Pantheon Quotes

Zeus needed someone to blame, so of course he’d picked the handsomest, most talented, most popular god in the pantheon: me.

It’s in our nature to want to watch our human frailties played out on a huge, epic canvas. Ancient societies had anthropomorphic gods: a huge pantheon expanding into centuries of dynastic drama: fathers and sons, star-crossed lovers, warring brothers, martyred heroes. Tales that taught us the danger of hubris and the primacy of humility. It’s the everyday stuff of everyman’s life, but it’s writ large, and we love it.

You had every right to be afraid. But your bastard bitches were wrong. It won’t be my son who destroys this pantheon. It is I! (Apollymi)

Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met. The usual I we are given has all the tidy containment of the kind of character the realist novel specializes in and none of the porousness of our every waking moment, the loose threads, the strange dreams, the forgettings and misrememberings, the portions of a life lived through others’ stories, the incoherence and inconsistency, the pantheon of dei ex machina and the companionability of ghosts. There are other ways of telling.

We humans are naturally disposed to worship gods and heroes, to build our pantheons and valhallas. I would rather see that impulse directed into the adoration of daft singers, thicko footballers and air-headed screen actors than into the veneration of dogmatic zealots, fanatical preachers, militant politicians and rabid cultural commentators.

Jiang was wrong. She was not dabbling in forces she could not control, for the gods were not dangerous. The gods had no power at all, except what she gave them. The gods could affect the universe only through humans like her. Her destiny had not been written in the stars, or in the registers of the Pantheon. She had made her choices fully and autonomously. And though she called upon the gods to aid her in battle, they were her tools from beginning to end. She was no victim of destiny. She was the last Speerly, commander of the Cike, and a shaman who called the gods to do her bidding. And she would call the gods to do such terrible things.

Nothing in my life ever seemed to fade away or take its rightful place among the pantheon of experiences that constituted my eighteen years. It was all still with me, the storage space in my brain crammed with vivid memories, packed and piled like photographs and old dresses in my grandmother’s bureau. I wasn’t just the madwoman in the attic — I was the attic itself. The past was all over me, all under me, all inside me.

What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star? That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian's. I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when Patroklos appears to Achilles in a dream. There is a very moving passage where Achilles overjoyed at the sight of the apparition – tries to throw his arms around the ghost of his old friend, and it vanishes. The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star… Which reminds me, by the way, of a dream I had a couple of weeks ago. I found myself in a strange deserted city – an old city, like London – underpopulated by war or disease. It was night; the streets were dark, bombed-out, abandoned. For a long time, I wandered aimlessly – past ruined parks, blasted statuary, vacant lots overgrown with weeds and collapsed apartment houses with rusted girders poking out of their sides like ribs. But here and there, interspersed among the desolate shells of the heavy old public buildings, I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble. I went inside one of these new buildings. It was like a laboratory, maybe, or a museum. My footsteps echoed on the tile floors.There was a cluster of men, all smoking pipes, gathered around an exhibit in a glass case that gleamed in the dim light and lit their faces ghoulishly from below. I drew nearer. In the case was a machine revolving slowly on a turntable, a machine with metal parts that slid in and out and collapsed in upon themselves to form new images. An Inca temple… click click click… the Pyramids… the Parthenon. History passing beneath my very eyes, changing every moment. 'I thought I'd find you here,' said a voice at my elbow. It was Henry. His gaze was steady and impassive in the dim light. Above his ear, beneath the wire stem of his spectacles, I could just make out the powder burn and the dark hole in his right temple. I was glad to see him, though not exactly surprised. 'You know,' I said to him, 'everybody is saying that you're dead.' He stared down at the machine. The Colosseum… click click click… the Pantheon. 'I'm not dead,' he said. 'I'm only having a bit of trouble with my passport.' 'What?' He cleared his throat. 'My movements are restricted,' he said. 'I no longer have the ability to travel as freely as I would like.' Hagia Sophia. St. Mark's, in Venice. 'What is this place?' I asked him. 'That information is classified, I'm afraid.' 1 looked around curiously. It seemed that I was the only visitor. 'Is it open to the public?' I said. 'Not generally, no.' I looked at him. There was so much I wanted to ask him, so much I wanted to say; but somehow I knew there wasn't time and even if there was, that it was all, somehow, beside the point. 'Are you happy here?' I said at last. He considered this for a moment. 'Not particularly,' he said. 'But you're not very happy where you are, either.' St. Basil's, in Moscow. Chartres. Salisbury and Amiens. He glanced at his watch. 'I hope you'll excuse me,' he said, 'but I'm late for an appointment.' He turned from me and walked away. I watched his back receding down the long, gleaming hall.

As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or do not exist. For many are the obstacles that impede knowledge, both the obscurity of the question and the shortness of human life.

I could be stronger than all the gods in the pantheon, Maia, but without you it means nothing. Nothing.” - from Rosanna Leo's For the Love of a God.

You of all beings know how fate works. What happened to you as a human happened because everyone from your parents on down tried to circumvent what was supposed to be – which ultimately was the destruction of the Atlantean pantheon. There was no changing that prophecy. But the way you suffered was completely unnecessary. Had your parents embraced their true destiny, you would have been saved years of torment. Fate will not be denied. We can sculpt it, but in the end we’re all pawns to our final destinies. Good, bad, or indifferent. (Savitar)

Traveling through space is for the birds. I’m bored…should’ve brought the wife. Poseidon, the Okeanos Pantheon.

I’ve seen fake gods and bad gods and demigods and would-be gods, and out of all that, out of that whole pantheon, if I believe in one thing, just one thing, I believe in her.

Now, I'm as appreciative as the next obsessive-compulsive recovering-academic of the vast riches of material becoming available online, thanks to all those Google scanners crouched in the basements of libraries around the world, madly feeding books through their machines. I download obscure tomes onto my iPad and give thanks to the dual gods Gates and Jobs, singing hymns to all the lesser pantheon of geniuses. But there's nothing like a book.

But his pantheon would have survived. (Kat) Would it? Fate is never that simple. It doesn’t go in a straight line, and the more you try to circumvent it, the worse you make it on yourself. Fate will not be denied. Sin would have lost his powers by another means, at another time and place. And whoever took them then might have killed him. Had he died, the world would have ended a long time ago or the gallu would have run free and taken over. There are infinite possibilities. (Acheron)

An inclination to play God was part and parcel of wanting to go out and terraform other worlds, but good practice was to at least play nicely with the rest of the pantheon.

Steve Jobs thus became the greatest business executive of our era, the one most certain to be remembered a century from now. History will place him in the pantheon right next to Edison and Ford. More than anyone else of this time, he made products that were completely innovative, combining the power of poetry and processors. With a ferocity that could make working with him as unsettling as it was inspiring, he also built the world's most creative company. And he was able to infuse into its DNA the design sensibilities, perfectionism, and imagination that make it likely to be, even decades from now, the company that thrives best at the intersection of artistry and technology.

