Ancient Famous Quotes

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.

CHORUS: You that live in my ancestral Thebes, behold this Oedipus,- him who knew the famous riddles and was a man most masterful; not a citizen who did not look with envy on his lot- see him now and see the breakers of misfortune swallow him! Look upon that last day always. Count no mortal happy till he has passed the final limit of his life secure from pain.

The shirt was a screen print of a famous Surrealist artwork by René Magritte in which he drew a pipe and then beneath it wrote in cursive Ceci n’est pas une pipe. (“This is not a pipe.”) “I just don’t get that shirt,” Mom said. “Peter Van Houten will get it, trust me. There are like seven thousand Magritte references in An Imperial Affliction.” “But it is a pipe.” “No, it’s not,” I said. “It’s a drawing of a pipe. Get it? All representations of a thing are inherently abstract. It’s very clever.” “How did you get so grown up that you understand things that confuse your ancient mother?” Mom asked. “It seems like just yes-terday that I was telling seven-year-old Hazel why the sky was blue. You thought I was a genius back then.” “Why is the sky blue?” I asked. “Cuz,” she answered. I laughed.

I knew that the languages which one learns there are necessary to understand the works of the ancients; and that the delicacy of fiction enlivens the mind; that famous deeds of history ennoble it and, if read with understanding, aid in maturing one's judgment; that the reading of all the great books is like conversing with the best people of earlier times; it is even studied conversation in which the authors show us only the best of their thoughts; that eloquence has incomparable powers and beauties; that poetry has enchanting delicacy and sweetness; that mathematics has very subtle processes which can serve as much to satisfy the inquiring mind as to aid all the arts and diminish man's labor; that treatises on morals contain very useful teachings and exhortations to virtue; that theology teaches us how to go to heaven; that philosophy teaches us to talk with appearance of truth about things, and to make ourselves admired by the less learned; that law, medicine, and the other sciences bring honors and wealth to those who pursue them; and finally, that it is desirable to have examined all of them, even to the most superstitious and false in order to recognize their real worth and avoid being deceived thereby

One of the biggest misperceptions about places of genius, I’m discovering, is that they are akin to paradise. They are not. Paradise is antithetical to genius. Paradise makes no demands, and creative genius takes root through meeting demands in new and imaginative ways. “The Athenians matured because they were challenged on all fronts,” said Nietzsche, in a variation of his famous “what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger” line.

For I make others say what I cannot say so well,... I do not count my borrowings, but, weight them.... They are all, or very nearly all, from such famous and ancient names that they seem to identify themselves enough without me.

Triumphantly, he announced their deaths to the cheering crowd in a famous one-word euphemism: vixere, 'they have lived' – that is, 'they're dead'.

biblical history did not take place in either the particular era or the manner described. Some of the most famous events in the Bible clearly never happened at all.

And some of the modern admirers of the gentle philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius would be less admiring if they reflected on the brutality of his suppression of the Germans, proudly illustrated in the scenes of battle that circle their way up his commemorative column that still stands in the centre of Rome; though less famous, it was clearly intended to rival Trajan’s and was carefully built just a little taller (see plate 10). 70.

The place was so famous, it made the list of Seven Wonders of the Ancient World…along with the Egyptian pyramids and, um, those other ones. The first McDonald’s? I forget.

In ancient times, he’d been famous for his youthful beauty that defied gender.

The kingdom of heaven is within oneself and the person who knows himself shall find it

He developed his revolutionary philosophy, with its grounding not in the Bible or ancient writers but in human reason, and became famous and infamous for it.

*The ancient whale-cry upon first sighting a whale from the mast-head, still used by whalemen in hunting the famous Gallipagos terrapin.

It is unlikely that many of us will be famous, or even remembered. But not less important than the brilliant few that lead a nation or a literature to fresh achievements, are the unknown many whose patient efforts keep the world from running backward; who guard and maintain the ancient values, even if they do not conquer new; whose inconspicuous triumph it is to pass on what they inherited from their fathers, unimpaired and undiminished, to their sons. Enough, for almost all of us, if we can hand on the torch, and not let it down; content to win the affection, if it may be, of a few who know us and to be forgotten when they in their turn have vanished. The destiny of mankind is not governed wholly by its 'stars'.

Something that once had importance might be forgotten by most people but because millions of people once knew it, a force is present that can be harnessed. There might be so much significance attached to a song, for example, or a fact, that it can’t die but only lies dormant, like a vampire in his coffin, waiting to be called forth from the grave once again. There is more magic in the fact that the first mass worldwide photo of the Church of Satan was taken by Joe Rosenthal – the same man who took the most famous news photo in history – the flag-raising at Iwo Jima. There’s real occult significance to that – much more than in memorizing grimoires and witches’ alphabets. People ask me about what music to use in rituals – what is the best occult music. I’ve instructed people to go to the most uncrowded section of the music store and it’s a guarantee what you’ll find there will be occult music. That’s the power of long-lost trivia. I get irritated by people who turn up their noses and whine ‘Why would anyone want to know that?’ Because once upon a time, everyone in America knew it. Suppose there’s a repository of neglected energy, that’s been generated and forgotten. Maybe it’s like a pressure cooker all this time, just waiting for someone to trigger its release. ‘Here I am,’ it beckons, ‘I have all this energy stored up just waiting for you – all you have to do is unlock the door. Because of man’s stupidity, he’s neglected me to this state of somnambulism – dreaming the ancient dreams – even though I was once so important to him.’ Think about that. A song that was once on millions of lips now is only on your lips. Now what does that contain? Those vibrations of that particular tune, what do they evoke, call up? What do they unlock? The old gods lie dormant, waiting.

Next, he showed the girls a narrow Incan street. Both sides of it had high stone walls and the driver stopped so the visitors could walk down a short distance to see the famous twelve-sided stone which was part of it. Each girl counted the sides and marveled at the way the ancient stonecutters had trimmed this enormous rock to accommodate the ones fitted around it. The young tourists noticed that all the stones were so perfectly fitted that there was not one single opening or crack between them. Not even an earthquake could damage this amazing artisanship!

MOUSE, n. An animal which strews its path with fainting women. As in Rome Christians were thrown to the lions, so centuries earlier in Otumwee, the most ancient and famous city of the world, female heretics were thrown to the mice.

Similar ecological disasters occurred on almost every one of the thousands of islands that pepper the Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean, Arctic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. Archaeologists have discovered on even the tiniest islands evidence of the existence of birds, insects and snails that lived there for countless generations, only to vanish when the first human farmers arrived. None but a few extremely remote islands escaped man’s notice until the modern age, and these islands kept their fauna intact. The Galapagos Islands, to give one famous example, remained uninhabited by humans until the nineteenth century, thus preserving their unique menagerie, including their giant tortoises, which, like the ancient diprotodons, show no fear of humans. The First Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the foragers, was followed by the Second Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the farmers, and gives us an important perspective on the Third Wave Extinction, which industrial activity is causing today. Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology. Perhaps if more people were aware of the First Wave and Second Wave extinctions, they’d be less nonchalant about the Third Wave they are part of. If we knew how many species we’ve already eradicated, we might be more motivated to protect those that still survive. This is especially relevant to the large animals of the oceans.

When Takuan had sentenced him to confinement, he had said, “You may read as much as you want. A famous priest of ancient times once said, ‘I become immersed in the sacred scriptures and read thousands of volumes. When I come away, I find that my heart sees more than before.

Plato, in his famous fight against the ancient Sophists, discovered that their “universal art of enchanting the mind by arguments” (Phaedrus 261) had nothing to do with truth but aimed at opinions which by their very nature are changing, and which are valid only “at the time of the agreement and as long as the agreement lasts” (Theaetetus 172). He also discovered the very insecure position of truth in the world, for from “opinions comes persuasion and not from truth” (Phaedrus 260). The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.

Thoreau went to Walden Pond to conduct his famous two-year experiment in simple living in large part so that he could refine his philosophy of life and thereby avoid misliving: A primary motive in going to Walden, he tells us, was his fear that he would, “when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence—moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how Democracy (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods? You remember how one of the Greek Dictators (they called them ‘tyrants’ then) sent an envoy to another Dictator to ask his advice about the principles of government. The second Dictator led the envoy into a field of corn, and there he snicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above the general level. The moral was plain. Allow no pre-eminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser, or better, or more famous, or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level; all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals. Thus Tyrants could practise, in a sense, ‘democracy’. But now ‘democracy’ can do the same work without any other tyranny than her own. No one need now go through the field with a cane. The little stalks will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones. The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to Be Like Stalks.

SPQR takes its title from another famous Roman catchphrase, Senatus PopulusQue Romanus, ‘The Senate and People of Rome’.

the famous Hymn to Zeus written by Cleanthes said: ‘The willing are led by fate, the reluctant dragged’.

lands studded with famous cities already ancient when Romulus was born.

Sixty-five years ago [written 2009], in a brief lull between storms in a remarkably stormy June, even by the standards of Channel weather, the heirs of Harold and the kinsmen of the Conqueror came to Normandy. They were supported by the remnants of their first, North American, empire, the two great nations that they had planted in the New World in the time of Good Queen Bess and James 6th and 1st: the Americans, who had rebelled in the name of the rights of Englishmen, and the Canadians, who had stood loyal in the name of the Crown. … The honours of these regiments are ancient and moving: Minden and Malplaquet, Mysore, Badajoz, Waterloo, Inkerman, Gallipoli, the Somme, Imjin. None shines more brightly than Normandy 1944. The paths of glory may lead but to the grave; yet all, even golden boys and girls, must come to dust. It is a better path to the grave than any of the others, not because glory is something to seek, but because, not once or twice in our long island story, the way of duty has been the path to glory; and duty is to be done. …Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.

