A Tale for Christmas

This post was published first in "Cassandra's Legacy" in 2013. I thought to republish here for the Christmas of 2016. It is not about Christmas, but it describes a story that has a magical atmosphere that reminds the original meaning of Christmas: the birth of the new year. And it remains a milestone for me, one of the stories that, in some ways, drove my life and made me what I am today.

In 1960, Vladimir Dudintsev (1918-1998) published a short novel titled "A New Year's tale."  This story greatly impressed me when I read it, many years ago, in an Italian translation in a collection titled "Russian Science Fiction". 

Some 50 years ago, I received as a Christmas present a book titled "Russian Science Fiction." All the stories in that book made a deep impression on me, but there was one that has remained in my mind more than the others; a curious story titled "A New Year's Tale".

I was, maybe, 12 at that time and, of course, I couldn't understand everything of that story and I didn't pay attention to the name of the author. But, as time went by, I didn't forget it; rather, it became entrenched in my mind, progressively acquiring more meaning and more importance. I reread it not long ago, and it came back to my mind during a recent trip to Russia. So, let me tell you this story as I remember it.

"A New Year's Tale" tells of one year of life of the protagonist, a researcher in a scientific laboratory somewhere in the Soviet Union. Dudintsev manages to tell the story without ever giving specific details about anything: no place names, no names of the characters, not even of the protagonist. It is a feat of literary virtuosity; it gives to the story an atmosphere of a fairy tale but, at the same time, it is very, very specific.

It took me time before I could understand the hints that Dudintsev gives all over the text, but after many trips to Russia, everything fell into place. It is curious how Dudintsev managed to catch so well the atmosphere of a research lab in the Soviet Union; he was not a scientific researcher. But that's what makes a great story-teller, after all: understanding what one is describing - and feeling something for it.

The story starts with a debate - rather, a quarrel - that the protagonist has with someone termed "a provincial academic" (we are not told his name). This provincial academic should be nothing more than a nuisance, but the protagonist can't stop from engaging in the debate. He understands that he is losing time, that he should be doing something more useful, more important. But he just can't sit down and do his job.

While the protagonist is entangled in this useless quarrel, the chief of the laboratory (again, we are not told his name), someone who dabbles in archeology, tells to his coworkers of a research of his somewhere in the Caucasus, where they found an ancient tomb. There was an owl engraved on the tombstone and an inscription that could be deciphered. It was, "...and the years of his life were 900...."

Now, what could that mean? Could the man buried there have lived 900 years? No, of course not. But then, what does the inscription mean? Well, someone says, that must mean that this man spent his life so well and so fully that it was like his years had been 900.

The discussion goes on. What does it mean to live such a full life? The researchers try to find an answer but, at some moment, they hear the voice of someone who usually keeps silent at these reunions. We are told that he is from far away, not Russian, that is. We can imagine that this man doesn't have a Russian name, but we are not told names. So, he is an outsider and he comes with a completely different viewpoint; let me call him "the foreign scientist" even though in the old Soviet Union, theoretically, there was no such distinction. "You see, comrades," he says, "it is very simple. To live a full life, you must always choose the greatest satisfactions, the highest joys you can find."

At this point, we hear the voice of the political commissioner of the lab. Apparently, there was usually someone in scientific academies in the Soviet Union who was in charge of making sure that Soviet Scientists would not fall into doing decadent capitalist science. So, he stands up and he tells the foreign scientist, "Well, comrade, don't you think one should also work for the people or something like that?" And the foreign scientist answers, "You are so backward, comrade. Don't you understand? The greatest satisfaction, the highest joy one can have in life is exactly that: working for the people!"

After that the discussion is over, the protagonist of the story reflects on the words of the foreign scientist and he resolves to start doing something serious in his life. He decides to start doing experiments, advance his theory. We are not told exactly what he is doing, but we understand that he is working on something important; a great discovery that has to do with capturing and storing solar light. And he manages to work on that for some time. Then, his colleagues bring to him another paper written by his provincial antagonist. So, he feels he has to answer that, and then the provincial academician replies.... and the protagonist finds himself entangled again into this argument that he can't abandon.

