrable to all but the bravest, strongest and most single-minded. Its reflection in the waters is still and alluring, the dangers of the subconscious, of dreams. Difficult to separate truth from illusion – a path demanding a different sort of strength. Desire for truth, spiritual fearlessness.
Thurisaz is a rune that is often shunned by runesters, it represents the forces of chaos – that which we fear, the powerful emotions and drivers lurking beneath the surface. A giant, a thorn, a powerful, uncontrollable force. Interestingly, it is Thor (part giant himself) who wields Mjollnir, the hammer that controls the force of Thurisaz. Turned on its back, Thurisaz resembles an anvil – when the hammer and anvil come together the Smith creates his magick.
There is also an interesting connection between Thurisaz and the concept of the thorn hedge which the witch or shaman is able to cross. The hagzissa or witch, is a ‘hedgesitter’ who has learned to pass through the barrier…"
""I know a third for the event / that I should be in dire need / of fettering a foeman. / I can dull the blades of my attackers / so that they can strike by neither weapons nor wile" (Havamal 148)
The nature of thurisaz is phallic and aggressive, and is the shape of the rune itself. The rune-poem references make clear the forceful aspects of phallocentric sexuality shown by thurisaz. Thurisaz is the rune of forth-rushing power as brute force; it is the world when their wrath is aimed at the walls of the gardh, but also the strength that makes Thorr so powerful agains his woe-working likes.
Thorr is a god of crops as well as a warder, as his being is shown forth in the summer thunderstorms which keep the grain alive. In parts of Scandinavia, it is still believed that the wheat will not ripen without the autumn lightning - the wedding of Thorr and his golden-haired wife Sif, who embodies the ripening grain. Thurisaz is the might which breaks through shields and barriers and clears the way for new growth and rebirth. The torment of women and the sickness of women referred to in the runic poems may well be the first pains of the loss of maidenhead and the illnesses which sometimes come with pregnancy - pain which is necessary if birth is to take place.
Thurisaz may be used to prick your will awake and to strengthen and aim your use of force. In certain bindings it aids in bringing on the rage of the berserker, which, however, is seldom a good thing in any settling less than open war and not always then. Used carefully, it may break down the barriers of closed mind and bring the lightning stroke of new thought.
Thurisaz can be used in raising and guiding thunderstorms, either as a ward against the wrath of the storm or in aiming the lightning if you must, though this would not be wisdom´s rede.All in all, working with Thurisaz is like picking up a thorny branch barehanded. If you are careful and skilled, you can use it well; if not, you can do yourself much harm. Agate is associated with the warding side of thurisaz. The Anglo-Saxons used this stone to gaurd against thunder, demons (thurses), witchcraft and the venom of snakes, all of which Thorr is mighty against."
Proto-Germanic *kambaz (cognates: Old Saxon and Old High German camb, German Kamm, Middle Dutch cam, Dutch kam, Old Norse kambr), literally "toothed object," from PIE *gombhos, from root *gembh- "to bite, tooth"
Thurisaz:
"The Thorn is sorely sharp for any thane Hurtful to hold Uncommonly severe To every man who lies among them.
or
"The thorn is exceedingly sharp, an evil thing for any knight to touch, uncommonly severe on all who sit among them."
"In ancient times, as well as in some places today, bramble or thorny bushes were used to fence and protect boundaries. One form of Norse execution was to throw criminals into thorns. Thor is the god that protects sacred enclosures in much the same way that the thorny hawthorn, blackberry or rose bush does. No matter how beautiful the rose, one should always be watchful of the thorns."
"It is indeed the tangling brambles which ensnare and cause delay in our lives as well as complicating our plans, however all things have two sides - the briars which tangle and trap the fox offer shelter and protection to the mouse hiding within them. This aspect of Thurisaz is an ideal protection for the helpless, a powerful defense for the weak. Like the briar it is a neutral natural force which can cause harm or help depending on how we choose to interact with it.
In divination when Thurisaz appears it often represents a warning about the need for strong defenses, as well as the possibility that you have become entangled in a situation which could be harmful to you. It presages delays and complications to plans and tells to carefully assess and think through your position before proceeding. In magic Thurisaz is a strong defensive rune which can be drawn in a protective circle around you to ward off harm or ill intent. When drawn or carved on a sharp object, such as a knife, it can be used to draw evil beings out of a person or place, and carved at the corner of your property it can be an effective warding."
"from pro- "forward" (see pro-) + crastinus "belonging to tomorrow," from cras "tomorrow," of unknown origin."
"The romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a procrastinator of the first order. His publishers were always nagging him for overdue manuscripts. Most famously, he was interrupted while writing "Kubla Khan," by someone knocking at his door. He never regained his concentration, and the poem remains an evocative fragment. But it is hard to deny that the unfinished "Kubla Khan" is a more stirring instance of romanticism than, say, the whole of Wordsworth's Prelude, a finished poem that goes on for hundreds of tedious pages.
Melville shows us what can happen to people who always pursue the most daunting task instead of casting about for something easier. The White Whale is a metaphor for the blank page, which writers hunt obsessively with our harpoon-pens. Moby-Dick would have ended differently if Ahab had lost himself in the pursuit of whale oil or the search for The Rachel's missing children. A monomaniacal, Calvinist "isolato" is not necessarily a better model for the writerly life than the louche, remorseful "inspirato" that Coleridge was.
Shakespeare's Hamlet was a great procrastinator. There was always something to be done before getting about the business of killing his father's murderer. But can anyone deny that Hamlet performed an honorable service in dispatching that pedantic spouter of aphorisms, Polonius? Perhaps things would have worked out better for Hamlet and Denmark if he had never got around to killing Claudius, if he had procrastinated until the old poisoner succumbed to cirrhosis.
As Hamlet shows us, procrastination can be highly productive, provided one has plenty of things to do while working toward the most dreaded task."
The comb draws in things to itself (and was thus akin to a magic spell or a love charm) and with-draws away (and thus akin to myths of mermaids stealing away the souls of sailors…)
The music of the magic harp is intruding, but with it, it draws out, makes protrude the undifferentiated chaotic unconscious upto the surface and 'twitches' there. It raises up the treasure from the abysmal bottom. The undifferentiated is the "inertia" or the cold sleep thorn of the dragon's power (Isa) that the thor/n pierces and parts like the comb, and breaks the slumber. Day-break. Meaning of parting the waters. Thor defeats the ice-giants. Mermaids are part draconic, and part human - thus… like Freud's metaphor for the mind. Their Speculation, mirroring under the teeth-rays of the sun-comb in the glittering waters and parting the veil now and then, is a procrastination into the future, combing the earth for treasures.
The comb draws in and out like the waves upon archetypical 'beds' that are always forming and dissolving...
"Will and wave. - How greedily this wave is approaching, as if it were trying to reach something! How it crawls with terrifying haste into the inmost crevices of the craggy gorge! It seems to be trying to arrive before someone else; something of value, of great value, seems to be hidden there. - And now it is returning, a bit more slowly but still quite white with excitement - is it disappointed? Has it found what it was seeking? Is it simulating disappointment? - But already another wave is nearing, still more greedily and wildly than the first; and its soul, too, seems full of secrets and the hunger for treasure-digging. That is how the waves live - that is how we live, we who will - I will say no more. So? You distrust me? You are angry with me, you beautiful monsters? Are you afraid I will divulge your entire secret? Well, be angry with me; raise your dangerous green bodies as high as you can; make a wall between me and the sun - as you are now! Truly, at this moment nothing remains of the world but green dusk and green thunderbolts. Carry on as you want, you high-spirited ones: roar with delight and malice - or dive again, pour your emeralds into the deepest depths, cast your endless white mane of foam and froth over them: everything is fine with me because everything suits you so well, and I love you so for everything - how could I betray you ! For - mark my words! - I know you and your secret; I know your kind! After all, you and I are of one kind! After all, you and I have one secret!" [JW, 310]
Here be Dragon thorns guarding the treasures of the sea, the emerald rose… put in Nietzsche's mouth:
Gladness means “open space”, ‘to open space’, the boundless Ginnunga gap, swelling, opening to life, movement, activity; the creative Maya. “O.E. glæd “Bright, shining, joyous”, O.N. glaðr “smooth, bright, glad; Du. glad “slippery,” Ger. glatt “smooth”; from PIE *ghel- “to shine”; and, O.E. bryht from beorht “bright; splendid; clear-sounding; beautiful; divine”, from PIE *bhereg- “to gleam, white” (cf. Skt. bhrajate “shines, glitters,” Lith. breksta “to dawn”). Meaning “quick-witted” is from 1741.”
