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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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}

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

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 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 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

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.

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 “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.

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.

The light on the Palace windows had died away, and the dome of the Pantheon swam aglow above the northern terrace, a fiery Valhalla in the sky; while below in grim array, along the terrace ranged, the marble ranks of queens looked out into the west.

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.

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.

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

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

It is unwise to favor one god above another. Better to shun them all than show favoritism amongst a jealous, prodigious pantheon.

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.

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.

we humans, Prometheus’s creations, controlled fire, Zeus feared we wouldn’t need gods to worship and obey; we could abolish our own creators. Zeus was right. We did. And we are Zeus now. We fear the entities we have created. If a Prometheus amongst us were to give AI consciousness, the divine spark, then humanity could become a mythic memory, an origin story for the machines to tell themselves, while we crumble into broken statuary alongside Zeus and his pantheon before us.

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.

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.

(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...

Good grief. Does he have to antagonize every god and goddess right from the start? If I make it home after this is all over, I’m switching to a different pantheon of gods. I sigh. “You don’t have to deliberately provoke them.” He says nothing to that.

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.

Nyaxia had gone mad with grief when she was given Alarus’s head—a grief that had made her powerful enough to defeat the rest of the White Pantheon and stake out her own kingdom in her husband’s abandoned territory. A grief that had driven her to create a following of her own—vampires.

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

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.

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.

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…

Pantheon.

pantheon

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

In the pantheon of military thinkers and grand strategists, two giants stand out: the Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz and the Chinese master Sun Tsu.

they stand at his back on the cold - he can feel them there now - like new gods. like a fresh pantheon waiting to be born. It was warm, by the fire.

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

I’m begging you. In her mind’s eye she saw the Phoenix recoil, as if irritated. It opened its wings in a huge, fiery expanse and then folded them. The way to the Pantheon shut.

...and the Americans responding with yet more of their own country's heroes, ignorant alike of diplomacy and any name at all from the pantheon of their sister republic.

Human nature - the Thucydidean pantheon of fear, self-interest, and honor - makes for a world of incessant conflict and coercion.

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.

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.

On his convex forehead his namam is a vertical, three-pronged fork, the center stripe red and the flanking two white. It signals he’s a Vaishnavite, holding Vishnu to be the supreme god in the pantheon.

The reason we read - the reason you're reading this book - is because some other book enchanted you, earlier on, and before that another, and before that another. This is the real literary canon, not some hegemonic pantheon, adapted and debated over time. We each have one, a literary canon, and we make it ourselves, not out of what is respectable or prestigious or prominent or lasting or moral or even well-made.

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).

Franklin’s scientific achievements placed him in the pantheon with Newton. Franklin’s experiments, he wrote in 1941, “afforded a basis for the explanation for all the known phenomena of electricity.”16 Franklin

As a member of a pantheon, I had an aversion to picking only one god. That was like picking your favorite child or your favorite musician. If you were capable of picking only one, you were doing something wrong.

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.

The first monotheist religion known to us appeared in Egypt, c.1350 BC, when Pharaoh Akhenaten declared that one of the minor deities of the Egyptian pantheon, the god Aten, was, in fact, the supreme power ruling the universe

The first monotheist religion known to us appeared in Egypt, c.1350 BC, when Pharaoh Akhenaten declared that one of the minor deities of the Egyptian pantheon, the god Aten, was, in fact, the supreme power ruling the universe.

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.

The trinity of gods that then followed was no other than a reduction of the former plurality, which was about twenty or thirty thousand: the statue of Mary succeeded the statue of Diana of Ephesus; the deification of heroes changed into the canonization of saints; the Mythologists had gods for everything; the Christian Mythologists had saints for everything; the church became as crowded with one, as the Pantheon had been with the other, and Rome was the place of both.

So they created the Trials of Ascension. Every decade, those with gifts were gathered, tested, broken down, and rebuilt in the gods' image. A few would ascend to join the pantheon. The rest would die, their power reclaimed by the Aesymar.

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.

When friends come to Rome in early summer to visit me I like to take them to the Pantheon during thunderstorms and stand them beneath the opening of the feathery, perfectly proportioned dome as rain falls through the open roof against the marble floor and lightning scissors through the wild and roiled skies. The emperor Hadrian rebuilt the temple to honor gods no longer worshiped, but you can feel the brute passion in that ardor in the Pantheon's grand and harmonious shape. I think gods have rarely been worshiped so well.

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.

Rome’s success was, its people believed, owing to the favour of chief god, Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Roman religion was not one of doctrine, improvement or salvation but one of ritual and lifestyle, based on sacrifices to a pantheon to ensure success and prosperity.

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.

Rome, yes, I say, thinking in quick succession of the Pantheon, the Colosseum and the cardinals screwing around while wondering whether women have souls or not, and of Nero, of course, who killed his closest family and let the city burn. I don't reckon he liked people, either.

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.

Earth is long since dead. On a colony planet, a band of men has gained control of technology, made themselves immortal, and now rule their world as the gods of the Hindu pantheon. Only one dares oppose them: he who was once Siddhartha and is now Mahasamatman. Binder of Demons, Lord of Light.

Three is a holy number, as well you know. Even the priests of the White Christ know this with their Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is interesting, no, that the Christians maintain a pantheon of gods, or a single god with three faces, but still call us heretical for having more than one god?

Sometimes I think it is that loneliness that drove our species a little bit insane. Why else would we have invented such a vast assortment of preposterous characters, all those pantheons of mad gods and uncountable legions of angels and devils and supernatural dream-things, if not to fill the void

The pantheon of those who won’t is the best church poetry has to offer. It’s a temple perfumed with the incense of sacrificed literary reputation, littered with bankruptcy notices for cynical cultural capital, warmed by the greater fire of the intrinsic, populated by the most famous and the most anon.

Is there anything in the legends about a topaz called the Wolf Diamond? A large yellow gem maybe?” I asked. Dali wrinkled her forehead. “Topaz is associated with Brihaspati—Jupiter.” “The Roman god?” Jim frowned. “No, the planet. Honestly, Jim, the world doesn’t revolve around the Greco-Roman pantheon.

Their first goal was to eradicate Elohim from the minds of men and replace him with their own pantheon. They disseminated myths that supported their hierarchy of the four high gods reigning over the earth. The four were: Anu, father god of the heavens; his vice-regent Enlil, lord of the air, wind, and storm; Enki, god of water and Abyss; and Ninhursag, the earth goddess. Below them were the three that completed the “Seven who Decreed Fate”: Nanna the moon god; Utu the sun god; and Inanna, goddess of sex and war. The Sumerians called these and the other gods of the cities Anunnaki, which means “gods of royal seed.