She’d loved him like a father once. He’d taught her everything he’d known. He’d led her to the Pantheon. Then he’d abandoned her, returned to her, betrayed her, and saved her. He’d let so many others die—he’d let her people die—but he had saved her. What the fuck was she supposed to do with a legacy like that?

They guillotined Charlotte Corday and they said Marat is dead. No, Marat is not dead. Put him in the Pantheon or throw him in the sewer; it doesn’t matter-he’s back the next day. He’s reborn in the man who has no job, the woman who has no bread, in the girl who has to sell her body, in the child who hasn’t learned to read; he’s reborn in the unheated tenement, in the wretched mattress without blankets, in the unemployed, in the proletariat, in the brothel, in the jailhouse, in your laws that show no pity, in your schools that give no future, and he appears in all that is ignorance and he recreates himself from all that is darkness. Oh, beware human society: you cannot kill Marat until you have killed the misery of poverty!

His unconscious was rapidly becoming a well-stocked pantheon of tutelary phobias and obsessions, homing onto his already over-burdened psyche like lost telepaths.

Who is the true god.” “Chaos,” he says. That’s the closest the Hesperians will ever come to understanding the Pantheon. They’ll never grasp the depths of it; the terrifying swirl of forces that constitute all that is. Their minds can’t handle its incoherence; the fact that the sixty-four gods do not will and do not care. They can’t fathom a world without intention. The only word they might accept is chaos. But Nezha knows divinity. It’s fathomless. It is not something that can be measured or studied; can’t be described through meticulously constructed logic. The forces that dreamed up this world are the opposite of rational. Divinity isn’t knowable. It’s the Dragon in the grotto. It’s the Dragon inside him. It’s the three madmen who united a nation and tore themselves apart. It’s pain, eternity, and terror. It’s endless, all-consuming fire. It’s her.

Permanence has been swept aside by the rapidity of empty images. The pantheon, we discover to our astonishment, is the doghouse of the burning asylum... We think our brain is a marble mausoleum, when in fact it's a house made of cardboard boxes, a shack stranded between an empty field and an endless dusk.

We girls aren't supposed to fall for the good boys.We are supposed to like a bit of grit in our oyster.That's how you get a pearl, after all.

The name of Robert G. Ingersoll is in the pantheon of the world. More than any other man who ever lived he destroyed religious superstition. He was the Shakespeare of oratory -- the greatest that the world has ever known. Ingersoll lived and died far in advance of his time. He wrought nobly for the transformation of this world into a habitable globe; and long after the last echo of destruction has been silenced, his name will be loved and honored, and his fame will shine resplendent, for his immortality is fixed and glorious. {Debbs had this much respect for Ingersoll, despite their radically different political views. This statement was made at Ingersoll's funeral}

Under the stars,I tried to sleep,but for once in my life couldn't.My mutant super power-the ability to nod off at at the drop of a hat,any time,anywhere-had deserted me.

The purity of the message makes it even more remarkable. It’s easy to tell someone about the Leaning Tower. Much harder to tell them about the Pantheon in Rome. So, even though the Pantheon is beautiful, breathtaking, and important, it sees 1 percent of the crowds that the harder-to-get-to Tower in Pisa gets.

When Jiang had taught her to access the Pantheon, he had only ever taught her to kneel before the deities. But the Cike pulled them down with them back into the world of mortals, and when they did, they were destructive and chaotic and terrible. When the shamans of the Cike prayed, they were not requesting that the gods do things for them so much as they were begging the gods to act *through* them

The future is a strange monster. The less there is of it, the more it frightens.

IN THE PANTHEON of Comforting Smells, I ranked McDonald’s french fry grease in the top five. Maybe

I suspect the only reason I’ve been able to go on writing is that I’ve had your heart by my side all along. — Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police, transl. Stephen Snyder (Pantheon, 2019)

And one bite, and I’m their slave?” – Sundown “Exactly.” – Sin “And who thought this would be a good idea?” – Sundown “Don’t get me started. There are idiots in all pantheons. Some days, I think the Sumerians had more than their fair share, and I only hope the idiocy is congenital and not something contracted later in life. Otherwise, I’m even more screwed.” – Sin

Our pasts shape us,Sam.None of us the person he or she used to be,it's true, but what we are still contains a great proportion of what we once were.Nothing,not even suffering the worst kind of tragedy,alters us completely.At core,we are set in stone.

As I see it,part of the art of being a hero is knowing when you don't need to be one anymore,realizing that the game has changed and that the stakes are different and that there isn't necessarily a place for you in this strange new pantheon of extraordinary people.

The actual cabin fell into disrepair probably before Lincoln became president. According to research by D. T. Pitcaithley, the new cabin, a hoax built in 1894, was leased to two amusement park owners, went to Coney Island, where it got commingled with the birthplace cabin of Jefferson Davis (another hoax), and was finally shrunk to fit inside a marble pantheon in Kentucky, where, reassembled, it still stands.

Do you have a problem with us hunting down and killing a god from your pantheon?" "If it is a god, then you cannot kill it, and if you can kill it, then it is not a god. I do not mourn the death of false gods.

I will endure until the stars wink out & the very last trace of heat ebbs from the cosmos & there is nothing but eternal icy nothingness

That is the voice of a place like this, where dead voices echo. They attract men and women of all kinds. But only certain gods visit here…

I took ‘em because nobody else had found ‘em yet. I brought ‘em here ta be protected from mortals that didn’t know the kinda power they once had, that might try ta unlock it again.

The “persecution” of the Christians had vastly more to do with the intolerance of the Christians for the pantheon of local gods than the reverse. What we read is history written by the Christian side, not the Greco-Roman one.

The ancient Greeks worshipped the human capacity for insight. Scott Berkun, in examining the topic of innovation, pointed out that the Greek religious pantheon included nine goddesses who represented the creative spirit. Leading philosophers such as Socrates and Plato visited temples dedicated to these goddesses, these muses, who were a source of inspiration. We honor this tradition when we visit a museum, a “place of the muses,” and when we enjoy music, the “art of the muses

Although Wayne occupies a prominent place in the pantheon of evangelical heroes, he is but one of many rugged and even ruthless icons of masculinity that evangelicals imbued with religious significance. Like Wayne, the heroes who best embodied militant Christian masculinity were those unencumbered by traditional Christian virtues. In this way, militant masculinity linked religious and secular conservatism, helping to secure an alliance with profound political ramifications. For many evangelicals, these militant heroes would come to define not only Christian manhood but Christianity itself.

The man you are seeing is no man, Andy. He was Odin Borson, Allfather and King of Asgard. His wolves were Freki and Geri and his hall was Valhalla. He was my father and the father of many others. And he was your father.

Hadrian’s Pantheon was another. Finished in the 120s CE, the concrete span of its dome remained the widest in the world until 1958

In the absence of an effective general mythology, each of us has his private, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dream.

Restell was a businesswoman, a scofflaw, an immigrant, and an abortionist. She made men really, really mad. She deserves a place in the pantheon of women with no fucks left to give.