The train of associations: brahman - ananda - gladness -slippery - smooth - gleam - quick witted, offer a brief to what Detienne & Vernant write;
Quote :
"The polumetis is also known by the name of poikilometis or aiolometis. The term poikilos is used to refer to the sheen of a material or the glittering of a weapon,the dappled hide of a fawn or the shining back of a snake mottled with darker patches. This many-coloured sheen or complex of appearances produces an effect of irridescence, shimmering, an interplay of reflections which the Greeks perceived as the ceaseless vibrations of light. In this sense, what is poikilos, many-coloured, is close to what is aiolos, which refers to fast movement.Thus it is that the changing surface of liver which is sometimes propitious and sometimes the reverse is called poikilos just as are good fortune which is so inconstant and changing and also the deity which endlessly guides the destinies of men from one side to the other, first in one direction and then in the other. Plato associates what is poikilos with what is never the same as itself, oudepote tauton and, similarly, elsewhere opposes it to that which is simple, haplous. …aiolos, is a term which is close to poikilos. E.Benveniste has connected it with the root at aion (skt. ayu): this denotes, first, the life force realised in human existence and, then, continuity of life, duration of life, a period of time. A linguistic analysis reveals that the fundamental meaning of aiolos, is: swift, mobile, changing [Maya]. …on connection with men, to those whose wiley mind is able to twist and turn in every direction." [Cunning Intelligence]
Maya or Metis of the ever-changing phenomenal world were originally counterparts to “Gladness”, that gradually devolved into slander with the Socratic equation of a static “virtue = truth = happiness”:
Partly, "All that glitters is not gold" is the enlightenment's discrediting of those metaphors that twinkle, and that do not shine with graspable certainty.
However, the postmodern stupidity of deleuze's or derrida's play and perspectivism for its own sake, is the absolutization of perspectival relativism and of the twinkling itself;
Quote :
"Iridescence begins, as it were, at the surface. For the most part, in the world at large, it is visible among animals, some minerals, and even some plants. It is not obvious what the proper preposition here would be—visible on, visible in, and so on. It is a trace or residue of the surface interacting with air and light, the mediums of vision. Let us consider iridescence as a Denkfigur for surfaces.
Iridescence is a visual phenomenon. The weird thing about it is that it seems to exist only insofar as it is seen. Essential to iridescence is its viewing geometry1—iridescence is the exhibition of “vivid colors which change with the angle of incidence or viewing due to optical wave interference in the multilayer structure present at the wavelength scale underneath the surface”2; it is the “visual characteristic attributed to surfaces that change in color with viewing angle.”3 This is what is meant by the claim that iridescence is only insofar as it is seen.
Iridescence is a phenomenon that has been formally recognized since as early as classical antiquity, as evinced by poikilos, a secular Greek word used to refer to dappled coloring, such as the skin of a leopard or the many-colored, indeed iridescent, scales of a snake.
What is being discussed here is basically the phenomenon of camouflage. Indeed, iridescence—as a phenomenon in Animalia—is a form of camouflage.
Consider iridophores, a class of color-producing cells that are found in a wide variety of animals, from crustaceans to bacteria.7 Sometimes they are akin to a luminescent accidents happening at or just beyond the final layer of skin, fur, chitin—whatever that external-most layer might be. Consider the particular iridophores we find in the species of squid Lolliguncula brevis; here, iridophores are produced from within the flesh of the animal. Embedded within the flesh of this specific squid, but also found in similar instances throughout the animal kingdom, iridescence is always a marker of this interior-exterior negotiation. It is a kind of sign, secreted from within the being of the animal, working its way toward the external world.
Iridescence, then, as a particularly scintillating instantiation of camouflage, literally dazzling the potential predator, is a demonstration of a particular interior-exterior negotiation that ultimately results in a suspension of the appearance-reality distinction. The specific crypsis that is camouflage is so interesting because it is a rehearsal of the problem of the relationship between reality and appearance. It is the case when, indeed, this distinction appears to be suspended. In fact, it is imperative that this strict distinction somehow dissipates; otherwise, camouflage fails and the organism dies. The cunning of iridescence, however, goes beyond its deployment as an undermining of the apparent rigidity of the animal integument. Precisely as a mechanism of decomposing the mediums of vision, iridescence seems to mark the site where a surface begins to emerge, where a surface surfaces.
To witness iridescence is to encounter a phenomenon where the axis of reality is perhaps no longer the mundanely given but rather one that is shifted towards a heterotopic convergence of images with different degrees of reality, cohering into a single image: the apparent—the really apparent and apparently real—of the perceived shine. This is not an epistemological valorization of the purely experiential at the cost of all other possible perspectives of considering the apparent phenomenon at hand; but nor it is an argument to enhance the understanding of that peculiarly puzzling and seductive phenomenon that is visible, for instance, in the animal kingdom. Iridescence, as Denkfigur, allows us to constellate a conception of the surface precisely not as boundary, but as a scintillating site of intractable multiplicities. Iridescence, then, appears as a Denkfigur for surfaces surfacing.
Though a strict taxonomy might suggest that the screen is a mere instantiation of surface, let us consider the surface as screen. In so doing, it will become clear that the constellation of realities, which occurs at the site of the screen, is precisely a rehearsal of the reality problem at the heart of the surface. Of course many of the considerations of the screen that I have in mind deal with the screen in the plain sense of a screen for projection, a screen on which something, namely a film, is projected. But as a site of projection, or rather upon which something is projected, the screen is freed to appear in a variety of manifestations. Here are some easy targets: consider the German word for screen in the sense of movie screen, Leinwand, which is also the exact same word for the canvas upon which one can, say, paint. But if we are going to indulge in word games, then there is of course that other just-as-prevalent definition of screen as blockage: the site of the absorption and reflection of luminance can also be a sight of exclusion and rejection. But of course, to have and to manifest that reflective potential, physically, there needs to be enough solidity/concretization as far as the substrate, the screen, is concerned. This is the alluring paradox of the screen agenda.
Friedberg thematizes the two spheres, which were identified above, in terms of a tension:
Another way of thinking about this tension between the material and the immaterial is by means of a question often asked in a spectator theory: “Where are we?” or “When are we when we watch film or television or sit at the computer?” The theorists have answered this in a variety of ways. The answer might be something like: in a subjective elsewhere, in a virtual space, a virtual time.8
“The space of the screen is a virtual space, an elsewhere that occupies a new dimension.” The virtual here is juxtaposed with the real. This juxtaposition seems to be one of the basic tenets of virtual-reality talk—the virtual is opposed to the real in the sense of the material, corporeal, and so on. And yet—and this is what I want to draw attention to—it seems that one is also speaking of virtuality to describe the effect that is produced by this sphere, as marking something like a quivering space or phenomenon or something between the real and the virtual. It is an effect on the real; it is a trace of the virtual. I take this to be the thrust of Elizabeth Grosz’s argument in her book Architecture from the Outside, particularly in the chapter “Cyberspace, Virtuality, and the Real.” While the discussion here initially begins by demarcating a kind of opposition between the virtual and the real, aligning the virtual with the realm of ideas (the unfeterred aspect of the imagination and fantasy), and the real with the body and the flesh, the clarity of this initial distinction quickly blurs:
The very term virtual reality attests to a phantasmatic extension, a bizarre contortion to save not the real (which is inevitably denigrated and condemned) but rather the will, desire, mind, beyond body or matter: this is a real not quite real, not an “actual real,” a “really real” but a real whose reality is at best virtual … The real is not so much divested of its status as reality as converted into a different order in which mind/will/desire are the ruling terms and whose matter, whose “real,” is stripped away.
Her account goes something like this: the virtual is ostensibly opposed to the real, but the real—fleshy bodies, for instance—persists; it coexists with the virtual because virtuality resides in the real. Yet Grosz ultimately emphasizes the dimension of futurity and potentiality as the link between the virtual and the real: “If virtuality resides in the real … this is because the real is always in fact open to the future, open to potentialities other than those now actualized.”
Virtuality shifts the locus of reality away from the thing in itself but not entirely back to the perceiving subject. It seems rather to suspend the issue altogether and rather suggests another locus of reality that is neither here nor there, which shimmers between revealing itself as thing-in-itself and purely experiential (subjective). What these considerations of virtuality ultimately suggest is that the difference between appearance and reality is not merely suspended, but actually collapsed.