Things are back to the silly normalcy of before, but then something happens. The protagonist finds that he is being stalked. Someone, or something, is following him all the time. When he sees it in full he discovers that it is an owl. A giant owl, almost as big as a man, looking at him. He thinks it is a hallucination, which of course it must be. But he keeps seeing this owl over and over.

So, the protagonist goes to see a doctor and the doctor asks him what made him come there. "An owl," he says, and the doctor pales. After a thorough physical examination, the doctor tells him: "you have one year to live, more or less." We are not told of what specific sickness the protagonist suffers. He asks, "but why the owl?" And the doctor answers, "we are studying that. You are not the only one. The owl is a symptom." Then, the doctor looks at the protagonist straight in his eyes and he says, "I can tell you something. Those who see the owl, have a chance to be saved."

In the meantime, there had been a long discussion between the protagonist and the foreign scientist, the one who had so well silenced the political commissioner. So, the foreign scientist had told to the protagonist his story, obliquely, yes, but clearly understandable. His fellow countrymen had not liked the idea that he had left the country to become a scientist. They are described as gangsters and criminals, but we have a feeling that there was something more at stake than just petty crimes. This man had made a choice and that had meant to make a clean break from his country and his culture; it had meant to accept the new Soviet Communist society. Now, he was spending his time in this new world trying to get his "greatest satisfactions and highest joys" by working for the people. And, because of that, his former countrymen had condemned him to death. So, he had changed his name and his identity, and he had even surgically changed his face to become unrecognizable. But he knew that "they" were looking for him and they would find him at some moment.

So, the destinies of the protagonist and of the foreign scientist are somehow parallel, they both have a limited time. After having seen the doctor, the protagonist understands the situation and he rushes to search for the foreign scientist. They can work together, they can join forces, in this way, maybe they can....  but, in horror, he discovers that the foreign scientist has been killed.

In panic, the protagonist desperately looks for the notes he had collected over the years. But the cleaning lady tells him that she had used them to start the fire in the stove. She had no idea that they could have been important. The protagonist feels like he is walking in a nightmare. Just one year and he has lost his notes. He must restart from scratch.... his great discovery.... how can he do? Yet, he decides to try.

He becomes absorbed in his work. He works harder and harder. Staying in the lab night and day and, when he goes home, he keeps working. His colleagues note the change; they are surprised that he doesn't react anymore to the attacks of the provincial academician, but he doesn't care (which is, by the way, a good lesson on how to handle Internet flames). He still sees the owl; always bigger and coming closer to him, the owl has become something of a familiar creature, almost a friend.

Then, someone appears. It is a woman with well-formed shoulders (of course, we are not told her name). The protagonist recognizes her. It is not the first time he has seen her. He remembers having seen her with the now dead foreign scientist.

The protagonist has no time for a love story. He has to work. He tries to ignore the woman, but he is also attracted to her. He can concede her just a few words. Ten minutes, maybe. So they talk and the woman tells him. "It is you, I recognize you! You can't fool me!" The protagonist remembers something that the foreign scientist had told him; that he had his face surgically changed to escape from his enemies. Now, this woman thinks that the protagonist is really her former lover, who changed again face and appearance and didn't tell that not even to her.

The protagonist tries to deny that he is the former lover of the woman, but, curiously, he doesn't succeed, not even to himself. In a way, he becomes the other, acting like him in his complete immersion in his work. The protagonist discovers that the foreign scientist had assembled a complete laboratory at home, much better than the lab they had at the academy. So he moves there, with the woman with the well-formed shoulders (and the owl comes, too, perching on a branch just outside the window). Then, the protagonist even discovers that the foreign scientist was secretly copying his notes and that he gave them to the woman. She had kept them, the notes are not lost! With these notes, the protagonist can gain months of work. Maybe he can make it in one year, maybe.....

