Bulls Power Quotes

It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown I back, throat to the stars, "more like deer than human being." To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.

Depends on the dog. Big country dogs like these? Yeah. It's the fancy city ones that give me trouble. Overbred, Dad says. Makes them skittish and screws up their wiring. I had a Chihuahua attack me last year." He showed me a faint scar on his hand. "Took a good chunk out." I sputtered a laugh. "A Chihuahua?" "Hey, that thing was more vicious than a pit bull. I was at a park with Simon, kicking around a ball. All of a sudden, this little rat dog comes tearing out of nowhere, jumps up, and clamps down on my hand. Wouldn't let go. I'm shaking it, and the owner's yelling at me not to hurt little Tito. I finally get the dog off. I'm bleeding all over that place and the guy never even apologizes.

In bullfighting there is an interesting parallel to the pause as a place of refuge and renewal. It is believed that in the midst of a fight, a bull can find his own particular area of safety in the arena. There he can reclaim his strength and power. This place and inner state are called his querencia. As long as the bull remains enraged and reactive, the matador is in charge. Yet when he finds his querencia, he gathers his strength and loses his fear. From the matador's perspective, at this point the bull is truly dangerous, for he has tapped into his power.

Where is the graveyard of dead gods? What lingering mourner waters their mounds? There was a time when Jupiter was the king of the gods, and any man who doubted his puissance was ipso facto a barbarian and an ignoramus. But where in all the world is there a man who worships Jupiter today? And who of Huitzilopochtli? In one year - and it is no more than five hundred years ago - 50,000 youths and maidens were slain in sacrifice to him. Today, if he is remembered at all, it is only by some vagrant savage in the depths of the Mexican forest. Huitzilopochtli, like many other gods, had no human father; his mother was a virtuous widow; he was born of an apparently innocent flirtation that she carried out with the sun. When he frowned, his father, the sun, stood still. When he roared with rage, earthquakes engulfed whole cities. When he thirsted he was watered with 10,000 gallons of human blood. But today Huitzilopochtli is as magnificently forgotten as Allen G. Thurman. Once the peer of Allah, Buddha and Wotan, he is now the peer of Richmond P. Hobson, Alton B. Parker, Adelina Patti, General Weyler and Tom Sharkey. Speaking of Huitzilopochtli recalls his brother Tezcatlipoca. Tezcatlipoca was almost as powerful; he consumed 25,000 virgins a year. Lead me to his tomb: I would weep, and hang a couronne des perles. But who knows where it is? Or where the grave of Quetzalcoatl is? Or Xiuhtecuhtli? Or Centeotl, that sweet one? Or Tlazolteotl, the goddess of love? Of Mictlan? Or Xipe? Or all the host of Tzitzimitl? Where are their bones? Where is the willow on which they hung their harps? In what forlorn and unheard-of Hell do they await their resurrection morn? Who enjoys their residuary estates? Or that of Dis, whom Caesar found to be the chief god of the Celts? Of that of Tarves, the bull? Or that of Moccos, the pig? Or that of Epona, the mare? Or that of Mullo, the celestial jackass? There was a time when the Irish revered all these gods, but today even the drunkest Irishman laughs at them. But they have company in oblivion: the Hell of dead gods is as crowded as the Presbyterian Hell for babies. Damona is there, and Esus, and Drunemeton, and Silvana, and Dervones, and Adsullata, and Deva, and Bellisima, and Uxellimus, and Borvo, and Grannos, and Mogons. All mighty gods in their day, worshipped by millions, full of demands and impositions, able to bind and loose - all gods of the first class. Men labored for generations to build vast temples to them - temples with stones as large as hay-wagons. The business of interpreting their whims occupied thousands of priests, bishops, archbishops. To doubt them was to die, usually at the stake. Armies took to the field to defend them against infidels; villages were burned, women and children butchered, cattle were driven off. Yet in the end they all withered and died, and today there is none so poor to do them reverence. What has become of Sutekh, once the high god of the whole Nile Valley? What has become of: Resheph Anath Ashtoreth El Nergal Nebo Ninib Melek Ahijah Isis Ptah Anubis Baal Astarte Hadad Addu Shalem Dagon Sharaab Yau Amon-Re Osiris Sebek Molech? All there were gods of the highest eminence. Many of them are mentioned with fear and trembling in the Old Testament. They ranked, five or six thousand years ago, with Yahweh Himself; the worst of them stood far higher than Thor. Yet they have all gone down the chute, and with them the following: Bilé Ler Arianrhod Morrigu Govannon Gunfled Sokk-mimi Nemetona Dagda Robigus Pluto Ops Meditrina Vesta You may think I spoof. That I invent the names. I do not. Ask the rector to lend you any good treatise on comparative religion: You will find them all listed. They were gods of the highest standing and dignity-gods of civilized peoples-worshiped and believed in by millions. All were omnipotent, omniscient and immortal. And all are dead.

The United States of Andrew Jackson or George Washington is not the United States of Frederick Douglass or Sitting Bull. But we present our history from the perspective of the winners, from those in power

Behold, my brothers, the spring has come; the earth has received the embraces of the sun and we shall soon see the results of that love! Every seed has awakened and so has all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves, to inhabit this land.

Political conflicts are merely surface manifestations. If conflicts arise you may be sure that certain powers intend to keep this conflict under operation since they hope to profit from the situation. To concern yourself with surface political conflicts is to make the mistake of the bull in the ring, you are charging the cloth. That is what politics is for, to teach you the cloth. Just as the bullfighter teaches the bull, teaches him to follow, obey the cloth.

Body language is a very powerful tool... 
80% of what you understand in a conversation
is read through the body, not the words.

In the Israelite encampment, even though there were iniquities, sins, and wickedness, God did not see any of them because the blood of bulls and goats, which they offered up to the Lord daily, covered the children of Israel. How much more true that is for us today, we who are washed clean forever by the blood of the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, our beautiful Savior.

The fundamental defect of the female character is a lack of a sense of justice. This originates first and foremost in their want of rationality and capacity for reflexion but it is strengthened by the fact that, as the weaker sex, they are driven to rely not on force but on cunning: hence their instinctive subtlety and their ineradicable tendency to tell lies: for, as nature has equipped the lion with claws and teeth, the elephant with tusks, the wild boar with fangs, the bull with horns and the cuttlefish with ink, so it has equipped woman with the power of dissimulation as her means of attack and defence, and has transformed into this gift all the strength it has bestowed on man in the form of physical strength and the power of reasoning. Dissimulation is thus inborn in her and consequently to be found in the stupid woman almost as often as in the clever one. To make use of it at every opportunity is as natural to her as it is for an animal to employ its means of defence whenever it is attacked, and when she does so she feels that to some extent she is only exercising her rights. A completely truthful woman who does not practice dissimulation is perhaps an impossibility, which is why women see through the dissimulation of others so easily it is inadvisable to attempt it with them. – But this fundamental defect which I have said they possess, together with all that is associated with it, gives rise to falsity, unfaithfulness, treachery, ingratitude, etc. Women are guilty of perjury far more often than men. It is questionable whether they ought to be allowed to take an oath at all.

I know why you did it too. You can't become mortal yourself until you change her back again. Isn't that it? You don't care what happens to her, or to the others, just as long as you become a real magician, even if you change the Bull into a bullfrog, because it's still just a trick when you do it. You don't care about anything but magic, and what kind of magician is that? Schmendrick, I don't feel good. I have to sit down." Schmendrick must have carried her for a time, because she was definitely not walking and his green eyes were ringing in her head. "That's right. Nothing but magic matters to me. I would round up unicorns for Haggard myself if it would heighten my power but half a hair. It's true. I have no preferences and no loyalties. I have only magic." His voice was hard and sad. "Really?" she asked, rocking dreamily in her terror, watching the brightness flowing by. "That's awful." She was very impressed. "Are you really like that?" "No," he said, then or later. "No, it's not true. How could I be like that, and still have all these troubles?" Then he said, "Molly, you have to walk now.

Do you remember what we were speaking of earlier, of how bloody, terrible things are sometimes the most beautiful?” he said. “It’s a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown back, throat to the stars, ‘more like deer than human being.’ To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.

Ignorance is bliss was bull. Melody had been ignorant her whole life, and things were far from blissful. It was time to give knowledge is power a try.

Behold, the Spring has come; the earth has received the embraces of the sun and we shall soon see the results of that love! Every seed is awakened and so has all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being, and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves, to inhabit this land. Yet, hear me, people, we have now to deal with another race – small and feeble when our fathers first met them but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule. They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own and fence their neighbors away; they deface her with their buildings and their refuse. The nation is like a spring freshet that overruns its banks and destroys all that are in its path. We cannot dwell side by side. Only seven years ago we made a treaty by which we were assured that the buffalo country should be left to us forever. Now they threaten to take that away from us. My brothers, shall we submit or shall we say to them: 'First kill me before you take possession of my land

The power of a man is like a bull’s charge, while the power of a woman moves aslant, like a serpent seeking its prey. Know the particular properties of your power. Unless you use it correctly, it won’t get you what you want.” His words perplexed me. Wasn’t power singular and simple? In the world that I knew, men just happened to have more of it. (I hoped to change this.)

Put it in their face,” Gotti urged Sammy the Bull Gravano. “They want to see fucking lions and tigers and that’s what we are.

Nearly all ancient peoples worshiped sex in some form and ritual, and not the lowest people but the highest expressed their worship most completely [...]. The sexual character and functions of primitive deities were held in high regard, not through any obscenity of mind, but through a passion for fertility in women and in the earth. Certain animals, like the bull and the snake, were worshiped as apparently possessing or symbolizing in a high degree the divine power of reproduction. The snake in the story of Eden is doubtless a phallic symbol, representing sex as the origin of evil, suggesting sexual awakening as the beginning of the knowledge of good and evil, and perhaps insinuating a certain proverbial connection between mental innocence and bliss.

What do you want?” he growled. “I just want to talk.” I tried to keep my voice steady. “You don't have to try to scare me.” He kept a straight face, and his tone was seductively low. "There's hardly any room for fear when you're so bloody turned-on.” A flash of shock hit me at his audacity. His eyes lowered to my body, but he never moved away. “Ah, there's anger now,” he said coolly, “and a bit of embarrassment.” He was reading me — reading my colors! And I couldn't see his at all. I felt stripped bare before him, vulnerable. I concentrated on why I'd gone there to begin with. “I know what we are now.” I wished my voice weren't shaky. “Congratulations.” He stood over me for a second more, savoring his power, no doubt, and then walked away, tossing the knife in the general direction of the dartboard and hitting the bull's-eye. Never missing a beat, he swaggered to a white couch with oversize pillows. He fell back onto it, propping his big, black boots on the white cushions and lounging back with arms spread wide across the back of the sofa. He stared as if daring me to talk. I had no idea what to say or do. I didn't know anymore why I'd come. Had I just wanted to barge in and say, Ha, I know what we are! and then demand information?

Bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism, and die on euphoria. The time of maximum pessimism is the best time to buy, and the time of maximum optimism is the best time to sell.

STAGE 1—shared by most street gangs and characterized by despair, hostility, and the collective belief that “life sucks.” STAGE 2—filled primarily with apathetic people who perceive themselves as victims and who are passively antagonistic, with the mind-set that “my life sucks.” Think The Office on TV or the Dilbert comic strip. STAGE 3—focused primarily on individual achievement and driven by the motto “I’m great (and you’re not).” According to the authors, people in organizations at this stage “have to win, and for them winning is personal. They’ll outwork and outthink their competitors on an individual basis. The mood that results is a collection of ‘lone warriors.’” STAGE 4—dedicated to tribal pride and the overriding conviction that “we’re great (and they’re not).” This kind of team requires a strong adversary, and the bigger the foe, the more powerful the tribe. STAGE 5—a rare stage characterized by a sense of innocent wonder and the strong belief that “life is great.” (See Bulls, Chicago, 1995–98.)

Clarence “Kelly” Johnson was an authentic American genius. He was the kind of enthusiastic visionary that bulled his way past vast odds to achieve great successes, in much the same way as Edison, Ford, and other immortal tinkerers of the past. When Kelly rolled up his sleeves, he became unstoppable, and the nay-sayers and doubters were simply ignored or bowled over. He declared his intention, then pushed through while his subordinates followed in his wake. He was so powerful that simply by going along on his plans and schemes, the rest of us helped to produce miracles too. Honest to God, there will never be another like him.

My father will sit down and give you theories to explain why he does this or that," the son of the billionaire investor George Soros has said. "But I remember seeing it as a kid, and thinking, At least half of this is bull. I mean, you know the reason he changes his position on the market or whatever is because his back starts killing him. He literally goes into a spasm, and it's this early warning sign.

The analysis of the last age, the 'dark age' or Kali Yuga, brings to light two essential features. The first is that mankind living in this age is strictly connected to the body and cannot prescind from it; therefore, the only way open is not that of pure detachment (as in early Buddhism and in the many varieties of yoga) but rather that of knowledge, awakening, and mastery over secret energies trapped in the body. The second characteristic is that of the dissolution typical of this age. During the Kali Yuga, the bull of dharma stands on only one foot (it lost the other three during the previous three ages). This means that the traditional law (dharma) is wavering, is reduced to a shadow of its former self, and seems to be almost succumbing. During Kali Yuga, however, the goddess Kali, who was asleep in the previous ages, is now fully awake. . . . let us say that this symbolism implies that during the last age elementary, infernal, and even abyssal forces are untrammeled.

But it's the same basic problem: What keeps us from seeing the obvious?" Douglas puts his hand to the brass bull's horn. "And? What does?" "Mostly other people.

He was as tenacious as a pit bull, but with half the brain power and none of the looks.

Which means what?” “That the Queen of Faerie recognizes you as a power, and has spoken to you with respect. Others will follow her lead.” “Huh. That and a quarter will buy me a gumball.

It’s different when people who’ve been living under somebody’s boot hate the foot the boot’s on. An oppressed people can’t be racist. They can be bigots, but not racist. You have to have power to be a racist...

Leadership is much more than hitting the bull’s eye. There is a large human component in leadership behaviour Young managers have to explore hitting deeper chords in human nature rather than just hitting targets.

The weather turned to damp heat, the kind that settled on the shoulders and made people walk as if they were twenty pounds too heavy. It pointed tempers and blunted energy, and gave despair a great seductive power.

In the first chapter, for example, when Job first gets all the bad news about the deaths of his children and the loss of his estate, we are told that “Job got up and tore his robe” and then he “fell to the ground” (Job 1:20), but then the author adds, “In all this Job sinned not” (Job 1:22). Here is a man already behaving in a way that many pious Christians would consider at least unseemly or showing a lack of faith. He rips his clothes, falls to the ground, cries out. He does not show any stoical patience. But the biblical text says, “In all this Job sinned not.” By the middle of the book, Job is cursing the day he is born and comes very close to charging God with injustice in his angry questions. And yet God’s final verdict on Job is surprisingly positive. At the end of the book, God turns to Eliphaz, the first of Job’s friends, and says: “I am angry with you and your two friends, because you have not spoken the truth about me, as my servant Job has. So now take seven bulls and seven rams and go to my servant Job and sacrifice a burnt offering for yourselves. My servant Job will pray for you, and I will accept his prayer and not deal with you according to your folly. You have not spoken the truth about me, as my servant Job has.” So Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite did what the Lord told them; and the Lord accepted Job’s prayer (Job 42:7–9). Job’s grief was expressed with powerful emotion and soaring rhetoric. He did not “make nice” with God, praying politely. He was brutally honest about his feelings. And while God did—as we will see later—forcefully call Job to acknowledge his unfathomable wisdom and majesty, nevertheless God ultimately vindicated him. A Bruised Reed He Will Not Break It is not right, therefore, for us to simply say to a person in grief and sorrow that they need to pull themselves together. We should be more gentle and patient with them. And that means we should also be gentle and patient with ourselves. We should not assume that if we are trusting in God we won’t weep, or feel anger, or feel hopeless.

The boy I love, the same becomes a man not through derived power but in his own right, Wicked, rather than virtuous out of conformity or fear, Fond of his sweetheart, relishing well his steak, Unrequited love or a slight cutting him worse than a wound cuts, First rate to ride, to fight, to hit the bull's eye, to sail a skiff, to sing a song or play on the banjo, Preferring scars and faces pitted with smallpox over all latherers and those that keep out the sun.

At a great distance appeared with the same pomp the sheep of Thebes, the dog of Bubastis, the cat of Phoebe, the crocodile of Arsinoe, the goat of Mendes, and all the inferior gods of Egypt, who came to pay homage to the great ox, to the mighty Apis, as powerful as Isis, Osiris, and Horus, united together. In the midst of the demi-gods, forty priests carried an enormous basket, filled with sacred onions. These were, it is true, gods, but they resembled onions very much. ("The White Bull")

Doc was collecting marine animals in the Great Tide Pool on the tip of the Peninsula. It is a fabulous place: when the tide is in, a wave-churned basin, creamy with foam, whipped by the combers that roll in from the whistling buoy on the reef. But when the tide goes out the little water world becomes quiet and lovely. The sea is very clear and the bottom becomes fantastic with hurrying, fighting, feeding, breeding animals. Crabs rush from frond to frond of the waving algae. Starfish squat over mussels and limpets, attach their million little suckers and then slowly lift with incredible power until the prey is broken from the rock. And then the starfish stomach comes out and envelops its food. Orange and speckled and fluted nudibranchs slide gracefully over the rocks, their skirts waving like the dresses of Spanish dancers. And black eels poke their heads out of crevices and wait for prey. The snapping shrimps with their trigger claws pop loudly. The lovely, colored world is glassed over. Hermit crabs like frantic children scamper on the bottom sand. And now one, finding an empty snail shell he likes better than his own, creeps out, exposing his soft body to the enemy for a moment, and then pops into the new shell. A wave breaks over the barrier, and churns the glassy water for a moment and mixes bubbles into the pool, and then it clears and is tranquil and lovely and murderous again. Here a crab tears a leg from his brother. The anemones expand like soft and brilliant flowers, inviting any tired and perplexed animal to lie for a moment in their arms, and when some small crab or little tide-pool Johnnie accepts the green and purple invitation, the petals whip in, the stinging cells shoot tiny narcotic needles into the prey and it grows weak and perhaps sleepy while the searing caustic digestive acids melt its body down. Then the creeping murderer, the octopus, steals out, slowly, softly, moving like a gray mist, pretending now to be a bit of weed, now a rock, now a lump of decaying meat while its evil goat eyes watch coldly. It oozes and flows toward a feeding crab, and as it comes close its yellow eyes burn and its body turns rosy with the pulsing color of anticipation and rage. Then suddenly it runs lightly on the tips of its arms, as ferociously as a charging cat. It leaps savagely on the crab, there is a puff of black fluid, and the struggling mass is obscured in the sepia cloud while the octopus murders the crab. On the exposed rocks out of water, the barnacles bubble behind their closed doors and the limpets dry out. And down to the rocks come the black flies to eat anything they can find. The sharp smell of iodine from the algae, and the lime smell of calcareous bodies and the smell of powerful protean, smell of sperm and ova fill the air. On the exposed rocks the starfish emit semen and eggs from between their rays. The smells of life and richness, of death and digestion, of decay and birth, burden the air. And salt spray blows in from the barrier where the ocean waits for its rising-tide strength to permit it back into the Great Tide Pool again. And on the reef the whistling buoy bellows like a sad and patient bull.

Archie Henderson has won no awards, written no books and never played any representative sport. He was an under-11 tournament-winning tennis player as a boy, but left the game when he discovered rugby where he was one of the worst flyhalves he can remember. This did not prevent him from having opinions on most things in sport. His moment of glory came in 1970 when he predicted—correctly as it turned out—that Griquas would beat the Blue Bulls (then still the meekly named Noord-Transvaal) in the Currie Cup final. It is something for which he has never been forgiven by the powers-that-be at Loftus. Archie has played cricket in South Africa and India and gave the bowling term military medium a new and more pacifist interpretation. His greatest ambition was to score a century on Llandudno beach before the tide came in.

One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.

Finn,” she protested. “I wasn’t laughing like, with her.” Izzy glowered at me. “She tried to kill me.” “Actually, I didn’t,” I broke in. There was a hard look in Aislinn’s and Finley’s eyes that scared the heck out of me. The last thing I wanted was to be held responsible for Elodie’s actions, especially now that I was, technically, one of these women, and the words just came pouring out of my mouth. “See, I don’t have powers anymore, because I was supposed to go through the Removal, and that sort of locked my magic away so that I can’t use it. But there was this girl-well, this witch-Elodie, and because she passed her magic on to me when she died, we’re connected. That means her ghost follows me around and stuff, so when you attacked me, she possessed my body. Which is new and, quite frankly, super freaky, and something that I haven’t really processed yet. Anyway, she was the one who used magic on you. Oh, and held the sword to your throat, and said all that creepy stuff. I’m not creepy. At least not on purpose.” By now, all three Brannick women-all four, if you counted Mom-were staring at me. Man, what had that piney-tasting stuff been? The Brannick version of Red Bull? “I’ll, uh, stop talking now.