The traffic was atrocious and shaming, of that pantheon of traffic encountered when one is late to a wedding or other monumental event of fleeting import. Surely an accident unraveled its miserable inevitabilities ahead and now all was fouled, decelerated, the vehicles syllables in an incantation of misfortune.

Perhaps Senkovi would have approved; he who had once seen himself as the trickster god of the pantheon, before there were no more gods left to trick. Perhaps Senkovi would have recalled ancient human myth figures whose outsize griefs and loves and rages were applauded by ancient audiences as noble, right and true.

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.

The extraordinary outpouring of bipartisan concern blotted out the scandals of Grant’s presidency and restored him to his rightful niche in the American pantheon. Hundreds of sympathetic messages piled up at the Grant residence, including telegrams from Jefferson Davis and the sons of Robert E. Lee and Albert Sidney Johnston.

Likewise, the division between popular and serious work was a scheme perpetrated by academics in need of creating a false pantheon of living writers when it became impossible to come up with fresh dissertation topics (to earn degrees and prestige) concerning the writers in the true pantheon, who had been analyzed to exhaustion.

But what Marie-Laure remembered, standing at the rail as it whistled past, was her father saying that Foucault's pendulum would never stop. It would keep swinging, she understood, after she and her father left the Pantheon, after she had fallen asleep that night. After she had forgotten about it, and lived her entire life, and died.

And so I find myself thinking that of all the goddesses in this book, the Furies – not in their role of vengeance-goddesses but in the sense of collective, societal shame that they also personify, shame at breaking your word or behaving cruelly and dishonestly – might be the ones I would most like to see restored to a modern pantheon.

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.

He is still uncertain if he likes being a god at all, let alone a god in this pantheon. He doesn’t hate it anymore, though, and that is something. He likes being alive, too. That feeling is new and altogether strange, and he knows it won’t last forever. Nothing good ever does. But perhaps…he can learn to like being happy. While it lasts.

Yes, but the end of it belongs to every pantheon tied to the mortal place. What gets you there at last can be drawn from all of us who came before." Quetzalcoatls showed all his sharp teeth in a smile that left Patrick cold before letting go."Stories are shared, after all. They are how we exist, how we are remembered." "They're also how you die.

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

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

I think I *was* the lightning.

Let others consume their efforts in pointless trifles. Let others drain their energy in futile worries.

The gods don't deserve any special deference solely because they're powerful. If they can judge us based on our actions, we should be treating them according to their own.

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.

This was not even a particularly big offense in the pantheon of book club crimes, where the worst sin one could commit was not to read the book in question--or, even worse, to lie about having read the book when, in fact, you'd simply seen the movie, a lie usually uncovered when you used the actor's name by accident. ("I love the part where Daniel Day-Lewis ...")

We have known for a long time that the pantheon of science is decorated with failure. Failures are the moving force in science: they seal off one possibility in order to expose another; they force us to look at the problem in a new light. We owe a huge debt, therefore, to the researchers whose life's work leads to a cul-de-sac. They are indirectly showing us the correct path.

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.

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.

Hades cracked his knuckles on each hand, and the noise was like gunpowder caps exploding in the silence. "First dish duty," he mumbled to himself, "now possessed cowboys. This just isn't my night.

Fred Rogers richly deserves a place in the pantheon of pacifists who tried to shake the foundations of society and culture. To the day of his death, he was a radical Christian pacifist—fervently committed to the end of violence and the presence of social justice in its full glory. The time has come for us to pull him out of the shadows so we can celebrate him just as he was—a fierce peacemaker.

Today we have become so familiar with the intolerance that has unfortunately been a characteristic of monotheism that we may not appreciate that this hostility toward other gods was a new religious attitude. Paganism was an essentially tolerant faith: provided that old cults were not threatened by the arrival of a new deity, there was always room for another god alongside the traditional pantheon.

only One True God can provide an adequate religious basis for the moral order. Divine essences such as the Tao do not command us to love one another. The “first mover” does not forbid us to covet another’s spouse. Paul Tillich’s conception of God as the “ground of our being” is not a being and therefore is incapable of having, let alone expressing, moral concerns. As for the little “beings” who populate pagan pantheons, they seem to concern themselves only with their own welfare and to ignore what people do to and for one another. Only monotheism serves as a basis for morality, for compelling and significant “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots.” This certainly is not to suggest that pagan societies lack morality, but to acknowledge that their moral orders are not justified on religious grounds.

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.

I wrinkled my nose at the thought of the world ending due to the battle between good and evil, law and chaos, and everything else that encompassed the Christian religion's apocalypse. I still wasn't sure why the Christian religion's doomsday scenario trumped the others, though I expected when shit went down, everything would end and all religions and their pantheons would find some way to make a mess of Earth.

I stood in the center of the Pantheon under the massive oculus, boiling. It was noon and the sun was right overhead, blinding everyone in the room. “Not incredibly practical to cut a hole in the roof if you ask me,” I deadpanned to the ten-year-old beside me. She sighed heavily and rolled her eyes, walking away with Architecture of the Italian Renaissance shoved underneath her arm. Very cultured, these kids today.

Indeed, in Proclus’ own interpretation of the Hellenic pantheon, the source of life for souls is seen more directly in Rhea, while the soul in its personal emergence is grasped through Persephone, who for Platonists embodies the soul’s descent, not into death, but embodied life.[19] Hekate’s special role in this process, I shall argue, is revelatory; and this is prefigured in her iconography, in which she typically bears twin torches.

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.

It galls me, when I catch a stray remark from the master, or between the older English pupils, to the effect that the Indians are uncommonly fortunate to be here. I have come to think it is a fault in us, to credit what we give in such a case, and never to consider what must be given up in order to receive it. And yet, it is not for me to weigh this balance: Christ, and knowledge against a pagan pantheon and an unaccomodated wilderness existence.

Leo Koretz, the Bernie Madoff of the Roaring Twenties, operated his swindle for far longer and with more panache than his contemporary, Charles Ponzi. He was a better actor, a more adept liar, a shrewder salesman. He kept his scam alive – and his investors none the wiser – for almost two decades …. In terms of the scale of their frauds, staying power and sheer audacity, Leo Koretz and Bernie Madoff stand apart in the pantheon of pyramid-building swindlers.

