DOCSLIB.ORG

University of California Santa Cruz Anxious Assumptions

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
University of California Santa Cruz Anxious Assumptions UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ ANXIOUS ASSUMPTIONS: ANXIETY, EXPERIENCE, AND LITERARY REPRESENTATION IN MODERNITY A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in LITERATURE by Brian Clack March 2017 The Thesis of Brian Clack is approved: __________________________ Professor Dorian Bell, Chair __________________________ Professor Richard Terdiman __________________________ Professor Vilashini Cooppan __________________________ Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Brian Clack 2017 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract v Introduction 1 Section One The Etiology of Modernity’s Anxiety 9 Section Two The Experience of Modernity, its Metaphors, and the Site of Anxiety 37 Section Three Zola’s Volatile Representations and Engagement with Empty(ied) Space 83 Bibliography 121 iii iv ABSTRACT Brian Clack Anxious Assumptions: Anxiety, Experience, and Literary Representation in Modernity This thesis explores the intersections of anxiety, experience, and literary representation in modernity, with a focus on the late nineteenth century. Anxiety is traditionally thought to be the catalyst for and subject of modern literature. This assumption is frequently made with minimal consideration for the nature of anxiety or the material experience that gives rise to it. This thesis explores the etiology of anxiety and resituates its unique presence in modernity within a dialectical framework. I use this framework to reconsider political and economic experience in Europe during the nineteenth century and its relationship with anxiety. I argue for a new conception, volatility of experience, which better captures the plurality of movement during this time. In section three, I use this conceptualization to consider two works of Émile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart and how these texts represent volatility while attempting to manage its resulting anxiety through the incorporation of colonial space. v vi INTRODUCTION Anxiety animates the modern fictional narrative. It is both the catalyst for and primary subject of a wide variety of literary output. In Useful Fictions, Michael Austin makes this connection simply: “humans think largely in narratives… so our anxiety always has a narrative component. Therefore, so must its resolution” (xv). In his work on mythic literary structures, Claude Lévi-Strauss argues that the purpose of ancient myth was to provide “a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction (an impossible achievement if, as it happens, the contradiction is real)” – another form of anxiety management to be sure (229). While structurally different from myth, the modern novel has taken up myth’s underlying project in more complex and comprehensive ways. This effort is timely because modernity is thought to be the most anxious epoch in human history – as the title of W.H. Auden’s famous eclogue makes clear, modernity is nothing less than the age of anxiety. The novel’s apprehensions of anxiety are vast and varied. Narrative structures can engage with human experience in more or less direct ways, but in every instance some level of engagement with human experience is present in the text. Jonathan Culler comments: “literature takes as its subject all human experience, and particularly the ordering, interpreting, and articulating of experience…” (10). In other words, the fictional text is derived from experience while also taking an active role in shaping that experience. Similar to other social discourses of modernity, the modern novel participates in an accelerating process of reflexivity, to use Anthony 1 Giddens’ term.1 Despite this dialectical relationship, contemporary literary critique too often begins and ends with the aesthetic object. Interpretations of fiction that lay claim to the representation of human experience are informed by unexplained (and possibly unexamined) assumptions specific to the theorist or to the field of literary criticism more generally. In these instances, the text becomes a means to represent experience without sufficiently accounting for the experiential foundation critical to the very representations the text may explore. I find this approach to be particularly problematic in the assessments of many late nineteenth and early twentieth century literature texts. These texts are pre-diagnosed by the literary critic – modern anxiety is assumed to animate them without a corresponding inquiry into the nature of collective social anxiety and the historical experience that may have given rise to their creation. This thesis attempts to avoid this pitfall. I will engage with certain literary texts of the late nineteenth century only after an exploration of the etiological basis for social anxiety and the changing nature of experience concurrent with their production. My intention is not to tear down or deconstruct the trope of modern anxiety, so much as to reconstruct the basis for its existence in a way that might lead to fresh insights. The following questions will serve as a guide: How should collective social anxiety be defined and what temporal framework is best suited for understanding its etiology? Have certain forms of social commentary about anxiety, particularly those focusing 1 Giddens defines reflexivity as a process in which thought and action are refracted back upon one another. For Giddens, the speed of this process is constantly increasing in modernity and the limitations on possibilities of experience inscribed by past traditions are increasingly weakened. See The Consequences of Modernity (36-9). 