decalogue

The always inspired and insightful This American Life reprises acts from earlier episodes to reflect on the Ten Commandments just after Pesach and Easter and the way those fundamental rules bind and perpetuate social order and how transgressions are addressed.
All of the stories are interesting but it was especially the first vignette, a memory by Shalom Auslander, in which a pupil at Chabad (Jewish Religious School) is informed that he bears one of the seven-two names of God and as the third Commandment directs, “shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” Peace was not the most common epithet for the divine but a strict interpretation of the law and customs (chumra) dictate that not only must special care be taken to avoid blasphemy and not to invoke God’s name to do harm, writing it down created something holy out of the profane and had to be handled in a fitting fashion. Ephemera and papers bearing the name of God were to be collected in a shaimos (name) box and once full, buried respectably in a storage structure (genizah) at a synagogue or cemetery according to tradition. School assignments and paper lunch bags from Auslander were permanently archived along with retired torah and prayers.

throwing down the gauntlet

We’ve yet to see the concluding chapters of the Avengers’ franchise and only know of Death-Dealing Thanos (no spoilers, please) but have been exposed enough to the references and artefacts to appreciate the resemblance that the super villain’s glove has to this reliquary which holds the uncorrupted hand of Teresa of Ávila (*1515 – †1582).
A noble woman whose Jewish ancestors were coerced to convert during the Spanish Inquisition, this Doctor of the Church was called to the monastic and contemplative life and after canonisation was a candidate for the patron saint of Spain—just edged out by James (Santiago de Zebedeo) and Catherine of Siena (whose Feast Day is coincidentally today). The well-travelled reformer succumbed to illness on the way to Alba de Tormes, just as most of Europe was switching from the Julian to Gregorian calendar so there’s some debate as to the time of her death and when to observe her Saint’s Day—15 October according to liturgical calendars, and her exumed body was dismembered and spread as relics to holy sites and the convents that she founded, her left eye and right hand going to Ronda in Andalusia, the later pictured next to the cinematic prop being kept by Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, sort of like the Lance of Longinus, until his death when the treasure was restored to the nunnery.

osterbrunnen

Sourced back as a tradition expanding outward from the Fränkische Schweiz (Franconian Switzerland) region in the early 1900s when public fountains started to lose a measure of their civil importance as more homes were being retrofitted with modern plumbing, decorating them and the village centre with eggs, ribbon and garlands for Eastertide has spread to other areas in Germany.

Though the ritual of well-dressing is a custom that goes back much further, communities have grown acutely aware and proud of their handiwork, since the 1950s generally put out on the day before Palm Sunday, that continues to evolve as a teachable and instagrammable lesson—plastic eggs having become the norm due to vandalism but many are returning to more authentic materials to celebrate the season and the rites of Spring.

sakoku

Within a couple decades after Commodore Perry compelled Japan to open its doors to the West with the Treaty of Shimoda, Japanese society was beginning to relax its taboos against the consumption of meat other than seafood signalled by Emperor Mutsuhito’s 1872 New Year’s repast of beef—which caused much consternation among devout Buddhists who had helped cultivate the prohibition for over twelve centuries.
The Meiji administration changed its policy of isolation and was eager to adopt Western ways and technologies, effectively rescinding a decree from Emperor Tenmu in the seventh century not to eat useful animals during the farming season, which came to be a general avoidance (a heavy penance was put in place or transgression) for practical reasons as well as the belief in transmigration of the soul and the chance that would could be reincarnated as a cow or boar.