Gladstone's was neither the first nor the last of great minds to be led astray by religious fervor, but in the case of his Studies on Homer, his convictions took the particular unfortunate turn of trying to marry Homer's pagan pantheon with the Christian creed. ... The Times was not amused: "Perfectly honest in his intentions, he takes up a theory, and no matter how ridiculous it is in reality, he can make it appear respectable in argument. Too clever by half!

leaves are left on the stalk, and the stalk spiked and hung at the proper distance, so that the plant neither molds nor dries out, but cures into that Virginia gold which moves the base and mortal man into the pantheon of Quality. Every step is essential and must be followed with the utmost care, and there is but one way to ensure that a man takes this care with a process that rewards him nothing, and that way is torture, murder, and maiming, is child-theft, is terror.

And naturally, you're going to believe your mother over a man you think is pure evil down to his bones, but it doesn't change the fact that she is telling you a very specific story with a very specific purpose in mind. The truth is what you make it.

I’d grown up with disco in the 1970s, when I just knew it as exciting pop music on AM radio. In the 1980s it died off, but still inspired everyone from New Order to Duran Duran to Kraftwerk. And then in the late 1980s the ghost of disco came back with a fury, giving birth to house music, techno, rave culture, and even a lot of hip-hop. Disco was the crucible in which most modern music had been born, and within the disco pantheon no one had ever reigned higher or more supreme than Donna Summer.

The dry-room, this pantheon, this sanctum sanctorum of the tulip-fancier, was, as Delphi of old, interdicted to the profane uninitiated. Never had any of his servants been bold enough to set his foot there. Cornelius admitted only the inoffensive broom of an old Frisian housekeeper, who had been his nurse, and who from the time when he had devoted himself to the culture of tulips ventured no longer to put onions in his stews, for fear of pulling to pieces and mincing the idol of her foster child.

subjects nicknamed him Epumanes – the Madman. But there was method in his madness for he hoped to bind his empire together around the worship of one king, one religion. He fully expected his subjects to worship their local gods and merge them into the Greek pantheon and his own cult. But it was different for the Jews, who had a love–hate relationship with Greek culture. They craved its civilization but resented its dominance. Josephus says they regarded Greeks as feckless, promiscuous, modernizing

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.

According to studies led by Dr. Allan C. Wilson of the University of California, there is genetic evidence that the entire human species arose from a single female in North Africa between 140,000 and 280,000 years ago. In other words, it is conceivable that we all started from the womb of a single woman. ... Or would we find an even greater mystery, that the whole pantheon of our reality was somehow contained in the wobbling mind of that creature, who fell down to thank her raw new gods after a panther leaped at her throat, and by a miracle missed devouring us all.

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.

Monotheism does not appear through amalgamation and syncretism but rather through the annihilation of other gods. Other divine entities are not simply taken on board and integrated into the pantheon; they are thrown over and left to drown. If they must be acknowledged, it is only done by a kind of deconsecration that demotes them to the status of demons and insists that they were never anything else. They are to be destroyed and plastered over. Their worshipers are attacked, and if they cannot be slaughtered like the prophets of Ba‘al, they are ridiculed, mocked and vilified.

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.

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.

For every person who was alarmed or startled to see an armoured, paramilitary-looking figure rushing past at astonishing speed, there were ten who were simply annoyed or indignant. "Hey, asshole, go shoot your goddamn sci-fi movie somewhere else!" "Extreme sports is California, dude!" "Fuck you, buddy!" New York.

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 whatshe gave them. The gods could affect the universe only through humans likeher. Her destiny had not been written in the stars, or in the registers of thePantheon. She had made her choices fully and autonomously. And thoughshe called upon the gods to aid her in battle, they were her tools frombeginning to end.She was no victim of destiny. She was the last Speerly, commander of theCike, and a shaman who called the gods to do her bidding.And she would call the gods to do such terrible things.

I sometimes wonder what I’d see if I could hold your heart in my hands, […] I imagine it fitting perfectly in my palms, soft and slippery, like gelatin that hasn’t quite set. It might wobble at the slightest touch, but I sense I’d need to hold it carefully, so it wouldn’t slip through my fingers. I also imagine the warmth of the thing. It’s usually hidden deep inside, so it’s much warmer than the rest of me. I close my eyes and sink into that warmth, and when I do, the sensations of all the things that have disappeared come back to me. I can feel all the things you remember, there in my hands. — Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police (Pantheon, 2019)

We cannot call ourselves anti-theist, like New Atheism, while creating even rainbow pantheons of gods to follow, chasing ideological spectres to the end of illogical rainbow arguments constructed and maintained artificially by ignorant leaders. When we do this we not only create strawmen, spectres, and artificial rainbows but pocket dimensions of subjective thought that can be likened to the Twilight Zone. In this place things will not be more real but be like a Marvel comics version of both biblical and Norse heroes that are created solely for the readers recreation and for corporate sales. We will end up selling our souls for ideological satisfaction.

This is a work of fiction incorporating episodes from the lives of the historic J. Marion Sims, M.D. (1813–1883), “the Father of Modern Gynecology”; Silas Weir Mitchell, M.D. (1829–1914), “the Father of Medical Neurology”; and Henry Cotton, M.D. (1876–1933), the director of the New Jersey Lunatic Asylum from 1907 to 1930. Several passages, scattered through the text, have been adapted from passages in Sims’s The Story of My Life (1888). Particular thanks are due to Andrew Scull’s Madhouse: A Tragic Tale of Megalomania and Modern Medicine (Yale University Press, 2005), a chronicle of the life and career of Henry Cotton; and Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture (1830–1980) (Pantheon Books, 1985).

At forty-two, I was still holding up pretty well, but my once effortlessly lean body now look as though it belonged in a Dove firming cream ad -- the one where they give women permission to have thighs. When I unbuttoned my jeans at night, I swore I heard the same sound that Pillsbury dough made when I twisted the cylindrical container. My hair was beginning to gray, and when I smiled, the parentheses around my mouth remained. My least favorite position in yoga class was the downward dog because, as I hung my head downward, I always felt the skin from my face was about to splatter against my mat like a pancake batter hitting the griddle. So being called the top model by a young Italian was a wonderful souvenir, though cheaper than the toys sold outside the Pantheon in Rome.

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.

He had told Larry Ellison that his return strategy was to sell NeXT to Apple, get appointed to the board, and be there ready when 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.