Seizing on the reduced-ranks situation, Gotti urged Gigante to reinforce his family with forty additional men. Sammy the Bull Gravano knew that Gotti was scheming to undercut Gigante and to court loyalty from the new Genovese cadre by informing them that he was responsible for their admission into Cosa Nostra.

Doublespeak turns lies told by politicians into "being economical with the truth," sewage sludge into "regulated organic nutrients" that do not stink but "exceed the odor threshold," the death of a patient in a hospital into "negative patient care outcome," an explosion and fire in a nuclear power plant into an "energetic disassembly" and "rapid oxidation.

This is a somewhat risky translation. It pivots on the Hebrew word for “great” gadal (#H1431 גְדִּ֖ל). This word can mean many things, including: horn, as in the horn of a powerful bull, the spike of a crown, the authority that a powerful king can wield to knock down an enemy, or gore them into bloody submission. This word also carries God-given authority to change history—as it was used in the book of Jonah. Jehovah made six things “great”: Nineveh (Jon 1:2); the storm (Jon 1:4); the fish (Jon 2:1); the plant (Jon 4:6); the worm (Jon 4:7); the wind (Jon 4:8). Each of these items were smaller tools being used by God to prod the bigger tool, like Assyria, into playing God’s weapon to punish unfaithful Israel. (Is 9:5-6) pg 15

29 But I am poor and sorrowful; Let Your salvation, O God, set me up on high. 30 aI will praise the name of God with a song, And will magnify Him with *thanksgiving. 31 aThis also shall please the LORD better than an ox or bull, Which has horns and hooves. 32 aThe humble shall see this and be glad; And you who seek God, byour hearts shall live. 33For the LORD hears the poor,

Death, the Sun, the Lovers. Lots of major arcana. Your future's controlled by others. There's powerful people playing with it. You're gonna have to fight to get it back...this is the country of truth. There the Devil, the Star, the Tower. In this country of truth, where your spirit lives, your life still isn't your own. Other stronger spirits, or maybe gods--they've got the say in what happens to you.

He was a curious mixture of things to me on that first occasion: he had the general physique of a bull, the tenacity of a vulture, the agility of a leopard, the tenderness of a lamb, and the coyness of a dove. He had a curious overgrown head which fasdnated me and which, for some reason, I took to be singularly Athenian. His hands were rather small for his body, and overly delicate. He was a vital, powerful man, capable of brutal gestures and rough words, yet somehow conveying a sense of warmth which was soft and feminine. There was also a great element of the tragic in him which his adroit mimicry only enhanced. He was extremely sympathetic and at the same time ruthless as a boor. He seemed to be talking about himself all the time, but never egotistically. He talked about himself because he himself was the most interesting person he knew. I liked that quality very much — I have a little of it myself.

Chickenshit refers to behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant ‘paying off of old scores’; and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances. Chickenshit is so called—instead of horse- or bull- or elephant shit—because it is small-minded and ignoble and takes the trivial seriously.

To her mortification, she was staring at him openly, ogling, and she couldn't seem to stop. If the back view of West Ravenel was fascinating, the front was absolutely mesmerizing. He was much harrier than her husband had been, his chest covered with dark fur that narrowed to a V at his midriff, and there was more hair on his forearms, and even a little trail below the navel. His shoulders and arms were so powerfully developed, one had to wonder why he hadn't simply wrestled the bull into submission.

Man wills to make of earth, not one Jerusalem but two; this sacramental blood de- clears the double mind by which he wills to lift both lion and lamb beyond the killing to exchange unaccount- able and vast. Man's priestliness therefore bespeaks his refusal of despair; proclaims acceptance of a world which, by its murderous hand, subscribes the insupportable dilemma of its being—the war of lion and lamb having no other, likely outcome here than two im- possibilities: The one, a pride of victors feeding on the slain; but leaving the lion as he was before, trapped in ancient reciprocities by which at last all power falls to crows; And the other, a hymn to despair no victim will accept; it is not enough, in this paroxysm of two martyrdoms, to stand upon the ship- wrecks of the slain and praise the weak for weakness; the lamb's will, too, was life; he died refusing death. Sacrifice therefore Not written off, but recognized, a sign in blood of the vaster end of blood; a redness turning all things white; an impossibility prefiguring the last exchange of all. The old order, of course, unchanged; the deaths of bulls and goats achieving nothing; Aaron still ineffectual; creation still bloody; But haunted now by bells within the veil where Aaron walks in shadows sprinkling blood and bids a new Jerusalem descend. Endless smoke now rising Lion become priest And lamb victim The world awaits The unimaginable union By which the Lion lifts Himself Lamb slain And, Priest and Victim, Brings The City Home.

if you were staffing an investment bank, management professor Kuhnen told me, you’d want to hire not only reward-sensitive types, who are likely to profit from bull markets, but also those who remain emotionally more neutral. You’d want to make sure that important corporate decisions reflect the input of both kinds of people, not just one type. And you’d want to know that individuals on all points of the reward-sensitivity spectrum understand their own emotional preferences and can temper them to match market conditions.

The name Schifanoia, derived from the phrase schivar la noia, or, to escape boredom. A pleasure palace on the outskirts of Ferrara where Borso d’Este, the eccentric ruler of an influential duchy, had an entire banquet hall painted with scenes from the zodiac. There was a procession of Venus being drawn on a carriage by swans. Beneath her, a resplendent Taurus, a tan-colored bull whose flanks were dotted with gold stars, blessed her passage. Borso had designed the hall to impress his guests—astrology as a performance of power, as a totem of good fortune.

What do you do when your greatest accomplishments lead you straight down the path of an even greater fear? Instead of summoning his faith and standing firm to see the deliverance of his God, Elijah retreats. And in his escape from his geographical surroundings, he begins to back down from the boldness that has characterized his whole ministry up to this point. When he came to Beersheba in Judah, he left his servant there, while he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness. He came to a broom bush, sat down under it and prayed that he might die. “I have had enough, LORD,” he said. “Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors.” Then he lay down under the bush and fell asleep. (1 Kings 19:3–5) Now I’m confused. Verse 3 says he was running for his life. Yet verse 4 says he asked God to kill him. Which one is it? Are you looking for life support, Elijah? Or shall God send the angels of euthanasia? One of these things is not like the other. The more I studied this text, though, and considered the context of Elijah’s despair and compared it to similar feelings I’ve experienced under much less duress, the more I got it. Although the text says Elijah ran for his life—and I’m sure that’s how it appeared—it seems like something deeper is going on. In fact, I’m not sure Elijah was running for his life at all, at least not in the sense we would use that phrase. I believe Elijah was actually running from his life. You see, it had been a long, lonely three years for Elijah. Did he survive the drought? Undoubtedly. And through him God won the battle with a unanimous decision. But winning can be as exhausting as losing. Sometimes the pressure of success can drain you at an even deeper level than the frustration of failure. Elijah knows Queen Jezebel doesn’t have the power to call on her gods and end his life. If she had, he’d have been buried beside his bull back on the mountain. So it’s safe to assume that his greatest fear at this point isn’t dying. His greatest fear is living—and having to fight yet another agonizing battle. Jezebel’s threat is ultimately impotent, yes. But that doesn’t make it ineffective. Because fear often finds its power, not in our actual situation, but in what we tell ourselves about our situation.

I sat up, woozy and blurry-eyed. I was lying in my old cot in the Me cabin. Sunlight streamed through the windows—morning light? Had I really slept that long? Snuggled up next to me, something warm and furry was growling and snuffling in my pillow. At first glance, I thought it might be a pit bull, though I was fairly sure I did not own a pit bull. Then it looked up, and I realized it was the disembodied head of a leopard. One nanosecond later, I was standing at the opposite end of the cabin, screaming. It was the closest I’d come to teleporting since I’d lost my godly powers. “Oh, you’re awake!” My son Will emerged from the bathroom in a billow of steam, his blond hair dripping wet and a towel around his waist. On his left pectoral was a stylized sun tattoo, which seemed unnecessary to me—as if he could be mistaken for anything but a child of the sun god. He froze when he registered the panic in my eyes. “What’s wrong?” GRR! said the leopard. “Seymour?” Will marched over to my cot and picked up the leopard head—which at some point in the distant past had been taxidermied and stuck on a plaque, then liberated from a garage sale by Dionysus and granted new life. Normally, as I recalled, Seymour resided over the fireplace mantel in the Big House, which did not explain why he had been chewing on my pillow. “What are you doing here?” Will demanded of the leopard. Then, to me: “I swear I did not put him in your bed.” “I did.” Dionysus materialized right next to me. My tortured lungs could not manage another scream, but I leaped back an additional few inches. Dionysus gave me his patented smirk. “I thought you might like some company. I always sleep better with a teddy leopard.” “Very kind.” I tried my best to kill him with eye daggers. “But I prefer to sleep alone.” “As you wish. Seymour, back to the Big House.” Dionysus snapped his fingers and the leopard head vanished from Will’s hands. “Well, then…

The gods of men's worship were not things in themselves, but the creations of the created - the forms under which man represented to himself his ineffable Creator and Sustainer, the form changing as man's power of understanding increased. The forms did not matter; peppery old Jehovah with his long white beard and golden crown could go into the discard without anybody being damned; and, equally, those who liked him could go on worshipping him still, without being damned either. You could help yourself to the kind of god that suited you, so long as you realized that he was only a dramatization. The real thing was behind all the gods, and no man had ever dramatized it.

Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised a certain royal preeminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu placing the title “Lord of the White Elephants” above all their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger; and the great Austrian Empire, Caesarian, heir to overlording Rome, having for the imperial color the same imperial hue; and though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; and though, besides, all this, whiteness has been even made significant of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and though in other mortal sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of many touching, noble things— the innocence of brides, the benignity of age; though among the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt of wampum was the deepest pledge of honor; though in many climes, whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge, and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by milk-white steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of the most august religions it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness and power; by the Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame being held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself being made incarnate in a snow-white bull; and though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was by far the holiest festival of their theology, that spotless, faithful creature being held the purest envoy they could send to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of their own fidelity; and though directly from the Latin word for white, all Christian priests derive the name of one part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of our Lord; though in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the redeemed, and the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the great-white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet for all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.