For example, camouflage is precisely that. It is not merely perception being tricked, but in that instant of recognition—recognizing something as something else—it is rather that another reality has been momentarily illuminated. The locus of reality is no longer in the perceiving subject, nor is the reality of the perceived object itself altered. The blending of reality and the apparent is precisely the mechanism of camouflage.
This shifting of the locus of reality, then, has important consequences for our thinking about the surface. The surface is only insofar as we, the perceivers, encounter it. The surface is only so long as it is perceived. In this way, surface itself becomes a locality, a point of experiential densification. The experience of surface, then, is an experience of recognition—recognizing that shimmering neither here nor there. This means that surface is a kind of densification of information and material. It has accrued and calcified, hypostatized into a plane of perception—the surface. And it is in this way that the surface can be read as a symptom—as a precipitate, as a densification, as an accumulation in a particular, specific locality. Hence I began this section with the suggestion that the surface is not a monolithic concretion, but an accretion.
Our perception, we could say, is the analogue of the water strider’s feet on the surface of the water. The moment our perception makes contact, the surface tightens into itself; it becomes. Our experience of surface, our experience of how the surface operates, is a localization of a densification, of multiple images/elevations/layers cohering in that moment of perception. This is the operation of surface tension, when the surface of the water becomes the surface. We may still encounter the surface as monolithic, as a solid integument, though it is in fact a series of elements brought together into a scintillating plane of perception.
Amidst all this talk of surfaces, I think the most urgent surface is the surface of the skin (for it is the closest to us), and thus of touching. And touch is the marker of intimacy. But beyond the necessary role of touch in our ontogenetic and phylogenetic survival, it has become something of a presiding metaphor in this talk of surfaces. It would thus be remiss to speak of surfaces without at least a passing glance at intimacy.
Intimacy is sex, maybe—it’s hard to say definitively because this is a euphemistic deployment of the word, and I think a somewhat antiquated one at that. These days, “intimacy” seems most close to closeness, that ineffably singular experience of feeling connected to another person. When speaking of intimates, there is an emphasis on the proximal, in the emphatic, spatial sense of the word—those who are close to one another, those who are close to me. It describes—in a phrase—the logics of proximity. This superficial closeness, literally proximity understood through the metrics of how much of my private sphere comes into contact with that of another, is rather a foil for an even deeper sense of spatiality, that of interiority.
Resuscitating this deeper sense of intimacy here is rather an attempt to highlight a tacit aspect of the earlier considerations of screens, surfaces, screening surfaces, and so forth—trying to enter the interiority, neither here nor there, of virtuality. This tacit element I now want to exhume is namely the architectonics of intimacy, or even more strongly: intimacy as architectonics, as fundamental, essential—as first architectonics. And it is as first architectonics that we should consider intimacy a heuristic of proximity and closeness, techniques of baffling the superficial. Surface negotiations are not merely just making contact, getting in touch, but rather a more consequential playing with the integument of reality.
If the superficial is itself a collation of so many layers, then intimacy would insist that it goes beyond these layers. Intimacy seems to insist on a realer real than the apparently given. Intimacy purports to access the realer real. If, then, the surface is already an issue of negotiating between the real and the apparent, what would the realer real mean here—to settle on the suspension between reality and appearance? Intimacy may apparently be an insistence precisely on the distinction in order to get to the depths of something, that is, insisting that the surface is merely superficial. (And hence the familiar insistence on touch, on the perpetuation and fulfillment of the haptic injunction.) However, we have established that the surface cannot be considered a site of monolithic concretion but rather at most a locality of perceptual density.
Intimacy is that sphere of reality that is not quite the real of the mundane given, and yet could be considered to exude a more intense reality, in the sense that it is like the ultimate confirmation of the first, inner reality. Instead of becoming a mere idiosyncrasy, the intimate encounter is a confirmation of that reality, but due to its complicity, also, with the material reality, it emerges as that scintillating virtuality.
When we understand intimacy as this drive towards, this navigating for, the locus of the real, we begin to be able to see how intimacy becomes an essential component of negotiating surfaces as we have come to understand them. Intimacy, understood in terms of degrees of proximity, is symptomatic of operating in a world where surfaces are taken to be boundaries, as monolithic concretions. But when we begin to see more clearly that surfaces are in fact these zones or localities of iridescently shifting, at-once-elusive-and-alluring shining—projecting into the space of the given reality and undermining its hegemony—intimacy becomes the drive towards palpating, recognizing, appropriating these heterotopic regions.
We live in a time of iridescence, of scintillation between the virtual and the real—an iridereal perhaps, where surfaces are no longer concretions to be encountered but rather sites of dazzling encounter. The very experience of touch must be conceptualized anew.
We move from Schein, the appearance of things inflected by a sense of dubiousness, something deceptive, to being blinded by the shine, to now penetrating it to seek out what it essentially is—a dynamic coherence of multiple images, each operating at varying degrees of reality, brought together into a scintillating iridescence, resulting in a dissolution of the strict duality of reality and appearance and instead illuminating the virtuality that is the site of this negotiation. The surface becomes the locus where this is rehearsed."
A woman is trained to give the world a chance. She is hope. (Why the sight of females crying and in despair is the most ugly...)
A man is trained to give chance a world, to seize it into a world of possibility... He is pride. (Why the sight of males shying of godly strength, of being lucifers (light-bringers), and whimpering in weakness is the most ugly...)
In the ideal,
To marry a woman is to marry your highest hope. Because you generate possibility, only a woman can redeem a possibility into a world and grant you freedom. She is your redemption.
To marry a man is to marry your strongest refuge. Because you have seen into the crevices, into the patterns that will blossom into a flower, you wish to give the world a chance, to conserve that memory that is You, only a man can protect it from oblivion, by shaping that fate to a destiny, by giving her his Name. He is her salvation.
The chalice and the sword leads to the holy grail of the philosopher's stone…
A sanctuary is also a vault - like that in the bank which Accrues interest slowly.
Pandora's vault had "hope" in it. Hope is 'B'oth - gift and poison.
Sanctuaries and Sanctions in the Greco-Roman periods also led to Memory-Sanctions. Your immortality was at stake. Criminals and degenerates and traitors were barred from names and graves.
Orwell wrote:
"Its counterpart in literate societies is the willful destruction of commemorative symbols (documents and monuments), including the burning of books, the destruction of inscriptions (damnatio memoriae), and the rewriting of history as described, for example, by Orwell in 1984. There is (as far as I can see) no comprehensive term to denote these acts of intentional and violent cultural oblivion. They seem to correspond, on the individual level, to repression, whereas structural amnesia corresponds rather to forgetting. “Cultural repression” might therefore serve as a term for the various forms of annihilating cultural memory."
For the Greek hero, to be unsung is to be as good as dead.
"Nowhere does this equation seem to be more true than in the Odyssey, where a major theme is the equation of anonymity with nonexistence. Not only must Odysseus escape physical destruction on his way back from Troy; he must also avoid being permanently trapped in various kinds of namelessness that the poem portrays as death. This imperative is in keeping with the dominant perspective of the story. “Everybody knows” that Odysseus lives only to get back home to Ithaka. In the Odyssey, we see him first on the shore of Calypso’s island, looking woefully to sea, longing to see his wife and family. And homecoming will restore him not only to the roles of king, husband, father, and son but to his identity in an existential sense. By killing the suitors he emerges from anonymity to become “Odysseus” again." [Nortwick, Unknown Odysseus]
In ancient Greece, "memory sanctions" were feared deterrants in their power to pass down through the generations;
Quote :
"The attitude of the Greek city-states to memory sanctions is primarily revealed in their laws and statutes. The internal stability of the individual cities depended on their being able to deal with threats, whether real or potential, from errant citizens who might disrupt the community or even overturn its government, sometimes seizing power and imposing a tyrannical regime. Such threats could be just as real as the danger of war with neighboring communities, and the two could and often did go together. Political strife (stasis) was endemic to Greek politics, and patterns of repeated tyrannies or oligarchies were vivid in the collective memories of many cities. Disaffected citizens might also join foreign enemies, such as the Persians. Even in the earliest times, sanctions against traitors and tyrants are attested in many Greek communities.
A Lokrian law of the late sixth century B.C. demonstrates the regular use of severe sanctions against the worst lawbreakers, such as murderers or violators of other communal civic agreements.