Now keep in mind that the typical Greek myth goes something like this: innocent shepherd boy is minding his own business, an overflying god spies him and gets a hard-on, swoops down and rapes him silly; while the victim is still staggering around in a daze, that god’s wife or lover, in a jealous rage, turns him–the helpless, innocent victim, that is–into let’s say an immortal turtle and e.g. power-staples him to a sheet of plywood with a dish of turtle food just out of his reach and leaves him out in the sun forever to be repeatedly disemboweled by army ants and stung by hornets or something. So if Arachne had dissed anyone else in the Pantheon, she would have been just a smoking hole in the ground before she knew what hit her.

The universe contains many planets which make it what it is – a unified system. In addition, our bodies contain many organs, and each part is congruent to a planet in our solar system. The universe we see out our eyes is a mirror of what is within us. This is what God meant by making man in his image. We are all made as a reflection of God and that reflection of him is within us. Furthermore, not only are all religions connected to the same Truth, or Cosmic Heart, but this concept is also mirrored in the pantheons of ancient religions, where each of the many gods simply represented one set of characteristics of the ONE. And in all cases, these many gods symbolized the planets, therefore mimicking the different parts of the universe and the ONE God’s many mirrors (He Who is All). The structure behind all polytheistic religions of the past and present is one and the same. They are all built on the same foundation as Nature.

Pantheon above save him, he might care for the woman more than he'd ever bargained for. The brash and unfashionable Wraith had lived up to her word from New Dortam. She had stolen his heart after all.

You’re the one with the family tree that doesn’t branch.” She illustrated said tree with her fingers. “How many Egyptian gods slept with their brothers’ and sisters’ wife’s mother’s uncle’s dogs? Hmm? I ask you?” He wasn’t quite sure if he should be offended or amused by her attack on his family. Honestly, he had no real feelings for any of them other than hatred and disdain but … “Have you visited your pantheon lately?” “We’re not talking about my pantheon, here. Are we? No. We’re insulting yours.” -Lydia and Seth-

They only worshiped seven gods in the Tholosian Empire: Letum, Bel, Rem, Salutem, Phobos, Algea, and Soter. Death, War, Honor, Survival, Fear, Agony, and Salvation. There was no place in their pantheon for Mercy.

The artists of this nation - state are, taken as one historical subject, one of 'latecomers' to the smorgasbord of the artistic pantheon.Even if Sweden as a nation-state thus seems to have been excluded from the world art history its contemporary arts infrastructure presently makes the country a much more vital place of production.

Speaking of cold... I shiver. "Has the temperature dropped, or is it just me?" "Here." Etienne unwraps the black scarf that had been tied loosely around his neck,and hands it to me. I take it, gently, and wrap it around mine. It makes me dizzy.It smells like freshly scrubbed boy. It smells like him. "Your hair looks nice," he says. "You bleached it again. I touch the stripe self-consciously. "Mom helped me." "That breeze is wicked,I'm going for coffee." Josh snaps his sketchbook closed. I'd forgotten he was here again. "You coming?" Etienne looks at me, waiting to see how I answer. Coffee! I'm dying for a real cup. I smile at Josh. "Sounds perfect." And then I'm heading down the steps of the Pantheon, cool and white and glittering, in the most beautiful city in the world. I'm with two attractive, intelligent,funny boys and I'm grinning ear to ear. If Bridgette could see me now. I mean,who needs Christopher when Etienne St. Clair is in the world? But as soon as I think of Toph, I get that same stomach churching I always do when I think about him now.Shame that I ever thought he might wait. That I wasted so much time on him. Ahead of mine,Etienne laughs at something Josh said. And the sound sends me spiraling into panic as the information hits me again and again and again. What am I going to do? I'm in love with my new best friend.

Each region of Paris is celebrated for the interesting treasures which are to be found there. There are ear-wigs in the timber-yards of the Ursulines, there are millepeds in the Pantheon, there are tadpoles in the ditches of the Champs-de-Mars.

(Dennis says) "Hey, you're playing confuse-the-unbeliever again. I have never been able to get a straight answer on whether you guys have two deities or dozens, taken from any pantheon you feel like mugging in a theological dark alley. Which is it? Number one or number two?" "Yes," Juniper said, with all the other coven members joining in to make a ragged chorus...

You, reader, believed that there, on the platform, my gaze was glued to the hands of the round clock of an old station, hands pierced like halberds, in the vain attempt to turn them back, to move backward over the cemetery of spent hours, lying lifeless in their circular pantheon.

Olujime was a pit fighter, an accountant, a magical warrior, and an ostrich whisperer. Somehow I was not surprised. “Is he going with you?” I asked. Thalia laughed. “No. Just helping us get ready. Seems like a good guy, but I don’t think he’s Hunter material. He’s not even, uh…a Greek-Roman type, is he? I mean, he’s not a legacy of you guys, the Olympians.” “No,” I agreed. “He is from a different tradition and parentage entirely.” Thalia’s short spiky hair rippled in the wind, as if reacting to her uneasiness. “You mean from other gods.” “Of course. He mentioned the Yoruba, though I admit I know very little about their ways.” “How is that possible? Other pantheons of gods, side by side?” I shrugged. I was often surprised by mortals’ limited imaginations, as if the world was an either/or proposition. Sometimes humans seemed as stuck in their thinking as they were in their meat-sack bodies. Not, mind you, that gods were much better. “How could it not be possible?” I countered. “In ancient times, this was common sense. Each country, sometimes each city, had its own pantheon of gods. We Olympians have always been used to living in close proximity to, ah…the competition.” “So you’re the sun god,” Thalia said. “But some other deity from some other culture is also the sun god?” “Exactly. Different manifestations of the same truth.” “I don’t get it.” I spread my hands. “Honestly, Thalia Grace, I don’t know how to explain it any better. But surely you’ve been a demigod long enough to

12. Each symbol, moreover, admits of interpretation upon the different planes, and through its astrological associations can be related to the gods of any pantheon, thus opening up vast new fields of implication in which the mind ranges endlessly, symbol leading on to symbol in an unbroken chain of associations; symbol confirming symbol as the many-branching threads gather themselves together into a synthetic glyph once more, and each symbol capable of interpretation in terms of whatever plane the mind may be functioning upon. 13. This mighty, all-embracing glyph of the soul of man and of the universe, by virtue of its logical association of symbols, evokes images in the mind; but these images are not randomly evolved, but follow along well-defined association-tracks in the Universal Mind. The symbol of the Tree is to the Universal Mind what the dream is to the individual ego; it is a glyph synthesized from subconsciousness to represent the hidden forces.

You still think there’s a strict binary between the material world and the Pantheon. You think calling the gods is like summoning a dog from the yard into the house. But you can’t conceive of the dream world as a physical place. The gods are painters. Your material world is a canvas. And this Divinatory is an angle from which we can see the colors on the palette. This isn’t really a place, it’s a perspective. But you’re interpreting it as a room because your human mind can’t process anything else.