2 exclusively on the loss of a particular object, limited our ability to comprehend its past and present affect? How should the changing nature of material experience in late nineteenth century Europe be conceptualized so as to best understand its implications on social expectations for the future? In what ways have certain iconic metaphors of modernity served to limit contemporary understandings of the affect of experience during the late nineteenth century? How effectively are expectations for the future understood and managed by collective identity and the social institutions that represent them? These questions form the basis for the first two sections of this thesis. In the third and final section, I will apply conceptualizations of anxiety and modern experience developed in the first two sections to several works of Émile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart. In section one, I explore the etiological basis for the affect of anxiety and attempt to create a framework through which modern experience might be better understood. Despite a multiplicity of contemporary and historical meanings, no affective aspect of modernity is spoken of more apodictically than anxiety. Modern anxiety might be something akin to cosmology’s dark matter – invisible and un-measurable but of whose existence we have no doubt. An exploration of psychoanalytic inquiries into anxiety does provide some consistency regarding anxiety’s temporal and relational nature. The affect of anxiety resides in the present, but it is generated by presumptions of a threatening future.2 Despite this consistency, anxiety in social 2 Given contemporary debates regarding the meaning of affect (as opposed to emotion), I should note that I use the term affect in this thesis to indicate bodily or collective social feelings that are lacking a 3 commentary is too often fixated on the loss of a particular object or way of life (often described as a loss of intrinsic meaning or realness). Commentary like this is typically followed by a call for a return to the past as a solution to present anxieties. These reclamation projects are often flawed given their failure to consider the particular ways in which this lost way of life informed a social identity effective at managing future expectations at that time. In other words, the dialectical relationship between social identity and collective expectations for future experience is critical to the understanding of collective social anxiety. In section two, I consider material experience in nineteenth century Europe and how we represent this experience in contemporary discourse. I approach my evaluation through the lens developed in section one, which I also supplement with the work of Reinhart Koselleck. His belief that the affect of time “is bound up with social and political actions” makes his theorizations particularly useful to my temporal framework for anxiety. When we consider a number of theoretical assessments of the nature of experience in modernity, two themes emerge: the initiation of change and the acceleration of experience. For the theorists who advance these assessments, modernity represents the moment in which the shackles of tradition are broken and the principles of historia magistra vitae become ineffective. Once initiated, the rate of change is thought to be in a constant state of acceleration. specific underlying object. In this regard, I broadly follow the work of Fredric Jameson and Rei Terada – see Jameson’s The Antinomies of Realism (32). 4 These themes are often communicated in contemporary discourse in figurative ways that obscure the full nature of modern experience. I identify two metaphors that have had a disproportionate effect, both having risen to the status of privileged signifier: modernity as a new state of matter (based in part on Marx’s famous comment in The Communist Manifesto that “all that is solid melts into air”); and modernity as that technological icon of the nineteenth century, the railway train. These metaphors
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Naming the Extrasolar Planets
    Naming the extrasolar planets W. Lyra Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, K¨onigstuhl 17, 69177, Heidelberg, Germany [email protected] Abstract and OGLE-TR-182 b, which does not help educators convey the message that these planets are quite similar to Jupiter. Extrasolar planets are not named and are referred to only In stark contrast, the sentence“planet Apollo is a gas giant by their assigned scientific designation. The reason given like Jupiter” is heavily - yet invisibly - coated with Coper- by the IAU to not name the planets is that it is consid- nicanism. ered impractical as planets are expected to be common. I One reason given by the IAU for not considering naming advance some reasons as to why this logic is flawed, and sug- the extrasolar planets is that it is a task deemed impractical. gest names for the 403 extrasolar planet candidates known One source is quoted as having said “if planets are found to as of Oct 2009. The names follow a scheme of association occur very frequently in the Universe, a system of individual with the constellation that the host star pertains to, and names for planets might well rapidly be found equally im- therefore are mostly drawn from Roman-Greek mythology. practicable as it is for stars, as planet discoveries progress.” Other mythologies may also be used given that a suitable 1. This leads to a second argument. It is indeed impractical association is established. to name all stars. But some stars are named nonetheless. In fact, all other classes of astronomical bodies are named.