There has always been a chasm between theological theories and historical realities. Most people have found it difficult to digest the monotheist idea fully. They have continued to divide the world into ‘we’ and ‘they’, and to see the supreme power of the universe as too distant and alien for their mundane needs. 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. Just as the god Jupiter defended Rome and Huitzilopochtli protected the Aztec Empire, so every Christian kingdom had its own patron saint who helped it overcome difficulties and win wars. England was protected by St George, Scotland by St Andrew, Hungary by St Stephen, and France had St Martin.

On the 22nd of June, a door opened before us, and we didn't know what was behind it. We could look out for gas warfare, bacteriological warfare. The heavy uncertainty took me by the throat. Here we were faced by beings who are complete strangers to us. Everything that resembles civilisation, the Bolsheviks have suppressed it, and I have no feelings about the idea of wiping out Kiev, Moscow or St. Petersburg. What our troops are doing is positively unimaginable. Not knowing the great news, how will our soldiers—who are at present on the way home—feel when they're once more on German soil? In comparison with Russia, even Poland looked like a civilised country. If time were to blot out our soldiers' deeds, the monuments I shall have set up in Berlin will continue to proclaim their glory a thousand years from to-day. The Arc de Triomphe, the Pantheon of the Army, the Pantheon of the German people....

Was [Steve Jobs] smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. [...] Like a pathfinder, he could absorb information, sniff the winds, and sense what lay ahead. 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 his 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.

The Ghost Like angels fierce and tawny-eyed, Back to your chamber I will glide, And noiselessly into your sight Steal with the shadows of the night. And I will bring you, brown delight, Kisses as cold as lunar night And the caresses of a snake Revolving in a grave. At break Of morning in its livid hue, You'd find I had bequeathed to you An empty place as cold as stone. Others by tenderness and ruth Would reign over your life and youth, But I would rule by fear alone.

Know, child, that the One God—He is so vast that He cannot be moved, else the Universe falls. Nor can He answer, for the very act of opening His Mouth is Movement, indeed the greatest Act of all, for it is the Word. And this is precisely why He has made an infinity of lesser gods, creating them in His own image, so that we can do the lesser things on His behalf. We are His hands and arms and feet and mouths. We are His answers to your prayers, enacted along the great Framework of Being.

I have a weird graphic I made for myself once, and it's the "lineage tree" of everyone that has inspired me and more importantly given me the permission to be myself in my work. There's a slew of people from theater: Erwin Piscator, Chekhov, Mac Wellman, Stein; and then a whole lot of wonderful works that are called novels: everything from Tristram Shandy to Bouvard and Pecuchet, to Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, and Finnegan's Wake and Invisible Man, and then contemporary writers I'm currently reading like Renee Gladman and Anakana Schofield. There are many more in my graphic also: there's Beckett's novels and Melancholy of Resistance, and there's Reznikoff and Dos Passos, there are contemporary poets I admire like Jena Osman, dance-writers like Michelle Ellsworth, and books I can't help read for fun like Muriel Spark. But there's Groucho Marx and Oscar Wilde. It's a huge question and the answers would likely change daily. But these I'm talking about here are in the pantheon.

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.

The Pantheons made themselves apparent in the blink of an eye; perhaps less. At one instant the planet was a place of faith, doubt, and godlessness, the next there was room for none of these. Who needed faith when the senses confirmed all? As for doubt and godlessness, they were absurdities now that every deity that had ever appeared in human consciousness (and some several hundred thousand who had never made it) had manifested themselves. The Coming was indiscriminate; it made no distinction between great divinities and small. There were vast and transformative powers abroad, deities that brought with them fleets of angelic vehicles and all manner of divine paraphernalia, but there were also threadbare local gods, guardians of painted rocks, spirits of bamboo groves; presences that healed sores and brought lovers, demons who haunted empty roads and forsaken hotels. A world of yearning and need was suddenly a place of surfeit; and the end of mankind began, for there was nothing left invisible, or unknowable, and therefore nothing left to hope for or desire.

Instead of ascending to enlightened states of being that involve the denial of the self, we have discovered that ours is a journey of descent: we look deep within to reclaim forgotten aspects of ourselves. In our descent, many of us rediscover “Sophia,” which is the Greek word for wisdom. She is a feminine aspect of the divine found in the Hebrew Scriptures. Her presence in the male pantheon of gods has been obscured, but not completely eradicated. In the Gnostic writings, considered heretical by the “orthodox” church, Sophia was present at creation and escorted Adam and Eve toward self-awareness. Women are reclaiming Sophia as a representation of their own inner wisdom. No longer is “god's will” imposed from outside of their lives—wisdom unfolds from within them and is in sync with their own natural gifts and capacities. No longer available to turn their lives and wills over to gods, gurus, and experts, they’re refusing to surrender except to Wisdom's urgings. No longer abdicating responsibility for their lives, they are employing their own willfulness in harmony with Wisdom's ways.

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.

So you have no faith in the gods?’ Jiang asked. ‘I believe in the gods as much as the next Nikara does,’ she replied. ‘I believe in gods as a cultural reference. As metaphors. As things we refer to keep us safe because we can’t do anything else, as manifestations of our neuroses. But not as things that I truly trust are real. Not as things that hold actual consequence for the universe.’ She said this with a straight face, but she was exaggerating. Because she knew that something was real. She knew that on some level, there was more to the cosmos than what she encountered in the material world. She was not truly such a skeptic as she pretended to be. But the best way to get Jiang to explain anything was by taking radical positions, because when she argued from the extremes, he made his best arguments in response. He hadn’t yet taken the bait, so she continued: ‘If there is a divine creator, some ultimate moral authority, then why do bad things happen to good people? And why would this deity create people at all, since people are such imperfect beings?’ ‘But if nothing is divine, why do we ascribe godlike status to mythological figures?’ Jiang countered. ‘Why bow to the Great Tortoise? The Snail Goddess Nüwa? Why burn incense to the heavenly pantheon? Believing in any religion involves sacrifice. Why would any poor, penniless Nikara farmer knowingly make sacrifices to entities he knew were just myths? Who does that benefit? How did these practices originate?’ ‘I don’t know,’ admitted Rin. ‘Then find out. Find out the nature of the cosmos.’ Rin thought it was somewhat unreasonable to ask her to puzzle out what philosophers and theologians had been trying to answer for millennia, but she returned to the library. And came back with more questions still. ‘But how does the existence or nonexistence of the gods affect me? Why does it matter how the universe came to be?’ ‘Because you’re part of it. Because you exist. And unless you want to only ever be a tiny modicum of existence that doesn’t understand its relation to the grander web of things, you will explore.’ ‘Why should I’ ‘Because I know you want power.’ He tapped her forehead again. ‘But how can you borrow power from the gods when you don’t understand what they are?