I'm mixed on figs. The fleshy quality feels spooky. In Italian, il fico, fig, has a slangy turn into la fica, meaning vulva. Possibly because of the famous fig leaf exodus from Eden, it seems like the most ancient of fruits. Oddest, too—the fig flower is inside the fruit. To pull one open is to look into a complex, primitive, infinitely sophisticated life cycle tableau.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.” —Winston Churchill, speaking in Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946

What benefit have the Hindus derived from their contact with Christian nations? The idea generally prevalent in this country about the morality and truthfulness of the Hindus evidently has been very low. Such seeds of enmity and hatred have been sown by the missionaries that it would be an almost Herculean task to establish better relations between India and America... If we examine Greek, Chinese, Persian, or Arabian writings on the Hindus, before foreigners invaded India, we find an impartial description of their national character. Megasthenes, the famous Greek ambassador, praises them for their love of truth and justice, for the absence of slavery, and for the chastity of their women. Arrian, in the second century, Hiouen-thsang, the famous Buddhist pilgrim in the seventh century, Marco Polo in the thirteenth century, have written in highest terms of praise of Hindu morality. The literature and philosophy of Ancient India have excited the admiration of all scholars, except Christian missionaries.

Cicero had the men summarily executed, with not even a show trial. Triumphantly, he announced their deaths to the cheering crowd in a famous one-word euphemism: vixere, ‘they have lived’ – that is, ‘they’re dead’.

The famous Babylonian “Code of Hammurabi” states that tavern owners must always pour a sufficient amount of beer or face the death penalty. Trade and travel then brought beer to Egypt, where it was again associated with the work of the gods. Workers at the Giza Pyramids were given beer rations several times a day and over a hundred medicines recipes included the beverage. The Egyptians believed beer to be healthier than water and shared it with their fellow men of all ages, young and old.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.

Inhaling fumes directly from burning foliage, either in a confined space such as a cave or a tent, or scooping up and breathing in the vapors from psychoactive plant materials scattered on a bowl full of hot coals, must be an extremely ancient practice. Herodotus's account from the fifth-century BCE, describing the use of small tents by the Scythians (a northwestern Iranian tribe) for inhaling the smoke of cannabis, is probably the most famous account that confirms the antiquity of the use of cannabis as a ritual intoxicant.

Horklump M.O.M. Classification: X The Horklump comes from Scandinavia but is now widespread throughout northern Europe. It resembles a fleshy, pinkish mushroom covered in sparse, wiry black bristles. A prodigious breeder, the Horklump will cover an average garden in a matter of days. It spreads sinewy tentacles rather than roots into the ground to search for its preferred food of earthworms. The Horklump is a favourite delicacy of gnomes but otherwise has no discernible use. Horned Serpent M.O.M. Classification: XXXXX Several species of Horned Serpents exist globally: large specimens have been caught in the Far East, while ancient bestiaries suggest that they were once native to Western Europe, where they have been hunted to extinction by wizards in search of potion ingredients. The largest and most diverse group of Horned Serpents still in existence is to be found in North America, of which the most famous and highly prized has a jewel in its forehead, which is reputed to give the power of invisibility and flight. A legend exists concerning the founder of Ilvermorny School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Isolt Sayre, and a Horned Serpent. Sayre was reputed to be able to understand the serpent, which offered her shavings from its horn as the core of the first ever American-made wand. The Horned Serpent gives its name to one of the houses of Ilvermorny.

Verres had Gavius thrown into prison, tortured and crucified, on the specious grounds that he was a spy for Spartacus. Roman citizenship should have protected him from this degrading punishment. So, as he was flogged, the poor man repeatedly cried out, ‘Civis Romanus sum’ (‘I am a Roman citizen’), but to no avail. Presumably, when they chose to repeat this phrase, both Palmerston and Kennedy (see p. 137) must have forgotten that its most famous ancient use was as the unsuccessful plea of an innocent victim under a sentence of death imposed by a rogue Roman governor.

This pointing-hand gesture—with its index finger and thumb extended upward—is a well-known symbol of the Ancient Mysteries, and it appears all over the world in ancient art. This same gesture appears in three of Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous encoded masterpieces—The Last Supper, Adoration of the Magi, and Saint John the Baptist. It’s a symbol of man’s mystical connection to God.” As above, so below. The madman’s bizarre choice of words was starting to feel more relevant now. “I’ve never seen it before,” Sato said. Then watch ESPN, Langdon thought, always amused to see professional athletes point skyward in gratitude to God after a touchdown or home run. He wondered how many knew they were continuing a pre-Christian mystical tradition of acknowledging the mystical power above, which, for one brief moment, had transformed them into a god capable of miraculous feats.

One of the greatest Roman poets was Ovid, an older contemporary of Jesus (his dates: 43 BCE–17 CE). His most famous work is his fifteen-volume Metamorphoses, which celebrates changes or transformations described in ancient mythology. Sometimes these changes involve gods who take on human form in order to interact, for a time, with mortals.

...They never let you be famous and happy.' He lifted an eyebrow. 'I'll tell you a secret.' 'Tell me.' I loved it when he was like this. 'I'm going to be the first.' He took my palm and held it to his. 'Swear it.' 'Why me?' 'Because you're the reason. Swear it.' 'I swear it,' I said, lost in the high colour of his cheeks, the flame in his eyes.

Our most heated argument concerned the preponderance of women in my epic and Athene’s ubiquity, and the precedence given to famous women when Odysseus meets the ghosts of the departed. I had mentioned only Tyro, Antiope, Alcmene, Jocasta, Chloris, Leda, Iphimedeia, Phaedra, Procris, Ariadne, Maera, Clymene and, naturally, Eriphyle, and let Odysseus describe them to Alcinous. “My dear Princess,” said Phemius, “if you really think that you can pass off this poem as the work of a man, you deceive yourself. A man would give pride of place to the ghosts of Agamemnon, Achilles, Ajax, Odysseus’s old comrades, and other more ancient heroes such as Minos, Orion, Tityus, Salmoneus, Tantalus, Sisyphus and Hercules; and mention their wives and mothers incidentally, if at all; and make at least one god help Odysseus at some stage or other.” I admitted the force of his argument, which explains why, now, Odysseus first meets a comrade who has fallen off a roof at Circe’s house—I call him Elpenor—and cracks a mild joke about Elpenor’s having come more quickly to the Grove of Persephone by land than he by sea. I also allow Alcinous to ask after Agamemnon, Achilles and the rest, and Odysseus to satisfy his curiosity. For Phemius’s sake I have even let Hermes supply the moly in passages adapted from my uncle Mentor’s story of Ulysses. In my original version I had given all the credit to Athene.

Before the rise of Christianity, did the Ancient Greeks consume a secret psychedelic sacrament during their most famous and well-attended religious rituals? Did the Ancient Greeks pass a version of their sacrament along to the earliest, Greek-speaking Christians, for whom the original Holy Communion or Eucharist was, in fact, a psychedelic Eucharist?

Thabit ibn Qurra (AD 836-901, and also born in Harran), would have had little patience with loaded terms like "star idolatry" which seek to place the "paganism" of the Sabians on a lower level than the deadly, and often bigoted, narrow-minded and unscientific clerical monotheism of religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Thabit was well aware that, underlying the ancient Sabian practices misunderstood by these young religions as "star idolatry," were indeed exact sciences of great benefit to mankind, and thus he wrote: 'Who else have civilized the world, and built the cities, if not the nobles and kings of Paganism? Who else have set in order the harbors and rivers? And who else have taught the hidden wisdom? To whom else has the Deity revealed itself, given oracles, and told about the future, if not the famous men among the Pagans? The Pagans have made known all this. They have discovered the art of healing the soul; they have also made known the art of healing the body. They have filled the earth with settled forms of government, and with wisdom, which is the highest good. Without Paganism the world would be empty and miserable.

Socratese was a famous IRL troll of pre-internets Greece credited with inventing the 1st recorded trolling technique and otherwise laying the foundation of western philosophy. Accounts of his successful trolls are in the form of TL;DR copypasta on Plato's livejournal. They have been causing all manner of butthurt and ass disaster for thousands of years in philosophy 101 classes around the world

Even in ancient times general recognition must have been accorded to the view which later in the shape of the maxim pecunia pecuniam parere non potest was to be the basis of all discussion of the problem of interest for hundreds and even thousands of years, and Aristotle undoubtedly did not state it in the famous passage in his Politics as a new doctrine but as a generally-accepted commonplace.2

Shaykha Sultana al-Zubaydiyya Shaykha Sultana al-Zubaydiyya, famous scholar and saint, was the dauther of 'Ali al-Zubaydi, a man belonging to the martial Zubaydi clan of the tribe of Bani Haritha, itself an offshoot of the major tribe of Kinda, one of the most ancient and best known tribes of Southern Yemen. [...] she became known as the Rabi'a of Hadramawt. [...] Shaykha Sultana became so engrossed in her spiritual pursuits that she never found it in herself to marry and beget children as was expected of her. Instead, she visited all the great men of the valley, sitting at the back of the mosques where the gatherings were held, and listening intently until she became well known and greatly respected by them. Mostafa al-Badawi, A blessed Valley, Volume One, Wadi Hadramawt & the Alawi Tradition, Chapter 10, S. 95-97

The vast majority of all the ancient Greek literature that has survived comes from this period of imperial rule. To give a sense of scale, the work of just one of these writers – Plutarch, the second-century CE biographer, philosopher, essayist and priest of the famous Greek oracle at Delphi – extends to as many modern pages as all the surviving work of the fifth century BCE put together, from the tragedies of Aeschylus to the history of Thucydides.