    [Show full text]
  • On the Months (De Mensibus) (Lewiston, 2013)
    John Lydus On the Months (De mensibus) Translated with introduction and annotations by Mischa Hooker 2nd edition (2017) ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abbreviations .......................................................................................... iv Introduction .............................................................................................. v On the Months: Book 1 ............................................................................... 1 On the Months: Book 2 ............................................................................ 17 On the Months: Book 3 ............................................................................ 33 On the Months: Book 4 January ......................................................................................... 55 February ....................................................................................... 76 March ............................................................................................. 85 April ............................................................................................ 109 May ............................................................................................. 123 June ............................................................................................ 134 July ............................................................................................. 140 August ........................................................................................ 147 September ................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Wonder, Space, and Place in Pausanias' Periegesis
    Axion Theas: Wonder, Space, and Place in Pausanias’ Periegesis Hellados by Jody Ellyn Cundy A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Classics University of Toronto © Copyright by Jody Ellyn Cundy 2016 Axion Theas: Wonder, Space, and Place in Pausanias’ Periegesis Hellados Jody Ellyn Cundy Doctor of Philosophy Department of Classics University of Toronto 2016 Abstract The Periegesis Hellados presents a description of the sites and sights of Roman Greece in ten carefully constructed books. These books present the fruits of author’s extensive travels and careful textual research over the course of several decades (between the 130’s and ca. AD 175-80) and compiled into a unified composite itinerary. There is no doubt that Pausanias travels through an “already written landscape,” and his travel experience is necessarily informed by and sometimes clearly motivated by his literary encounters. This project investigates Pausanias’ engagement with literary antecedents, with a particular focus on the antiquarian impulse to excerpt and compile anecdotes in thematic catalogues, which broadly resemble wonder-texts (paradoxographies). The organizing principle of these thematic catalogues contrasts with the topographical (spatial) structure of the frame narrative of the Periegesis. In part, this study aims to resolve the perceived tension between the travel account and the antiquarian mode in Pausanias’ project in order to show that they serve complementary rather than competing ends. Resolution of these competing paradigms allows in turn for a more coherent understanding of the Periegesis as unified subject. This study argues that wonder (thauma) is a unifying theme ii of Periegesis Hellados.
    [Show full text]
  • Dr. Turhan Yörükân | Yunan Mitolojisinde Aşk
    Dr. Turhan Yörükân | Yunan Mitolojisinde Aşk TÜRKİYE İŞ BANKASI Kültür Yayınları Dr. Turhan Yörükân 29 Aralık 1927'de İstanbul'da doğdu. Lise öğrenimini Latince eğitim veren çeşitli okullarda tamamladı. Dil ve Tarih Coğrafya Fakültesi Felsefe Bölümü'nü bitirdi; sonraları aynı fakültede psikoloji ve pedagoji -slstanı olarak görev yaptı. Gençliğinden başlayarak klasik filolojiyle İlgilenen Dr Yörükân Yunan mitosuna, felsefesine ve bilimine olan merakını hep canlı tuttu. Çeşitli bilimsel dergilerde makaleleri yayım lanan Dr. Yörükân yazar ve editör olarak otuzun üzerinde kitap yayımladı. Dr. Yörükân halen Ankara'da yaşıyor, çalışmalarını sürdürüyor. T Ü R K İY E İŞ B A N K A S I Kültür Yayınları Genel Yayın: 457 Edebiyat Dizisi: 115 Datça / Knidos’daki Aphrodite Euploia tapınağında yer alan Aphrodite heykeli için, Gaius Plinius Secundus (İ.S. 23- 79), yazdığı tabiî ilimler ansiklopedisinde (Naturalis Historia, 36, 20), “Praksiteles, bu eseriyle, mermer işleyen bir sanatçı olarak, kendisini bile aşmıştır... Onun bu eseri, sadece kendi yaptığı eserler içerisinde değil, bütün dünyadaki eserler içeri­ sinde en üstün olanı idi. Birçok kimse, denizler aşarak onu Knidos’ta görmeye geliyordu", diyor. Samsatlı (Samosatalı) Lukianos (İ.S. 120-200), Aşklar (13-14) adlı eserinde, “Bahçedeki bitkilerden yeterince haz duyduktan sonra, tapmağa girdik. Tanrıçanın Paros merme­ rinden yapılmış olağanüstü güzellikteki heykeli, tapmağın or­ tasında duruyordu... Vücudunun bütün güzelliği, herhangi bir örtü ile gizlenmiş değildi. Sadece bir eliyle, iffetini korumak istercesine önünü kapatıyordu. Sanatçının sergilediği üstün­ lük, taşın katı ve inatçı tabiatını kırmış, onu, her uzvun şekli­ ne uyum sağlamak zorunda bırakmıştı", diyor. Praksiteles’in yapmış olduğu Aphrodite heykelinin sikke­ ler üzerine darp edilmiş görüntüsü, aradan asırlar geçmiş ol­ masına rağmen, Roma Dönemi’nde etkisini sürdürmeye de­ vam etmiştir.