One article on reproductive strategies was titled "Sneaky Fuckers." Kya laughed. As is well known, the article began, in nature, usually the males with the most prominent secondary sexual characteristics, such as the biggest antlers, deepest voices, broadest chests, and superior knowledge secure the best territories because they have fended off weaker males. The females choose to mate with these imposing alphas and are thereby inseminated with the best DNA around, which is passed on to the female's offspring- one of the most powerful phenomena in the adaptation and continuance of life. Plus, the females get the best territory for their young. However, some stunted males, not strong, adorned, or smart enough to hold good territories, possess bags of tricks to fool the females. They parade their smaller forms around in pumped-up postures or shout frequently- even if in shrill voices. By relying on pretense and false signals, they manage to grab a copulation here or there. Pint-sized male bullfrogs, the author wrote, hunker down in the grass and hide near an alpha male who is croaking with great gusto to call in mates. When several females are attracted to his strong vocals at the same time, and the alpha is busy copulating with one, the weaker male leaps in and mates one of the others. The imposter males were referred to as "sneaky fuckers." Kya remembered, those many years ago, Ma warning her older sisters about young men who overrevved their rusted-out pickups or drove jalopies around with radios blaring. "Unworthy boys make a lot of noise," Ma had said. She read a consolation for females. Nature is audacious enough to ensure that the males who send out dishonest signals or go from one female to the next almost always end up alone. Another article delved into the wild rivalries between sperm. Across most life-forms, males compete to inseminate females. Male lions occasionally fight to the death; rival bull elephants lock tusks and demolish the ground beneath their feet as they tear at each other's flesh. Though very ritualized, the conflicts can still end in mutilations. To avoid such injuries, inseminators of some species compete in less violent, more creative methods. Insects, the most imaginative. The penis of the male damselfly is equipped with a small scoop, which removes sperm ejected by a previous opponent before he supplies his own. Kya dropped the journal on her lap, her mind drifting with the clouds. Some female insects eat their mates, overstressed mammal mothers abandon their young, many males design risky or shifty ways to outsperm their competitors. Nothing seemed too indecorous as long as the tick and the tock of life carried on. She knew this was not a dark side to Nature, just inventive ways to endure against all odds. Surely for humans there was more.

A moment of truth here: If you continue to eat processed foods full of sugar and fat, you won’t lose weight. But you knew that. And that’s not why you’re here. You’re here to discover how good you’ll feel on a diet of vegetarian proteins, whole grains, and all the glorious and diverse vegetables and fruits of the earth. If you look around, you won’t see many fat vegans. Vegans tend to be slim and strong, gorgeous and glowing, and that’s because a healthy, plant-based diet creates vitality and vigor— and weight loss simply happens as a result of not eating fatty animal protein. And lest you think a plant-based diet is for weaklings, consider bulls, elephants, gorillas, orangutans, and stallions. These plant eaters are pure lean and powerful muscle.

To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown back, throat to the stars, ‘more like deer than human being.’ To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.

...because a man on the scent of the White House is rarely rational. He is more like a beast in heat: a bull elk in the rut, crashing blindly through the timber in a fever for something to fuck. Anything! A cow, a calf, a mare--any flesh and blood beast with a hole in it.The bull elk is a very crafty animal for about fifty weeks of the year; his senses are so sharp that only an artful stalker can get within a thousand yards of him...butwhen the rut comes on, in the autumn, any geek with the sense to blow an elk-whistle can lure a bull elk right up to his car in ten minutes if he can drive within hearing range. The dumb bastards lose all control of themselves when the rut comes on. Their eyes glaze over, their ears pack up with hot wax, and their loins get heavy with blood. Anything that sounds like a cow elk in heat will fuse the central nervous systems of every bull on the mountain. They will race through the timbers like huge cannonballs, trampling small trees and scraping off bloody chunks of their own hair on the unyielding bark of the big ones. They behave like sharks in a feeding frenzy, attacking each other with all the demented violence of human drug dealers gone mad on their own wares. A career politician finally smelling the White House is not Much different from a bull elk in the rut. He will stop at nothing, trashing anything that gets in his way; and anything he can't handle personally, he will hire out--or, failing that, make a deal. It is a difficult syndrome for most people to understand, because so few of us ever come close to the kind of Ultimate Power and Achievement that the White House represents to a career politician.

the following prayer by Dr. Jane Goodall, who was named a UN Messenger of Peace for her continued world efforts, she seems to touch on most aspects of world conflict as we know them today and as they pertain to all living things. Prayer for World Peace We pray to the great Spiritual Power in which we live and move and have our being. We pray that we may at all times keep our minds open to new ideas and shun dogma; that we may grow in our understanding of the nature of all living beings and our connectedness with the natural world; that we may become ever more filled with generosity of spirit and true compassion and love for all life; that we may strive to heal the hurts that we have inflicted on nature and control our greed for material things, knowing that our actions are harming our natural world and the future of our children; that we may value each and every human being for who he is, for who she is, reaching to the spirit that is within,knowing the power of each individual to change the world. We pray for social justice, for the alleviation of the crippling poverty that condemns millions of people around the world to lives of misery—hungry, sick, and utterly without hope. We pray for the children who are starving,who are condemned to homelessness, slave labor, and prostitution, and especially for those forced to fight, to kill and torture even members of their own family. We pray for the victims of violence and war, for those wounded in body and for those wounded in mind. We pray for the multitudes of refugees, forced from their homes to alien places through war or through the utter destruction of their environment. We pray for suffering animals everywhere, for an end to the pain caused by scientific experimentation, intensive farming, fur farming, shooting, trapping, training for entertainment, abusive pet owners, and all other forms of exploitation such as overloading and overworking pack animals, bull fighting, badger baiting, dog and cock fighting and so many more. We pray for an end to cruelty, whether to humans or other animals, for an end to bullying, and torture in all its forms. We pray that we may learn the peace that comes with forgiving and the strength we gain in loving; that we may learn to take nothing for granted in this life; that we may learn to see and understand with our hearts; that we may learn to rejoice in our being. We pray for these things with humility; We pray because of the hope that is within us, and because of a faith in the ultimate triumph of the human spirit; We pray because of our love for Creation, and because of our trust in God. We pray, above all, for peace throughout the world. I love this beautiful and magnanimous prayer. Each request is spelled out clearly and specifically, and it asks that love, peace, and kindness be shown to all of earth’s creatures, not just its human occupants.

How To Make A Human Take the cat out of the sphinx and what is left? Riddle Me That. Take the horse from the centaur and you take away the sleek grace, the strength of harnessed power. What is left can still run across fields, after a fashion, but is easily winded; what is left will therefore erect buildings to divide the open plains so he no longer must face the wide expanse where once his equine legs raced the winds and, sometimes, won. Take the bull from the Minotaur but what is left will still assemble a herd for the sake of ruling over it. What is left will kill for sport, in an arena thronged with spectators shouting "Ole" at each deadly thrust. Take the fish from the Merman: What is left can still swim, if only with lots of splashing; gone is the sleek sliding through the waves, alert to the subtle changes in the current. What is left will build ships so he can cross the oceans without getting his feet wet, what is left won't care if his boats pollute the seas he can no longer breathe so long as their passage can keep him from sinking. Take the goat from the satyr but what is left will dance out of reach before you have the chance to get that Dionysian streak of myschief, the love of music and wine, the rutting parts that like to party all the day through. What is left will still be stubborn and refuse to give way; what is left will lock horns and butt heads with anyone who challenges him. Take the bird from the harpy, but the memory of flying, a constant yearning ache for skies so tantalizingly distant, will still remain, as will the established pecking orders, the bitter squabbling over food and territory, and the magpie eye that lusts for shining objects. What is left will cut down the whole forest to feather his sprawling urban nest. At the end of these operations, tell me: what is left? The answer: Man, a creature divorced from nature, who's forgotten where he came from.

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown back, throat to the stars, ‘more like deer than human being.’ To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown I back, throat to the stars, “more like deer than human being.” To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.

Five Hundred Years of Solitude The rise of modern science and industry brought about the next revolution in human–animal relations. During the Agricultural Revolution humankind silenced animals and plants, and turned the animist grand opera into a dialogue between man and gods. During the Scientific Revolution humankind silenced the gods too. The world was now a one-man show. Humankind stood alone on an empty stage, talking to itself, negotiating with no one and acquiring enormous powers without any obligations. Having deciphered the mute laws of physics, chemistry and biology, humankind now does with them as it pleases. When an archaic hunter went out to the savannah, he asked the help of the wild bull, and the bull demanded something of the hunter. When an ancient farmer wanted his cows to produce lots of milk, he asked some great heavenly god for help, and the god stipulated his conditions. When the white-coated staff in Nestlé’s Research and Development department want to increase dairy production, they study genetics – and the genes don’t ask for anything in return.

I looked. The Palace stood on an easy slope; yet it had no more walls than a common dwelling-house might have, to keep thieves out and slaves in. The roofs were even without battlements, crowned only by their insolent horns, a pair facing each way. Such was the power of Minos. His walls were on the waters, which his ships commanded. I stared in silence, shutting my face on my despair. I felt like a child come among warriors with a wooden spear. Also I felt up-country, rude and ignorant, which hurts a young man more. “All very fine,” I said. “But if war came to Crete, they could not hold it a day.” Lukos had heard me. But here on his home ground he was too easy for anger. He said with his careless smile, “The House of the Ax has stood here a thousand years, and never fell yet except when the Earth Bull shook it. It was old when you Hellenes were herdsmen still on the northern grasslands. I see you doubt me, but that is natural. We have learned from the Egyptians to reckon years and ages. You, I think, have a saying, ‘Time out of mind.’” He strolled on, before I had an answer.

The Bears would play in Wrigley Field from 1921 to 1970. In their first home game, they beat the Rochester Jeffersons. Wrigley Field was particularly ill suited for football. The end zones, which are normally ten yards deep, were foreshortened by a dugout on one side, an outfield wall on the other. A wide receiver might make a catch, then fall into the dugout. On one occasion, Bronko Nagurski, the great power runner of the 1930s, took the ball, put his head down, bulled through every defender—and straight into a brick wall. He got up slowly. When he made it to the bench, Halas was concerned: “You okay, Bronk?” Nagurski said he was fine, but added, “That last guy gave me a pretty good lick, coach.” In the early years, most NFL teams played in baseball stadiums, and many took the name of the host team. Hence the Pittsburgh Pirates, who played in Forbes Field, and the New York Football Giants, who played in the Polo Grounds. Halas considered naming his team the Cubs, but in the end, believing that football players were much tougher than baseball players, he called them the Bears.