Such sanctions included the confiscation of property and the razing of the transgressor’s house, which thus spelled the expulsion of the individual and of his family from the community. The razing of the house was a widely attested penalty, which the Greeks themselves dated back to mythical times in the story of the revenge taken on those guilty of the murder of Hesiod.5 Although not mentioned in the Homeric poems, its place in myth underlines the symbolic significance of such a penalty in the Greek imagination. Greek tragedies often speak of the gods’ destruction of the houses of the wicked, and many villains of tragedy were portrayed as tyrannical rulers who misused their power in relation to men or to gods, even as they brought disaster on the cities they were supposed to be leading.
Such destruction was used at Corinth to mark the end of the reign of the Cypselids. At Sparta the houses of individual kings were destroyed, even though the monarchy itself was never in question as an aspect of the traditional system of government.6 The razing of the house symbolized the ruin of the family and of its position in society. Even in the historical period, the gods were thought to enact their own form of this penalty against particular offenders. Glaukus the Spartan, for example, dared to ask the Delphic oracle whether he could swear a false oath in order to keep a deposit of money that had been left in his care. Although he never actually committed the perjury he was contemplating, Apollo still punished him by making his family and house disappear from Sparta, where he had formerly enjoyed a reputation for justice and fairness.
An archaic sanction that carried distinct religious overtones, the razing of the house went far beyond mere symbolism. It literally destroyed the economic status and social position of the whole family, or at least of the branch that lived in the house in question. The result was that the offending individual would no longer live there, nor would his descendants and relatives. The implication was that this family could no longer coexist with the community at large. In most cities outside Athens, the confiscated land seems simply to have been reused for another purpose, so that all traces of the erasure itself were also removed. Presumably, the whole incident might eventually be forgotten. Although the razing of a house was not primarily designed as a memory sanction, it could and often did carry this secondary effect.
Additional penalties could be associated with confiscation and destruction of property. Equally severe was the restriction of burial within the territory of the city. Most often this penalty would apply to the offender himself, but it could also involve his descendants (those now going into exile) and even sometimes his ancestors. In the latter case, graves might be dug up and the remains cast out beyond the borders of the community.
In this case, it seems fairer to speak of denial of burial as a true memory sanction, especially when a whole family group was affected. The presence of the family in the city was marked by the house of the living and by the graves of the dead. In cases of treason, tyranny, or other egregious violations, a whole family might be removed from the community as if it had never been a part of it. Such a removal could involve an elaborate series of public events, including the razing of the house and the ritual of exposing a corpse, or the digging up of family graves and the casting of old bones over the border. It seems probable that the expulsion of ancestors was more likely to involve prominent families and to represent a much more politicized erasure of family power and influence than the unceremonious casting of a common criminal into a pit reserved for those who had been crucified." [Harriet Flower, The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political Culture]
In contrast to threats of oblivion and obliterating memory, rememberance of criminals and making sure they were never forgotten was also practised as an apotropaism.
Quote :
"What made Athens different from the point of view of memory was its practice of publicly recording the names of traitors and other notorious offenders on stelai that were prominently displayed in the city. By providing examples (paradeigmata) of individual villains, such inscriptions ensured that their memory would be perpetuated in a negative way that served the purposes of the Athenian democracy. Far from erasure and oblivion, the Athenians’ system of memorializing notorious offenders helped to protect the city by describing the individuals who posed the most serious threats to its way of life.
Consequently, Athens redefined the worst offenders as outlaws who had lost not only their citizen status but also their physical place within the community, both in life and after death. The implied, albeit usually silent, consent of the community of citizens as a whole was an important part of this rhetoric of punishment. Oblivion remained the more common lot of the lowly criminal. The notorious elite offender, however, especially the traitor or aspirant to tyranny, was memorialized as such by having his name and deed advertised through special inscription(s). If his house was destroyed, its former location was marked rather than being simply consigned to the vagaries of collective memory. From its earliest days the Athenian democracy arrogated to itself the practice of labeling and controlling public memory in order to preserve its political system, communal values, and way of life." [Harriet Flower, The Art of Forgetting]
If that can be called Modernity, then Postmodernity can be observed in the final method deployed by ancient Greco-Rome. From Amnesia, derives the word Amnesty.
Amnesty International and the UN International Human Rights court all attempt to undo the remembrance severely enforced by modernity and freeing them of all accountability. The past pardoned and erased and allowed to be re-invented like nothing every happened. History fictionalized as just one other "interpretation" among the many narratives equally valid. Relativism in the name of liberty and self-fashioning retarding any trace of maturity and responsibility to a juvenile cosplay of conscience;
Quote :
"The Athenians, and other Greeks also, developed another practice that was a type of deliberate memory sanction, namely an amnesty. According to the terms of an amnesty, a reconciliation was made between two sides in a conflict, whether within a community or between two rival Greek cities. The new settlement was based on a pledge to put aside past differences and not to pursue old grudges.
Such a pledge was usually made by both sides in the conflict by means of an oath taken by each person in his own name. Each person would make a personal pledge to reconcile and to make a new start. This practice reveals much about the construction of political memory within the Greek city, as well as between cities. In the Greek view, political relations took place within the memory space specifically created by the community, and the role of the past in determining the future was clearly acknowledged. A new start was made by promising not to use the past as a political weapon. The standard term used in Greek for the oaths was ou mnesikakein, “not to remember evils from the past” or even “not to misuse memory.”
In other words a special verb was created to express the recalling of previous wrongs, presumably nearly always with a view to seeking some kind of personal vengeance or to provoking political unrest. Rather than using a verb of forgetting or of reconciling, the Greeks expressed an amnesty in negative terms, literally as a sanction against certain types of or uses of “memory.” This was not a general ban on the act of remembering itself, but rather a specific agreement about the public use of certain kinds of memories. The agreement relies on memory and presupposes that people will and must inevitably recall the past in order to obey the law.
An alternative term was a verb of “being angry on the basis of memory” (mnasicholesai). In this case the individual would swear not “to be angry in remembering the past.” The connection of anger with vengeance and strife is a time-honored Greek concept that goes back to the anger of Achilles in the Iliad. Similarly, the Odyssey ends with an exchange of oaths and a pact between Odysseus and the families of the suitors whom he has killed. The word “amnesty” was also a Greek term (amnestia) but is only attested later, for example, in the alliance between Miletus and Heracleotis of about 180 B.C.
The practice of banning such memories of evil was current in the fifth century, as attested in the reconciliation between the Athenians and the Bottiaians in 422 B.C. Other examples include the reconciliation of Athens and Iulis (362 B.C.) and the amnesty decree from Aliphera in Arcadia (late third century B.C.). The practice is also celebrated in myth by the reconciliation of Poseidon and Athena after their contest over who should be the principal protective deity of Athens.
The myth was depicted in sculpture on the monumental west pediment of the Parthenon. According to Plutarch, Poseidon was happy to share a temple with Athena, and there was an altar dedicated to Lethe, goddess of Forgetting, at the Erechtheium. Each year the Athenians apparently omitted the second day of the month Boedromion because that had been the day of the contest between Poseidon and Athena. By contrast, the Furies (Erinyes or Eumenides) were characterized as goddesses who kept alive the memories of evil and whose constant quest for revenge was based on memory, linked to grief and pollution. In Aeschylus’ Eumenides the goddesses become the protectors of the city by agreeing to accept legal arbitration of blood feuds and by taking on an official role as guardians of memory." [Flower, The Art of Forgetting]
Quote :
"An effective limit was put on revenge and bloodshed by elevating a law of reconciliation (and consequently also the legal system in general) as an authoritative tool to put an end to disputes between citizens. At the same time, the lawcourts served as venues for exploring and controlling the bitter memories of the past. Athenian legal speeches continually recalled the past rather than keeping silent, but this practice seems to have served to reinforce rather than to undermine the effectiveness of the amnesty decree. Open discussion in the courts of its limits and consequences helped to shape its practical details and to give the community ownership of the new political order. The price of peace was for all to step aside from their past roles, whether as defeated oligarchs, victorious democrats, or fearful citizens who had simply tried to stay out of the conflict.
At the same time, the collective guilt and reproaches for what had happened could be virtually transferred to the notorious Thirty, who could serve as scapegoats for the whole community. Their small and precise number suggested that most other Athenians had been their victims and that the unity of the community had essentially remained intact. As a result, the new democracy could be closely associated with the old, even as the constitutional break of 404 was isolated and relabeled. Meanwhile, all citizens who remained in the community were to be on an equal footing and hence to emerge as the victors from the conflict.