As he fell, Caesar cried out in Greek to Brutus, ‘You too, child’, which was either a threat (‘I’ll get you, boy!’) or a poignant regret for the disloyalty of a young friend (‘You too, my child?’), or even, as some suspicious contemporaries imagined, a final revelation that Brutus was, in fact, his victim’s natural son and that this was not merely assassination but patricide. The famous Latin phrase ‘Et tu, Brute?’ (‘You too, Brutus?’) is an invention of Shakespeare’s.

In China our professional artists or craftsman used to carve large pieces of white ivory into models of famous buildings, such as the Peking Palace or the Temple of Heaven, with streets and people to the minutest detail. I have been fortunate enough to see a few of theses, and the snow-covered Oxford High, with its yellow stone, resembled one of these exquisite ivory carvings, yellowed with age. I was happy to have discovered such affinity between Oxford and Ancient China.

Now we’re going to set the features,” says Theo. He lifts one of the man’s eyelids and packs tufts of cotton underneath to fill out the lid the way the man’s eyeballs once did. Oddly, the culture I associate most closely with cotton, the Egyptians, did not use their famous Egyptian cotton for plumping out withered eyes. The ancient Egyptians put pearl onions in there. Onions. Speaking for myself, if I had to have a small round martini garnish inserted under my eyelids, I would go with olives.

Average Egyptians take pride in their pharaonic history, but there’s also a disconnect, because the tradition of the Islamic past is stronger and more immediate. This is captured perfectly by the design of Egypt’s currency. Every denomination follows the same pattern: On one side of a bill, words are in Arabic, and there’s an image of some famous Egyptian mosque. The other side pairs English text with a pharaonic statue or monument. The implication is clear: the ancients belong to foreigners, and Islam belongs to us.

In ancient Iran, for example, every single person or object in the mundane world (getik) was held to have its counterpart in the archetypal world of sacred reality (menok). This is a perspective that is difficult for us to appreciate in the modern world, since we see autonomy and independence as supreme human values. Yet the famous tag post coitum omne animal tristis est still expresses a common experience: after an intense and eagerly anticipated moment, we often feel that we have missed something greater that remains just beyond our grasp.

As we stated, after their initial conquest, the Milesians began assimilating the gnosis of their predecessors. Of course they were no lovers of the Druids. After all, the British Druids were collaborators with their dire enemies, the Amenists. Nevertheless, returning to the ancient homeland was a most important step for the displaced and despised Atonists. Owning and controlling the wellspring of knowledge proved to be exceptionally politically fortunate for them. It was a key move on the grand geopolitical chessboard, so to speak. From their new seats in the garden paradise of Britain they could set about conquering the rest of the world. Their designs for a “New World Order,” to replace one lost, commenced from the Western Isles that had unfortunately fallen into their undeserving hands. But why all this exertion, one might rightly ask? Well, a close study of the Culdees and the Cistercians provides the answer. Indeed, a close study of history reveals that, despite appearances to the contrary, religion is less of a concern to despotic men or regimes than politics and economics. Religion is often instrumental to those secretly attempting to attain material power. This is especially true in the case of the Milesian-Atonists. The chieftains of the Sun Cult did not conceive of Christianity for its own sake or because they were intent on saving the world. They wanted to conquer the world not save it. In short, Atonist Christianity was devised so the Milesian nobility could have unrestricted access to the many rich mines of minerals and ore existing throughout the British Isles. It is no accident the great seats of early British Christianity - the many famous churches, chapels, cathedrals and monasteries, as well as forts, castles and private estates - happen to be situated in close proximity to rich underground mines. Of course the Milesian nobility were not going to have access to these precious territories as a matter of course. After all, these sites were often located beside groves and earthworks considered sacred by natives not as irreverent or apathetic as their unfortunate descendants. The Atonists realized that their materialist objectives could be achieved if they manufactured a religion that appeared to be a satisfactory carry on of Druidism. If they could devise a theology which assimilated enough Druidic elements, then perhaps the people would permit the erection of new religious sites over those which stood in ruins. And so the Order of the Culdees was born. So, Christianity was born. In the early days the religion was actually known as Culdeanism or Jessaeanism. Early Christians were known as Culdeans, Therapeuts or suggestively as Galileans. Although they would later spread throughout Europe and the Middle East, their birthplace was Britain.

Each letter in the Celtic ogham alphabet stood for a tree and its magical associations, and the symbology of trees is a richly poetic presence in Celtic myths. The English poet Robert Graves, in his extraordinary book The White Goddess, deals at great length with the order and meanings of the letters comprising this tree alphabet. He conjectures that the famous Welsh Battle of the Trees (a group of ancient poems preserved in the sixteenth century manuscript The Romance of Taliesin) refers to a druidic battle of words rather than a literal battle of vegetation.

The most well known theory concerning the whereabouts of the Ark, made famous by the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, places it in the ruins of the ancient city of Tanis in Egypt. This theory proposes that the Ark was plundered by the Egyptians shortly after Solomon’s death. According to the Old Testament, the pharaoh Sheshonq I of Egypt attacked Jerusalem, raided the Temple, and plundered its treasures (1 Kgs 14:26). Sheshonq I established Tanis as the new Egyptian capital, and so it is here that Indiana Jones discovers the lost Ark in Steven Spielberg’s movie.

This analogy was a foundation for the treatise that Francesco was composing. “All the arts and all the world’s rules are derived from a well-composed and proportioned human body,” he wrote in the foreword to his fifth chapter. “Man, called a little world, contains in himself all the general perfections of the whole world.”15 Leonardo likewise embraced the analogy in both his art and his science. He famously wrote around this time, “The ancients called man a lesser world, and certainly the use of this name is well bestowed, because his body is an analog for the world.

So Musa was a simple god, a god of few words. His thick beard and strong arms made him seem like a giant who could have wrung the neck of any soldier in any ancient pharaoh's army. Which explains why, on the day when we learned of his death and the circumstances surrounding it, I didn't feel sad or angry at first; instead I felt disappointed and offended, as if someone had insulted me. My brother Musa was capable of parting the sea, and yet he died in insignificance, like a common bit player, on a beach that today has disappeared, close to the waves that should have made him famous forever.

Elrond knew all about runes of every kind. That day he looked at the swords they had brought from the trolls' lair, and he said: "These are not troll-make. They are old swords, very old swords of High Elves of the West, my kin. They were made in Gondolin for the Goblin-wars. They must have come from a dragon's hoard or goblin plunder, for dragons and goblins destroyed that city many ages ago. This, Thorin, the runes name Orcrist, the Goblin-cleaver in the ancient tongue of Gondolin; it was a famous blade. This, Gandalf, was Glamdring, Foe-hammer that the kind of Gondolin once wore. Keep them well!

Forty years ago, at the dawn of molecular biology, the French biologist Jacques Monod wrote his famous book Chance and Necessity, which argues bleakly that the origin of life on earth was a freak accident, and that we are alone in an empty universe. The final lines of his book are close to poetry, an amalgam of science and metaphysics: The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe’s unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose. Since

Oh, we solved that long ago!” Rubedo chuckled. “I believe that was Greengallows, Henrik Greengallows? Is that right, my love? Ancient history has never been my subject. A famous case study even reported a method for turning straw into gold! The young lady who discovered it wrote a really rather thin paper—but she toured the lecture circuit for years! Her firstborn refined it, so that she could make straw from gold and solve the terrible problem of housing for destitute brownies.” “Hedwig Greengallows, my dear,” mused Citrinitas. “Henrik was just her mercurer. Men are so awfully fond of attributing women’s work to their brothers!

We know from history that much of what doctors do at any particular time is ineffective or even dangerous when viewed in retrospect. Years ago a famous professor warned his graduating medical students that half of what he'd taught them was wrong, but the trouble was he didn't know which half...the principle still applies: we don't know which of the well-intentioned therapies of the present will end up looking like the leeches and bloodletting of ancient time or like the thalidomide, Dalkon shields, and tonsillectomies of a more recent era gone by. Accordingly, the pronouncements of doctors should be viewed with healthy skepticism.

A long time ago I was in the ancient city of Prague and at the same time Joseph Alsop, the justly famous critic of places and events, was there. He talked to informed people, officials, ambassadors; he read reports, even the fine print and figures, while I in my slipshod manner roved about with actors, gypsies, vagabonds. Joe and I flew home to America on the same plane, and on the way he told me about Prague, and his Prague had no relation to the city I had seen and heard. It just wasn’t the same place, and yet each of us was honest, neither one a liar, both pretty good observers by any standard, and we brought home two cities, two truths.

Other big questions tackled by ancient cultures are at least as radical. What is real? Is there more to reality than meets the eye? Yes! was Plato's answer over two millennia ago. In his famous cave analogy, he likened us to people who'd lived their entire lives shacked ina a cave, facing a blank wall, watching the shadows cast by things passing behind them, and eventually coming to mistakenly believe that these shadows were the full reality. Plato argued that what we humans call our everyday reality is similarly just a limited and distorted representation of the true reality, and that we must free ourselves from our mental shackles to comprehending it.