That is the voice of a place like this, where dead voices echo. They attract men and women of all kinds. But only certain gods visit here…

the Disney pantheon that if you wear clothes, you can own other animals who do not

Çünkü tarihin Pantheon'una yalnız kahramanlar girer, entrikacılar değil.

Did I exist before my birth? No. Shall I exist after death? No. What am I? A little dust collected in an organism. What am I to do on this earth? The choice rests with me: suffer or enjoy. Whither will suffering lead me? To nothingness; but I shall have suffered. Whither will enjoyment lead me? To nothingness; but I shall have enjoyed myself. My choice is made. One must eat or be eaten. I shall eat. It is better to be the tooth than the grass. Such is my wisdom. After which, go whither I push thee, the grave-digger is there; the Pantheon for some of us: all falls into the great hole. End. Finis. Total liquidation. This is the vanishing-point. Death is death, believe me. I laugh at the idea of there being any one who has anything to tell me on that subject. Fables of nurses; bugaboo for children; Jehovah for men. No; our to-morrow is the night. Beyond the tomb there is nothing but equal nothingness.

She’s on it? And she has the item?” “Yes. She passed through using her own ID, Dysson from Freemantle.” The agent watched his senior. “If she’s playing for the other side, Boss, we can still pick her up at the other end.” “Very likely. More important is what she’s doing for us.” Brown turned. “And if we did stop her we’d have the problem of trying to replace her.” He paused. “Turn the whole place over, make them think we think the chips are still here. Make them think we don’t know who are working for their side.” He scowled. “And make the bloody Pantheon think their people are still here.” For a moment the man stared, his face slowly registering the implications. “The chips she’s carrying are not the plans, are they, sir?”        “Max, sometimes the price of keeping something secure and out of the hands of someone who will abuse it is almost too high. They’ve got the plans—but when they try to build it …” He shrugged.

Jane sobbed even harder, not noticing the sounds of footsteps coming up behind her. A cold wind blew, and she shivered in it. As her eyes hung between tears, she looked out and saw a shape where the car had been. It was a figure, slim and wrapped in a gray shroud. Almost the whole body was covered, save for a single blue eye that stared at her intently. Jane stared back until she felt a warm hand touch her shoulder and a cold voice whisper in her ear. “You are never alone.

Reality, at first glance, is a simple thing: the television speaking to you now is real. Your body sunk into that chair in the approach to midnight, a clock ticking at the threshold of awareness. All the endless detail of a solid and material world surrounding you. These things exist. They can be measured with a yardstick, a voltammeter, a weighing scale. These things are real. Then there’s the mind, half-focused on the TV, the settee, the clock. This ghostly knot of memory, idea and feeling that we call ourself also exists, though not within the measurable world our science may describe. Consciousness is unquantifiable, a ghost in the machine, barely considered real at all, though in a sense this flickering mosaic of awareness is the only true reality that we can ever know. The Here-and-Now demands attention, is more present to us. We dismiss the inner world of our ideas as less important, although most of our immediate physical reality originated only in the mind. The TV, sofa, clock and room, the whole civilisation that contains them once were nothing save ideas. Material existence is entirely founded on a phantom realm of mind, whose nature and geography are unexplored. Before the Age of Reason was announced, humanity had polished strategies for interacting with the world of the imaginary and invisible: complicated magic-systems; sprawling pantheons of gods and spirits, images and names with which we labelled powerful inner forces so that we might better understand them. Intellect, Emotion and Unconscious Thought were made divinities or demons so that we, like Faust, might better know them; deal with them; become them. Ancient cultures did not worship idols. Their god-statues represented ideal states which, when meditated constantly upon, one might aspire to. Science proves there never was a mermaid, blue-skinned Krishna or a virgin birth in physical reality. Yet thought is real, and the domain of thought is the one place where gods inarguably ezdst, wielding tremendous power. If Aphrodite were a myth and Love only a concept, then would that negate the crimes and kindnesses and songs done in Love’s name? If Christ were only ever fiction, a divine Idea, would this invalidate the social change inspired by that idea, make holy wars less terrible, or human betterment less real, less sacred? The world of ideas is in certain senses deeper, truer than reality; this solid television less significant than the Idea of television. Ideas, unlike solid structures, do not perish. They remain immortal, immaterial and everywhere, like all Divine things. Ideas are a golden, savage landscape that we wander unaware, without a map. Be careful: in the last analysis, reality may be exactly what we think it is.

For two days we explored Rome, a city that is both a living organism and a fossil. Bleached structures from antiquity lay like dried bones, embedded in pulsating cables and thrumming traffic, the arteries of modern life. We visited the Pantheon, the Roman Forum, the Sistine Chapel. My instinct was to worship, to venerate. That was how I felt toward the whole city: that it should be behind glass, adored from a distance, never touched, never altered. My companions moved through the city differently, aware of its significance but not subdued by it. They were not hushed by the Trevi Fountain; they were not silenced by the Colosseum. Instead, as we moved from one relic to the next, they debated philosophy—Hobbes and Descartes, Aquinas and Machiavelli. There was a kind of symbiosis in their relationship to these grand places: they gave life to the ancient architecture by making it the backdrop of their discourse, by refusing to worship at its altar as if it were a dead thing.

from The Prep Pantheon: An All-Time Great Alumni Association Caroline Kennedy. Concord Academy ’75. Harvard ’80. On technical points Preppier than Mummy. During four years at Harvard Square, an unnatural fiber never went near her body (except for the shell of her L. L. Bean down vest). Her lacrosse game was ruthless, her brunch technique dazzling (smoked heavily, sat with the descendents of three other presidents).

The Norse mythology offers no suggestions that Thor’s sacrifice would be rewarded in any way, which makes the sacrifice of Thor and his willingness to struggle to the end major reasons why his followers were attracted to him.

They’re into a bit more than assassination,” said the Admiral, aka Mr Brown, “and not all of them are top agents—the ones that use the names of gods and goddesses to identify themselves. Some are called daemons, and they serve as apprentices to the top players. They’ve a large number of people in the mix. Same arrangement. A team of professional killers, safe crackers, explosives—you name it —round each one, and they’re not afraid to sacrifice members for the objective, or to protect the goddess or god heading it. Every time we get close to them we lose people. It’s as if they’re playing with us. We’re pretty sure they’re all very well connected, and some of them indulge in what they call ‘hunting’. Some poor bastard is abducted and dumped somewhere remote without the means to defend himself. Then he or she is hunted by one or more of the Pantheon. They’re psychopaths—but, as I said, they’re very well connected.

propose to get hold of a suitable house, one of those big, left-over country mansions with lots of huge rooms, that are white elephants to everybody, and fit up the different rooms as temples to the different gods of the old pantheons. Make a really artistic job of it, you know. Have some first-class frescoes done, and all the rest of it; and I'm inclined to think that if we make the temple ready, the god will indwell it, and we shall begin to learn something about him—or her.