The amnesty of 403 B.C. was appropriately celebrated in its own right as an expression of Athenian civic values and as a basis for shared political life. It recalled ancient pledges of an end to blood feuds and a respect for laws that brought to mind Solon and the first establishment of a stable political system. Yet it also inaugurated a new style of democracy and a renewed appreciation for the value of the law as the true basis of the political community. The importance of controlling the memory of the past for the future of the community was acknowledged and brought home to every citizen in his personal taking of the oath. Control of memory ultimately belonged to each citizen in his own person, rather than to any representative group or body within the city. The conception and success of this amnesty became celebrated throughout the fourth century and helped to establish the image of Athens that was familiar to successive generations." [Flower, The Art of Forgetting]
1.Traditionalism: Obliterate into oblivion by memory Sanctions as a memetic exile and purging out without a trace from the whole community for the entire future.
2. Modernity: Remembrance: memory enforcement, and criminalization of any Amnesia of the standard narrative.
3. Post-Modernity: Universal Amnesty and granting pardon to erase all past history and reboot a new start, a blank state.
All three were described by Nietzsche as the grounds of pre-moral, moral, and immoral society.
The two pyramids of the B-rune go back to the "two deaths". Soma and sema - mean body and tomb.
The root meaning of sema is a "sign" or "marks the spot", and by this significance, it was linked with the "tomb." Plato's, "Now some say that the body (soma) is the sema of the soul, as if it were buried in its present existence; and also because through it the soul makes signs it is rightly named sema.", was shorthanded in J.-Xt. into "The body is the tomb."
Banking and the slow accruing of interest is also the accretions of epigenetic memory.
Berkana as the first breath of a baby, and the first menstrual blood marking the maturity of procreatable woman is basically a periodicity marker. The rhythm of the beat. It is the A, T, C DNA-sequencing. "Missing the mark (sema)" - hamartia could change everything.
Likewise, in terms of soma - pole-vaulting is about leaping from volvere - to turn around, roll… It is the pattern and the atavism that shows itself in the generational skip, without missing a beat. The greatest mark is your Initial - when the mother introduces the child to the name of the father, the sur(charged)name. The Initial is also the first Principal/ple that is referred to as capital in banking.
Sperm-banks and dealing with infertility issues is very much under Berkana.
Black Panther wrote:
It is clear that it relates to the loins and hips - Venus.
No, Venus rules the semen, Jupiter rules the thighs and hips.
I have never seen a happy pair of twins yet; it is dangerous to have them.
1520s, "foot soldier who prepares the way for the army," from Middle French pionnier "foot-soldier, pioneer," from Old French paonier "foot-soldier" (11c.), from peon (see pawn). Figurative sense of "person who goes first or does something first" is from c. 1600. Related: Pioneers.
Pawn.
lowly chess piece, late 14c., from Anglo-French poun, Old French peon, earlier pehon, from Medieval Latin pedonem "foot soldier," from Late Latin pedonem (nominative pedo) "one going on foot," from Latin pes (genitive pedis) "foot," from PIE root *ped- (1) "a foot".
Invention is a pioneering and taking the first foot forward.
Its the fool's path, where one puts the cart before the horse and learns by the gaps and the pitfalls.
Nietzsche wrote:
"All inventions made possible only by pre-supposing that truth has been found…" [WTP, 452]
Nietzsche wrote:
"The perspective of all organic functions, all the strongest instincts of life: the force in all life that wills error; error as the precondition even of thought. Before there is "thought" there must have been "invention"; the comtruction of identical cases, of the appearance of sameness, is more primitive than the knowledge of sameness." [WTP, 544]
In binding Berkana with Uruz, the flow of the uncontrollable animal power, vigour is directed back to the earth, and regulates the self/vessel from shattering. Berkana's synchronizing things enables one to experience this most unmediatedly, along-with. It allows one to "with-stand" - "syn"chronously.
In common terms, the bond between a mother and a child is one of unspoken immediacy, songs that keep the rhythm [bar] regulate power-surges, like incantations were metric formulae that rolled along like chariot wheels. Metric, metron, measure, mother. The mother-tongue and sanity from Latin sanus "sound, healthy". Sound and health in-sync: sound-health. Reversely, to choke on your own words, noise-grains, insane.
Quote :
"Symptoms are the body's mother-tongue; signs are in a foreign language." [John Brown]
Quote :
"These Cro-Magnon people were identical to us: they had the same physique, the same brain, the same looks. And, unlike all previous hominids who roamed the earth, they could choke on food. That may seem a trifling point, but the slight evolutionary change that pushed man's larynx deeper into his throat, and thus made choking a possibility, also brought with it the possibility of sophisticated, well articulated speech. Other mammals have no contact between their air passages and oesophagi. They can breathe and swallow at the same time, and there is no possibility of food going down the wrong way. But with Homo sapiens food and drink must pass over the larynx on the way to the gullet and thus there is a constant risk that some will be inadvertently inhaled. In modern humans, the lowered larynx isn't in position from birth. It descends sometime between the ages of three and five months - curiously, the precise period when babies are likely to suffer from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. At all events, the descended larynx explains why you can speak and your dog cannot." [Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way]
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"When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs. I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb's bleat." [Henry David Thoreau]
Speech reveals to man his divine nature; the sounds of speech are creative forces which unite him with his spiritual origin and enable him, once again, to find the path leading to the spirit. Speech raises the human being above the level of the animal; it leads him back to the Divine within his Ego. That spark from the Divine Ego, which, issuing forth, prepared itself to become man, had of necessity, as it traveled the path leading into the material world, to unite itself with the forces of destruction. When the densifying process worked too strongly, damming up the spirit, as it were, then the form could be cast off by the ever-recurring forces of death and change. Thus there arose the animal kingdom, which may be likened to a kind of extended alphabet, containing within it all that burdened man too heavily when he carried it compressed within the limits of his own being. In man it was able to be so far clarified that it could develop into the Word, into Speech. Sound, tone in the animal kingdom cannot rise to the level of speech. It remains mere noise in the case of cold-blooded animals, and, in the case of warm-blooded animals, inarticulate sound. Even in its most beautiful form, in the song of the birds, cosmic tone cannot fully reveal itself; the song of the birds is at most only its faintest echo. It is in speech that the individual force of the Ego first finds expression through tone and becomes aware of its own being. Through speech, cosmic forces can, as it were, focus themselves in an individual Ego and from out this Ego work creatively once more. When man raises himself to the upright position, when he changes from the horizontal position natural to the animal to the vertical position of the human being, he frees in himself the forces of speech. The child is overshadowed by these forces; as his individuality develops he becomes more and more strongly united with them. The child does not say ‘ I ’ of himself so long as his utterance is mere incoherent babbling. In personal desire, in egoism, the lower ego in the first place struggles through, expressing itself in wishes and desires, afterwards working its way through to feeling and thence into thought. Thought enters into the human being through the gate of speech. Pictures, imaginations are in this way raised up into the consciousness. Through this interplay of processes man becomes a thinking being. A ray from the spiritual essence of the Sun enters into the human being through the mind. In the German language there is a reflection of this in the words ‘Sonne’ (Sun) and ‘Sinn’ (Mind), where the all-embracing, all-enclosing vowel sound ‘ O ’ is transformed into an arrow of light in the vowel sound ‘ E ’ (ee). The knowledge acquired through sense-perception forms a path which leads man back to the spirit. However far he may have strayed from the true path in his striving to comprehend his own being, however far he may have been hurled from his primaeval spirituality, one thing remains to him, binding him to the spiritual world: Speech. However much he may have cut himself off from the universal All in order to dive down into matter and cover himself with the mask of personality, however much he may deceive himself into the belief that he is the Lord of Nature, no artificial language which has ever been invented, no Esperanto or ‘Volapuk,’ can afford him proof that he is able to create for himself a true language. He can only experiment with the elements of language already existent. If he penetrates deeply into the nature of this mystery he is able to find his way back to the spiritual world. For this reason — because speech is a divine creative force — it is so inexpressibly painful, so hopelessly inartistic, when in our modern tasteless age people try mechanically to construct dead, wooden words, with no spirit left in them, out of the initial letters of certain word-complexes. Such words effect us like the rattling bones of a skeleton. Even the clipping of the final syllables of words, so common in these days of dried up and lifeless speech, hurts like the sight of an amputated limb. And how much more so when, in a language still retaining the vitality of youth, a language which has not yet reached its maturity, the devil plays havoc by creating word-monstrosities, tossed together for the most part from the broken-off first syllables of different foreign words, — as is now actually being done in Soviet Russia. Satan himself seems to mock at us from out of these atrocities of language; he points them at us like a poisoned spear. A people whose soul has been so pierced may be likened to the suffering Amfortas, who needs must endure