    [Show full text]
  • A SMALL DICTIONARY of GODS and GODDESSES by D.W. Owens Copyright 1994. This Work May Be Reproduced Without Permission, in Its En
    A SMALL DICTIONARY OF PAGAN GODS AND GODDESSES 5/6/03 2:42 PM Check out the NEW Hotbot Tell me when this page is updated A SMALL DICTIONARY OF GODS AND GODDESSES by D.W. Owens Copyright 1994. This work may be reproduced without permission, in its entirety and without alteration, together with the other four parts which make up the entire work, for free distribution. For any other distribution, please contact the author. CONTENTS Pt. 1 : Contents / Foreword / AFRICA / AZTEC / CELTIC Pt. 2 : CHINA / EGYPT / GREECE Pt. 3 : GREECE (Continued) / JAPAN / MESOPOTAMIA / NORSE Pt. 4 : NORSE / NORTH AMERICAN INDIAN / OCEANIA (PACIFIC ISLANDS AND AUSTRALIA) http://members.tripod.com/goldendawnaz/gods01.htm Page 1 of 19 A SMALL DICTIONARY OF PAGAN GODS AND GODDESSES 5/6/03 2:42 PM PT. 5 : ROME / SANTERIA / SLAVIC / SOUTH AND CENTRAL AMERICAN INDIAN / Sources FOREWORD Some time ago, for no particular reason, I started spending odd moments in the public library browsing through reference works about ancient religion. I started taking notes, more or less at random, about the gods and gradually accumulated information about some 330 pagan gods and goddesses. Not wanting all that work to go to waste, and not knowing what else to do with the information, I decided to make a small dictionary and place it on several bulletin board systems, in hopes that others will find this little work interesting and useful. There is no pretense of original or exhaustive research here. The information is drawn from popular books and standard reference works such as can be found in any library.
    [Show full text]
  • Inciting Difference and Distance in the Writings of Sakiyama Tami, Yi Yang-Ji, and Tawada Yōko
    Inciting Difference and Distance in the Writings of Sakiyama Tami, Yi Yang-ji, and Tawada Yōko Victoria Young Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of East Asian Studies, School of Languages, Cultures and Societies March 2016 ii The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. © 2016 The University of Leeds and Victoria Young iii Acknowledgements The first three years of this degree were fully funded by a Postgraduate Studentship provided by the academic journal Japan Forum in conjunction with BAJS (British Association for Japanese Studies), and a University of Leeds Full Fees Bursary. My final year maintenance costs were provided by a GB Sasakawa Postgraduate Studentship and a BAJS John Crump Studentship. I would like to express my thanks to each of these funding bodies, and to the University of Leeds ‘Leeds for Life’ programme for helping to fund a trip to present my research in Japan in March 2012. I am incredibly thankful to many people who have supported me on the way to completing this thesis. The diversity offered within Dr Mark Morris’s literature lectures and his encouragement as the supervisor of my undergraduate dissertation in Cambridge were both fundamental factors in my decision to pursue further postgraduate studies, and I am indebted to Mark for introducing me to my MA supervisor, Dr Nicola Liscutin.
    [Show full text]
  • Medea's Lovesickness
    2 Medea’s Lovesickness Eros and Melancholia I come at last to that heroical love, which is proper to men and women, is a frequent cause of melancholy, and deserves much rather to be called burn- ing lust, than by such an honourable title. —robert burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy “Here comes the downpour, here the lightning and the cursed hail, the roar of thunder and the croaking of frogs.” Thus speaking with each rapid breath, the slender maid, already close to death, enflames the fire which love has spread throughout her limbs. —srì harsa-deva (trans. Ingalls [1965, 232]) Erotic infatuation is violent. Love comes unexpectedly and overwhelms its victim. Its attack brings speechlessness, swooning, silence, blushing, insom- nia, the sweats, and weeping.1 It vanquishes the strongest of wills. When eros remains unconsummated (whether intentionally or merely through circum- stance), there is persuasion,2 then, if that is unsuccessful, rape.3 Sometimes neither persuasion nor rape are useful. The very old must endure their lack of consummation, as must lovers permanently separated, through death, dis- tance, conclusive rejection, physical infirmity, or gender.4 This enforced en- durance may lead to acts of violence, anger, and crime, especially crime if it is a woman who is subject to the frustration.5 Or it may lead to a melancholic lovesickness—anorexia and eventual death.6 Violence remains the most common reaction to erotic frustration.7 Valerius Flaccus’s description of Medea’s lovesickness, completed by 92 or 93 C.E., is typ- ical of this tradition. Medea was a young, barbarian princess from Colchis in what is now Georgia.