I have just removed a dozen of my best men from Vatican City on the eve of conclave. And I have done this to stake out the Pantheon based on the testimony of some American I have never met who has just interpreted a four hundred-year-old poem.

Hierarchy and discipline gave shape to the world;that was what he had always believed.Life was made easy by adherence toa rigid structure.But maybe that only really worked when you were at the top of the ladder,when you were doing well.The further down the rungs you went,the more of a victim of circumstances you became and the less it mattered whether or not you were in control.

The torpedo launch console has big square plastic buttons—Flood Tube, Open Shuttle, Ready to Fire—that flash red or green, like something Q would have built into James Bond’s Aston Martin. The missile compartment has similarly retro-looking panels of buttons. They provided the setup for one of the more quotable things Murray said to me—a line that, were fewer precautions in place, could have joined “Houston, we’ve had a problem” or “Watch this” in the pantheon of understated taglines for calamity: “I wouldn’t lean on that.

Mesoamerica would deserve its place in the human pantheon if its inhabitants had only created maize, in terms of harvest weight the world’s most important crop. But the inhabitants of Mexico and northern Central America also developed tomatoes, now basic to Italian cuisine; peppers, essential to Thai and Indian food; all the world’s squashes (except for a few domesticated in the United States); and many of the beans on dinner plates around the world. One writer has estimated that Indians developed three-fifths of the crops now in cultivation, most of them in Mesoamerica. Having secured their food supply, Mesoamerican societies turned to intellectual pursuits. In a millennium or less, a comparatively short time, they invented their own writing, astronomy, and mathematics, including the zero.

The monotheist religions expelled the gods through the front door with a lot of fanfare, only to take them back in through the side window. Christianity, for example, developed its own pantheon of saints, whose cults differed little from those of the polytheistic gods.

Yet why did not the Æsir kill the Wolf, seeing they had expectation of evil from him?" Hárr answered: "So greatly did the gods esteem their holy place and sanctuary, that they would not stain it with the Wolf's blood; though (so say the prophecies) he shall be the slayer of Odin.

She turned back to the spot where Kamala had been, and where the bow she'd held still was. Andrea walked over to it and picked it up. She ran her hands over it gently, feeling the intricate designs carved into it, the elegance of the metal guard. Andrea held it out before her and pulled the string back. It came easily, though with all the tensions of a thousand taut muscles. She relaxed the string and looked at the bow with a sad familiarity, as she uttered one word. “Sister.

Only one god. Strange, that you English, who gather about you so many things, are content with one only. And so distant, up there in the sky. I do not have to look so far. I can see my skygod clear enough, right there,’ he said, stretching out an arm towards the sun. ‘By day Keesakand. Tonight Nanpawshat, moon god, will take his place. And there will be Potanit, god of the fire....’ He prattled on, cataloguing his pantheon of heathenish idols. Trees, fish, animals and the like vanities, all of them invested with souls, all wielding powers. I kept a count as he enumerated, the final tally of his gods reaching thirty-seven. I said nothing. At first, because I hardly knew what to say to one so lost. “But then, I remembered the singing under the cliffs. An inner voice, barely audible: the merest hiss. Satan’s voice, I am sure of it now, whispering to me that I already knew Keesakand, that I had already worshipped him many times as I bathed in the radiance of the sunrise, or paused to witness the glory of his sunset. And did not Nanpawshat have power over me, governing the swelling, salty tides of my own body, which, not so very long since, had begun to ebb and flow with the moon. It was good, the voice whispered. It was right and well to know these powers, to live in a world aswirl with spirits, everywhere ablaze with divinity.

Against the backdrop of darkness, it seemed as though she was the only being in the entire world - a lone star in the void.

Noontime illumination forced itself in from the space between the shade and the window frame.

But beyond the extravagance of Rome's wealthiest citizens and flamboyant gourmands, a more restrained cuisine emerged for the masses: breads baked with emmer wheat; polenta made from ground barley; cheese, fresh and aged, made from the milk of cows and sheep; pork sausages and cured meats; vegetables grown in the fertile soil along the Tiber. In these staples, more than the spice-rubbed game and wine-soaked feasts of Apicius and his ilk, we see the earliest signs of Italian cuisine taking shape. The pillars of Italian cuisine, like the pillars of the Pantheon, are indeed old and sturdy. The arrival of pasta to Italy is a subject of deep, rancorous debate, but despite the legend that Marco Polo returned from his trip to Asia with ramen noodles in his satchel, historians believe that pasta has been eaten on the Italian peninsula since at least the Etruscan time. Pizza as we know it didn't hit the streets of Naples until the seventeenth century, when Old World tomato and, eventually, cheese, but the foundations were forged in the fires of Pompeii, where archaeologists have discovered 2,000-year-old ovens of the same size and shape as the modern wood-burning oven. Sheep's- and cow's-milk cheeses sold in the daily markets of ancient Rome were crude precursors of pecorino and Parmesan, cheeses that literally and figuratively hold vast swaths of Italian cuisine together. Olives and wine were fundamental for rich and poor alike.

One of the distinctions that religious scholars make about various religions is the monotheistic and polytheistic world views. It seems to me that if one were to describe to a Hindu the myriad of divine beings in Christianity (and by relationship Judaism and Islam), such as angels, archangels, cherubim, seraphim, putti, Satan and his crew, Mother Mary, Jesus the son of God – who threw out demons; not to mention the saints and martyrs, who can be contacted and prayed to as divine guides, etc., I dare say this Hindu would consider the Christians polytheistic like himself. If we then include holy relics, the cunning snake and the talking fiery bush, then we are moving towards animism. Monotheism in this light is actually referring to One ruling (and jealous) god over many lesser “gods,” deities, angels and souls, which is describing a polytheistic hierarchy and not monotheism. My conclusion: there is no monotheism. It may be heretical to say, but perhaps the Western religions have more in common with Hinduism and with the Roman or Scandinavian pantheons than they care to admit.

CEO Gil Amelio stumbled. Ellison may have been baffled when Jobs insisted that he was not motivated by money, but it was partly true. He had neither Ellison’s conspicuous consumption needs nor Gates’s philanthropic impulses nor the competitive urge to see how high on the Forbes list he could get. Instead his ego needs and personal drives led him to seek fulfillment by creating a legacy that would awe people. A dual legacy, actually: building innovative products and building a lasting company. He wanted to be in the pantheon with, indeed a notch above, people like Edwin Land, Bill Hewlett, and David Packard. And the best way to achieve all this was to return to Apple and reclaim his kingdom. And yet when the cup of power neared his lips, he became strangely hesitant, reluctant, perhaps coy. He returned to Apple officially in January 1997 as a part-time advisor, as he had told Amelio he would. He began to assert himself in some personnel areas, especially in protecting his people who had made the transition from NeXT. But in most other ways he was unusually passive. The decision not to ask him to join the board offended him, and he felt demeaned

I understand your feelings, James, but I can’t allow it. If it helps, I’m not finding it easy either.” The Admiral paused, considering his words. He wanted to take out these Pantheon agents, every last one of them, and he knew which he was up against. But it looked like the price would be high. “Mars is like a bloody rabbit warren. The early settlements tunnelled all over the bloody place looking for water, mineral deposits, and, of course, to create habitats for themselves. They didn’t have the equipment to create the shields we have there now. Most of them gave up when habitable planets became available, and the attempts at greening the place fell through—and now we have squatters in some of the abandoned areas, and all sorts of questionable activities turning up.