And what about Hillel’s famous dictum (which, like Pascal’s, has been beaten to death)? Did Hillel not ask, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” I understood, of course. I listened respectfully to the rabbis and hospital chaplains. But I remembered my old friend Benny Lévy, the French Maoist leader and personal secretary to Sartre who turned to the study of the Torah, inviting me to ponder the rest of Hillel’s saying. Yes, of course, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” But Hillel followed that immediately by asking, “If I am only for myself, what am I?”2 Notice that Hillel said “what,” not “who.” He wanted us to understand clearly that if I am “only for me,” I become a “what,” a neutral being without qualities, a half-being, a thing. If I graze in the meadow of this me, he insisted, if I confine myself within the me-substance and the persevering ego (a specialty of the West that Covid-19 has raised to the Pantheon), then I am not much of anything; I am a subject without a predicate, a thing without qualification. I place myself under the tyranny of the object. Did someone say “the cult of me”?

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.

I’d go up to her house and lie on the carpet beside the long low bookshelves. My usual company was an edition of Aesop’s Fables and, perhaps my favorite, Bulfinch’s Mythology. I would leaf through the pages, pausing only to crack a few nuts while I absorbed accounts of flying horses, intricate labyrinths, and serpent-haired Gorgons who turned mortals to stone. I was in awe of Odysseus, and liked Zeus, Apollo, Hermes, and Athena well enough, but the deity I admired most had to be Hephaestus: the ugly god of fire, volcanoes, blacksmiths, and carpenters, the god of tinkerers. I was proud of being able to spell his Greek name, and of knowing that his Roman name, Vulcan, was used for the home planet of Spock from Star Trek. The fundamental premise of the Greco-Roman pantheon always stuck with me. Up at the summit of some mountain there was this gang of gods and goddesses who spent most of their infinite existence fighting with each other and spying on the business of humanity. Occasionally, when they noticed something that intrigued or disturbed them, they disguised themselves, as lambs and swans and lions, and descended the slopes of Olympus to investigate and meddle.

worship of gods. Buddhism told people that they should aim for the ultimate goal of complete liberation from suffering, rather than for stops along the way such as economic prosperity and political power. However, 99 per cent of Buddhists did not attain nirvana, and even if they hoped to do so in some future lifetime, they devoted most of their present lives to the pursuit of mundane achievements. So they continued to worship various gods, such as the Hindu gods in India, the Bon gods in Tibet, and the Shinto gods in Japan. Moreover, as time went by several Buddhist sects developed pantheons of Buddhas and bodhisattvas. These are human and non-human beings with the capacity to achieve full liberation from suffering but who forego this liberation out of compassion, in order to help the countless beings still trapped in the cycle of misery. Instead of worshipping gods, many Buddhists began worshipping these enlightened beings, asking them for help not only in attaining nirvana, but also in dealing with mundane problems. Thus we find many Buddhas and bodhisattvas throughout East Asia who spend their time bringing rain, stopping plagues, and even winning bloody wars – in exchange for prayers, colourful flowers, fragrant incense and gifts of rice and candy.

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.

WRITING GUIDES AND REFERENCES: A SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY The Artful Edit, by Susan Bell (Norton) The Art of Time in Memoir, by Sven Birkerts (Graywolf Press) The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard (Harper & Row) Writing with Power, by Peter Elbow (Oxford University Press) Writing Creative Nonfiction, edited by Carolyn Forché and Philip Gerard (Story Press) Tough, Sweet and Stuffy, by Walker Gibson (Indiana University Press) The Situation and the Story, by Vivian Gornick (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Intimate Journalism: The Art and Craft of Reporting Everyday Life, by Walt Harrington (Sage) On Writing, by Stephen King (Scribner) Telling True Stories, edited by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call (Plume) Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott (Pantheon) The Forest for the Trees, by Betsy Lerner (Riverhead) Unless It Moves the Human Heart, by Roger Rosenblatt (Ecco) The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White (Macmillan) Clear and Simple as the Truth, by Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner (Princeton University Press) Word Court, by Barbara Wallraff (Harcourt) Style, by Joseph M. Williams and Gregory G. Colomb (Longman) On Writing Well, by William Zinsser (Harper & Row) The Chicago Manual of Style, by University of Chicago Press staff (University of Chicago Press) Modern English Usage, by H. W. Fowler, revised edition by Sir Ernest Gowers (Oxford University Press) Modern American Usage, by Wilson Follett (Hill and Wang) Words into Type, by Marjorie E. Skillin and Robert M. Gay (Prentice-Hall) To CHRIS, SAMMY, NICK, AND MADDIE, AND TO TOMMY, JAMIE, THEODORE, AND PENNY

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.

He shook his head again. “I’m afraid I don’t feel much of anything these days. Especially not hope. I have no time or energy to waste on false wishes and dreams that won’t come true.” “Hope isn’t about ignorant wishing.” She surprised even herself with her defensive backlash. “Hope is about believing—believing there are better things in store for us if we just wait for them. It’s about understanding we’re not left completely on our own here, regardless of the way things appear.” Lamont snorted. “That ain’t much for a body to go on.” “Perhaps not, but I reckon it’s enough. Sometimes it’s gotta be, anyhow. Without hope, what would drive one onward?” He was silent for a long moment before he looked up and met her eyes. His own eyes displayed no emotion when he answered in a weary, grim tone, “Fear.” He took a drink and fell silent again as she quietly scrutinized him, attempting to discern in his haggard face the thoughts behind what he had said.