his agony until his deliverer approaches, bearing the spear of healing and salvation. Parsifal bore this spear of deliverance, which has been stolen away by Klingsor, back to the Castle of the Grail. The forces of evil are besieging the power of the World and threaten to destroy it. [...] We [can] see the deliverer, who gives back to us the redeeming, magical power of the Word, healing our wounds by casting the radiant Sun-Spear into the very Word itself. When will the day dawn that will give back to us again the understanding for the magical and healing forces of the word, for the waves of the spirit that surge beneath the word and seek an outlet through it? To live consciously in the breath, to give form to the breath, to use the breath as a chisel and with it give plastic form to the air, to feel the quivering, subtle vibrations of air and ether, to experience the overtones and the undertones, the delicate intervals within the diphthongs, through which filters the stream of the spirit — here is an artistic activity indeed, working creatively in the finest of substances. Here is a nobler task than that forced outpouring of emotion in sounds tending to become animal-like in their nature, such as we find only too frequently on the modern stage. But so long as there is no discrimination between spirituality and empty pathos, the way is barred to the redemption of art and all that is highest in man through the word. These things, subtle and impalpable though they be, must nevertheless be raised up into the consciousness. If the German is to fulfil his appointed task in the world he has no choice but to raise up into Ego-consciousness also in the sphere of Art that which other peoples have been able to accomplish instinctively. When German actors began to imitate the traditions of the French style, with all its elegance and distinction, their acting gradually became pathetically void of content. And when they associated themselves with the realism of the present day, it came about that, through their very thoroughness, they gradually descended to the sub-human, — first to the animal, then to the gramophone. Through the illumination of the consciousness there arises within us the knowledge of the fundamental laws of speech, which up to now have remained hidden and unknown; and with the knowledge the power to apply these laws, so that — given the necessary talent — the possibility arises of overcoming false emotion and of allowing real spirituality to take its place. There must be absolute truth, not mere imitation of the incidental and superficial; there must be the truth which comprehends the undercurrent of Being upon whose surface all that is incidental can make but the merest ripple, and which flows in an artistic ‘line,’ that must never be interrupted, never allowed to deviate in its aim, in the stream of its movement: For speech is movement, in continual flux and flow, borne on the waves of an inner music, painted in magic colours, and chiseled with fine precision. If we look upon speech merely as a means of making ourselves intelligible, merely as the garment of intellectualistic thought, we kill it as an Art. We tear it limb from limb when we simply adapt it to our intellect, instead of allowing our intellect to be illuminated by its light. When speech is thus intellectually conceived the stream of its sound flows grey and lifeless, instead of glowing with a many-coloured, jeweled radiance. The rhythm of speech, its melody, its sculptured outlines, its architectural impulse, the strength or the calm of its metrical beat, the dignity of its cadence, the curve that welds all these together and parts them asunder, and throws them again into a whirling vortex, — till the movement sweeps onward to a Dionysian revel or flows bright and crystal-clear in Apollonian dance ... a dead world this for most of our contemporaries, life and riches for those who possess its key. [...]Will humanity recognise the Spirit-King who gives back life to the beautiful lily? Or will the mocking face of the satyr bar the way? Yet even the satyr turns at last from evil ways and challenges in the figure of Marsyas the lyre of Apollo. Let us, then, seek once more, in full consciousness, for this path of knowledge which flowed in the very life-blood of the Greeks, imparted to them by the forces of the etheric body; let us open up this path once more to humanity, so that this priceless treasure may be made available to all as a wealth of knowledge and as a well-spring of regenerating life. And let us not fear the cold word: Consciousness. Consciousness is not the destroyer of Art. On the contrary, consciousness deepens Art, for it raises it up into the sphere of the Ego and frees it from the fetters of the mask-like personality. We need only direct our conscious perception towards the force which, seizing us as with arms of fire, lifts us up beyond that lower realm. In the fire of this experience something comes to pass, a form is created, but the form is fleeting and dissolves. If we are to hold it fast, to make it a lasting possession, we must gain a clear understanding of what it is that happens; we must observe it closely, then, detaching ourselves from it, learn really to know it. Having learned to know it we win it back anew, for it conies towards us as something having free, independent existence, as something which has attained an objective life of its own. Now it is filled with the treasures of those objective worlds, compared with which our own subjective life is but a poor and shrunken realm. Monotonous indeed seems this subjective life of the soul to one whose ears are opened to the boundless harmonies of the objective worlds, with their vivid wealth of tone-colour. Such a one will strive to give this back in Art out of direct experience, not veiled in a cloud of personal feeling. This personal interpretation may have some justification in certain roles on the stage, but none where poetry is concerned; for even the gentler atmosphere of a lyric poem may best be expressed by allowing the poem to speak out of its own inherent elements, out of the rhythm and the sounds into which the content is poured, rather than by a sentimental pulling of the heart-strings, or a more or less unhealthy over-tension of the nerves. Here we reach the point where we begin to gain some understanding of what is meant by the building and forming of speech. It means the experience of the creative activity of sound working through the medium of the air, through the out-going stream of the breath, — an experience, however, that can only be gained by first mastering the technique of sound-formation and production, in accordance with the laws and necessities underlying the organs of speech. It means, moreover, a highly developed ear for musical intervals and for variation of tone, an instinct which, for example, would make it impossible to bring an upward-striving, life-bringing, rejuvenating impulse into the tone of the voice when the form and feeling of the words makes a downward curve. It means a perception of the ‘line’ of a poem that is borne onward in an ever-moving curve, giving life and movement to word, line and stanza; of the artistic curve carrying with it impulse, activity and fire, which is inspired from the spiritual worlds, and seized upon by the spirit of men endowed with artistic gift. The flow of this curve must never be checked, not even in the pauses, in those essential and significant pauses, which it has to mould and shape, and during which the line, plunging down, as it were, into the spirit, draws forth a fresh impetus. Through perpetually submerging oneself in one's own soul-being the movement and flow of the line is destroyed, and finally this tendency towards self-absorption gains the ascendancy. This is illustrated in the legend of Narcissus, although in his case there was something noble, even in his self-adulation; Narcissus was at least beautiful. To-day, however, ‘to be beautiful’ is not sufficiently piquant, — and as for being ‘nobly beautiful,’ that has no attraction. Ugliness is much more piquant. The indulged and over-excited nerves need continual stimulant; even the pose of an ‘interesting’ consumptive, merely tinged with melancholy, no longer suffices. There must be a tinge of the abnormal, there must be a kind of negro element, something inane, in order to produce the required piquancy; people revel in agonising death scenes, and are weary of the pleasant languishing decline. Nay more they rejoice in the sub-human, in the demoniacal, which again rises from the negroid element. Do these words of mine seem too bitter? Alas, they are only too true. One must deliberately close one's eyes to facts if one would not see these things; or one's sensibilities must be blunted so that the extent of the decadence is no longer felt or noticed. That would mean the downfall of our civilisation. Yet the voice proclaiming the new impulse sounds loud and clear; men are yearning for a new world, for light, for a simpler and healthier existence; they are struggling to gain a foothold in the void. [Creative Speech, 7 March, 1926]
_________________ Life has a twisted sense of humour, doesn't it. . . .
* * *
Black Panther
Gender : Posts : 164 Join date : 2013-11-26 Location : on your mind
"A natural world order is essentially a magical world order. It is not reducible to a rational order. For that to work there are too many irrational combinations of words and things. Magic incorporates the rational and the rest and thereby hones ratio to be the sharpest blade it can be or the strongest mast to contain both the sail and the storm to become the travel. Forward! But in degrees.
Magical thinking does not follow protocol, even when it orients on it. The magical work is wholly within the transient excess, and the work remains as the ground vanishes. If one is a skilled magician! Otherwise one tumbles along with the ground into the abyss where so many blackened brothers build their faltering, wet piles of wood in the dream of a campfire.
When a magician philosophizes, he becomes unreasonably fearless and a destroyer of laws. Here, very few metaphysics suffices beyond laughing stock. Man draws back to the elemental forces now. His philosophy becomes grounded in the thunder. Earth and light become indiscernible from one another. Morality is perfectly evident.
Finally, man finds the calm center of the fundamental dizziness of the galaxy. But immediately the Caesar calls out for the games to begin! Man will never rest except in the seething birch, in the traveling fire-arrow, the salt-watered cup... he must spend his blood to be at peace, he is the warm blooded animal, this excess is his nature and its beauty is his rest..."
::
"The 'soul' - lostness itself as it was, once it was established as a notion and a center of yearning, was turned to be the seat of virtue. Hence the Devil was born. Virtue postnatally aborted, didn't even get access into heaven. Wherever he roams he claims.