Loni watched the horse through her binoculars. Shifting auroras reflected off its pearlescent mane, sending a cascade of prismatic brilliance across its ivory coat. Hands, smaller than Loni's own, held on to its silver reins.

I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my programme for the metier of poetry. The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim which can be rejected by appeal to the lives of poets in any pantheon. It will even be affirmed that much learning deadens or perverts poetic sensibility. While, however, we persist in believing that a poet ought to know as much as will not encroach upon his necessary receptivity and necessary laziness, it is not desirable to confine knowledge to whatever can be put into a useful shape for examinations, drawing rooms, or the still more pretentious modes of publicity. Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum. What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop this consciousness throughout his career. What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Mesoamerica would deserve its place in the human pantheon if its inhabitants had only created maize, in terms of harvest weight the world’s most important crop. But the inhabitants of Mexico and northern Central America also developed tomatoes, now basic to Italian cuisine; peppers, essential to Thai and Indian food; all the world’s squashes (except for a few domesticated in the United States); and many of the beans on dinner plates around the world. One writer has estimated that Indians developed three-fifths of the crops now in cultivation, most of them in Mesoamerica.

During his time at VGIK, Tarkovsky and his fellow students studied all aspects of filmmaking, watching the classics of Soviet cinema and taking part in workshops in which they would demonstrate their technical ability. This even included acting; Tarkovsky’s fellow student and friend, Alexander Gordon, remembers him giving a superb performance as the aging Prince Bolkonsky when Romm got the students to perform scenes from War and Peace during their third year at VGIK. Tarkovsky saw many classics from outside the Soviet Union, including Citizen Kane, the films of John Ford and William Wyler, and the works of the fathers of the French New Wave, Jean Renoir and Jean Vigo. Tarkovsky developed a personal pantheon that included Bergman, Bunuel, Mizoguchi and Kurosawa, Fellini and Antonioni. The only Soviet director who made it into his pantheon was Dovzhenko, although he was good friends with the Georgian director Sergei Parajanov, whom he regarded as ‘a genius in everything’. He also spoke highly of Iosseliani, and, on occasion, of Boris Barnet. But above them all was the towering figure of Robert Bresson, whom Tarkovsky regarded as the ultimate film artist.

Buddhism suddenly deteriorated in India sometime after the fourth century of the Christian era. It has been rightly said that Hinduism stifled it in its friendly embrace. Like Christianity and Judaism in Judea and Confucianism and Taoism in China, Buddhism had to be exiled from India for it to become a world religion. It was necessary for India to turn to a more primitive folk religion. Hinduism perfunctorily retained the name Buddha in a far corner of its pantheon, where he was preserved as the ninth of the ten avatars of Vishnu. Vishnu is believed to assume ten transfigurations: Matsya, the fish; Kurma, the land tortoise; Varha, the boar; Narasimha, the man-lion; Vamana, the dwarf; Parashurama; Rama; Krishna; the Buddha; and the Kalki. According to the Brahmans, Vishnu, assuming the form of Buddha, purposely introduced a heretical religion so that believers would be led astray, thus presenting the opportunity for the Brahmans to lead them back to their true religion -- Hinduism. Thus, along with the decline of Buddhism the cave temples at Ajanta in western India fell into ruin and became known to the world only twelve centuries later, in 1819, when a British Army corps chanced upon them.

Today almost everybody is a writer, the enormous publish button on blogs and websites begs you everywhere to click on it! And bam you are a writer. To hell with agents and publishing houses and rejection letters. Immortality for you is on the click of a mouth! We are advancing at the speed of light! You can become an author at 140 characters. To hell with long winding sentences and long hours of scratching the head, the immortals of today instantly get a "like" and they instantly enter the pantheon! They seat side by side Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, St Paul, Buddha, Martin Luther, Rousseau, Bangambiki…

Six millennia ago, the air god Enlil and the sea god Enki settled themselves in the pantheon of Sumerian deities. The Sumerians believed the world was something like a snow globe. Enlil kept the air in the world together with lil, a mingling atmosphere that also lent luminosity to the sun and stars embellished on the inside of the snow globe. Behind the firmament was a deep sea, and Enki’s house was on the sea floor—a place called Abzu. It was a house made of colors that could not be seen, tiles of lapis lazuli, and encrustations of gems, most especially ruby and cornelian, that could not be crushed at those depths. The bowed cedar doors were hammered right with gold no brine could corrode. In this house Enki created a man. He mixed clay over the volcanic furnace, shaped it with heavy water, and swam it to the world. He breathed air into it there. The man failed. His body was weak. So was his spirit. According to the translation of Samuel Kramer of the University of Pennsylvania, the man was offered a piece of bread: “He does not reach out for it. He can neither sit nor stand nor bend his knees.” What is the lesson? That a man-creature created in the deep should stay there: in a house without light, without a hearth.

Therefore, it is believed that the ancestors return after a lapse of tiem as if to a general and spiritual reservoir from which they will sooner or later unite once more with human bodies and human souls as their stimuli and impulses to life. ... Such is more or less the idea of Confucianism. And the only exception is that all human beings are not viewed as equally immortal. Whoever has harmonized his nature and caused his existence to be so effective as to emanate magical powers because they can transform and act creatively, such a person will not return after death. He will not be a Kuei, but a Shen. Shen means someone divinely effective -- man as hero, who is connected with the entire cultural complex. The duration of the culture is also his duration, because his life endures in the pantheon of this culture.

The problem is that we who are badly wounded in our relation to the feminine usually have a fairly successful persona, a good public image. We have grown up as docile, often intellectual, daughters of the patriarchy, with what I call ‘animus-egos.’ We strive to keep up the virtues and aesthetic ideals which the patriarchal superego has presented to us. But we are filled with self-loathing and a deep sense of personal ugliness and failure when we can neither meet nor mitigate the superego’s standards of perfection. But we also feel unseen because there are no images alive to reflect our wholeness and variety. But where shall we look for symbols to suggest the full mystery and potency of the feminine and to provide images as models for personal life. The later Greek goddesses and Mary, Virgin Mother, and Mediator, have not struck me to the core as have Innana-Ereshkigal, Kali, and Isis. An image for the goddess as Self needs to have a full-bodied coherence. So I have had to see the female Greek deities as partial aspects of one wholeness pattern and to look always for the darker powers hidden i their stories—the gorgon aspect of Athena, the underworld Aphrodite-Urania, the Black Demeter, etc. Even in the tales of Inanna and other early Sumerian, Semitic, and Egyptian writings there is evidence that the original potencies of the feminine have been ‘demoted.' As Kramer tells us, the goddesses ‘that held top rank in the Sumerian pantheon were gradually forced down the ladder by male theologians’ and ‘their powers turned over to male deities. This permitted cerebral-intellectual-Apollonian, left brain consciousness, with its ethical and conceptual discriminations, to be born and to grow.