California, land of my dreams and my longing. You've seen me in New York and you know what I'm like there but in L.A., man, I tell you, I'm even more of a high-achiever - all fizz and push, a fixer, a bustler, a real new-dealer. Last December for a whole week my thirty-minute short Dean Street was being shown daily at the Pantheon of Celestial Arts. In squeaky-clean restaurants, round smoggy poolsides, in jungly jacuzzis I made my deals. Business went well and it all looked possible. It was in the pleasure area, as usual, that I found I had a problem. In L.A., you can't do anything unless you drive. Now I can't do anything unless I drink. And the drink-drive combination, it really isn't possible out there. If you so much as loosen your seatbelt or drop your ash or pick your nose, then it's an Alcatraz autopsy with the questions asked later. Any indiscipline, you feel, any variation, and there's a bullhorn, a set of scope sights, and a coptered pig drawing a bead on your rug. So what can a poor boy do? You come out of the hotel, the Vraimont. Over boiling Watts the downtown skyline carries a smear of God's green snot. You walk left, you walk right, you are a bank rat on a busy river. This restaurant serves no drink, this one serves no meat, this one serves no heterosexuals. You can get your chimp shampooed, you can get your dick tattooed, twenty-four hour, but can you get lunch? And should you see a sign on the far side of the street flashing BEEF-BOOZE-NO STRINGS, then you can forget it. The only way to get across the road is to be born there. All the ped-xing signs say DON'T WALK, all of them, all the time. That is the message, the content of Los Angeles: don't walk. Stay inside. Don't walk. Drive. Don't walk. Run! I tried the cabs. No use. The cabbies are all Saturnians who aren't even sure whether this is a right planet or a left planet. The first thing you have to do, every trip, is teach them how to drive.

Remain still; breathe naturally,” he whispered right in her ear, very, very quietly. She did as he suggested, not wanting to be found in the darkness with him by people too inebriated to observe a little discretion. And while she stood so close to him, the night breeze stirred the air, bringing Hazlit’s scent to Maggie’s nose. She puzzled over it, because it was faint but alluring. Complicated, like the man who wore it. Honeysuckle was the primary note, as sweet a scent as ever graced a bottle—and as intoxicating. She was marveling over that bit of deduction and deciding the undertone was bergamot, when she felt Hazlit’s hand in her hair. Holding her still? He gathered a few of the locks drifting over her right shoulder and rubbed them silently between his fingers. When had he taken off his gloves? Remain still; breathe naturally. It was good advice, when her heart wanted to pound, when she wanted both to run and to stand there forever, his fingers playing with her hair. His hand shifted so he brushed her hair back over her shoulder, just once. Maggie’s heart started to thud in her chest. She wasn’t frightened, exactly, but she was rattled. Men never touched her, not if they knew what was good for them, and she ought to abhor being rattled like this. She held still, waiting for him to repeat that simple caress. “They’re gone,” he said, still whispering. He took her by the wrist again and led her to the path, offering her his arm with perfect propriety. They returned to the house without incident, and Maggie thanked every merciful god in the pantheon she and her escort had missed the dancing. “Will you be going in to supper?” he asked. “I’d prefer not to.” And what had that business been with her hair? Was he going to pretend he hadn’t taken such a liberty? “I’ll fetch your coach. Find your wrap, and if you brought one, your reticule.” He offered her an ironic little bow and went off on his gentlemanly errand. Maggie was home and fighting her way toward sleep before she realized Hazlit hadn’t been pretending he’d never touched her hair. He’d been letting her ignore the fact that she’d allowed it. ***

In the first century BC, the funeral processions of members of the political elite, including females, even halted at the Forum, where an oration was delivered.99 The family also arranged for “living statues” to accompany the procession; these were actors wearing the masks of important ancestors who had themselves been honored with public statues. By these means, which endured into the Imperial Age, descendants created a publicly visible representation of their families and their position in society.100 How did surviving associates and relatives mark the exceptional nature of a funeral? On the one hand, they did it by ostentatiously neglecting their own outward appearance, leaving their hair unkempt (or at least without ornament), and wearing ragged, “dirty” (or at least dark) clothing. In sum, by renouncing signs of social distinction.101 At the same time, however, the opportunity for public exposure that the mourning ritual provided was not to be missed, for it was yet another opportunity to showcase the personal status or the prestige of the family or group.

Moreover, Nancy Sinatra was afflicted, as the overwhelming majority of Americans were, with monolingualism. Lana’s richer, more textured version of “Bang Bang” layered English with French and Vietnamese. Bang bang, je ne l’oublierai pas went the last line of the French version, which was echoed by Pham Duy’s Vietnamese version, We will never forget. In the pantheon of classic pop songs from Saigon, this tricolor rendition was one of the most memorable, masterfully weaving together love and violence in the enigmatic story of two lovers who, regardless of having known each other since childhood, or because of knowing each other since childhood, shoot each other down. Bang bang was the sound of memory’s pistol firing into our heads, for we could not forget love, we could not forget war, we could not forget lovers, we could not forget enemies, we could not forget home, and we could not forget Saigon. We could not forget the caramel flavor of iced coffee with coarse sugar; the bowls of noodle soup eaten while squatting on the sidewalk; the strumming of a friend’s guitar while we swayed on hammocks under coconut trees; the football matches played barefoot and shirtless in alleys, squares, parks, and meadows; the pearl chokers of morning mist draped around the mountains; the labial moistness of oysters shucked on a gritty beach; the whisper of a dewy lover saying the most seductive words in our language, anh oi; the rattle of rice being threshed; the workingmen who slept in their cyclos on the streets, kept warm only by the memories of their families; the refugees who slept on every sidewalk of every city; the slow burning of patient mosquito coils; the sweetness and firmness of a mango plucked fresh from its tree; the girls who refused to talk to us and who we only pined for more; the men who had died or disappeared; the streets and homes blown away by bombshells; the streams where we swam naked and laughing; the secret grove where we spied on the nymphs who bathed and splashed with the innocence of the birds; the shadows cast by candlelight on the walls of wattled huts; the atonal tinkle of cowbells on mud roads and country paths; the barking of a hungry dog in an abandoned village; the appetizing reek of the fresh durian one wept to eat; the sight and sound of orphans howling by the dead bodies of their mothers and fathers; the stickiness of one’s shirt by afternoon, the stickiness of one’s lover by the end of lovemaking, the stickiness of our situations; the frantic squealing of pigs running for their lives as villagers gave chase; the hills afire with sunset; the crowned head of dawn rising from the sheets of the sea; the hot grasp of our mother’s hand; and while the list could go on and on and on, the point was simply this: the most important thing we could never forget was that we could never forget.