Built on the Consummation of Man, this creature's standards of living are improbable.
No Man can claim this beast. Rather this beast claims all men, except those who fall away. By the Horned One we are born into the world, several times in our lives if we are really in the world.
Satan either buys or kills the soul, whatever it take to free man from his roots in nothingness. Lucifer separates man from the sun and turns man into a self-sustaining flame. The sun (like all birds besides crows) is unfathomably evil. It is life-giver, but by degrees of cruelty the gods separate in lineage.
Against procrastination (and bad breath); doors that want to open become mouths that want to devour."
::
"The World is an Eagle
soaring high above its ground.
Its ground is the chasm between possible and impossible. 'holy hell'
every form of pain relates back to this. Therefore the Eagle, because by his heart, mind and endurance alone man would not make it; he must soar above himself, perceive the origins of his acts and sufferings and relate to his life like an airborne hunter to a scurrying prey."
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37200 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
A true pagan does not want to change the world, but only to adapt to it: change himself in reference to it. His ideals are rooted in world, not hovering in the limbo of his mind where all words can be interpreted in any which way, and each follower can imagine it in whatever way satisfies his particular needs. He challenges himself, by placing his goal outside his subjectivity, and judges self, and his approach toward this idea(l), accordingly, viciously, cruelly. The words he uses to define, to describe, are connected to the world outside his mind - to what appears whether he likes it or not, whether he is there to witness it or not.
But, when the words have been convoluted by Judeo-Christian/Islamic Nihilism, inverted and converted, "world" has been associated with "humanity"; with world as man-made. When man uses words like "world" like "value" like "love", he has mystified them, by detaching them from their phenomenal references, from activities, and made them into noetic constructs. "World changers" like Napoleon were really changers of world of man...not world outside human premises. Napoleon did not change nature, or physics, or what is superior and what is inferior, and what is fit and beautiful...he changed human relationships.
The height of narcissistic inter-subjectivity; nihilism manufacturing idea(l)s contradicting the real, and then baptizing this "new reality" as reality proper - and there is where men fight over which delusion, which manufactured reality, will determine human destiny.
When Pagan speaks of changing world, he means the man-made constructs, not world as outside of them. He fights this Nihilistic dis-ease, as another human artifice, wanting a more honest, direct, noble relationship with reality. He wants to die having lived as a man, not as some manufactured caricature, cowering behind words and delusions, and "positive" ideals.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
While Ansuz corresponds to inspired utterance, Berkana refers to the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. If the female had the womb who made the child grow, the scop had the well of poetry, who made the fame grow into a standard and a law. The great sanctuary that also functioned as a sanction was the Orlog, weaving in the deeds of human actions, past, present and future building "layers", to lay down, to set forth… where cowards were "bar"red.
Poetry re- Corded the hero. like a womb.
To be well-versed, meant to be weal-footed.
Verse: "to turn"
Stanza: "originally "a turning," in reference to the section of an ode sung by the chorus while turning in one direction, from strephein "to turn," from PIE *streb(h)- "to wind, turn" (cognates: Greek strophaligs "whirl, whirlwind," streblos "twisted," stremma "that which is twisted"). Latin stantem (nominative stans), present participle of stare "to stand," from PIE root *sta- "to stand, set down, make or be firm."
Foot: "PIE root *ped- (1) "a foot" (cognates: Avestan pad-; Sanskrit pad-, accusative padam "foot;" Greek pos, Attic pous, genitive podos; Latin pes, genitive pedis "foot;" Lithuanian padas "sole," peda "footstep"; The metrical foot (late Old English, translating Latin pes, Greek pous in the same sense) is commonly taken to represent one rise and one fall of a foot: keeping time according to some, dancing according to others."
Like uruz is the putting down of the first foot - "the whirlwind", berkana's beot - "to boast", is to put down the speech first, while ansuz is more the first speech, the first inspired utterance.
The great hall of the symbel was when word and deed was made to hold together. The rush of Uruz [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] resounding in the forests of the birch… to tie, to "sync" the past and the future to the present was no ordinary "feet"/feat.
Quote :
"Behold the breath of Elden’s firstborn. Arrive Arlo! And adjacent his loyal companions, I keep the company to rival kings. The most celebrated scops stand at my hand, And voluptuous valkyries hold place in my verdant eye. Envy instilled in hearts upon my entry to this material-plane, God gasped at the greatness he saw. Even the wily Norns, who weave the wyrd of this world, Have forged trap after trap so I would finally meet my fate So their jealousy be slaked and vanity persist. Challenges the supernatural placed at my feet Accepted them I did, and glory I hold. The glass-dragon slain, shattered, by my shoulder-blade. The reaper came for the river troll when he drowned under my palms. The creeping creatures of night weep for their cousins under my feet. Yet, all life’s lessons have not been learned. And I will wander the world till I find my way into history."
"The other kind of speech, the bēot or gilp, differs in significant ways from the account. 'The words gylpword and beotword. . . seem to mean the same thing; but it is probable that gielp-stresses the glory of the adventure, something to boast of, whereas beot-stresses the fact that it is a promise, a vow. Both words with their derivatives recur again and again . . . [in] heroic poetry' (Einarsson 1934:976).
The bēot places its 'promise' of action within a closely defined course of events from which the speaker will be unable to extricate himself without showing himself to be a fool or a coward. Thus, the utterer of the bēot places himself at the confluence of words and deeds; the outcome is the direct association and involvement of the speaker in the unity of the two where the deed is found to be at one with the bēotword. Otherwise, he will be at variance with the course of events implying either his inability to understand the course of events (proving him to be a fool) or his inability to act honorably within it (proving him to be a coward). Thus, the bēot links foreseeable events with the words representative of them. In the bēot the word precedes events and statements become facts; in the 'account', on the other hand, the actions precede the words; however, in both the act of speaking and the fact of occurrence are linked.
The most important instances of both the account and the bēot in Beowulf occur in conjunction with the symbel, the ritual feast, in the poem (but, it needs to be stressed, not only there). A symbel proceeds first to whatever speaking is central to the occasion. The speech making takes the form of either bēot or 'account' or both (most frequently both). Relevant events from the past are reiterated and, through their being spoken, create a context in which advice or counsel can be given to those making the bēot.
a gilp-laden man, mindful of speeches, who, of all of the old-speakings, a great many kept in mind, [he] found additional words bound with truth; this man then undertook to stir up through [his] craft the deed of Beowulf and to create with skill a careful account [= spel], to mingle the words . . .
Now, for the first time, Beowulf becomes part of the great past kept and sung by the scop. The fabric of his own greatness has now begun to be woven in earnest. The poem continues to accumulate the actions of Beowulf as they associate themselves with other great actions. The poem as we have it becomes the container of Beowulf's life, his actions, and the actions of others whose lives his touches in a significant way. Thus, the end of the poem leaves the Geats singing his praises:
"they said he was of the world-kings of men the kindest and most noble,
most gentle to his people and most praise eager."" [The Well and the Tree]
Quote :
"Boasts were taken seriously. Boasts were understood to be serious utterances with personal, social, legal, and political consequences. Recent analyses of Anglo-Saxon boasting emphasize its function as pledge. The assembly that would applaud the boast performance is the same group whose members would degrade and ostracize if the boaster did not honor his words with matching deeds.
"Scop or sceop (OHG scof; ON skop) 'singer, poet, entertainer' is a difficult form to trace etymologically. See, for example, Werlich ( 1967:361-74). It seems to have connections with both Mod. E shape (OE scieppan [class VI] 'fashion, create') and scoff. The idea of poet as maker or creator seems right to us; yet poet as derider or scoffer seems strange. In Beowulf, the scop is never explicitly connected with derision or scoffing. Still, the related form skop in Old Norse seems regularly to refer to mocking or railing." [Bauschatz, The Well and the Tree]
The performance of the scop and the boasting of warriors are both linked with the mead-hall. These boasts were not the courtly gestures they latter degenerated into at the Burgundian Feast of the Pheasant and other such events. Like other things that took place in the mead-hall, the boast was a contract -- seriously made; to be seriously kept. The scop was a powerful and important man because he boasted not for himself, but for the entire tribe."
Berkana bears the power of the mother's breast hardening and continuing into the breast-plate or the shield of the hero. It is the love of Thetis that is the forge of Achilles' shield, that she gives him.
The shield of Achilles was a lay in itself, re-cording it all, an ekphrasis; To draw out [uruz] an inanimate object by pro-claiming [berkana], and in reverse: to sound out the hollow ideals/idols...