But what one finds in the New World os not just a collection of houses and buildings, which might have had the same common ancestor in the mesolithic hamlet. One discovers, rather, a parallel collection of cultural traits: highly developed fertility ceremonies, a pantheon of cosmic deities, a magnified ruler and central authority who personifies the whole community, great temples whose forms recall such functionally different structures as the pyramid and the ziggurat, along with the same domination of a peasantry by an original hunter-warrior group, or (among the early Mayas) an even more ancient priesthood. Likewise the same division of castes and specialization of vocational groups, and the beginnings of writing, time measuring, and the calendar-including an immense extension of time perspectives among the Mayas, which surpasses in complexity and accuracy even what we know of the cosmic periods of the Babylonians and the Egyptians. These traits seem too specific to have been spontaneously repeated in a whole constellation.

Why can't we sit together? What's the point of seat reservations,anyway? The bored woman calls my section next,and I think terrible thoughts about her as she slides my ticket through her machine. At least I have a window seat. The middle and aisle are occupied with more businessmen. I'm reaching for my book again-it's going to be a long flight-when a polite English accent speaks to the man beside me. "Pardon me,but I wonder if you wouldn't mind switching seats.You see,that's my girlfriend there,and she's pregnant. And since she gets a bit ill on airplanes,I thought she might need someone to hold back her hair when...well..." St. Clair holds up the courtesy barf bag and shakes it around. The paper crinkles dramatically. The man sprints off the seat as my face flames. His pregnant girlfriend? "Thank you.I was in forty-five G." He slides into the vacated chair and waits for the man to disappear before speaking again. The guy onhis other side stares at us in horror,but St. Clair doesn't care. "They had me next to some horrible couple in matching Hawaiian shirts. There's no reason to suffer this flight alone when we can suffer it together." "That's flattering,thanks." But I laugh,and he looks pleased-until takeoff, when he claws the armrest and turns a color disturbingy similar to key lime pie. I distract him with a story about the time I broke my arm playing Peter Pan. It turned out there was more to flying than thinking happy thoughts and jumping out a window. St. Clair relaxes once we're above the clouds. Time passes quickly for an eight-hour flight. We don't talk about what waits on the other side of the ocean. Not his mother. Not Toph.Instead,we browse Skymall. We play the if-you-had-to-buy-one-thing-off-each-page game. He laughs when I choose the hot-dog toaster, and I tease him about the fogless shower mirror and the world's largest crossword puzzle. "At least they're practical," he says. "What are you gonna do with a giant crossword poster? 'Oh,I'm sorry Anna. I can't go to the movies tonight. I'm working on two thousand across, Norwegian Birdcall." "At least I'm not buying a Large Plastic Rock for hiding "unsightly utility posts.' You realize you have no lawn?" "I could hide other stuff.Like...failed French tests.Or illegal moonshining equipment." He doubles over with that wonderful boyish laughter, and I grin. "But what will you do with a motorized swimming-pool snack float?" "Use it in the bathtub." He wipes a tear from his cheek. "Ooo,look! A Mount Rushmore garden statue. Just what you need,Anna.And only forty dollars! A bargain!" We get stumped on the page of golfing accessories, so we switch to drawing rude pictures of the other people on the plane,followed by rude pictures of Euro Disney Guy. St. Clair's eyes glint as he sketches the man falling down the Pantheon's spiral staircase. There's a lot of blood. And Mickey Mouse ears. After a few hours,he grows sleepy.His head sinks against my shoulder. I don't dare move.The sun is coming up,and the sky is pink and orange and makes me think of sherbet.I siff his hair. Not out of weirdness.It's just...there. He must have woken earlier than I thought,because it smells shower-fresh. Clean. Healthy.Mmm.I doze in and out of a peaceful dream,and the next thing I know,the captain's voice is crackling over the airplane.We're here. I'm home.

In the Palacolithic period, for example, when agriculture was developing, the cult the Mother Goddess expressed a sense that the fertility which was transforming human life was actually sacred.Artists carved those statues depicting her as a naked pregnant woman which archaeologists have found all over Europe, the Middle East and India.The Great Mother remained imaginatively important for centuries.Like the old Sky God, she was absorbed into later pantheons and took her place alongside the older deities.She was usually of powerful of the gods, certainly more powerful than the Sky God, who remained a rather shadowy figure.She was called Inana in ancient Sumeria, Ishtar in Babylon, Anat in Canaan, Isis in Egypt and Aphrodite in Greece, and remarkably similar stories were devised in all these cultures to express her role in the spiritual lives of the people.These myths were not intended to be taken literally but were metaphorical attempts to describe a reality that was too complex and elusive to express in any other way.These dramatic and evocative stories of gods and goddesses helped people to articulate their sense of powerful but forces that surrounded them.

The text begins by saying that the gods Anu, Enlil and Marduk – the leading deities of the Mesopotamian pantheon – appointed Hammurabi ‘to make justice prevail in the land, to abolish the wicked and the evil, to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak’.4 It then lists about 300 judgements, given in the set formula ‘If such and such a thing happens, such is the judgment.’ For example, judgements 196–9 and 209–14 read: 196. If a superior man should blind the eye of another superior man, they shall blind his eye. 197. If he should break the bone of another superior man, they shall break his bone. 198. If he should blind the eye of a commoner or break the bone of a commoner, he shall weigh and deliver 60 shekels of silver. 199. If he should blind the eye of a slave of a superior man or break the bone of a slave of a superior man, he shall weigh and deliver one-half of the slave’s value (in silver).5 209. If a superior man strikes a woman of superior class and thereby causes her to miscarry her fetus, he shall weigh and deliver ten shekels of silver for her fetus. 210. If that woman should die, they shall kill his daughter. 211. If he should cause a woman of commoner class to miscarry her fetus by the beating, he shall weigh and deliver five shekels of silver. 212. If that woman should die, he shall weigh and deliver thirty shekels of silver. 213. If he strikes a slave-woman of a superior man and thereby causes her to miscarry her fetus, he shall weigh and deliver two shekels of silver. 214. If that slave-woman should die, he shall weigh and deliver twenty shekels of silver.