    [Show full text]
  • Theriomorphic Forms: Analyzing Terrestrial Animal- Human Hybrids in Ancient Greek Culture and Religion
    Theriomorphic Forms: Analyzing Terrestrial Animal- Human Hybrids in Ancient Greek Culture and Religion Item Type text; Electronic Thesis Authors Carter, Caroline LynnLee Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction, presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 23/09/2021 21:29:46 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/633185 THERIOMORPHIC FORMS: ANALYZING TERRESTRIAL ANIMAL-HUMAN HYBRIDS IN ANCIENT GREEK CULTURE AND RELIGION by Caroline Carter ____________________________ Copyright © Caroline Carter 2019 A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES AND CLASSICS In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 2019 THE UNIYERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE As members of the Master's Committee, we certi$ that we have read the thesis prepared by Caroline Carter titled Theriomorphic Forms: Analyzing Terrestrial Animal-Humøn Hybrids in Ancíent Greek Culture and Religion and reç¡¡ü¡sr6 that it be accepted as firlfilling the disse¡tation requirement for the Master's Degree. G Date: + 26 Z¿f T MaryV o 1.011 ,AtÌ.r.ln Date: \l 41 , Dr. David Gilman Romano - 4*--l -r Date; { zé l2 Dr. David Soren r) øate:4'2 6 - l\ Dr. Kyle Mahoney Final approval and acceptance of this thesis is contingent upon the candidate's submission of the final copies of the thesis to the Graduate College.
    [Show full text]
  • Myth – Religion in Ancient Greece
    Potsdamer Altertumswissenschaftliche Beiträge – Band 67 Franz Steiner Verlag Sonderdruck aus: Natur – Mythos – Religion im antiken Griechenland Nature – Myth – Religion in Ancient Greece Herausgegeben von Tanja Susanne Scheer Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2019 INHALTSVERZEICHNIS Allgemeines Abkürzungsverzeichnis ................................................................. 9 I BEGRIFFE, KONZEPTE, METHODEN Tanja S. Scheer Natur – Mythos – Religion im antiken Griechenland: Eine Einleitung ............. 13 Katja Sporn Natural Features in Greek Cult Places: The Case of Athens .............................. 29 Richard Gordon The Greeks, Religion and Nature in German Neo-humanist Discourse from Romanticism to Early Industrialisation ..................................................... 49 Jennifer Larson Nature Gods, Nymphs and the Cognitive Science of Religion .......................... 71 II DIE VEREHRUNG DER ‚NATUR‘ BEI DEN GRIECHEN? Jan N. Bremmer Rivers and River Gods in Ancient Greek Religion and Culture ........................ 89 Esther Eidinow “They Blow Now One Way, Now Another” (Hes. Theog. 875): Winds in the Ancient Greek Imaginary .............................................................. 113 Renate Schlesier Sapphos aphrodisische Fauna und Flora ............................................................ 133 Julia Kindt Animals in Ancient Greek Religion: Divine Zoomorphism and the Anthropomorphic Divine Body ............................................................. 155 Dorit Engster Von Delphinen und ihren Reitern:
    [Show full text]
  • Thetis and Cheiron in Thessaly
    Kernos Revue internationale et pluridisciplinaire de religion grecque antique 22 | 2009 Varia Thetis and Cheiron in Thessaly Emma Aston Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/kernos/1769 DOI: 10.4000/kernos.1769 ISSN: 2034-7871 Publisher Centre international d'étude de la religion grecque antique Printed version Date of publication: 1 January 2009 ISSN: 0776-3824 Electronic reference Emma Aston, « Thetis and Cheiron in Thessaly », Kernos [Online], 22 | 2009, Online since 26 October 2012, connection on 19 April 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/kernos/1769 ; DOI : 10.4000/ kernos.1769 Kernos Kernos22(2009), p. 83-107. Thetisand Cheironin Thessaly Abstract: This artic e examines an area of Thessa ian mytho ogy andcu t surrounding the figures of Thetis the Nereid and Cheiron the centaur. It argues that the pair deriEe a substantia amount of their characterisation, in ancient narratiEes, from their mutua association, andthat on y by studying them together can we receiEe a fu insight into their mytho ogica and re igious personae. Thetis and Cheiron are shown to differ significant y with regardto a number of themes, such as their re ationship with symbo ic topography and the natura andscape of Thessa y and–most striLing y –their Lourotrophic ro es. ThetisF strong association with ambiguous nurture is argued to connect with her physica conception, especia y her association with the shape-changing sepia, cutt efish, an association which inEo Ees her in the wider ancient discourse of unre iab e fema e beauty. It is a so shown that the Thetis of 1omeric epic is significant y different from the Thetis foundinotherancientnarratiEes.