sunday drive: kloster kreuzberg

Built on the western-face of Franconia’s “holy mountain” with some six hundred thousand visitors and host to eighty pilgrimages yearly and not to mention one our favourite nearby locales, I was a bit taken aback to find that I had neglected to make mention of the Franciscan Kreuzberg Cloister beforehand—but will make amends for the place we went to again today, taking advantage of the sunny and clear though cold day.
Until Irish missionaries arrived in the mid-seventeenth century, the mountain was known as Aschberg (after a warlike race of Norse gods Æsir, like the titans as distinct from the Olympians, and not the tree, however) and ostensibly the site of a tree-worshiping cult before being rebranded in the native language after Golgotha.  A convent was later formed and in the early 1700s, the brothers were granted a charter to brew beer (it is hard to object to a group of sequestered individuals who earn their keep through prayer and beer), which is still a major attraction to this day.
After making sport in the snow or hiking the trails, most repair to the guesthouse for a beer and refreshments. The monks also raise Saint Bernards to rescue the wayward, but the newest additions in the kennel were not in the mood to have their pictures taken.  We are sure to return another time when the place is a bit less crowded and once again more conducive to exploring.

ōmisoka

Having adopted the Western solar system of timekeeping as its official civil calendar at the beginning of the Meiji dynasty in 1873, Japanese new year’s customs are a rich fusion of traditional and adopted customs and rituals.
In addition to purification rites and sharing a bowl of long noodles with neighbours that symbolically bridge the span between new and old, areas with a Buddhist temple will ring their bells to atone for the one-hundred and eight earthly temptations that are the cause of human suffering. These enumerated kleshas (煩悩) are mental states (greed, sloth, pulverbatching, being hangry, irusu,  Vemödalen, and so forth) that are the mind-killers and manifest in poor decisions and destructive behaviour, and are in the broadest sense ignorance, attachment and aversion. Though it’s far beyond my cursory familiarity to wade further into the subject, it’s nonetheless comforting to know that the bonshō are tolling for us.

þorláksmessa

Though not officially recognised as part of the Calendar of the Saints until Pope John Paul II made it official in 1984 and followed up with a visit to the island, Saint Þorlákur Þórhallsson—Thorlak Thornhallsson, Bishop of Skálholt, had been considered the patron of Iceland for the greater part of a millennia.

His feast day, today, the anniversary of his death in 1193, marked the end of the customary Christmas time of fasting and signaled for households to prepare for Christmas in earnest, doing the last-minute shopping and finishing decorating the tree. Traditionally, Icelanders have skate, a sort of ray-like fish, on this evening—Thorlak also being the patron of fisherman and currently under consideration, informal investigation for being nominated as the patron saint of Autism, apparently as his interventions (we’re not exactly sure why but everyone needs a cause and a champion) have proved especially helpful for those on the spectrum.

the funk of forty-thousand years

I can’t exactly pin-point the appeal of this vintage audio grimoire—released by Capitol Records in 1969 as a double eight-track tape—except to say that people respond to stories and can’t exactly vouch for the accuracy of the history and witch culture presented, but this recording from Vincent Price, “Witchcraft-Magic: An Adventure in Demonology” is incredibly soothing and somehow enchanting.  With interstitials by the witches’ chorus from Hamlet, Price masterfully delivers anecdotes and instructional lessons of how to summon the unseen, as well as the antithetical, graphic explanation for witch-hunts over the fragility of the male ego and challenging the hierarchy.

8x8

window dressing: a growing gallery of the store front of Tokyo, via Everlasting Blört

via galactica: the short-run Broadway space opera whose plot left audiences baffled

outsider art: the musical stylings of Superstar & Star

hand play: hyper-realistic digital animation from Jesper Lindborg

jornada del muerto: an arresting photographic essay of atomic tests, via Nag on the Lake

autohagiography: staging an adaptation of the first English confessional autobiography, the non-traditional saint Margery Kempe, whose first aspirations were as to become an alewife

patteran: a comprehensive primer on the coded hieroglyphics of vagrants and migratory workers (previously)