The last part of the story goes on at a feverish pace. The protagonist becomes sicker and sicker; to the point that he has to stay in bed and it is the woman with the well-formed shoulders who takes up the work in the lab. And the owl perches on the bed head. But they manage to get some important results and that's enough to catch the attention of the lab boss. He orders to everyone in the lab to come there and help the protagonist (and the woman with the well-formed shoulders) to move on with the experiments.

In the final scene, the year has ended and we see the protagonist in bed, dying. But his colleagues show him the results of the experiment: something so bright, so beautiful; we are not told exactly what: anyway it is a way to catch sunlight in a compact form: a new form of energy, a new understanding of the working of the sun - we don't know, but it is something fantastic. Even the owl looks at that thing, curious. The protagonist hears the sound of bells from the window. A new year is starting. We are not told whether he lives or not but, in any case, it is a new beginning and, whatever it happens, they'll tell about him that the years of his life had been 900.


And here we are. You see, it is a magic story. It keeps your attention; you want to know if the protagonist lives or not and you want to know if he manages to make his great discovery. But it is also the story of the life and of the mind of scientists that I think you can't find anywhere else in novels or short stories. It is curious that Dudintsev did so well because, as I said, he wasn't a scientist; he was a literate. But he managed to catch so incredibly well the life of a scientist - of a scientist working in the Soviet Union, yes, but not just that. Dudintsev's portrait of science and scientists goes beyond the quirks of the old Soviet world.

Yes, in Soviet science there were things that look strange to us, such as having a political commissioner in the lab to watch what scientists were doing. But that's just a minor feature and, today, we have plenty of different constraints on what we do that don't involve a dumb political commissioner. The point is that scientists often work as if their life were to last just one year; at least during the productive time of their life; when they are trying to compress each year as if it were to be 900 years long. It is their lot: the search for the discovery, being so deeply absorbed in their work, being remote from everyone else; obsessed with owls that they alone can see.

And yet, Dudintsev's story is so universal that it goes beyond the peculiar mind of scientists. It is the story of all men, all over the world, of what we do and how we spend our lives. And the key of the story is the woman with the well-formed shoulders. She recognizes her former lover in the protagonist, or she feigns to recognize him. It is him or it is not him - it doesn't matter, but her devotion to her man is so touching: you perceive true love in this attitude. In the end, that's the key of the whole story: whatever we do in life, we do it for those we love.

Some of us are scientists, some aren't. But it is not a bad advice to live your life as if you wanted each year to be 900 years long. And every new year is a new beginning.

Walking around Fiesole: a post by Tatiana Yugay

Tatiana Yugay is Russian, professor of the University of Moscow, and she fell in love with Italy and with everything Italian. She owns an apartment in Italy, on the Mediterranean coast and, once, she drove all the way from Moscow to there, all alone - not a small feat!

Here, she reports on her visit to Florence and Fiesole. She is coming back for Christmas, this year. Apparently, she really likes the place!

Walking About Fiesole: From Etruscans to Franciscans

 

By Tatiana Yugay, from her blog "Santa Tatiana"

 

 

I fell in love with  Fiesole even before visiting it. I first knew about this charming town from Ugo Bardi's photo blog. Ugo published there his photos with brief or sometimes long comments. I liked very much his pictures of nature and its creatures, sunrises and sunsets, historic sights, old postcards and local folks. He also wrote about historic and modern political, scientific and cultural events in Fiesole. I write in the past time because, unfortunately, Ugo didn't update his blog since December 2015. Though he wrote in Italian, I highly recommend you to visit the blog because his photos speak by themselves. It was a kind of chronicle of Fiesole's everyday life which was made with such a love and mild humor that I became dreaming to see Fiesole with my own eyes.