One of the towering figures of the age of Enlightenment was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, known to this day in German-speaking lands as the poet of princes and prince of poets. Unlike Voltaire, he openly practiced esoteric disciplines, particularly alchemy. He wrote a famous verse about the Cathars, which translated says: “There were those who knew the Father. What became of them? Oh, they took them and burned them!” Goethe's chief work, of course, is his Faust. As noted in chapter 8, the figure of Faust was inspired by the image of the early Gnostic teacher Simon Magus, one of whose honorific names was Faustus. While in Christopher Marlowe's sixteenth-century play,

From the pleasure podium of Ali Qapu, beyond the enhanced enclosure, the city spread itself towards the horizon. Ugly buildings are prohibited in Esfahan. They go to Tehran or stay in Mashhad. Planters vie with planners to outnumber buildings with trees. Attracting nightingales, blackbirds and orioles is considered as important as attracting people. Maples line the canals, reaching towards each other with branches linked. Beneath them, people meander, stroll and promenade. The Safavids' high standards generated a kind of architectural pole-vaulting competition in which beauty is the bar, and ever since the Persians have been imbuing the most mundane objects with design. Turquoise tiles ennoble even power stations. In the meadow in the middle of Naghshe Jahan, as lovers strolled or rode in horse-drawn traps, I lay on my back picking four-leafed clovers and looking at the sky. There was an intimacy about its grandeur, like having someone famous in your family. The life of centuries past was more alive here than anywhere else, its physical dimensions unchanged. Even the brutal mountains, folded in light and shadows beyond the square, stood back in awe of it. At three o'clock, the tiled domes soaked up the sunshine, transforming its invisible colours to their own hue, and the gushing fountains ventilated the breeze and passed it on to grateful Esfahanis. But above all was the soaring sky, captured by this snare of arches.(p378)

Wallenberg Raoul Wallenberg was the second foreigner to be given honorary American citizenship. The first was Winston Churchill. The reason for this honor? Wallenberg helped to rescue many Jews from the horrors of concentration camps. The exact number of Hungarian Jews rescued directly by Wallenberg or as a result of his efforts is unknown. Low estimates are in the few thousands, but they go as high as 100,000. Either way, Wallenberg was responsible for the rescue of thousands of people when the Holocaust began in full in Hungary in 1944. Wallenberg was born into a life of privilege. His family had been at or near the center of Swedish politics and business since the mid-1800s. Today, the Wallenberg family owns significant parts of or controls many famous Swedish companies, including telecommunications

Hindus who adhere to the caste system believe that cosmic forces have made one caste superior to another. According to a famous Hindu creation myth, the gods fashioned the world out of the body of a primeval being, the Purusa. The sun was created from the Purusa’s eye, the moon from the Purusa’s brain, the Brahmins (priests) from its mouth, the Kshatriyas (warriors) from its arms, the Vaishyas (peasants and merchants) from its thighs, and the Shudras (servants) from its legs. Accept this explanation and the sociopolitical differences between Brahmins and Shudras are as natural and eternal as the differences between the sun and the moon.1 The ancient Chinese believed that when the goddess Nü Wa created humans from earth, she kneaded aristocrats from fine yellow soil, whereas commoners were formed from brown mud.

11. Let Go of your Idle Thoughts.[FN#263] [FN#263] A famous Zenist, Mu-go-koku-shi, is said to have replied to every questioner, saying: "Let go of your idle thoughts." A Brahmin, having troubled himself a long while with reference to the problem of life and of the world, went out to call on Shakya Muni that he might be instructed by the Master. He got some beautiful flowers to offer them as a present to the Muni, and proceeded to the place where He was addressing his disciples and believers. No sooner had he come in sight of the Master than he read in his mien the struggles going on within him. "Let go of that," said the Muni to the Brahmin, who was going to offer the flowers in both his hands. He dropped on the ground the flowers in his right hand, but still holding those in his left. "Let go of that," demanded the Master, and the Brahmin dropped the flowers in his left hand rather reluctantly. "Let go of that, I say," the Muni commanded again; but the Brahmin, having nothing to let go of, asked: "What shall I let go of, Reverend Sir? I have nothing in my hands, you know." "Let go of that, you have neither in your right nor in your left band, but in the middle." Upon these words of the Muni a light came into the sufferer's mind, and he went home satisfied and in joy.[FN#264] "Not to attach to all things is Dhyana," writes an ancient Zenist, "and if you understand this, going out, staying in, sitting, and lying are in Dhyana." Therefore allow not your mind to be a receptacle for the dust of society, or the ashes of life, or rags and waste paper of the world. You bear too much burden upon your shoulders with which you have nothing to do. [FN#264]

A prime example of this is a Vatican fresco by Raphael, the Italian artist who was Leonardo’s young follower. His School of Athens, painted around the time that Leonardo was turning sixty, depicts two dozen ancient philosophers standing in discourse. At the center is Plato, striding alongside Aristotle (fig. 120). Raphael used his contemporaries as models for most of the philosophers, and Plato looks to be a depiction of Leonardo. He wears a rose-colored toga, matching the colorful tunics that Leonardo famously sported. As in the Melzi portrait and others of Leonardo, Plato is balding, with wisps of curly hair on top and curls flowing in waves from the side of his head to his shoulder. There is also the curly beard, coming down to the top of his chest. And he is making a gesture characteristic of Leonardo: his right index finger is pointing up to the heavens.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,’ he declared, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe: Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow . . . The Communist parties, which were very small in all these Eastern States of Europe, have been raised to pre-eminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control. Police governments are prevailing in nearly every case, and so far, except in Czechoslovakia, there is no true democracy.

Plato presents Socrates as not using his remarks to rebut all the charges or to try to curry favor or beg for sympathy, as jurors expected defendants to do in serious cases like this one. Instead, he bluntly reiterated his unyielding dedication to goading his fellow citizens into examining their preconceptions. The unexamined life, he famously stated, was not worth living. His irritating process of constant questioning, he maintained, would help his fellow citizens learn to live lives of excellence, and he would never stop doing that, no matter what penalty he might experience as a result. Furthermore, they should care not about their material possessions but about making their true selves—their souls—as good as possible. Nothing else should take priority. If he were to be acquitted, he baldly stated, he vowed to remain their stinging gadfly no matter what the consequences to himself.

Just as famous, if not more so, is the ancient Asian sage Sun Tsu, author of The Art of War. Sun Tsu is a much easier and quicker read than Clausewitz, full of short pieces of advice, from the tactical to the strategic, that have been quoted and applied far beyond the military, often in the world of business. The adage most frequently attributed to Sun Tsu—“know your enemy if you wish to win”—is actually a misquotation. It is indeed good to know your enemy if you wish to win, but Sun Tsu’s recipe for ultimate victory begins with knowing yourself—why you are going to war, what you are fighting for. You may have studied the culture and ways of your foe for years and be intimately familiar with his thinking, but first you must be able to answer the questions, What do I represent? What am I prepared to risk blood and treasure for, and why exactly am I going to war? If you cannot answer these questions, then you should not be going to war at all.

With Circe, I wanted to take a woman’s life and set it at the center of an epic story. Ancient epic almost exclusively features male protagonists, and the few women who appear are there mostly as cameo helpmeets, breeding stock, or obstacles to be overcome; their stories matter only in how they touch the hero’s. I wanted to flip the script, to make Odysseus the cameo and Circe the epic hero. I also deliberately included things that have been shut out of epic because they are considered traditionally female, like parenting, crafts, and childbirth. As anyone who’s ever lived through or witnessed childbirth can tell you, it is one of life’s more epic experiences. "Meanwhile, with The Song of Achilles, I wanted to do the opposite: take a story that was famously epic and tell it from a personal and intimate perspective. I was inspired by Homer in subject matter, but in tone I wanted to come more out of the tradition of the ancient lyric poets, including Sappho and Catullus.

Paint in several colors was squeezed out of tubes and mixed and applied to woven fabric stretched on a wooden frame so artfully we say we see a woman hanging out a sheet rather than oil on canvas. Ana Teresa Fernandez’s image on that canvas is six feet tall, five feet wide, the figure almost life-size. Though it is untitled, the series it’s in has a title: Telaraña. Spiderweb. The spiderweb of gender and history in which the painted woman is caught; the spiderweb of her own power that she is weaving in this painting dominated by a sheet that was woven. Woven now by a machine, but before the industrial revolution by women whose spinning and weaving linked them to spiders and made spiders feminine in the old stories. In this part of the world, in the creation stories of the Hopi, Pueblo, Navajo, Choctaw, and Cherokee peoples, Spider Grandmother is the principal creator of the universe. Ancient Greek stories included an unfortunate spinning woman who was famously turned into a spider as well as the more powerful Greek fates, who spun, wove, and cut each person’s lifeline, who ensured that those lives would be linear narratives that end. Spiderwebs are images of the nonlinear, of the many directions in which something might go, the many sources for it; of the grandmothers as well as the strings of begats. There’s a German painting from the nineteenth century of women processing the flax from which linen is made. They wear wooden shoes, dark dresses, demure white caps, and stand at various distances from a wall, where the hanks of raw material are being wound up as thread. From each of them, a single thread extends across the room, as though they were spiders, as though it came right out of their bellies. Or as though they were tethered to the wall by the fine, slim threads that are invisible in other kinds of light. They are spinning, they are caught in the web. To spin the web and not be caught in it, to create the world, to create your own life, to rule your fate, to name the grandmothers as well as the fathers, to draw nets and not just straight lines, to be a maker as well as a cleaner, to be able to sing and not be silenced, to take down the veil and appear: all these are the banners on the laundry line I hang out.