claim-jumping: meet the man who owns the Moon

ultragoth

Thanks to a clever member of the Twitterati, we learn to our delight that there was a sixth century consort of the king of the Neustrain Franks of the Merovingian dynasty (previously here, here and here), wife of Chodebert I who ruled Paris and the western part of Gaul, called Ultragoth.
Charitably, Childebert is credited for bringing Roman Catholicism to Spain, at the request of his sister Chlortilde who claimed she was being berated and abused for her faith by King Amalaric of the Visigoths (an attested follower of Arius), who brought an army to settle this domestic dispute and invaded the peninsula, ousting the heretical Visigoths in favour of a dynasty more closely aligned with the Church.  Childebert also plundered some relics from Spain, including the dalmatic vestments of Saint Vincent of Saragossa, which Ultragoth found suitable homes for. Likely spelt Ultrogothe (or Vulthrogotha, which is also cool) in Franconian, not to be a spoil-sport, there’s no indication of frequency or popularity for the name but other female regnants and consorts (which seem to never be repeated) included Ermengarde, Himiltrude, Chimnechild, Radegund, Amalberga, Bilichild, Waldrada, Fulberte, Wulfegundis and Wisigard. Nothing else is known of Childebert’s wife other than that she, having failed to produce sons and therefore heirs, and her daughters, Chrodoberge and Chrodesinde, were sent into exile after the king’s death—as was their custom, and his share of the kingdom reverted to his younger brother, Chlothar.

freedom of religion is also freedom from religion

We were a little familiar with the personage of Ingersoll (*1833 - †1899) though the occasional quotation featured on Cynical-C, whose author has happily reconsidered retiring from blogging, but had not invested learning more about the figure, who is regarded as one of the greater orators and politicians of the United States of America during the Golden Age of Free Thought (the freethinking movement that coalesced with the conclusion of the US Civil War in 1865 and lasted until roughly the outbreak of World War I—but did not get the needed extra academic nudge until learning that this day is (among a few other things) the anniversary of Robert Green Ingersoll’s birth.
I wonder what the noted lawyer and politician called “The Great Agnostic” would make of such a day of obligation. Amazingly popular and charismatic as a speaker, despite attacks levied against his character for disdaining organised religion and spirituality that did not compliment scientific inquiry, logic and humanism, audiences would pay the sum of one-dollar entry fees (nominally, around thirty dollars in today’s money but that’s a simplistic comparison considering how far a dollar stretched back then and what else a person could get instead for that admission price) and attended to Ingersoll’s every word. Credited with informing the way we understand the separation of church and state as well as reviving Thomas Payne as an important, foundational figure in socio-political thought, many of Ingersoll’s lectures, whose topics were not limited to disabusing superstition and fealty but also humility, family, universal suffrage, civil rights and Shakespeare, were improvised but many others were committed to print—which one can peruse here in full or, if you’d rather, as a daily digest.

talent pool

As part of a larger discussion on the pace of technological advancement, Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen introduces us to the Grand Ise Shirine complex in the Mie prefecture of Japan and how process and institutional knowledge play a big role in progress.

The architectural style dates back to antiquity and can be referenced in no other structures—this site being holy to the sun goddess Amaterasu, housing the Imperial artefact the Sacred Mirror—and is characterised by gabled and thatched roofs with plank walls. To ensure that the buildings are forever both new and ancient and that succeeding generations know the craft and technique of construction, for at least the past twelve hundred years, the old shrines and the wooden bridge that spans the Isuzu River (namesake of the automotive company) have been dismantled and rebuilt on a site adjacent to exact specifications every twenty years. The cycle of renewal is called Sengu, and the present buildings (originals in their sixty-first iteration) date from 2013.

6x6

we don’t deserve dogs: a very good boy in Madrid demonstrates his life-saving skills

heat-exchange: we’ve crossed a critical climate point-of-no-return in the Barents Sea

german engineering: a proposal for a solar power plant that’s nearly a century old plus an even older printing-press that ran on sunshine

thinking you’re impervious to the dunning-kruger effect is itself an example of the dunning-kruger effect: more on the psychological observation (previously) that helps explain why we’re all confidently incompetent

pr’s pr award: the World Architectural Festival has announced its finalists for building of the year

the pearl of great price: plans to build a Mormon utopian community of microhousing (based on the biblical Enoch’s exceptional righteous, and rapture-ready city) poses a threat to Vermont’s historic village, via Super Punch