Quote :
"Ekphrasis or ecphrasis, from the Greek description of a work of art, possibly imaginary, produced as a rhetorical exercise; often used in adjectival form, ekphrastic. A graphic, often dramatic, description of a visual work of art. In ancient times, it referred to a description of any thing, person, or experience. The word comes from the Greek ek and phrasis, 'out' and 'speak' respectively, verb ekphrazein, to proclaim or call an inanimate object by name.
Ekphrasis has been considered generally to be a rhetorical device in which one medium of art tries to relate to another medium by defining and describing its essence and form, and in doing so, relate more directly to the audience, through its illuminative liveliness. A descriptive work of prose or poetry, a film, or even a photograph may thus highlight through its rhetorical vividness what is happening, or what is shown in, say, any of the visual arts, and in doing so, may enhance the original art and so take on a life of its own through its brilliant description. One example is a painting of a sculpture: the painting is "telling the story of" the sculpture, and so becoming a storyteller, as well as a story (work of art) itself. Virtually any type of artistic medium may be the actor of, or subject of ekphrasis. One may not always be able, for example, to make an accurate sculpture of a book to retell the story in an authentic way; yet if it's the spirit of the book that we are more concerned about, it certainly can be conveyed by virtually any medium and thereby enhance the artistic impact of the original book through synergy.
In this way, a painting may represent a sculpture, and vice versa; a poem portray a picture; a sculpture depict a heroine of a novel; in fact, given the right circumstances, any art may describe any other art, especially if a rhetorical element, standing for the sentiments of the artist when she/he created her/his work, is present. For instance, the distorted faces in a crowd in a painting depicting an original work of art, a sullen countenance on the face of a sculpture representing a historical figure, or a film showing particularly dark aspects of neo-Gothic architecture, are all examples of ekphrasis.
In another instance, Socrates talks about ekphrasis to Phaedrus thus:
"You know, Phaedrus, that is the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly correspond to painting. The painter's products stand before us as though they were alive, but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words; they seem to talk to you as if they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing forever."
Walter Pater, above all for his famous evocation of the Mona Lisa, are among the most notable…"
The bar of a man's life lay bare or barred in the bars of the bard.
The same shield was how the dead warrior and his bar - his lore and measure, was carried back;
Bauschatz wrote:
"The shield functioned within the society as a symbol of the public and private esteem of the man himself:
corpora suorum etiam in dubiis proeliis referunt. scutum reliquisse praecipuum flagitium, nec aut sacris adesse aut concilium inire ignominioso fas, multique superstites bellorum infamiam laqueo finierunt. ( Germania 6)
They bring back the bodies of the fallen even when a battle hangs in the balance. To throw away one's shield is the supreme disgrace, and the man who has thus dishonoured himself is debarred from attendance at sacrifice or assembly. Many such survivors from the battlefield have ended their shame by hanging themselves. ( Mattingly 1970: 106-7)
At his funeral (in Tacitus, a cremation), the arms of the dead man were burned with him:
Funerum nulla ambitio: id solum observatur ut corpora clarorum virorum certis lignis crementur. struem rogi nec vestibus nec odoribus cumulant: sua cuique arma, quorundam igni et equus adicitur. sepulcrum caespes erigit. ( Germania 27)
There is no ostentation about their funerals. The only special observance is that the bodies of famous men are burned with particular kinds of wood. When they have heaped up the pyre they do not throw garments or spices on it; only the dead man's arms, and sometimes his horse too, are cast into the flames. The tomb is a raised mound of turf. ( Mattingly 1970: 123)
Further, the combination of sword and shield together can be seen to parallel aspects of the symbolic iconography of the world tree itself, with the shield expressive of the wide-spreading, protective branches and the sword of a stout, supportive trunk." [The Well and the Tree]
If the uruz was the point of no return, the Beot was the sanctum one stood in, yet to reach… The sanctum was one's word, yet to attain sanctity. This is also the procrastinating credit bubble pulled out from thin air, checking the whirlwind from catching up and sweeping it all away. [The creation of Las Vegas] Credere - to believe, to trust, to put one's heart, one's breast, credo. Credential - character - to en-grave, dig, dwelve, inquire. (soma and sema; womb and tomb)
"I shall": "to call out to one self, self-birth."
Uruz: A psyche of force taking shape and "congealing" into a form and a format, a protocol. It is set. Berkana: A body of force "extracting" something inanimate into animate formula - a rhythm. [first breath and the birth of a child, etc.] It is reverberating;
Evola wrote:
"...a freeing upwards from the confines of individuality and the assumption of the bursting upwards of the deeper side of one's own being as the instrument of a sort of active ecstasy, implying not the deepening but the transfiguration of personality, and, with it, of all lucid vision, precise action, command and domination. Such moments, such culminations of heroic experience, not only do not exclude, but actually demand all the aspects of war that have an 'elemental', destructive, we could almost say telluric, character... the assumptions of such heroic experience seem to possess an almost magical effectiveness: they are inner triumphs which can determine even material victory and are a sort of evocation of divine forces intimately tied to 'tradition' and the 'race of the spirit' of a given stock. That is why, in the ritual of the triumph in Rome, the victorious leader bore the insignia of the Capitoline divinity." [MW]
And in that one sees the connection between the maternal and telluric breast, and the warrior's breast-plate.
Berkana is almost a mode of meditation in itself (why runes were carved on birch barks), where gazing unblinkingly into the abyss, makes the monster [Uruz] stare back from out of the hood... It takes Berkana to sound it out…
Odin means even one spark of inspiration, of fury, one breath is enough to break fetters and set the psychic turbine in motion to victory, to a higher plane. Mouth to mouth resuscitation and CPR, making the wind circulate, the rush of th wildhunt and reanimating the stopped heart and the dead body. Blue blood.
Quote :
"The whole forest, becomes fragrant, by one good tree, which puts forth fragrant flowers, just as by one virtuous son, the whole clan, becomes illustrious." [Subhashitani]
Loki means even one flaw, one black stain, one pitfall is enough to corrode a mighty magnificence, bring down a Rome, an absolute, to take the wind out of someone and break their idealism/romanticism. All Loki needed was one failing to send baldr to his death.
Both are revolutionaries. Uranus is mercury on a higher octave.
"Ansuz energies are very often twisted past the point of mere persuasion into the domain of bullshit and point-blank lying. We all, invariably, invent stories and lie to ourselves to one degree or another — we must be sure to study the virtue of honesty to self and others — dishonesty is very harmful to the spirit. Breaking one’s word was considered dishonorable, to the ancients.
Repeat a lie enough, and you will come to believe it. It is a weak magic that relies on illusion. Ansuz is most powerful when aligned as close as possible to reality. But therein lay another treacherous flaw inherent in over-dependence on this rune.
Over-Conceptualization and Duality
The word “tree” can be defined in many ways: as a plant with a hard bark, a source of wood, as growing leaves and forming a canopy, either deciduous or coniferous. But neither the word tree or its definition, or its visual image in our minds — however vivid — is an actual tree.
Here we approach the limit of Ansuz, and there is a very strong, unconscious tendency in Western society to believe too heavily in the name, too heavily in the idea, or theory, while neglecting the infinitely more complex, subtle and interconnected nature of the universe.
Naming and describing does not necessitate understanding. Yet, our minds have the unconscious habit of believing that if we can name, describe, theorize, explain, then we have true understanding. We mistake this layer of symbols, this ‘psychotopography’, as the real world all too easily. We often confuse the map for the actual territory.
Labels are always reductive. Classification always fragments and divides a universe which is not, in and of itself, divided. This can trap us in a mode of thinking that is out of alignment with the truth. Beware this veil of words: it may fool us into believing that just because we have a word for something, we know what it is, and needn’t investigate further. Words can expand understanding, there’s no arguing this. But it is wise to see that they can form walls as well.
And what about a thing that is real, but no word in our language exists for it? Or no word in any language? Can we think about such things, and experience them, regardless?
Conclusion
A word itself makes nothing more or less real, except in our minds, though this is not to understate the power and potential of our minds! Symbols shape and order consciousness. They can increase consciousness, but they can also lower it. Words affect people, and people affect the world. Words may inspire us to action, or mold the beliefs which guide our lives and shape the attitudes in our society. Remember though, that that ‘action’ is beyond the energy of Ansuz. Ansuz only inspires it.
You may talk the talk — but that is often a far cry from walking the walk — which may actually be why the rune Raidho (Ride, or Journey) follows Ansuz."