Needless to say, what whites now think and say about race has undergone a revolution. In fact, it would be hard to find other opinions broadly held by Americans that have changed so radically. What whites are now expected to think about race can be summarized as follows: Race is an insignificant matter and not a valid criterion for any purpose—except perhaps for redressing wrongs done to non-whites. The races are equal in every respect and are therefore interchangeable. It thus makes no difference if a neighborhood or nation becomes non-white or if white children marry outside their race. Whites have no valid group interests, so it is illegitimate for them to attempt to organize as whites. Given the past crimes of whites, any expression of racial pride is wrong. The displacement of whites by non-whites through immigration will strengthen the United States. These are matters on which there is little ground for disagreement; anyone who holds differing views is not merely mistaken but morally suspect. By these standards, of course, most of the great men of America’s past are morally suspect, and many Americans are embarrassed to discover what our traditional heroes actually said. Some people deliberately conceal this part of our history. For example, the Jefferson Memorial has the following quotation from the third president inscribed on the marble interior: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people [the Negroes] shall be free.” Jefferson did not end those words with a period, but with a semicolon, after which he wrote: “nor is it less certain that the two races equally free, cannot live under the same government.” The Jefferson Memorial was completed in 1942. A more contemporary approach to the past is to bring out all the facts and then repudiate historical figures. This is what author Conor Cruise O’Brien did in a 1996 cover story for The Atlantic Monthly. After detailing Jefferson’s views, he concluded: “It follows that there can be no room for a cult of Thomas Jefferson in the civil religion of an effectively multiracial America . . . . Once the facts are known, Jefferson is of necessity abhorrent to people who would not be in America at all if he could have had his way.” Columnist Richard Grenier likened Jefferson to Nazi SS and Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler, and called for the demolition of the Jefferson Memorial “stone by stone.” It is all very well to wax indignant over Jefferson’s views 170 years after his death, but if we expel Jefferson from the pantheon where do we stop? Clearly Lincoln must go, so his memorial must come down too. Washington owned slaves, so his monument is next. If we repudiate Jefferson, we do not just change the skyline of the nation’s capital, we repudiate practically our entire history. This, in effect, is what some people wish to do. American colonists and Victorian Englishmen saw the expansion of their race as an inspiring triumph. Now it is cause for shame. “The white race is the cancer of human history,” wrote Susan Sontag. The wealth of America used to be attributed to courage, hard work, and even divine providence. Now, it is common to describe it as stolen property. Robin Morgan, a former child actor and feminist, has written, “My white skin disgusts me. My passport disgusts me. They are the marks of an insufferable privilege bought at the price of others’ agony.

Dalla parte opposta Antoine-Luois-Leon Florelle de Saint-Just, pallido, fronte bassa, profilo regolare, sguardo misterioso, tristezza profonda, ventitré anni; Merlin de Thionville, chiamato dai tedeschi Feuer-Teufel, diavolo di fuoco; Merlin de Douai, criminale autore della legge dei sospetti; Soubrany, che il popolo volle come generale al primo pratile; l'ex curato Lebon che maneggiava la spada con la mano un tempo benedicente; Billaud-Varennes che sognava una magistratura dell'avvenire senza giudici, affidata a soli arbitri; Fabre d'Eglantine, che ebbe una piacevole trovata , il calendario repubblicano, come Rouget de Lisle ebbe un'ispirazione sublime, La Marsigliese, ma l'uno come l'altro senza ritorni spirituali; Manuel, il procuratore della Comune, il quale sentenziò: «Un re morto non rappresenta un uomo di meno»; Goujon che era entrato nelle truppe a Trippe Lacroix, avvocato fattosi generale e creato cavaliere di San Luigi sei giorni prima del 12 agosto; Frèron Thersiste, figlio di Fréron-Zoile; Ruhl, inesorabile nell'esaminare il contenuto del famoso armadio di ferro, predestinato al suicidio, da perfetto repubblicano, il giorno in cui fosse caduta la repubblica; Fouché, anima demoniaca e viso cadaverico; Camboulas, l'amico di di Père Duchéne, che rimproverava a Guilliotin: «Tu appartieni al Club dei Foglianti, ma tua figlia al Club dei giacobini» Jagot, che obiettava a coloro che non approvavano la nudità dei carcerati. « Una prigione è pur sempre un abito di pietra»; Javagues, il macabro violatore di tombe di Saint-Denis; Osselin, proscrittore che concedeva asilo a una proscritta, Madame Charry; Bentabolle, il quale nelle funzioni di presidente, dava al pubblico il segnale degli applausi o delle imprecazioni; il giornalista Robert, marito di Kéralio, la quale scriveva: «Né Robespierre né Marta frequentano la mia casa, Robespierrre vi può venire quando vuole, Marat non vi metterà mai piede»; Garan Coulon, che a seguito dell'intervento della Spagna nel processo contro Luigi XVI aveva chiesto fieramente che l'assemblea non si degnasse di dar lettura della lettera di un re a favore di un altro re; Grégoire, vescovo degno della Chiesa primitiva, il quale sotto l'Impero, cancellò poi la sua fede repubblicana, assumendo il titolo di conte Grégoire; Amar, che affermava: «La terra intera condanna Luigi XVI. A chi appellarsi contro la condanna, ai pianeti?» Rouyer, il quale si era opposto all'impiego del cannone dal Pont – Neuf asserendo: «La testa di un re non deve, cadendo, far più rumore della testa di un uomo qualsiasi»; Chénier, fratello di André; Vadier, uno di quelli che posarono una pistola sulla tribuna; Tanis, che diceva a Momoro: «Voglio che Robespierre e Marat si riappacifichino alla mia tavola». «Dove abitate? A Charenton. «Mi sarei stupito che abitaste altrove»; Legendre, il macellaio della rivoluzione d'Inghilterra: « Vieni dunque che ti spacchi la testa», gridava a Lanjuinais; E costui rispondeva: «Devi ottenere prima un decreto che mi classifiche tra i buoi»; Collot d'Herbois, macabro commediante che portava sul viso l'antica maschera con due bocche, una per il sì e una per il no, uomo che approvava con l'una ciò che biasimava con l'alra, pronto ad accusare Carrier a Nantes e a deificare Châlier a Lione, a inviare Robespierre al patibolo e Marat al Pantheon; Génissieux, il quale chiedeva la pena di morte contro chiunque portasse su di sé la medaglia rappresentante Luigi XVI martirizzato; Leonard Bourdain, il maestro di scuola che aveva offerto la sua casa al vegliardo di Mont-Jura;Topsent, marinaio; Goupilleau, avvocato; Laurent Lecointre, commerciante; Duhem, medico; Sergent, scultore; David,pittore; Joseph Égalité, principe. Atri ancora: Lecointe-Piuraveau, il quale chiedeva che Marat «fosse riconosciuto in stato di demenza»;

It is well attested that the Stoics called their divine principle Zeus. They admitted other divinities in the Greek pantheon as aspects or manifestations of the single divine principle and identified them as entities in—or rather, elements of—the world.