𒍪 og súmersk trúarbrögð

As reported by BBC Monitoring and News from Elsewhere, in response to a surge in membership, Iceland’s Zuism community, a revival of the ancient Sumerian religion—considered the most venerable and precursor to all other forms of faith, is seeking permission to construct a two-storey ziggurat in Reykjavík as a meeting place for their growing congregation.
Having spread across Scandinavia, in part due to the fact that adherents are not subjected to the tithing that applies to other state-recognised religions and that instead the tax revenues are used to support social welfare projects, the name derives from the verb to know zu (𒍪) and references the thunder-bird god of wisdom Zú or Imdugud and the theogony also includes four main divinities: An or Dingir—the heavens associated with the north celestial pole who crosses the skies in the Little Dipper (constellation Usra Minor), Ninhursag, Mother Earth—or the Lady of the Mountain, Enki—the lord of the harvest and agriculture and Enlil, the weather god. There’s a whole cast of heroes and minor deities as well whose counterparts are readily recognised. He that you call Jupiter, we call Marduk. In addition to influencing religions to follow, the Mesopotamian civilisation also invented taxation and debt but with the understanding that in order to avoid the ill societal effects of a crippling burden, it was necessary to have the occasional debt-forgiveness—a practise which the Zuistar (what members call themselves) hope champion and to reintroduce as well.

inherit the wind

Following Turkey’s and Florida’s decision to strike evolution from its public school curriculum, the state of Arizona is set to order that science textbooks and syllabi be revised to remove references to evolution and the Big Bang and replace them with euphemistic phrases, in order to avoid the appearance of unfairly subjecting students to indoctrination.

Though the possibilities which religious fundamentalists consider conjecture rather than an accepted, progressing fact because they have “theory” (a generalised and consistent description of how things work, contrasted with practise) attached to them are not completely edited out, the awkward language enlisted to avoid the terminology associated with natural selection and current cosmology accomplishes what it was designed to do in failing to impart students with critical-thinking skills and an interest in the sciences. Let’s hope that the kids are more resilient than the forces of regression and devolution.

pfingsten

Today is the Feast of the Pentecost (Pfingsten, previously)—coming ten days after the Feast of the Assumption (Christi Himmelfahrt, a Thursday observance that’s translated into Fathers’ Day in Germany and a long weekend)—which marks what many to believe is the foundational moment of the Church when the Holy Ghost again descends and speaks to His followers.
We have in our front garden what are known as Pfingstrosen (peony in English and named for Paeon the hapless physician’s apprentice of Asclepius who had a bit of an ego problem and did not want to see the student surpassing the teacher, and was turned into a flower by Zeus to protect him from the healer’s wrath) because they bloom around the time of movable feast—too soon but maybe they’ll open up later today.
This year Pentecost—from the Greek for the fifty(ish) day after Passover—coincides with the saint day of Lucifer of Cagliari, a fourth century bishop of Sardinia, who as a staunch orthodox and fighter against Arianism would be pleased to see that the tripartite being of the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost has endured—rather than the heretical belief that Jesus was God’s son and not eternal and coterminous with the divine. While many appreciated Lucifer’s fervent support for one, united theological front, others regarded him as an abrasive bully who did not allow freedom in interpretation. Enjoying fine strawberries on Pfingsten, which we’ll do later, is said to signal a good year for wine.

jubilee

Naked Capitalism features an engrossing and thought-provoking interview with economist and professor Michael Hudson on what ancient civilisations can teach us about how we frame debt, poverty and opportunity. As the tradition of burying a ruler with their material wealth was tool of social justice as much as the belief such grave goods were useful for the afterlife, debt-forgiveness was a common institution in Western Antiquity—although money or labour in abeyance was generally to the ruler himself or a cadre of wealthy aristocrats who could absorb sunk costs readily and could dispense a bit of kindness by writing debt off.