The sky is a dark bowl, the stars die and fall. The celestial bows quiver, the bones of the earthgods shake and planets come to a halt when they sight the king in all his power, the god who feeds on his father and eats his mother. The king is such a tower of wisdom even his mother can't discern his name. His glory is in the sky, his strength lies in the horizon like that of his father the sungod Atum who conceived him. Atum conceived the king, but the dead king has greater dominion. His vital spirits surround him, his qualities lie below his feet, he is cloaked in gods and cobras coil on his forehead. His guiding snakes decorate his brow and peer into souls, ready to spit fire against his enemies. The king's head is on his torso. He is the bull of the sky who charges and vanquishes all. He lives on the stuff of the gods, he feeds on their limbs and entrails, even when they have bloated their bodies with magic at Nesisi, the island of fire. He cooks the leftover gods into a bone soup. Their souls belong to him and their shadows as well. In his pyramid among those who live on the earth of Egypt, the dead king ascends and appears forever and forever.

If any of them give you trouble,” Ethan said to West as the three of them walked out to the front drive where the family carriage awaited, “use this.” He handed him the Bull Dog pocket revolver. “It’s a double-action model. You only need to cock the hammer once, and it will fire a round with every pull of the trigger.” West regarded the gun dubiously. “If any of those louts give me trouble, I have a shed full of farming implements to use on them. You’ll need this if you’re planning to confront Jenkyn.” “We’ll be armed with something far more powerful than bullets,” Garrett told him. West looked at Ethan with mock alarm. “You’re taking the spoon?” Reluctant amusement tugged at the corner of Ethan’s lips. “No. Dr. Gibson means we’ll be armed with words.” “Words,” West repeated doubtfully, pocketing the revolver. “I’ve always been skeptical when people say ‘The pen is mightier than the sword.’ It’s only true if the pen is glued to the handle of a German steel cutlass.” “The words will be printed in a newspaper,” Garrett said. “We’re going to the Times office.” “Oh. That’s fine, then. The Times is mightier than the pen, the sword, and Her Majesty’s entire Royal Army.

we have much to learn from the struggles in Alabama and Mississippi in the early 1960s. In the spring of 1963 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Dr. King launched a “fill the jails” campaign to desegregate downtown department stores and schools in Birmingham. But few local blacks were coming forward. Black adults were afraid of losing their jobs, local black preachers were reluctant to accept the leadership of an “Outsider,” and city police commissioner Bull Connor had everyone intimidated. Facing a major defeat, King was persuaded by his aide, James Bevel, to allow any child old enough to belong to a church to march. So on D-day, May 2, before the eyes of the whole nation, thousands of schoolchildren, many of them first graders, joined the movement and were beaten, fire-hosed, attacked by police dogs, and herded off to jail in paddy wagons and school buses. The result was what has been called the “Children’s Miracle.” Inspired and shamed into action, thousands of adults rushed to join the movement. All over the country rallies were called to express outrage against Bull Connor’s brutality. Locally, the power structure was forced to desegregate lunch counters and dressing rooms in downtown stores, hire blacks to work downtown, and begin desegregating the schools. Nationally, the Kennedy administration, which had been trying not to alienate white Dixiecrat voters, was forced to begin drafting civil rights legislation as the only way to forestall more Birminghams. The next year as part of Mississippi Freedom Summer, activists created Freedom Schools because the existing school system (like ours today) had been organized to produce subjects, not citizens. People in the community, both children and adults, needed to be empowered to exercise their civil and voting rights. A mental revolution was needed. To bring it about, reading, writing, and speaking skills were taught through discussions of black history, the power structure, and building a movement. Everyone took this revolutionary civics course, then chose from more academic subjects such as algebra and chemistry. All over Mississippi, in church basements and parish halls, on shady lawns and in abandoned buildings, volunteer teachers empowered thousands of children and adults through this community curriculum. The Freedom Schools of 1964 demonstrated that when Education involves young people in making community changes that matter to them, when it gives meaning to their lives in the present instead of preparing them only to make a living in the future, young people begin to believe in themselves and to dream of the future.

He was known by three names. The official records have the first one: Marcos Maria Ribeira. And his official data. Born 1929. Died 1970. Worked in the steel foundry. Perfect safety record. Never arrested. A wife, six children. A model citizen, because he never did anything bad enough to go on the public record. The second name he had was Marcao. Big Marcos. Because he was a giant of a man. Reached his adult size early in his life. How old was he when he reached two meters? Eleven? Definitely by the time he was twelve. His size and strength made him valuable in the foundry,where the lots of steel are so small that much of the work is controlled by hand and strength matters. People's lives depended on Marcao's strength. His third name was Cao. Dog. That was the name you used for him when you heard his wife, Novinha, had another black eye, walked with a limp, had stitches in her lip. He was an animal to do that to her. Not that any of you liked Novinha. Not that cold woman who never gave any of you good morning. But she was smaller than he was, and she was the mother of his children, and when he beat her, he deserved the name of Cao. Tell me, is this the man you knew? Spent more hours in the bars than anyone but never made any friends there, never the camaraderie of alcohol for him. You couldn't even tell how much he had been drinking. He was surly and short-tempered before he had a drink and he was surly and short-tempered right before he passed out-nobody could tell the difference. You never heard of him having a friend, and none of you was ever glad to see him come into a room. That's the man you knew, most of you. Cao. Hardly a man at all. A few men, the men from the foundry in Bairro das Fabricados, knew him as a strong arm as they could trust. They knew he never said he could do more than he could do and he always did what he said he would do. You could count on him. So, within the walls of the foundry, he had their respect. But when you walked out of the door, you treated him like everybody else-ignored him, thought little of him. Some of you also know something else that you never talk about much. You know you gave him the name Cao long before he earned it. You were ten, eleven, twelve years old. Little boys. He grew so tall. It made you ashamed to be near him. And afraid, because he made you feel helpless. So you handled him the way human beings always handle things that are bigger than they are. You banded together. Like hunters trying to bring down a mastodon. Like bullfighters trying to weaken a giant bull to prepare it for the kill. Pokes, taunts, teases. Keep him turning around. He can't guess where the next blow was coming from. Prick him with barbs that stay under his skin. Weaken him with pain. Madden him. Because big as he is, you can make him do things. You can make him yell. You can make him run. You can make him cry. See? He's weaker than you after all. There's no blame in this. You were children then, and children are cruel without knowing better. You wouldn't do that now. But now that I've reminded you, you can clearly see an answer. You called him a dog, so he became one. For the rest of his life, hurting helpless people. Beating his wife. Speaking so cruelly and abusively to his son, Miro, that it drove the boy out of his house. He was acting the way you treated him, becoming what you told him he was. But the easy answer isn't true. Your torments didn't make him violent - they made him sullen. And when you grew out of tormenting him, he grew out of hating you. He wasn't one to bear a grudge. His anger cooled and turned into suspicion. He knew you despised him; he learned to live without you. In peace. So how did he become the cruel man you knew him to be? Think a moment. Who was it that tasted his cruelty? His wife. His children. Some people beat their wife and children because they lust for power, but are too weak or stupid to win power in the world.

When inanimate things ceased to commune with me like natural men, other dreams came to live with me. Animals took on lives and characteristics which nobody knew anything about except myself. Little things that people did or said grew into fantastic stories. There was a man who turned into an alligator for my amusement. All he did was live in a one-room house by himself down near Lake Belle. I did the rest myself. He came into the village one evening near dusk and stopped at the store. Somebody teased him about living out there by himself, and said that if he did not hurry up and get married, he was liable to go wild. I saw him tending his little garden all day, and otherwise just being a natural man. But I made an image of him for after dark that was different. In my imagination, his work-a-day hands and feet became the reptilian claws of an alligator. A tough, knotty hide crept over him, and his mouth became a huge snout with prong-toothed, powerful jaws. In the dark of the night, when the alligators began their nightly mysteries behind the cloaking curtain of cypress trees that all but hid Lake Belle, I could see him crawling from his door, turning his ugly head from left to right to see who was looking, then gliding down into the dark waters to become a ’gator among ’gators. He would mingle his bellow with other bull ’gator bellows and be strong and terrible. He was the king of ’gators and the others minded him. When I heard the thunder of bull ’gator voices from the lake on dark nights, I used to whisper to myself, “That’s Mr. Pendir! Just listen at him!

The Greeks were different. They had a passion for order and symmetry, much like the Romans, but they knew how foolish it was to deny the unseen world, the old gods. Emotion, darkness, barbarism.” He looked at the ceiling for a moment, his face almost troubled. “Do you remember what we were speaking of earlier, of how bloody, terrible things are sometimes the most beautiful?” he said. “It’s a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown back, throat to the stars, ‘more like deer than human being.’ To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.” We were all leaning forward, motionless. My mouth had fallen open; I was aware of every breath I took. “And that, to me, is the terrible seduction of Dionysiac ritual. Hard for us to imagine. That fire of pure being.

Mithras is a Persian light and warrior god adopted by the Roman army as their tutelary deity.  His name means “Friend”.  Mithras was the emissary of Ahura Mazda, the supreme power of good, who battled Ahriman, the supreme evil.  Mithras slew the divine bull to release its life-giving blood into the earth, and creatures that served Ahriman like scorpions and serpents tried to stop this happening. Mithras was often depicted with a pointed cap, and a number of reliefs show him in the act of slaying the bull.  As a solar god he was directly equated to Sol Invictus by the Romans, as can be seen from inscriptions.[469]  Twelve inscriptions to him have been found to date.[470] There were seven grades in the Mithraic mysteries, which were only open to free men.  The Mithraic cult was highly tolerant of other deities, as is evidences by depictions of other gods in the shrines.  Also as the soldier god, priesthoods were known to bring their statues to the Mithraea (temples) for protection when danger threatened. The Mithraea were usually small, and have preserved their mysteries to an extent as little writing remains from them.  A relief from Housesteads (Northumberland) shows Mithras bearing a sword and spear rising from an egg, surrounded by a hoop depicting the signs of the zodiac.  A silver amulet found at St Albans similarly depicts Mithras rising from a pile of stones.  More commonly images on altars showed him sacrificing a bull, such as at Rudchester (Northumberland), Carrawburgh (Northumberland) and the London Mithraeum.  There are now five known Mithraea in Britain, those at Caernarvon, Carrawburgh, Housesteads, London and Rudchester.  Of these all were purely military apart from the London Mithraea. 