inbox. It was from Ogden Morrow. The subject line read “We Can Dance If We Want To.” There was no text in the body of the e-mail. Just a file attachment—an invitation to one of the most exclusive gatherings in the OASIS: Ogden Morrow’s birthday party. In the real world, Morrow almost never made public appearances, and in the OASIS, he came out of hiding only once a year, to host this event. The invitation featured a photo of Morrow’s world-famous avatar, the Great and Powerful Og. The gray-bearded wizard was hunched over an elaborate DJ mixing board, one headphone pressed to his ear, biting his lower lip in auditory ecstasy as his fingers scratched ancient vinyl on a set of silver turntables. His record crate bore a DON’T PANIC sticker and an anti-Sixer logo—a yellow number six with a red circle-and-slash over it. The text at the bottom read Ogden Morrow’s ’80s Dance Party in celebration of his 73rd birthday! Tonight—10pm OST at the Distracted Globe ADMIT ONE I was flabbergasted. Ogden Morrow had actually taken the time to invite me to his birthday party. It felt like the greatest honor I’d ever received. I called Art3mis, and she confirmed that she’d received the same e-mail. She said she couldn’t pass up an invitation from Og himself

Evidently Nehru, though a nationalist at the political level, was intellectually and emotionally drawn to the Indus civilization by his regard for internationalism, secularism, art, technology and modernity. By contrast, Nehru’s political rival, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, neither visited Mohenjo-daro nor commented on the significance of the Indus civilization. Nor did Nehru’s mentor, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, India’s greatest nationalist leader. In Jinnah’s case, this silence is puzzling, given that the Indus valley lies in Pakistan and, moreover, Jinnah himself was born in Karachi, in the province of Sindh, not so far from Mohenjo-daro. In Gandhi’s case, the silence is even more puzzling. Not only was Gandhi, too, an Indus dweller, so to speak, having been born in Gujarat, in Saurashtra, but he must surely also have become aware in the 1930s of the Indus civilization as the potential origin of Hinduism, plus the astonishing revelation that it apparently functioned without resort to military violence. Yet, there is not a single comment on the Indus civilization in the one hundred large volumes of the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. The nearest he comes to commenting is a touching remark recorded by the Mahatma’s secretary when the two of them visited the site of Marshall’s famous excavations at Taxila, in northern Punjab, in 1938. On being shown a pair of heavy silver ancient anklets by the curator of the Taxila archaeological museum, ‘Gandhiji with a deep sigh remarked: “Just like what my mother used to wear.

Although Zolla no longer associated with Julius Evola, he nevertheless arranged for me to meet Italy’s most famous crypto-traditionalist writer who was a very controversial figure because of his espousal of the cause of Mussolini during the Second World War. I had already read some of Evola’s works, many of which are now being translated into English and are attracting some attention in philosophical circles. But based on the image I had of him as an expositor of traditional doctrines including Yoga, I was surprised to see him, now crippled as a result of a bomb explosion in 1945, living in the center of Rome in a large old apartment which was severe and fairly dark and without works of traditional art which I had expected to see around him. He had piercing eyes and gazed directly at me as we spoke about knightly initiation, myths and symbols of ancient Persia, traditional alchemy and Hermeticism and similar subjects. While he extolled the ancient Romans and their virtues, he spoke pejoratively about his contemporary Italians. When I asked him what happened to those Roman virtues, he said they traveled north to Germany and we were left with Italian waiters singing o sole mio! He also seemed to have little knowledge or interest in esoteric Christianity and refuse to acknowledge the presence of a sapiental current in Christianity. It was surprising for me to see an Italian sitting a few minutes from the Vatican, with his immense knowledge of various esoteric philosophies from the Greek to the Indian, being so impervious to the inner realities of the tradition so close to his home.

But Dave Wain that lean rangy red head Welchman with his penchant for going off in Willie to fish in the Rogue River up in Oregon where he knows an abandoned mining camp, or for blattin around the desert roads, for suddenly reappearing in town to get drunk, and a marvelous poet himself, has that certain something that young hip teenagers probably wanta imitate–For one thing is one of the world's best talkers, and funny too–As I'll show–It was he and George Baso who hit on the fantastically simple truth that everybody in America was walking around with a dirty behind, but everybody, because the ancient ritual of washing with water after the toilet had not occurred in all the modern antisepticism–Says Dave "People in America have all these racks of drycleaned clothes like you say on their trips, they spatter Eau de Cologne all over themselves, they wear Ban and Aid or whatever it is under their armpits, they get aghast to see a spot on a shirt or a dress, they probably change underwear and socks maybe even twice a day, they go around all puffed up and insolent thinking themselves the cleanest people on earth and they're walkin around with dirty azzoles–Isnt that amazing?give me a little nip on that tit" he says reaching for my drink so I order two more, I've been engrossed, Dave can order all the drinks he wants anytime, "The President of the United States, the big ministers of state, the great bishops and shmishops and big shots everywhere, down to the lowest factory worker with all his fierce pride, movie stars, executives and great engineers and presidents of law firms and advertising firms with silk shirts and neckties and great expensive traveling cases in which they place these various expensive English imported hair brushes and shaving gear and pomades and perfumes are all walkin around with dirty azzoles! All you gotta do is simply wash yourself with soap and water! it hasn't occurred to anybody in America at all! it's one of the funniest things I've ever heard of! dont you think it's marvelous that we're being called filthy unwashed beatniks but we're the only ones walkin around with clean azzoles?"–The whole azzole shot in fact had spread swiftly and everybody I knew and Dave knew from coast to coast had embarked on this great crusade which I must say is a good one–In fact in Big Sur I'd instituted a shelf in Monsanto's outhouse where the soap must be kept and everyone had to bring a can of water there on each trip–Monsanto hadnt heard about it yet, "Do you realize that until we tell poor Lorenzo Monsanto the famous writer that he is walking around with a dirty azzole he will be doing just that?"–"Let's go tell him right now!"–"Why of course if we wait another minute...and besides do you know what it does to people to walk around with a dirty azzole? it leaves a great yawning guilt that they cant understand all day, they go to work all cleaned up in the morning and you can smell all that freshly laundered clothes and Eau de Cologne in the commute train yet there's something gnawing at them, something's wrong, they know something's wrong they dont know just what!"–We rush to tell Monsanto at once in the book store around the corner. (Big Sur, Chap. 11)

I quickly learned that the congressional delegation from Alaska was deeply committed to the oil industry and other commercial interests, and senatorial courtesy prevented other members from disputing with Senators Ted Stevens (Republican) and Mike Gravel (Democrat) over a matter involving their home state. Former Idaho governor Cecil Andrus, my secretary of interior, and I began to study the history of the controversy and maps of the disputed areas, and I flew over some of them a few times. Environmental groups and most indigenous natives were my allies, but professional hunters, loggers, fishers, and the Chambers of Commerce were aligned with the oil companies. All the odds were against us until Cecil discovered an ancient law, the Antiquities Act of 1906, which permitted a president to set aside an area for “the protection of objects of historic and scientific interest,” such as Indian burial grounds, artifacts, or perhaps an ancient church building or the site of a famous battle. We decided to use this authority to set aside for preservation large areas of Alaska as national monuments, and eventually we had included more than 56 million acres (larger than the state of Minnesota). This gave me the bargaining chip I needed, and I was able to prevail in the subsequent debates. My efforts were extremely unpopular in Alaska, and I had to have extra security on my visits. I remember that there was a state fair where people threw baseballs at two targets to plunge a clown into a tank of water. My face was on one target and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini’s on the other, and few people threw at the Ayatollah’s.

In the earliest strand of the conquest narratives, Joshua's violence was associated with an ancient Canaanite custom called the "ban" (herem). Before a battle, a military leader would strike a deal with his god: if this deity undertook to give him the city, the commander promised to "devote" (HRM) all valuable loot to his temple and offer the conquered people to him in a human sacrifice. Joshua had made such a pact with Yahweh before attacking Jericho, and Yahweh responded by delivering the town to Israel in a specular miracle, causing its famous walls to collapse when the priests blew their rams' horns. Before allowing his troops to storm the city, Joshua explained the terms of the ban and stipulated that no one in the city should be spared, since everybody and everything in the town had been "devoted" to Yahweh. Accordingly, the Israelites "enforced the ban on everything in the town, men, and women, young and old, even the oxen and sheep and donkeys, massacring them all." But the ban had been violated when one of the soldiers kept booty for himself, and consequently the Israelites failed to take the town of Ai the following day. After the culprit had been found and executed, the Israelites attached Ai again, this time successfully, setting fire to the city so that it became a sacrificial pyre and slaughtering anybody who tried to escape: "The number of those who fell that day, men and women together, were twelve thousand all (the) people of Ai." Finally Joshua hanged the king from a tree, built a monumental cairn over his body, and reduced the city to "a ruin for ever more, a desolate place, even today.