Peer-to-peer exchanges were enforced but the ruling class was interested (it’s conjectured) with keeping their labour and defensive forces free of crippling obligations or indentured to some intermediary. With the rise of the merchant class and the decentralisation of economies, there were more and more in the game that could not afford not to be paid and Rome became the first major civilisation not to continue in the tradition. In hoc to creditors over the Republic’s rapid expansion and broad network of trade, a century of civil war (the crisis of the Republic that resulted in Imperium) followed from this decision, punctuated over the decades by the systematic assassination of advocates for a return to practise of debt-forgiveness, Christianity being one of the chief proponents until the Empire realised it could not suppress the message directly, co-opted the Church’s organisation and hierarchy.

freixenet

This overview of medieval European microstates (micronations can be equally idiosyncratic but with severely limited recognition) that came into being either through omission, neglect or force, with nearly half still in existence, struck us a fascinating material and urged us to learn more. One favourite that we had not heard of was the outpost Fraxinet, a stronghold founded and held by Muslim pirates (a press-gang) sailing from Andalusia (al-Andalus) in the vicinity of Saint-Tropez in the late ninth century.
The settlement expanded and was as much a centre of trade and commerce as a place of piracy, if not more, and peace was negotiated among other Frankish ruling families in the area. The uneasy peace held for an astonishing eighty years with the Andalusis bringing all sorts of innovations to the indigenous people, including medical skills, tar, ceramics and the tambourine, but Fraxinet finally ended with the Battle of Tourtour when a group of nobles from Provence dispatched with the raiders, worried that they would seize control of an important Alpine pass nearby, conveniently spurred to action at the ransoming of an influential abbot.

snowbirds

The always brilliant Nag on the Lake directs our attention to a rather fascinating annual ritual through the photo-essay by Alice Gregory and Dina Litovsky that documents the end of vacation season, running from after October’s harvest to spring planting in April when the fields are fallow, for the “Plain People”—that is communities of the Amish, Anabaptists and Mennonites from rural Pennsylvania and Ohio—who are bussed down to a neighbourhood in Sarasota, Florida to enjoy an extended vacation away from the farm and harsh winters and to spend time with other members of their groups that are outside of their immediate communities, in fact any outsiders. Being on holiday, some of the strictures that determine their code of conduct are relaxed a little and for people that consider hard-labour and self-sufficiency sacred virtues, momentary leisure is to be savoured.

kreuzweg oder via dolorosa

Taking advantage of the fine weather, H and I rumbled about on the scenic Hochrhönstraße that’s a stretch of road that forms one of the few connections through the biosphere reserve, linking moor and mountain and on the return trip stopped in the village of Nordheim, near Fladungen.
Just outside of the village on a high hill is the Chapel of Saint Sebastian—dedicated in 1670 and then deconcentrated in 1804 with the secularization of church property by the Kingdom of Bavaria, though thankfully the chapel’s ensemble remained intact.
At the base of the hill there was a Marian Grotto (Mariengrotto, a shrine) and then the footpath up the slope was line with a series of bas relief sculptures depicting the Stations of the Cross.

The weather has been fair and there are signs of Spring (some activity we were afraid came prematurely before the last cold snaps) but it struck me that the only green on the great old trees lining the path was from mistletoe (Mistel) and I wondered if the plant that many consider just a parasite might not be more of a partner in regulating seasonal cycles.
The chapel, dedicated to saint and martyr Sebastian, featured him prominently in his most familiar iconographic form—though he survived that volley of arrows with the interdiction of Saint Irene only to be clubbed to death by Emperor Diocletian’s henchmen during the purges of the Christians for not being accommodating and succumbing to their first attack.

Everything was vibrant and expressive and one has to wonder how such visual brilliance might be the only exposure that the common person had to fuel their imagination and limn their artistic horizons in a world that was certainly not bleak or colourless but for whom art and artifice were rarer things.   It was also significantly colder inside the chapel than it was outside, for whatever reason, with our breath visible.
There’s also a shrine dedicated to Saint Anthony of Padua (Hl. Antonius von Padua) who is the patron of swineherds, bakers, social-workers, mine-workers and travellers as well as who to turn to to remedy infertility, match-making and lost things plus reputed to have once preached to a school of fish. It was certainly an impressive place to discover and we cannot wait to happen upon more local treasures.