Everything is estimated by the standard of its own good. The vine is valued for its productiveness and the flavour of its wine, the stag for his speed. We ask, with regard to beasts of burden, how sturdy of back they are; for their only use is to bear burdens. If a dog is to find the trail of a wild beast, keenness of scent is of first importance; if to catch his quarry, swiftness of foot; if to attack and harry it, courage. In each thing that quality should be best for which the thing is brought into being and by which it is judged. And what quality is best in man? It is reason; by virtue of reason he surpasses the animals, and is surpassed only by the gods. Perfect reason is therefore the good peculiar to man; all other qualities he shares in some degree with animals and plants. Man is strong; so is the lion. Man is comely; so is the peacock. Man is swift; so is the horse. I do not say that man is surpassed in all these qualities. I am not seeking to find that which is greatest in him, but that which is peculiarly his own. Man has body; so also have trees. Man has the power to act and to move at will; so have beasts and worms. Man has a voice; but how much louder is the voice of the dog, how much shriller that of the eagle, how much deeper that of the bull, how much sweeter and more melodious that of the nightingale! What then is peculiar to man? Reason. When this is right and has reached perfection, man's felicity is complete. Hence, if everything is praiseworthy and has arrived at the end intended by its nature, when it has brought its peculiar good to perfection, and if man's peculiar good is reason; then, if a man has brought his reason to perfection, he is praiseworthy and has readied the end suited to his nature. This perfect reason is called virtue, and is likewise that which is honourable.

It would be nice to help them avoid the typical discouragements. I’d tell them to hit pause, think long and hard about how they want to spend their time, and with whom they want to spend it for the next forty years. I’d tell men and women in their midtwenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling. Even if you don’t know what that means, seek it. If you’re following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you’ve ever felt. I’d like to warn the best of them, the iconoclasts, the innovators, the rebels, that they will always have a bull’s-eye on their backs. The better they get, the bigger the bull’s-eye. It’s not one man’s opinion; it’s a law of nature. I’d like to remind them that America isn’t the entrepreneurial Shangri-La people think. Free enterprise always irritates the kinds of trolls who live to block, to thwart, to say no, sorry, no. And it’s always been this way. Entrepreneurs have always been outgunned, outnumbered. They’ve always fought uphill, and the hill has never been steeper. America is becoming less entrepreneurial, not more. A Harvard Business School study recently ranked all the countries of the world in terms of their entrepreneurial spirit. America ranked behind Peru. And those who urge entrepreneurs to never give up? Charlatans. Sometimes you have to give up. Sometimes knowing when to give up, when to try something else, is genius. Giving up doesn’t mean stopping. Don’t ever stop. Luck plays a big role. Yes, I’d like to publicly acknowledge the power of luck. Athletes get lucky, poets get lucky, businesses get lucky. Hard work is critical, a good team is essential, brains and determination are invaluable, but luck may decide the outcome. Some people might not call it luck. They might call it Tao, or Logos, or Jñāna, or Dharma. Or Spirit. Or God. Put it this way. The harder you work, the better your Tao. And since no one has ever adequately defined Tao, I now try to go regularly to mass. I would tell them: Have faith in yourself, but also have faith in faith. Not faith as others define it. Faith as you define it. Faith as faith defines itself in your heart.

write animal stories. This one was called Dialogues Between a Cow and a Filly; a meditation on ethics, you might say; it had been inspired by a short business trip to Brittany. Here’s a key passage from it: ‘Let us first consider the Breton cow: all year round she thinks of nothing but grazing, her glossy muzzle ascends and descends with impressive regularity, and no shudder of anguish comes to trouble the wistful gaze of her light-brown eyes. All that is as it ought to be, and even appears to indicate a profound existential oneness, a decidedly enviable identity between her being-in-the-world and her being-in-itself. Alas, in this instance the philosopher is found wanting, and his conclusions, while based on a correct and profound intuition, will be rendered invalid if he has not previously taken the trouble of gathering documentary evidence from the naturalist. In fact the Breton cow’s nature is duplicitous. At certain times of the year (precisely determined by the inexorable functioning of genetic programming) an astonishing revolution takes place in her being. Her mooing becomes more strident, prolonged, its very harmonic texture modified to the point of recalling at times, and astonishingly so, certain groans which escape the sons of men. Her movements become more rapid, more nervous, from time to time she breaks into a trot. It is not simply her muzzle, though it seems, in its glossy regularity, conceived for reflecting the abiding presence of a mineral passivity, which contracts and twitches under the painful effect of an assuredly powerful desire. ‘The key to the riddle is extremely simple, and it is that what the Breton cow desires (thus demonstrating, and she must be given credit here, her life’s one desire) is, as the breeders say in their cynical parlance, “to get stuffed”. And stuff her they do, more or less directly; the artificial insemination syringe can in effect, whatever the cost in certain emotional complications, take the place of the bull’s penis in performing this function. In both cases the cow calms down and returns to her original state of earnest meditation, except that a few months later she will give birth to an adorable little calf. Which, let it be said in passing, means profit for the breeder.’ * The breeder, of course, symbolized God. Moved by an irrational sympathy for the filly, he promised her, starting from the next chapter, the everlasting delight of numerous stallions, while the cow, guilty of the sin of pride, was to be gradually condemned to the dismal pleasures of artificial fertilization. The pathetic mooing of the ruminant would prove incapable of swaying the judgment of the Great Architect. A delegation of sheep, formed in solidarity, had no better luck. The God presented in this short story was not, one observes, a merciful God.

[the virgin birth account] occurs everywhere. When the Herod figure ( the extreme figure of misgovernment) has brought man to the nadir of spirit, the occult forces of the cycle begin to move. In an inconspicuous village, Mary is born who will maintain herself undefiled by fashionable errors of her generation. Her womb, remaining fallw as the primordial abyss, summons itself by its very readiness the original power that fertilzed the void. Mary's virgin birth story is recounted everywhere. and with such striking unity of the main contours, that early christian missionaries had to think the devil must be creating mockeries of Mary's birth wherever they testified. One missionary reports that after work was begun among Tunja and Sogamozzo South American Indians, "the demon began giving contrary doctrines. The demon sought to discredit Mary's account, declaring it had not yet come to pass; but presently, the sun would bring it to pass by taking flesh in the womb of a virgin in a small village, causing her to conceive by rays of the sun while she yet remained virgin." Hindu mythology tells of the maiden parvati who retreated to the high hills to practice austerities. Taraka had usurped mastery of the world, a tyrant. Prophecy said only a son of the high god Shiva could overthrow him. Shive however was the pattern god of yoga-alone, aloof, meditating. It was impossible Shiva could be moved to beget. Parvati tried changing the world situation by metching Shiva in meditation. Aloof, indrawn in her soul meditating, she fasted naked beneath the blazing sun, even adding to the heat by building four great fires. One day a Brahmin youth arrived and asked why anyone so beautiful should be destroying herself with such torture. "My desire," she said "is Shiva, the Highest. He is the god of solitude and concentration. I therefore imitate his meditation to move him from his balance and bring him to me in love." Shiva, the youth announced, is a god of destruction, shiva is World Annhilator. Snakes are his garlands. The virgin said: He is beyond the mind of such as you. He is terrifying but the source of grace. snake garlands or jewel garlands he can assume or put off at will. Shiva is my love. The youth thereupon put away his disguise-he was Shiva. The Buddha descended from heaven to his mother's womb in the shape of a milk white elephant. The Aztec Coatlicue was approached by a god in the form of a ball of feathers. The chapters of Ovid's Metamorphoses swarm with nymphs beset by gods in sundry masquerades: jove as a bull, a swan, a shower of gold. Any leaf, any nut, or even the breath of a breeze, may be enough to fertilize the ready virgin womb. The procreating power is everywhere. And according to whim or destiny of the hour, either a hero savior or a world--annihilating demon may be conceived-one can never know.

This is the mighty and branching tree called mythology which ramifies round the whole world whose remote branches under separate skies bear like colored birds the costly idols of Asia and the half-baked fetishes of Africa and the fairy kings and princesses of the folk-tales of the forest and buried amid vines and olives the Lares of the Latins, and carried on the clouds of Olympus the buoyant supremacy of the gods of Greece. These are the myths and he who has no sympathy with myths has no sympathy with men. But he who has most Sympathy with myths will most fully realize that they are not and never were a religion, in the sense that Christianity or even Islam is a religion. They satisfy some of the needs satisfied by a religion; and notably the need for doing certain things at certain dates; the need of the twin ideas of festivity and formality. But though they provide a man with a calendar they do not provide him with a creed. A man did not stand up and say 'I believe in Jupiter and Juno and Neptune,' etc., as he stands up and says 'I believe in God the Father Almighty' and the rest of the Apostles' Creed.... Polytheism fades away at its fringes into fairy-tales or barbaric memories; it is not a thing like monotheism as held by serious monotheists. Again it does satisfy the need to cry out on some uplifted name, or some noble memory in moments that are themselves noble and uplifted; such as the birth of a child or the saving of a city. But the name was so used by many to whom it was only a name. Finally it did satisfy, or rather it partially satisfied, a thing very deep in humanity indeed; the idea of surrendering something as the portion of the unknown powers; of pouring out wine upon the ground, of throwing a ring into the sea; in a word, of sacrifice....A child pretending there is a goblin in a hollow tree will do a crude and material thing like leaving a piece of cake for him. A poet might do a more dignified and elegant thing, like bringing to the god fruits as well as flowers. But the degree of seriousness in both acts may be the same or it may vary in almost any degree. The crude fancy is no more a creed than the ideal fancy is a creed. Certainly the pagan does not disbelieve like an atheist, any more than he believes like a Christian. He feels the presence of powers about which he guesses and invents. St. Paul said that the Greeks had one altar to an unknown god. But in truth all their gods were unknown gods. And the real break in history did come when St. Paul declared to them whom they had worshipped. The substance of all such paganism may be summarized thus. It is an attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone; in its own field reason does not restrain it at all..... There is nothing in Paganism whereby one may check his own exaggerations.... The only objection to Natural Religion is that somehow it always becomes unnatural. A man loves Nature in the morning for her innocence and amiability, and at nightfall, if he is loving her still, it is for her darkness and her cruelty. He washes at dawn in clear water as did the Wise Man of the Stoics, yet, somehow at the dark end of the day, he is bathing in hot bull’s blood, as did Julian the Apostate.

When I thought of them together, I saw my sister perched behind Philbert on a bucking Brahma bull. She wasn’t grasping her boyfriend around the waist but kept her seat by clenching her knees. Somewhere in the picture Philbert was tossed to the ground, but Evelyn clung to the animal’s back like a wood tick, dug in, ignoring Philert’s waving arms and shouts for her to let go. The scene was so vivid in my mind I asked Evelyn once if she’d ever ridden a bull. “I thought about,” she admitted. “But I’m only crazy for a second.