For the lady’s husband to become actively jealous was considered both doltish and dishonorable, a breach of the spirit of courtesy. Yet the record suggests that this was a fairly common occurrence and one of the occupational hazards of being a troubadour. The most famous crime passionnel of the epoch was the murder of Guilhem de Cabestanh, a troubadour knight whose love for the Lady Seremonda aroused the jealousy of her husband, Raimon de Castel-Roussillon. The story goes that Raimon killed Guilhem while he was out hunting, removed the heart from the body, and had it served to his wife for dinner, cooked and seasoned with pepper. Then comes the great confrontation: “And when the lady had eaten of it, RAimon de Castel-Roussillon said unto her: “Know you of what you have eaten?’ And she said, ‘I know not, save that the taste thereof is good and savoury.’ Then he said to her that that she had eaten of was in very truth the head of SIr Guilhem of Cabestanh, and caused the head to be brought before her, that she might the more readily believe it. And when the lady had seen and heard this, she straightway fell into a swoon, and when she was recovered of it, she spake and said: “Of a truth, my Lord, such good meat have you given me that never more will I eat of other.” THen he, hearing this, ran upon her with his sword and would have struck at her head, but the lady ran to a balcony, and cast herself down, and so died.” ...the story is probably apocryphal… grisly details...borrowed from an ancient legend...the Middle Ages believed it and drew the intended moral conclusion-that husbands should leave well enough alone. Raimon was held up to scorn while Guilhem became one of the great heroes of the troubadour epoch.

Scrupling to do writings relative to keeping slaves has been a means of sundry small trials to me, in which I have so evidently felt my own will set aside that I think it good to mention a few of them. Tradesmen and retailers of goods, who depend on their business for a living, are naturally inclined to keep the good-will of their customers; nor is it a pleasant thing for young men to be under any necessity to question the judgment or honesty of elderly men, and more especially of such as have a fair reputation. Deep-rooted customs, though wrong, are not easily altered; but it is the duty of all to be firm in that which they certainly know is right for them. A charitable, benevolent man, well acquainted with a negro, may, I believe, under some circumstances, keep him in his family as a servant, on no other motives than the negro's good; but man, as man, knows not what shall be after him, nor hath he any assurance that his children will attain to that perfection in wisdom and goodness necessary rightly to exercise such power; hence it is clear to me, that I ought not to be the scribe where wills are drawn in which some children are made ales masters over others during life. About this time an ancient man of good esteem in the neighborhood came to my house to get his will written. He had young negroes, and I asked him privately how he purposed to dispose of them. He told me; I then said, "I cannot write thy will without breaking my own peace," and respectfully gave him my reasons for it. He signified that he had a choice that I should have written it, but as I could not, consistently with my conscience, he did not desire it, and so he got it written by some other person. A few years after, there being great alterations in his family, he came again to get me to write his will. His negroes were yet young, and his son, to whom he intended to give them, was, since he first spoke to me, from a libertine become a sober young man, and he supposed that I would have been free on that account to write it. We had much friendly talk on the subject, and then deferred it. A few days after he came again and directed their freedom, and I then wrote his will.

Be thou joyous, Prince! Whose lot is set apart for heavenly Birth. Two stamps there are marked on all living men, Divine and Undivine; I spake to thee By what marks thou shouldst know the Heavenly Man, Hear from me now of the Unheavenly! They comprehend not, the Unheavenly, How Souls go forth from Me; nor how they come Back unto Me: nor is there Truth in these, Nor purity, nor rule of Life. "This world Hath not a Law, nor Order, nor a Lord," So say they: "nor hath risen up by Cause Following on Cause, in perfect purposing, But is none other than a House of Lust." And, this thing thinking, all those ruined ones—Of little wit, dark-minded—give themselves To evil deeds, the curses of their kind. Surrendered to desires insatiable, Full of deceitfulness, folly, and pride, In blindness cleaving to their errors, caught Into the sinful course, they trust this lie As it were true—this lie which leads to death—Finding in Pleasure all the good which is, And crying "Here it finisheth!" Ensnared In nooses of a hundred idle hopes, Slaves to their passion and their wrath, they buy Wealth with base deeds, to glut hot appetites; "Thus much, to-day," they say, "we gained! thereby Such and such wish of heart shall have its fill; And this is ours! and th' other shall be ours! To-day we slew a foe, and we will slay Our other enemy to-morrow! Look! Are we not lords? Make we not goodly cheer? Is not our fortune famous, brave, and great? Rich are we, proudly born! What other men Live like to us? Kill, then, for sacrifice! Cast largesse, and be merry!" So they speak Darkened by ignorance; and so they fall—Tossed to and fro with projects, tricked, and bound In net of black delusion, lost in lusts—Down to foul Naraka. Conceited, fond, Stubborn and proud, dead-drunken with the wine Of wealth, and reckless, all their offerings Have but a show of reverence, being not made In piety of ancient faith. Thus vowed To self-hood, force, insolence, feasting, wrath, These My blasphemers, in the forms they wear And in the forms they breed, my foemen are, Hateful and hating; cruel, evil, vile, Lowest and least of men, whom I cast down Again, and yet again, at end of lives, Into some devilish womb, whence—birth by birth—The devilish wombs re-spawn them, all beguiled; And, till they find and worship Me, sweet Prince! Tread they that Nether Road. The Doors of Hell Are threefold, whereby men to ruin pass,—The door of Lust, the door of Wrath, the door Of Avarice. Let a man shun those three! He who shall turn aside from entering All those three gates of Narak, wendeth straight To find his peace, and comes to Swarga's gate.

(3) Theology of Exodus: A Covenant People “I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God” (Exod 6:7). When God first demanded that the Egyptian Pharaoh let Israel leave Egypt, he referred to Israel as “my … people.” Again and again he said those famous words to Pharaoh, Let my people go.56 Pharaoh may not have known who Yahweh was,57 but Yahweh certainly knew Israel. He knew them not just as a nation needing rescue but as his own people needing to be closely bound to him by the beneficent covenant he had in store for them once they reached the place he was taking them to himself, out of harm's way, and into his sacred space.58 To be in the image of God is to have a job assignment. God's “image”59 is supposed to represent him on earth and accomplish his purposes here. Reasoning from a degenerate form of this truth, pagan religions thought that an image (idol) in the form of something they fashioned would convey to its worshipers the presence of a god or goddess. But the real purpose of the heavenly decision described in 1:26 was not to have a humanlike statue as a representative of God on earth but to have humans do his work here, as the Lord's Prayer asks (“your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” Matt 6:10). Although the fall of humanity as described in Genesis 3 corrupted the ability of humans to function properly in the image of God, the divine plan of redemption was hardly thwarted. It took the form of the calling of Abraham and the promises to him of a special people. In both Exod 6:6–8 and 19:4–6 God reiterates his plan to develop a people that will be his very own, a special people that, in distinction from all other peoples of the earth, will belong to him and accomplish his purposes, being as Exod 19:6 says “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” Since the essence of holiness is belonging to God, by belonging to God this people became holy, reflecting the character of their Lord as well as being obedient to his purposes. No other nation in the ancient world ever claimed Yahweh as its God, and Yahweh never claimed any other nation as his people. This is not to say that he did not love and care for other nations60 but only to say that he chose Israel as the focus of his plan of redemption for the world. In the New Testament, Israel becomes all who will place faith in Jesus Christ—not an ethnic or political entity at all but now a spiritual entity, a family of God. Thus the New Testament speaks of the true Israel as defined by conversion to Christ in rebirth and not by physical birth at all. But in the Old Covenant, the true Israel was the people group that, from the various ethnic groups that gathered at Sinai, agreed to accept God's covenant and therefore to benefit from this abiding presence among them (see comments on Exod 33:12–24:28). Exodus is the place in the Bible where God's full covenant with a nation—as opposed to a person or small group—emerges, and the language of Exod 6:7, “I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God,” is language predicting that covenant establishment.61

In the early 1680s, at just about the time that Edmond Halley and his friends Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke were settling down in a London coffee house and embarking on the casual wager that would result eventually in Isaac Newton’s Principia, Hemy Cavendish’s weighing of the Earth, and many of the other inspired and commendable undertakings that have occupied us for much of the past four hundred pages, a rather less desirable milestone was being passed on the island of Mauritius, far out in the Indian Ocean some eight hundred miles off the east coast of Madagascar. There, some forgotten sailor or sailor’s pet was harrying to death the last of the dodos, the famously flightless bird whose dim but trusting nature and lack of leggy zip made it a rather irresistible target for bored young tars on shore leave. Millions of years of peaceful isolation had not prepared it for the erratic and deeply unnerving behavior of human beings. We don’t know precisely the circumstances, or even year, attending the last moments of the last dodo, so we don’t know which arrived first a world that contained a Principia or one that had no dodos, but we do know that they happened at more or less the same time. You would be hard pressed, I would submit to find a better pairing of occurrences to illustrate the divine and felonious nature of the human being-a species of organism that is capable of unpicking the deepest secrets of the heavens while at the same time pounding into extinction, for no purpose at all, a creature that never did us any harm and wasn’t even remotely capable of understanding what we were doing to it as we did it. Indeed, dodos were so spectacularly short on insight it is reported, that if you wished to find all the dodos in a vicinity you had only to catch one and set it to squawking, and all the others would waddle along to see what was up. The indignities to the poor dodo didn’t end quite there. In 1755, some seventy years after the last dodo’s death, the director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford decided that the institution’s stuffed dodo was becoming unpleasantly musty and ordered it tossed on a bonfire. This was a surprising decision as it was by this time the only dodo in existence, stuffed or otherwise. A passing employee, aghast tried to rescue the bird but could save only its head and part of one limb. As a result of this and other departures from common sense, we are not now entirely sure what a living dodo was like. We possess much less information than most people suppose-a handful of crude descriptions by "unscientific voyagers, three or four oil paintings, and a few scattered osseous fragments," in the somewhat aggrieved words of the nineteenth century naturalist H. E. Strickland. As Strickland wistfully observed, we have more physical evidence of some ancient sea monsters and lumbering saurapods than we do of a bird that lived into modern times and required nothing of us to survive except our absence. So what is known of the dodo is this: it lived on Mauritius, was plump but not tasty, and was the biggest-ever member of the pigeon family, though by quite what margin is unknown as its weight was never accurately recorded. Extrapolations from Strickland’s "osseous fragments" and the Ashmolean’s modest remains show that it was a little over two and a half feet tall and about the same distance from beak tip to backside. Being flightless, it nested on the ground, leaving its eggs and chicks tragically easy prey for pigs, dogs, and monkeys brought to the island by outsiders. It was probably extinct by 1683 and was most certainly gone by 1693. Beyond that we know almost nothing except of course that we will not see its like again. We know nothing of its reproductive habits and diet, where it ranged, what sounds it made in tranquility or alarm. We don’t possess a single dodo egg. From beginning to end our acquaintance with animate dodos lasted just seventy years.