Kant is sometimes considered to be an advocate of reason. Kant was in favor of science, it is argued. He emphasized the importance of rational consistency in ethics. He posited regulative principles of reason to guide our thinking, even our thinking about religion. And he resisted the ravings of Johann Hamann and the relativism of Johann Herder. Thus, the argument runs, Kant should be placed in the pantheon of Enlightenment greats. That is a mistake. The fundamental question of reason is its relationship to reality. Is reason capable of knowing reality - or is it not? Is our rational faculty a cognitive function, taking its material form reality, understanding the significance of that material, and using that understanding to guide our actions in reality - or is it not? This is the question that divides philosophers into pro- and anti-reason camps, this is the question that divides the rational gnostics and the skeptics, and this was Kant’s question in his Critique of Pure Reason. Kant was crystal clear about his answer. Reality - real, noumenal reality - is forever closed off to reason, and reason is limited to awareness and understanding of its own subjective products… Kant was the decisive break with the Enlightenment and the first major step toward postmodernism. Contrary to the Enlightenment account of reason, Kant held that the mind is not a response mechanism but a constitute mechanism. He held that the mind - and not reality - sets the terms for knowledge. And he held that reality conforms to reason, not vice versa. In the history of philosphy, Kant marks a fundamental shift from objectivity as the standard to subjectivity as the standard. What a minute, a defender of Kant may reply. Kant was hardly opposed to reason. After all, he favored rational consistency and he believed in universal principles. So what is anti-reason about it? The answer is that more fundamental to reason than consistency and universality is a connection to reality. Any thinker who concludes that in principle reason cannot know reality is not fundamentally an advocate of reason… Suppose a thinker argued the following: “I am an advocate of freedom for women. Options and the power to choose among them are crucial to our human dignity. And I am wholeheartedly an advocate of women’s human dignity. But we must understand that a scope of a women’s choice is confined to the kitchen. Beyond the kitchen’s door she must not attempt to exercise choice. Within the kitchen, however, she has a whole feast of choices[…]”. No one would mistake such a thinker for an advocate of women’s freedom. Anyone would point out that there is a whole world beyond the kitchen and that freedom is essentially about exercising choice about defining and creating one’s place in the world as a whole. The key point about Kant, to draw the analogy crudely, is that he prohibits knowledge of anything outside our skulls. The gives reasons lots to do withing the skull, and he does advocate a well-organized and tidy mind, but this hardly makes him a champion of reason… Kant did not take all of the steps down to postmodernism, but he did take the decisive one. Of the five major features of Enlightenment reason - objectivity, competence, autonomy, universality, and being an individual faculty - Kant rejected objectivity.

The Sumerian pantheon was headed by an "Olympian Circle" of twelve, for each of these supreme gods had to have a celestial counterpart, one of the twelve members of the Solar System. Indeed, the names of the gods and their planets were one and the same (except when a variety of epithets were used to describe the planet or the god's attributes). Heading the pantheon was the ruler of Nibiru, ANU whose name was synonymous with "Heaven," for he resided on Nibiru. His spouse, also a member of the Twelve, was called ANTU. Included in this group were the two principal sons of ANU: E.A ("Whose House Is Water"), Anu's Firstborn but not by Antu; and EN.LIL ("Lord of the Command") who was the Heir Apparent because his mother was Antu, a half sister of Anu. Ea was also called in Sumerian texts EN.KI ("Lord Earth"), for he had led the first mission of the Anunnaki from Nibiru to Earth and established on Earth their first colonies in the E.DIN ("Home of the Righteous Ones")—the biblical Eden. His mission was to obtain gold, for which Earth was a unique source. Not for ornamentation or because of vanity, but as away to save the atmosphere of Nibiru by suspending gold dust in that planet's stratosphere. As recorded in the Sumerian texts (and related by us in The 12th Planet and subsequent books of The Earth Chronicles), Enlil was sent to Earth to take over the command when the initial extraction methods used by Enki proved unsatisfactory. This laid the groundwork for an ongoing feud between the two half brothers and their descendants, a feud that led to Wars of the Gods; it ended with a peace treaty worked out by their sister Ninti (thereafter renamed Ninharsag). The inhabited Earth was divided between the warring clans. The three sons of Enlil—Ninurta, Sin, Adad—together with Sin's twin children, Shamash (the Sun) and Ishtar (Venus), were given the lands of Shem and Japhet, the lands of the Semites and Indo-Europeans: Sin (the Moon) lowland Mesopotamia; Ninurta, ("Enlil's Warrior," Mars) the highlands of Elam and Assyria; Adad ("The Thunderer," Mercury) Asia Minor (the land of the Hittites) and Lebanon. Ishtar was granted dominion as the goddess of the Indus Valley civilization; Shamash was given command of the spaceport in the Sinai peninsula. This division, which did not go uncontested, gave Enki and his sons the lands of Ham—the brown/black people—of Africa: the civilization of the Nile Valley and the gold mines of southern and western Africa—a vital and cherished prize. A great scientist and metallurgist, Enki's Egyptian name was Ptah ("The Developer"; a title that translated into Hephaestus by the Greeks and Vulcan by the Romans). He shared the continent with his sons; among them was the firstborn MAR.DUK ("Son of the Bright Mound") whom the Egyptians called Ra, and NIN.GISH.ZI.DA ("Lord of the Tree of Life") whom the Egyptians called Thoth (Hermes to the Greeks)—a god of secret knowledge including astronomy, mathematics, and the building of pyramids. It was the knowledge imparted by this pantheon, the needs of the gods who had come to Earth, and the leadership of Thoth, that directed the African Olmecs and the bearded Near Easterners to the other side of the world. And having arrived in Mesoamerica on the Gulf coast—just as the Spaniards, aided by the same sea currents, did millennia later—they cut across the Mesoamerican isthmus at its narrowest neck and—just like the Spaniards due to the same geography—sailed down from the Pacific coast of Mesoamerica southward, to the lands of Central America and beyond. For that is where the gold was, in Spanish times and before.

The only point that everyone I spoke with in Rome agrees upon is that Armando al Pantheon is one of the city's last true trattorie. Given the location, Claudio and his family could have gone the way of the rest of the neighborhood a long time ago and mailed it in with a handful of fresh mozzarella and prosciutto. But he's chosen the opposite path, an unwavering dedication to the details- the extra steps that make the oxtail more succulent, the pasta more perfectly toothsome, the artichokes and favas and squash blossoms more poetic in their expression of the Roman seasons. "I experiment in my own small ways. I want to make something new, but I also want my guests to think of their mothers and grandmothers. I want them to taste their infancy, to taste their memories. Like that great scene in Ratatouille." I didn't grow up on amatriciana and offal, but when I eat them here, they taste like a memory I never knew I had. I keep coming back. For the cacio e pepe, which sings that salty-spicy duet with unrivaled clarity, thanks to the depth charge of toasted Malaysian peppercorns Claudio employs. For his coda alla vaccinara, as Roman as the Colosseum, a masterpiece of quinto quarto cookery: the oxtail cooked to the point of collapse, bathed in a tomato sauce with a gentle green undertow of celery, one of Rome's unsung heroes. For the vegetables: one day a crostini of stewed favas and pork cheek, the next a tumble of bitter puntarelle greens bound in a bracing anchovy vinaigrette. And always the artichokes. If Roman artichokes are drugs, Claudio's are pure poppy, a vegetable so deeply addictive that I find myself thinking about it at the most inappropriate times. Whether fried into a crisp, juicy flower or braised into tender, melting submission, it makes you wonder what the rest of the world is doing with their thistles.