In the Aitareya Brahmana, the breath (asu) of Brahma-Prajapati became alive, and from that breath he created the Asuras. Later on, after the war, the Asuras are called the enemies of the gods, hence—"A-suras," the initial "A" being a negative prefix—or "no-gods" -- the "gods" being referred to as "Suras." This then connects the Asuras and their "Hosts," enumerated further on, with the "Fallen Angels" of the Christian Churches, a hierarchy of spiritual Beings to be found in every Pantheon of ancient and even modern nations—from the Zoroastrian down to that of the Chinaman. They are the sons of the primeval Creative Breath at the beginning of every new Maha Kalpa, or Manvantara; in the same rank as the Angels who had remained "faithful." These were the allies of Soma (the parent of the Esoteric Wisdom) as against Brihaspati (representing ritualistic or ceremonial worship). Evidently they have been degraded in Space and Time into opposing powers or demons by the ceremonialists, on account of their rebellion against hypocrisy, sham-worship, and the dead-letter form.

But now suppose that early humans, equipped with a hypersensitive agency detector, a new abilityto engage in shared intentionality, and a love of stories, begin to talk about their many misperceptions. Suppose they begin attributing agency to the weather. (Thunder and lightning sure make it seem as though somebody up in the sky is angry at us.) Suppose a group of humans begins jointly creating a pantheon of invisible agents who cause the weather, and other assorted cases of good or bad fortune. Voilà—the birth of supernatural agents, not as an adaptation for anything but as a by-product of a cognitive module that is otherwise highly adaptive.

Inscriptions in the Dome of the Rock proclaimed the mission of Islam, the truth of the new faith, and the surpassing of the old faith. These passages name Muhammad as the envoy of God, but they bless Jesus and acknowledge him as a prophet and messiah. They acknowledge blessings for the day when Jesus is raised up again but deny that he is the son of God. Is the mention of Jesus meant to include him in the Muslim pantheon and thus appeal to Christians? Or is the intention to refute the Christian doctrines of Jesus’s divinity and to convert them to Islam?

Purell is a fetish. Once one carries it—I have noticed from those who do—it seems necessary throughout the day to cleanse. It reflects a constant awareness that the world is awash with bacteria and you, going about your innocent carefree way, are all the while collecting microbes that can murder you or at least give you the twenty-four-hour flu. It’s awkward to turn down Purell, so I didn’t. That struck almost as powerfully as the Pantheon, I’m ashamed to admit. It’s as if one is saying, I prefer germs, I prefer to eat with dirty hands, I have poor hygiene. I am a pig.

the Aeon of Isis we identified with the earth. Life came miraculously from earth and woman. All magical pantheons were aspects of the Goddess. Death was a mystery whose depths were impossible to plumb. In the Aeon of Osiris we identified with the dying/resurrected sun. All magical pantheons were aspects of God the Father. Death could be magically overcome by obedience to formulae, rites and doctrine.

the Aeon of Horus we identify with the self-radiant, ever-living sun. All magical pantheons have become aspects of ourselves. We, like the sun, do not die. Death, like night, is an illusion. Life is now seen as a process of continual growth and humanity is developing a consciousness of the continuity of existence that will eventually dissolve the sting of death.53

The first and better known is Mesoamerica, where half a dozen societies, the Olmec first among them, rose in the centuries before Christ. The second is the Peruvian littoral, home of a much older civilization that has come to light only in the twenty-first century.* 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.

He glanced up at the hole in the ceiling. "Yes," he said brusquely. "Like the Pantheon.

My friend’s dad was a teacher in the local public schools, a loyal member of the teachers’ union, and a more dedicated liberal than most: not only had he been a staunch supporter of George McGovern, but in the 1980 Democratic primary he had voted for Barbara Jordan, the black U.S. Representative from Texas. My friend, meanwhile, was in those days a high school Republican, a Reagan youth who fancied Adam Smith ties and savored the writing of William F. Buckley. The dad would listen to the son spout off about Milton Friedman and the godliness of free-market capitalism, and he would just shake his head. Someday, kid, you’ll know what a jerk you are. It was the dad, though, who was eventually converted. These days he votes for the farthest-right Republicans he can find on the ballot. The particular issue that brought him over was abortion. A devout Catholic, my friend’s dad was persuaded in the early nineties that the sanctity of the fetus outweighed all of his other concerns, and from there he gradually accepted the whole pantheon of conservative devil-figures: the elite media and the American Civil Liberties Union, contemptuous of our values; the la-di-da feminists; the idea that Christians are vilely persecuted—right here in the U.S. of A. It doesn’t even bother him, really, when his new hero Bill O’Reilly blasts the teachers’ union as a group that “does not love America.

But we should be wary of restricting the idea of meaningful work too tightly, of focusing only on the doctors, the nuns of Kolkata or the Old Masters. There can be less exalted ways to contribute to the furtherance of the collective good and it seems that making a perfectly formed stripey chocolate circle which helps to fill an impatient stomach in the long morning hours between nine o'clock and noon may deserve its own secure, if microscopic, place in the pantheon of innovations designed to alleviate the burdens of existence.

Sterling Memorial, the main library at Yale, had been built to resemble a Gothic cathedral, replete with stained glass, carved stonework, and a crenellated tower. Completed in 1930, the structure was "as near to modern Gothic as we dared" according to its architect, James Gamble Rogers. The use of the word "dare" always intrigued me. It suggested boundaries and infractions. There was, as I had come to expect at Yale, a scandalous story attached to the library's design. The benefactress, an old woman with failing eyesight, wanted a place of worship, and Yale wanted a library. Flouting its own motto, Lux et Veritas, Yale presented her with a structural trompe l'oeil. A cathedral in its outlines, but in its details a pantheon to books, where King Lear was a demigod and Huckleberry Finn a mischievous angel. The visual world had already become a greasy smudge to the benefactress, so the old biddy died never knowing the difference. Light and Truth, indeed.

He ripped aside the veil of respectability with which the ancients had clothed their traditional gods and goddesses and exposed the sordid reality underneath. What Socrates and Plato had started, the overthrow of the pagan pantheon, Origen’s Christianity finished.

For the goddess was only a figment of Valia’s inner pantheon, which she herself ruled, an adjunct to Valia. As magic was. Which might explain why her talent was so poor.