is now evident that many events of biblical history did not take place in either the particular era or the manner described. Some of the most famous events in the Bible clearly never happened at all.

The Treaty of Tianjin and the Convention of Peking that ended the Second Opium War gave Kowloon – an area next to Hong Kong – to Britain, legalised the opium trade and granted Christians full civil rights. Importantly, foreign powers were given the right to carry Chinese workers to labour in their own lands and colonies. This launched the ‘coolie’ trade and Chinese workers were conveyed to work in plantations and mines in places such as Malaya, while in America they famously built the railroads.

It was a famous Stoic ‘paradox’ that the Sage is believed to be absolutely free, even when imprisoned or exiled by a powerful tyrant. This was often put to the test because ancient philosophers were quite frequently imprisoned, exiled or even executed! The freedom of the truly wise man consists in following his own rational nature, by doing what is within his control in accord with wisdom and virtue. His mind is like a blazing fire, which consumes anything cast into it.

Loving your fate and joyful acceptance Epictetus actually describes a three-stage process to his students, which relates to the discipline of desire. He begins by emphasizing the need for Stoics to train themselves rigorously to adhere to their principles, having certain phrases constantly ready-to-hand day and night. These should be written down, read over, analysed and discussed, until they have been memorized and understood. We should then rehearse all the possible catastrophes that can befall us in life, things the majority of people fear, and prepare for them in advance. Then, if one of those things happens which are called ‘undesirable’, immediately the thought that it was not unexpected will be the first thing to lighten the burden. For in every case it is a great help to be able to say, ‘I knew the son whom I had begotten was mortal.’ [A famous saying, attributed to various wise men.] For that is what you will say, and likewise, ‘I knew that I was mortal’, ‘I knew that I was vulnerable to exile’, ‘I knew that I might be sent off to prison.’ (Discourses, 3.24)

THE MASADA MYSTERY WE WERE STANDING in the middle of a large valley, harsh and forbidding. “The prophet Ezekiel was taken in a vision to a valley filled with dry bones, which, by the hand of God, would rise and come to life and become a massive army. It was a prophecy that the nation of Israel, though utterly destroyed, would one day by God’s hand be resurrected from the grave.” The teacher began to walk through the valley, unfolding the mystery as he went. “In the first century the Romans destroyed the nation of Israel. The nation’s last stand took place on a desert mountain fortress called Masada. It was there that her last soldiers would meet their end. So Masada became the grave of ancient Israel. But then, after two thousand years, the nation of Israel was resurrected by the hand of God as foretold in the vision of dry bones. The people were resurrected, the cities were resurrected, and the Israeli soldier was resurrected. And then the resurrected nation decided to return to its ancient grave.” “To Masada? Why?” “To excavate it, to dig it up. The man in charge of the excavation was one of the nation’s most famous soldiers and archaeologists. And Israeli soldiers helped in the excavation. So now on the grave of Israel’s ancient soldiers walked her resurrected soldiers to see what lay hidden in its ruins.” “And what was hidden in the ruins?” “A prophetic mystery . . . a Scripture. It had been buried and hidden there for almost two thousand years.” “And what did it say?” “It was from the Book of Ezekiel, the section that contained the prophecy of the Valley of Dry Bones: ‘Thus says the Lord God: “Behold, O My people, I will open your graves and cause you to come up from your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel.”’ So the prophecy was hidden right there in Israel’s ancient grave, waiting for ages for the day that it would be uncovered, the day when its words would be fulfilled and the nation resurrected from its grave. You see, God is real. And His will is to restore the broken, bring hope from hopelessness, and life from death. Don’t ever give up. For with God, nothing is impossible . . . even restoration of a nation from a valley of dry bones.” The Mission: Bring your most hopeless situations and issues to God. Believe God for the impossible. Live and move in the power of the impossible. Ezekiel 37:12–14; Luke 1:37 The Masada Mystery

President Theodore Roosevelt said, “When you educate a man in mind and not in morals, you educate a menace to society.” Science is learning to control everything but man. We have not yet solved the problems of hate, lust, greed, and prejudice, which produce social injustice, racial strife, and ultimately war. Our future is threatened by many dangers, such as the nuclear destruction that hangs over our heads. However, the greatest danger is from within. Every major civilization before us has disintegrated and collapsed from internal forces rather than military conquest. Ancient Rome is the outstanding example of the fall of a civilization. While its disintegration was hastened by foreign invasions, in the opinion of Arthur Weigall, a world-famous archaeologist, it collapsed “only after bribery and corruption had been rife for generations.” No matter how advanced its progress, any generation that neglects its spiritual and moral life is going to disintegrate. This is the story of man, and this is our modern problem.

Alone, we can listen, not to those who tell us we must see the famous this or that, or to the voice in our head that says a place must be as it seems in a film or on a website - but to what's really there. We can hear the muezzin, the bookseller, the rug hawker, the echoes of an ancient cistern and the mysteries buried within. Alone, we don't have to speak. We can feel the vibration of a city as it is in that moment in time and will never be again: the sound of the crowd, the waves crashing into the harbor, the cries of seagulls swooping over the Bosporus. Here, and then gone.

I have often tried in dreams to be the kind of imposing individual the Romantics imagined themselves to be, and whenever I have, I’ve always ended up laughing out loud at myself for even giving house-room to such an idea. After all, the homme fatal exists in the dreams of all ordinary men, and romanticism is merely the turning inside out of our normal daily selves. In the most secret part of their being, all men dream of ruling over a great empire, with all men their subjects, all women theirs for the asking, adored by all the people and (if they are inferior men) of all ages … Few are as accustomed to dreaming as I am and so are not lucid enough to laugh at the aesthetic possibility of nurturing such dreams. The most serious criticism of romanticism has not yet been made, namely, that it represents the inner truth of human nature, an externalization of what lies deepest in the human soul, but made concrete, visible, even possible, if being possible depends on something other than Fate, and its excesses, its absurdities, its various ploys for moving and seducing people, all stem from that. Even I who laugh at the seductive traps laid by the imagination often find myself imagining how wonderful it would be to be famous, how gratifying to be loved, how thrilling to be a success! And yet I can never manage to see myself in those exulted roles without hearing a guffaw from the other “I” I always keep as close to me as a street in the Baixa. Do I imagine myself famous? Only as a famous bookkeeper. Do I fancy myself raised up onto the thrones of celebrity? This fantasy only ever comes upon me in the office in Rua dos Douradores, and my colleagues inevitably ruin the effect. Do I hear the applause of the most variegated multitudes? That applause comes from the cheap fourth-floor room where I live and clashes horribly with the shabby furnishings, with the surrounding vulgarity, humiliating both me and the dream. I never even had any castles in Spain, like those Spaniards we Portuguese have always feared. My castles were built out of an incomplete deck of grubby playing cards; and they didn’t collapse of their own accord, but had to be demolished with a sweeping gesture of the hand, the impatient gesture of an elderly maid wanting to restore the tablecloth and reset the table, because teatime was calling like some fateful curse. Even that vision is of little worth, because I don’t have a house in the provinces or old aunts at whose table, at the end of a family gathering, I sit sipping a cup of tea that tastes to me of repose. My dream failed even in its metaphors and figurations. My empire didn’t even go as far as a pack of old playing cards. My victory didn’t even include a teapot or an ancient cat. I will die as I lived, among the bric-a-brac of my room, sold off by weight among the postscripts of things lost. May I at least take with me into the immense possibilities to be found in the abyss of everything the glory of my disillusion as if it were that of a great dream, the splendor of my unbelief like a flag of defeat — a flag held aloft by feeble hands, but dragged through the mud and blood of the weak and held on high as we sink into the shifting sands, whether in protest or defiance or despair no one knows … No one knows because no one knows anything, and the sands swallow up those with flags and those without … And the sands cover everything, my life, my prose, my eternity. I carry with me the knowledge of my defeat as if it were a flag of victory