The kingdom of poetry" This is like light. This is light, Useful as light, as charming And enchanting… …Poetry is certainly More interesting, more valuable, and certainly more charming Than Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, the Atlantic Ocean And other much admired natural phenomena. It is useful as light, and as beautiful It is preposterous Precisely, making it possible to say One cannot carry a mountain, but a poem can be carried all over. It is monstrous. Pleasantly, for poetry can say, seriously or in play: “Poetry is better than hope, “For poetry is patience of hope, and all hope’s vivid pictures, “Poetry is better than excitement, it is far more delightful, “Poetry is superior to success, and victory, it endures in serene blessedness “Long after the most fabulous feat like fireworks has mounted and fallen. “Poetry is far more powerful and far more enchanting animal “Than any wood, jungle, ark, circus or zoo possesses.” For poetry magnifies and heighten reality: Poetry says of reality that if it is magnificent, it is also stupid: For poetry is, in a way, omnipotent; For reality is various and rich, powerful and vivid, but it is not enough Because it is disorderly and stupid or only at times, and erratically, intelligent: For without poetry, reality is speechless or incoherent: It is inchoate, like the pomp and the bombast of thunder: Its peroration verge upon the ceaseless oration of the ocean: For reality glows and glory, without poetry, Fake, like the red operas of sunset The blue rivers and the windows of morning. The arts of poetry makes it possible to say: Pandemonium. For poetry is gay and exact. It says: “The sunset resembles a bull-fight. “A sleeping arm feels like soda, fizzing.” Poetry resurrect the past from the sepulchre, like Lazarus. It transforms a lion into a sphinx and a girl. It gives a girl the splendor of Latin. It transforms the water into wine at each marriage in Cana of Galilee. For it is true that poetry invented the unicorn, the centaur and the phoenix. Hence it is true that poetry is an everlasting Ark. An omnibus containing, bearing and begetting all the mind’s animals. Whence it is that poetry gave and gives tongue to forgiveness Therefore a history of poetry would be a history of joy, and a history of the mystery of love For poetry provides spontaneously, abundantly and freely The petnames and the diminutives which love requires and without which the mystery of love cannot be mastered. For poetry is like light, and it is light. It shines over all, like the blue sky, with the same blue justice. For poetry is the sunlight of consciousness: It is also the soil of the fruits of knowledge In the orchards of being: It shows us the pleasures of the city. It lights up the structures of reality. It is a cause of knowledge and laughter: It sharpens the whistles of the witty: It is like morning and the flutes of morning, chanting and enchanted. It is the birth and the rebirth of the first morning forever. Poetry is quick as tigers, clever as cats, vivid as oranges, Nevertheless, it is deathless: it is evergreen and in blossom; long after the Pharaohs and the Caesars have fallen, It shines and endures more than diamonds, It is because poetry is the actuality of possibility, it is The reality of the imagination, The throat of exaltation, The processions of possessions, The motion of meaning and The meaning of morning and The mastery of meaning. The praise of poetry is like the clarity of the heights of the mountains. The heights of poetry are like the exaltation of the mountains. It is the consummation of consciousness in the country of the morning!

The ancients called the saving word the Logos, an expression of divine reason.I04 So much unreason / was in man that he 42 /43 needed reason to be saved. If one waits long enough, one sees how the Gods all change into serpents and underworld dragons in the end. This is also the fate ofthe Logos: in the end it poisons us all. In time, we were all poisoned, but unknowingly we kept the One, the Powerful One, the eternal wanderer in us away from the poison. We spread poison and paralysis around us in that we want to educate all the world around us into reason. Some have their reason in thinking, others in feeling. Both are servantsofLogos,andinsecretbecomeworshipersoftheserpent.I05 You can subjugate yourself shackle yourself in irons, whip yourself bloody every day: you have crushed yourself but not overcome yourself Precisely through this you have helped the Powerful One, strengthened your paralysis, and promoted his blindness. He would like to see it in others, and inflict it on them, and would like to force the Logos on you and others, longingly and tyrannically with blind obstinacy and vacant stubborness. Give him a taste of Logos. He is afraid, and he already trembles from afar since he suspects that he has become outdated, and that a tiny droplet ofthe poison ofLogos will paralyze him. But because he is your beautiful, much loved brother, you will act slavishly toward him and you would like to spare him as you have spared none of your fellow men. You spared no merry and no powerful means to strike your fellow men with the poisoned arrow. Paralyzed game is an unworthy prey. The powerful huntsman, who wrestles the bull to the ground and tears the lion to pieces and strikes the army of Tiamat, is your bow's worthy target.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? 2 My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest.[b] 3 Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One; you are the one Israel praises.[c] 4 In you our ancestors put their trust; they trusted and you delivered them. 5 To you they cried out and were saved; in you they trusted and were not put to shame. 6 But I am a worm and not a man, scorned by everyone, despised by the people. 7 All who see me mock me; they hurl insults, shaking their heads. 8 “He trusts in the Lord,” they say, “let the Lord rescue him. Let him deliver him, since he delights in him.” 9 Yet you brought me out of the womb; you made me trust in you, even at my mother’s breast. 10 From birth I was cast on you; from my mother’s womb you have been my God. 11 Do not be far from me, for trouble is near and there is no one to help. 12 Many bulls surround me; strong bulls of Bashan encircle me. 13 Roaring lions that tear their prey open their mouths wide against me. 14 I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. My heart has turned to wax; it has melted within me. 15 My mouth[d] is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth; you lay me in the dust of death. 16 Dogs surround me, a pack of villains encircles me; they pierce[e] my hands and my feet. 17 All my bones are on display; people stare and gloat over me. 18 They divide my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment. 19 But you, Lord, do not be far from me. You are my strength; come quickly to help me. 20 Deliver me from the sword, my precious life from the power of the dogs. 21 Rescue me from the mouth of the lions; save me from the horns of the wild oxen. 22 I will declare your name to my people; in the assembly I will praise you. 23 You who fear the Lord, praise him! All you descendants of Jacob, honor him! Revere him, all you descendants of Israel! 24 For he has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help. 25 From you comes the theme of my praise in the great assembly; before those who fear you[f] I will fulfill my vows. 26 The poor will eat and be satisfied; those who seek the Lord will praise him— may your hearts live forever! 27 All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations will bow down before him, 28 for dominion belongs to the Lord and he rules over the nations. 29 All the rich of the earth will feast and worship; all who go down to the dust will kneel before him— those who cannot keep themselves alive. 30 Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about the Lord. 31 They will proclaim his righteousness, declaring to a people yet unborn: He has done it!

In keeping with the all-embracing nature of the Absolute from whence these forms descend, even lovely Tara has her grim demonic form and, conversely, the hideous, bull-headed Yamāntaka may appear as the gentle youth Manjushri; for it is thus that dualism is transcended. Were the adept to cling to beauty and flee from horror, dwell always upon joy and exclude terror from his mind, how would it be possible for him to attain to the non-dual realm? It takes not 'one' but 'both' to lead to 'neither'.

Bathed in perspiration he worked like a bull, turning over with a shovel the chalk and the clay which was to become cement. This brute strength of his came not through his intelligence but from the profundities of his strong body; it did not explode within him but flowed out of him in great waves through the thunder of the earth, across the stones and the rails, from this enormous ant-like crowd who with shouting and moaning were rising from the depths with spades and hammers, emerged from smoke-stacks and the factory buildings , from the breaches quarried from the rocks, from the smoky depths up toward the obelisks supporting the power-cables.

This lingering hint of savagery isn’t necessarily a strike against fire cooking, however. To the contrary, some believe a bloody slab of beefsteak augments the power of the eater. “Whoever partakes of it,” Roland Barthes wrote in Mythologies, “assimilates a bull-like strength.” By comparison, the braise or stew—and particularly the braise or stew of meat that’s been cut into geometric cubes and rendered tender by long hours in the pot—represents a deeper sublimation, or forgetting, of the brutal reality of this particular transaction among species. Certainly

The buffalo played a large part in the ceremonies and mythology of the Plains Indians. Many myths and folk tales about the buffalo, which delighted both young and old, were told and retold about the campfires. The first buffalo spirit was supposed to have been born in a northern cave and was said to have been pure white. It had great powers in healing, especially wounds. A white buffalo in a herd was supposed to be the reappearance of this buffalo spirit on earth. The hide taken from such an animal was sacred and had special ceremonial purposes. Most of the Plains tribes had buffalo societies. The members of these groups took part in special buffalo ceremonies and dances. These men had personal names suggesting movements, actions, or postures of the animal, such as “Standing Buffalo,” or “Sitting Bull.” The Buffalo Dance of the Plains tribes has many forms. Sometimes a herd of buffalo are represented. In this dance we have only one buffalo wearing a buffalo mask and a buffalo tail. Other dancers, eight or more in number, are hunters carrying feathered lances and shields.

By the pastime of killing the bull-demon named Ariṣṭāsura, Śrī Kṛṣṇa showed how He destroys this tendency. Our hearts will be purified of this anārtha by reading this pastime, and by loudly calling the all-powerful Lord Hari to drive out this anārtha.

BY 1876, THE YEAR THE Battle of the Little Bighorn was fought, the United States had become a nation of some forty million people, the vast majority of whom had never seen a fighting Indian—not, that is, unless they happened to glimpse one or another of the powerful Indian leaders whom the government periodically paraded through Washington or New York, usually Red Cloud, the powerful Sioux diplomat, who made a long-winded speech at Cooper Union in 1870. Or, it might be Spotted Tail, of the Brulé Sioux; or American Horse, or even, if they were lucky, Sitting Bull, who hated whites, the main exceptions being Annie Oakley, his “Little Sure Shot,” or Buffalo Bill Cody, who once described Sitting Bull as “peevish,” surely the understatement of the century. Sitting Bull often tried to marry Annie Oakley, who was married; he did not succeed.

Often, when a person is ill-treated or relegated to a demeaning position in society, they will respond by venting their frustrations at someone whose societal position is even lower than their own. It is not rational; their violent action in no way serves as a retaliation towards their own oppressors. Taking this concept one step further, we can see that by a torturing or dominating a powerful animal, such as a bull, or a tiger in a big-game hunt, the oppressors feel, unconsciously, that they have destroyed those who held power over them. By destroying or tormenting the weak, such as a rabbit or child, the oppressors become the master who has in turn tortured them, their own victims’ helpless writings echoing what they have so often felt. Temporarily replaced in the role of victim, these new reactive torturers ascend, momentarily in their own minds, to the social- or physical-power position of their own masters.

Yes, I've learned a few things along the way, though now that I'm neither man nor woman they can't do me any good. But here's one that may be of use to you: the power of a man is like a bull's charge, while the power of a woman moves aslant, like a serpent seeking its prey. Know the particular properties of your power. Unless you use it correctly, it won't get you what you want.