    [Show full text]
  • OF BLACKNESS in MYTHOLOGICAL NAMES Richard Buxton the Aim Of
    THE SIGNIFICANCE (OR INSIGNIFICANCE) OF BLACKNESS IN MYTHOLOGICAL NAMES Richard Buxton The aim of this paper is to examine certain mythological names involving the component melas. In order to set this enquiry into context, however, I shall first look at the general opposition between melas and leukos in Greek thought. In his still useful dissertation Die Bedeutung der weissen und der schwarzen Farbe in Kult und Brauch der Griechen und Römer, Gerhard Radke conveys a message which is basically very straightforward: in rela- tion to the gods and their worship, black is negative, white positive.1 Melas is associated with the Underworld,2 with Ate,3 with death,4 with mourning.5 In keeping with this nexus of funereal associations, animals described as melas are sacrificed to powers of the Underworld and to the dead: thus at Odyssey .– Odysseus promises to dedicate an 5ϊν παμμλανα to Teiresias if he gets back safe to Ithaca, while in Colophon, according to Pausanias (..), they sacrifice a black bitch to Enodia, andmoreovertheydosoatnight.6 Leukos, by contrast, is associated not just with divinities of light such as Helios and Day—in Aeschylus’ Persians () the glorious day of the victory at Salamis is a λευκ- πωλς μρα—but with divinities in general, especially when they are conceived of as ‘favourable’: the Dioscuri, those twin saviours, ride on 1 G. Radke, Die Bedeutung der weissen und der schwarzen Farbe in Kult und Brauch der Griechen und Römer (diss. Berlin; Jena: Neuenhahn, ). P.Vidal-Naquet, “Le chasseur noir et l’origine de l’éphébie athénienne”, Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations (): –, revised in Le chasseur noir: formes de pensée et formes de société dans le monde grec (Paris: Maspero, ), – () called this a ‘catalogue consciencieux’.
    [Show full text]
  • Mother Earth: Female (Genitals/Genital) Symbolism 01/04/2018 23:44
    Mother Earth: Female (Genitals/Genital) Symbolism 01/04/2018 23:44 Mother Earth Yoni "Vulva," the primary Tantric object of worship, symbolized variously by a triangle, fish, double-pointed oval, horseshoe, egg, fruits, etc. Personifying the yoni, the Goddess Kali bore the title of Cunti or Kunda, root of the ubiquitous Indo-European word "cunt" and all its relatives: cunnus, cunte, cunning, cunctipotent, ken, kin, country. The Yoni Yantra or triangle was known as the Primordial Image, representing the Great Mother as source of all life.1 As the genital focus of her divine energy, the Yantra was adored as a geometrical symbol, as the cross was adored by Christians. The ceremony of baptismal rebirth often involved being drawn bodily through a giant yoni. Those who underwent this ceremony were styled "twice-born." 2 http://hobbithills.blogspot.cz/2013/11/female-genitalsgenital-symbolism.html Page 1 of 61 Mother Earth: Female (Genitals/Genital) Symbolism 01/04/2018 23:44 Yoni Yantra Yoni Mudra http://hobbithills.blogspot.cz/2013/11/female-genitalsgenital-symbolism.html Page 2 of 61 Mother Earth: Female (Genitals/Genital) Symbolism 01/04/2018 23:44 Yoni Yogini Triangle Tantric tradition said the triangle was the Primordial Image, or the female Triangle of Life.1 It was known as the Kali Yantra, representing Kali as Cunti, or else as the Yoni Yantra, or sign of the vulva.2 In Egypt the triangle was a hieroglyphic sign for "woman," and it carried the same meaning among the gypsies, who brought it from their original home in Hindustan. 3 In the Greek sacred alphabet, the delta or triangle stood for the Holy Door, vulva of the All-Mother Demeter ("Mother Delta").
    [Show full text]