I have often tried in dreams to be the kind of imposing individual the Romantics imagined themselves to be, and whenever I have, I’ve always ended up laughing out loud at myself for even giving house-room to such an idea. After all, the homme fatal exists in the dreams of all ordinary men, and romanticism is merely the turning inside out of our normal daily selves. In the most secret part of their being, all men dream of ruling over a great empire, with all men their subjects, all women theirs for the asking, adored by all the people and (if they are inferior men) of all ages … Few are as accustomed to dreaming as I am and so are not lucid enough to laugh at the aesthetic possibility of nurturing such dreams. The most serious criticism of romanticism has not yet been made, namely, that it represents the inner truth of human nature, an externalization of what lies deepest in the human soul, but made concrete, visible, even possible, if being possible depends on something other than Fate, and its excesses, its absurdities, its various ploys for moving and seducing people, all stem from that. Even I who laugh at the seductive traps laid by the imagination often find myself imagining how wonderful it would be to be famous, how gratifying to be loved, how thrilling to be a success! And yet I can never manage to see myself in those exulted roles without hearing a guffaw from the other “I” I always keep as close to me as a street in the Baixa. Do I imagine myself famous? Only as a famous bookkeeper. Do I fancy myself raised up onto the thrones of celebrity? This fantasy only ever comes upon me in the office in Rua dos Douradores, and my colleagues inevitably ruin the effect. Do I hear the applause of the most variegated multitudes? That applause comes from the cheap fourth-floor room where I live and clashes horribly with the shabby furnishings, with the surrounding vulgarity, humiliating both me and the dream. I never even had any castles in Spain, like those Spaniards we Portuguese have always feared. My castles were built out of an incomplete deck of grubby playing cards; and they didn’t collapse of their own accord, but had to be demolished with a sweeping gesture of the hand, the impatient gesture of an elderly maid wanting to restore the tablecloth and reset the table, because teatime was calling like some fateful curse. Even that vision is of little worth, because I don’t have a house in the provinces or old aunts at whose table, at the end of a family gathering, I sit sipping a cup of tea that tastes to me of repose. My dream failed even in its metaphors and figurations. My empire didn’t even go as far as a pack of old playing cards. My victory didn’t even include a teapot or an ancient cat. I will die as I lived, among the bric-a-brac of my room, sold off by weight among the postscripts of things lost. May I at least take with me into the immense possibilities to be found in the abyss of everything the glory of my disillusion as if it were that of a great dream, the splendor of my unbelief like a flag of defeat — a flag held aloft by feeble hands, but dragged through the mud and blood of the weak and held on high as we sink into the shifting sands, whether in protest or defiance or despair no one knows … No one knows because no one knows anything, and the sands swallow up those with flags and those without … And the sands cover everything, my life, my prose, my eternity. I carry with me the knowledge of my defeat as if it were a flag of victory

Astronomy was the special science of the Babylonians, for which they were famous throughout the ancient world.

The Historical Setting of Genesis Mesopotamia: Sumer Through Old Babylonia Sumerians. It is not possible at this time to put Ge 1–11 into a specific place in the historical record. Our history of the ancient Near East begins in earnest after writing has been invented, and the earliest civilization known to us in the historical record is that of the Sumerians. This culture dominated southern Mesopotamia for over 500 years during the first half of the third millennium BC (2900–2350 BC), known as the Early Dynastic Period. The Sumerians have become known through the excavation of several of their principal cities, which include Eridu, Uruk and Ur. The Sumerians are credited with many of the important developments in civilization, including the foundations of mathematics, astronomy, law and medicine. Urbanization is also first witnessed among the Sumerians. By the time of Abraham, the Sumerians no longer dominate the ancient Near East politically, but their culture continues to influence the region. Other cultures replace them in the political arena but benefit from the advances they made. Dynasty of Akkad. In the middle of the twenty-fourth century BC, the Sumerian culture was overrun by the formation of an empire under the kingship of Sargon I, who established his capital at Akkad. He ruled all of southern Mesopotamia and ranged eastward into Elam and northwest to the Mediterranean on campaigns of a military and economic nature. The empire lasted for almost 150 years before being apparently overthrown by the Gutians (a barbaric people from the Zagros Mountains east of the Tigris), though other factors, including internal dissent, may have contributed to the downfall. Ur III. Of the next century little is known as more than 20 Gutian kings succeeded one another. Just before 2100 BC, the city of Ur took control of southern Mesopotamia under the kingship of Ur-Nammu, and for the next century there was a Sumerian renaissance in what has been called the Ur III period. It is difficult to ascertain the limits of territorial control of the Ur III kings, though the territory does not seem to have been as extensive as that of the dynasty of Akkad. Under Ur-Nammu’s son Shulgi, the region enjoyed almost a half century of peace. Decline and fall came late in the twenty-first century BC through the infiltration of the Amorites and the increased aggression of the Elamites to the east. The Elamites finally overthrew the city. It is against this backdrop of history that the OT patriarchs emerge. Some have pictured Abraham as leaving the sophisticated Ur that was the center of the powerful Ur III period to settle in the unknown wilderness of Canaan, but that involves both chronological and geographic speculation. By the highest chronology (i.e., the earliest dates attributed to him), Abraham probably would have traveled from Ur to Harran during the reign of Ur-Nammu, but many scholars are inclined to place Abraham in the later Isin-Larsa period or even the Old Babylonian period. From a geographic standpoint it is difficult to be sure that the Ur mentioned in the Bible is the famous city in southern Mesopotamia (see note on 11:28). All this makes it impossible to give a precise background of Abraham. The Ur III period ended in southern Mesopotamia as the last king of Ur, Ibbi-Sin, lost the support of one city after another and was finally overthrown by the Elamites, who lived just east of the Tigris. In the ensuing two centuries (c. 2000–1800 BC), power was again returned to city-states that controlled more local areas. Isin, Larsa, Eshnunna, Lagash, Mari, Assur and Babylon all served as major political centers.

Ancient Rome began as a small city-state. Its citizens were tough and stoic. They were famous for their pragmatism. But as they moved from being a republic to an empire and their power expanded, everything reversed itself. Their citizens’ minds hungered for newer and newer forms of escape. They lost all sense of proportion—petty political battles consumed their attention more than much larger dangers on the outskirts of the empire. The empire fell well before the invasion of the barbarians. It collapsed from the collective softness of its citizens’ minds and the turning of their back on reality.

In other Celtic lands, destruction of the ancient bardic orders meant the loss of history and myth as well as of poetry. But not in Ireland -- at least, not entirely. There, the melding of the Christian and the pagan began early, during the great period of Celtic monasticism. Irish monks of that period provided most of our written records of Celtic mythology. In continental Europe, evidence of Celtic beliefs is found only in sculpture; in Britain, it is found only in a few verbal shards and the occasional inscribed statue; but in Ireland we find entire epics, whole chants and songs, lengthy narratives. In the curvilinear script for which they are justly famous, Irish monks wrote down the stories, poems, place-names, and other lore of their pagan ancestors before it disappeared in the mists of history.

The Testament of Solomon, a work from the third century AD, further illustrates the widespread belief in apotropaic magic. This is a pseudepigraphical work (one that falsely claims to have been written by a famous person of the Old Testament) attributed to Solomon.

Cattle and metal treasure were the main forms of wealth in ancient Ireland—metal because it was rare, and cattle because they were useful. Cattle provided milk to drink and to make into cheese, and hide and meat after they were dead. If a king demanded tribute from his subjects, it would probably be in the form of cattle—in fact, a wealthy farmer was called a bóiare, or “lord of cows.” In the famous poem Táin Bó Cuailnge, a major war starts because Queen Mebd discovers that her husband has one more bull than she does. Celtic chieftains spent quite a bit of their energy stealing cattle from one another. They even had a special word for this activity, táin. (Cattle raiding wasn’t just an amusement for the ancient Irish; modern Irish people were stealing one another’s cattle well into the twentieth century.)

Ancient Ways The Greek Isles are divided into several major chains lying in the Aegean, the Mediterranean, and the Ionian seas. The Cyclades chain alone includes more than two hundred islands clustered in the southern Aegean. In the southeastern Aegean, between Crete and Asia Minor, there are 163 islands known as the Dodecanese chain. Only 26 of these are inhabited; the largest of them is Rhodes, where the world-famous Colossus once stood. The Ionian chain of western Greece (named for the eponymous sea) includes the large island of Corfu. Cyprus lies in the eastern Mediterranean, south of Turkey. Today, Cyprus stands politically divided, with Turkish rule in the north, and a government in the south that remains independent from Greece. However, the island has always been linked culturally and linguistically to Greece, and it shares traditions and ways of life with the smaller islands scattered to its south and west. In the Greek Isles, history blends myth and fact. Historians glean information about the early days of the Greek Isles from the countless ancient stories and legends set there. According to Homer, battleships sailed from the harbors of Kos and Rhodes during the Trojan War. A well-known legend holds that the Argonauts sought refuge from a storm on the island of Anafi in the southeastern Cyclades. The lovely island of Lésvos is mentioned throughout the Homeric epics and in many ancient Greek tales. Tradition has it that the god Helios witnessed the island of Rhodes rising mystically from the sea, and chose it for his home. The ill-fated Daedalus and his son, Icarus, attempted to soar through the skies over the magical island of Crete, where the great god Zeus was born in a mountaintop cave. Villagers still recount how Aphrodite emerged from the sea on a breathtaking stretch of beach near the village of Paphos on Cyprus. Visitors must actually lay eyes on a Greek island to gain a full appreciation for these ancient stories. Just setting foot on one of these islands makes you feel as if you’ve stepped into one of the timeless tales from ancient Greek mythology.