But things that take their power from explosions contained in iron, things operated by an intricacy of mechanical devices—I mislike them, I’m afraid, and I mishandle them more often than not. Some of humankind’s creations trouble me not at all. The ones that deal in directing the flow of electricity, for example.” He indicated the stereo with the turn of his hand. “But the internal combustion engine…” “But why would it bother you to drive one, and not to ride it?” “A reasonable question, though I’m not sure it has a reasonable answer. I’ve—a mental block? A moral objection?—to being put in control of such a machine. Being borne along one I can put up with.” “But cars make you uncomfortable.” He raked his hands through the black curls at his temples and smiled crookedly. “I am a creature of earth and air,” he said. “Enclosed in a car, I feel sickened and weak, and as panicky as an animal that chews through its own leg to escape a trap.” Eddi stared at him, surprised. She knew he’d been uncomfortable in the car, but she hadn’t dreamed he’d been uncomfortable as all that.

Then Willy himself came toward them through the fey army. He still wore his torn T shirt; his only concession to his place among the Seelie Court was the weapon he carried, the long white lance of the Sidhe horsemen. He saw the phouka on the back of the bike. “Good,” he said, with a quick nod. “Good,” the phouka sighed. “I am saved from certain death, and all he says is ‘Good.’ ” Willy tried not to smile and failed. “That and ‘Thank you.’ ” Eddi looked up, startled. He’d said it as if it were in a foreign language—or as if the words had power. And of course, they did.

He looked like a pouting pit bull who’d just been smacked with a rolled-up newspaper for shitting on the rug.

The mind is so powerful it can create something “outside” itself to be more powerful. That’s why it’s essential when doing the experiments to suspend judgment long enough to believe they’ll work. If you’re convinced they’re a family-size bucket of bull, you’ll collect data to support that viewpoint.

The Caesars by Stewart Stafford A dynasty regurgitated: The Emperor is mad, Bloodily decadent, Corrupt in the mind. Thank the Gods, No hubris eclipses Rome's, Let them have their toys; Lives to violate and end. Satire prickles august flesh; As Suetonius's profiles bite, Caligula's infamy was my youth, Now déjà vu relative Nero reigns. Bull and Aquila check Caesarean power: Senatorial consensus, martial muscle; Praetorian fealty is the Golden House, Whilst gory "games" slake Plebeian thirst. The ghost of the Old Republic, Laments its peacock successors; Barbaric beasts to wrestle with, Not sport for imperial whims. © Stewart Stafford, 2024. All rights reserved.

Rats exert roughly 150kg of biting force per square centimetre, which equates to around 2,000 p.s.i. For context, this is more powerful (relative to body weight) than a hyena, grizzly bear, bull shark or hippopotamus, and roughly 20 times the bite of a human.

where they’d drink Mountain Dew, play Nerf basketball, and talk for hours, riffing on the film’s numerous bull’s-eyes: masculinity, consumerism, their aggravating elders. “We were sitting around, thinking of all the things we wanted to stick a fork [into],” says Norton, who was especially irked by the recent revival of the Volkswagen Beetle, an icon of the flower-power era that was being targeted to younger drivers. “They just wanted to repackage an authentic baby boomer youth experience to us—they don’t even want us to have our own,” he says, laughing. “They just want us to buy sentiment for the sixties, with a little fucking molded flower that you sit in the dashboard. And they wonder why we’re cynical.

Flies represent demons in the Word, as do other animals. If you could see into the spirit world, many demons resemble animals. For example, the Bible said that when the seed of God’s Word is sown, the birds of the air come to eat it up (Matt. 13:4, 19). When Jesus said, “They will take up serpents” (Mark 16:18), He was referring to demonic powers. The Bible talks about treading on snakes and scorpions (Luke 10:19). David, in foretelling Jesus’s experience on the cross, said, “Strong bulls of Bashan have encircled me” (Ps. 22:12). Those spirits came at Him, goring Him like bulls. Devils will start—you guessed it—dropping like flies! These demon spirits attach themselves to our lives as generational curses, bondages, strongholds of the mind, lust, perversion, and addictions of every kind. The problem with most churches is that we just swat at the flies for a few days when they are right up in our faces. They go away for a while, but they keep coming back. It’s time to clean house! It’s time for a scriptural season of cleansing. Devils will start—you guessed it—dropping like flies, not only those in your life and your generation, but also the future generation of demons that would be passed down to your children. Solomon wrote, “Dead flies putrefy the perfumer’s ointment, and cause it to give off a foul odor” (Eccles. 10:1). Flies would get into the special anointing oil. They’d get stuck in it, die, and spoil the fragrance. Flies hinder the anointing in your life. Your worship gets polluted by flies of lust and perversion. We are supposed to walk in that pure anointing that pierces hearts, breaks yokes, delivers from bondages, and heals the sick. It’s time to get rid of the “flies” in your business, your marriage, your mind, your house.

The inner planets came out to the black with an understanding that they were soldiers sent to a foreign land. Bull remembered the feeling from when he’d first shipped out: the sense that his home was behind him. For the inners, the expansion out into the solar system had always had the military at its core. The Belters didn’t have that. They were the natives here. The forces that had brought their ancestors out to the Belt had roots in trade, commerce, and the overwhelming promise of freedom. The OPA had begun its life more like a labor union than a nation. The difference was subtle but powerful, and it showed in strange ways.

Never had the pleasure.” “Every fall the female elk releases this musk in her urine, see. Tells the bull elks she’s ready to mate. The bull elks can smell the musk, and they start fighting each other over the female. Charge at each other, butting heads, locking antlers, making this unbelievable racket, this loud bugling, until one of them gives up, and the winner gets the girl.” “I’ve seen bar fights like that.” “That’s how the females can tell which bulls are the fittest. They mate with the winners. Otherwise, the weak genes get passed on, and the elks are gonna die out. This is how it works in nature.

Shane Douglas defeated Pit Bull Two in a match so dull, it was soul-destroying.

Famed basketball coach Phil Jackson, a meditator himself, arranged to have his players—first the Chicago Bulls, and then the L.A. Lakers—learn meditation as a way to improve their focus and teamwork. Jackson finds that mindfulness assists players in paying attention to what’s happening on the court moment by moment. Such precise training in attention has paid off during tense playoffs; Jackson has led more teams to championships than any coach in NBA history. Meditation

Then it came to him. This was not the diversion, the battle of Gibeah was the diversion. The real goal was to capture Mikael himself, the prince of Israel. Well, he thought, they picked the wrong archangel to mess with. I have a chosen nation to protect. He pulled out his horn to call for help, but Ba’alzebul’s mace smashed it out of his hands. Dagon assaulted him with a barrage of sword slashes and strikes. Mikael kept him at bay, but almost got stung by Asherah’s javelin from the other side. He dodged and kept moving. His Karabu training was his only hope. It was the heavenly battle technique of Yahweh’s archangels developed to protect the Garden of Eden in primordial days. They had taught the human giant killers Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, and Caleb the Way of Karabu, but now he would need to call upon his training to survive this ordeal. He flipped, spun, and danced around the four attacking gods and their weapons. It frustrated the malevolent beings, which was to Mikael’s advantage. But archangels were still created beings. He began to grow tired. They were wearing him down. Dagon’s sword grazed Mikael’s arm, cutting through his tunic. He was not going to be able to keep it up. He would have to do something drastic. Ba’alzebul moved in on Mikael. The biggest, meanest, mightiest of the gods had been waiting for his opportune moment when Mikael was just weary enough, just worn enough, to be incapable of expecting the unexpected. Ba’alzebul took the lead and pounded Mikael’s sword with his mace and backed him up against the ledge. Mikael looked down to the chasm floor. Saul and his forces made their way through the chasm below after slaughtering the priests of Molech. It wasn’t a fair fight. And neither was this fight. But Saul was safe. He had made it through and went north toward Gibeah. But the gods were not here for Saul. They were here for Mikael. Ba’alzebul suddenly threw down his mace and rushed Mikael like a bull goring its prey. Mikael didn’t register why, until Ba’alzebul hit him. The two of them launched off into space, plummeting toward the chasm floor two hundred feet below. Angels and gods could not die. But they were not mere spirits. They were enfleshed spirits. While it was unique flesh that would heal miraculously, it was still flesh that could be hurt — as Ba’alzebul knew all too well from his own painful experience in the molten earth. They hit the ground with a powerful thud and sank several feet into the dirt. Every bone in Mikael’s body was broken in the fall. He was paralyzed in excruciating pain. Ba’alzebul had been on top of Mikael, so while he too would be somewhat incapacitated, it would not be as bad for him, having used Mikael’s body as a cushion in the fall. As Mikael slipped into a state of delirious pain, he knew that their goal had been to capture him this way. To ambush him and therefore make both Saul and David more vulnerable to human attack. But what did they plan for Mikael? He could not begin to imagine.

She leaned up and kissed me. Her mouth tasted like lipstick, blood, and gunpowder. It was also the softest thing that I’d ever felt, and in spite of the pain I felt my mouth opening so that my tongue could flick out to taste hers. The heat came off her face like a furnace. Our tongues moved around each other’s, swirling and dueling. Finally she broke the kiss. It was like surfacing after a long, intoxicating dive through a sea of Red Bull. “What was that for?”I managed. “I am beginning to like you, Perry.”I shivered out a breath. “You’ve got a kooky way of showing it.”“Have you ever felt more alive?”“Once or twice, yes.”Gobi was still looking at me, lips half parted, eyes searching the depths of whatever was inside me. She looked lost and young and totally uncontrolled, a reflection of how I felt now, in a place that I’d never been before, somewhere that nobody would ever think to look for me. I had the sudden, ridiculous, absolutely compelling vision of chucking everything—school, music, my family and friends—and running away with her, away from the rest of the world. I figured we’d last about a week. “Are you all right?”she asked. “My head hurts.”“Is the lipstick,”she smiled. “There is a mind-control drug in it. You are now completely under my power ... By dawn you will be mine.”“Just promise me you won’t hurt my family.”She went serious. “Families get hurt, Perry. There are no guarantees this side of the grave.”“You’re a real bitch, you know that?”“I never denied it.”I swung at her. She caught my fist. “Too slow.”I let myself tilt forward just enough for our foreheads to touch, then reached for her neck and put my fingers on the scar, tracing the thin curve of raised tissue. “What happened there?”Her gaze shifted away. “A painful memory.”“Like what, getting your throat cut and coming back from the grave?”Gobi straightened up. The mood didn’t just break—it shattered into a million sharp and spiky pieces that lay all over the sidewalk like dragon’s teeth. Then she shuddered and fell still. “Gobi?”She leaned forward again, and I caught her. For a moment we just stood there together in front of the dive bar, and when I felt her legs starting to give way, I lowered her back down the front steps.