As a matter of fact, the Fiesolans have two strong reasons to consider themselves superior to the Florentines. Firstly,  Fiesole is much more ancient than Florence and, secondly, the town literally overlooks the Arno valley where Florence is situated.
 

Fiesole is a hill town located on a scenic height of 8 kilometres of distance from Florence. It spreads over two hills, San Francesco and Sant’ Apollinare, and the modern town is situated in the saddle between them. Fiesole (Etruscan - Viesul, Viśl, Vipsul) was a flourishing Etruscan city which was probably founded in the 9th century BC.  It was surrounded by an imposing ring of city walls stretching for over two and a half km which were erected to defend Fiesole from the Gauls' invasion. Even three millennia later, we can observe impressive Etruscan remnants in the town.

The Romans conquered Faesulae, as Fiesole was then known, in 283 BC. Under Roman rule, it became the seat of a famous school of augurs, and every year twelve young men were sent here from Rome to study the art of divination.
Fiesole had seen the great victory of Roman general Stilicho over Germanic hordes of the Vandals and Suebi under Radagaisus in 406. Ugo Bardi wrote in his blog “Cassandra legacy” that he had visited the battle place in order to commemorate an anniversary of this victory.  During the Gothic War (536-53), Fiesole was besieged several times and in 539 Justinus, the Byzantine general, captured it and razed its fortifications.

In the early Middle Ages, Fiesole was more powerful than Florence in the valley below, and many wars arose between them. In 1010 and 1025 Fiesole was sacked by the Florentines and was finally conquered in 1125.

Nowadays,  Fiesole is a charming and tranquil city and only landmarks of various epochs remind us about its glorious and turbulent history.
My first meeting with Fiesole took place last August when I visited the Bardis in their beautiful house near Fiesole. It was great to walk around the city with such a connoisseur of the place as Ugo. When driving to Fiesole, Ugo asked me, what would I like to see most of all. Of course, I wished to see the memorial place of  Stilicho's victory at the King's Mountain. It took us some minutes to get there. I'd better cite Ugo's post about this place.

“Of those remote times, little more than a few lines in history books remain. But, in the Mugnone Valley, you can still find a hill that takes the name of Montereggi, from the Latin "Mons Regis", the King's Mountain. It is the place where, it is said, King Radagaisus was beheaded. We can still walk there and find a small Christian church surrounded by cypress trees. There is also a pile of stones with a sign that says "Ave crux, spes nostra" (Hail, cross, our hope). We have no reason to believe that it was the exact point where the king was beheaded, but surely it is a suggestive place”.

 

The place looked exactly as Ugo depicted it. The little white church surrounded by secular cypresses and young olive trees looked very peaceful. Only an ancient cross kept the memory of those faraway days. The impression of serenity was emphasized by a naive statue of the Madonna under a gazebo.

Surprisingly enough, we started our visit to Fiesole with so called Casa del popolo (People's House) built by local communists in the middle of 20th century. We had a nice talk with old communists who enjoyed their siesta playing chess and sipping coffee.

When Ugo parked the car near a wall made of huge wild stones, he told me that this was the best preserved fragment of ancient Etruscan walls. I was amused because they were in excellent condition and looked no older than mediaeval ones. I've seen Etruscan constructions before, namely, in Perugia and Viterbo.

Nonetheless, every time the same questions buzz in my head. How did the Etruscans manage to built such giant structures without any cement? How did these constructions survive till our days? While I was thinking about that, Ugo showed me another ancient piece of history.

He led me to the to the edge of the cliff and said that it was the best place to see the Roman amphitheater which was far bellow. And that wasn't all! Just near the parking, he showed me a fragment of an ancient Roman road. Black basalt stones were smoothly polished by centuries and half covered with grass. I'm passionate about ancient ruins and was happy to see and even touch Etruscan and Roman antiquities.

After a short walk along the Etruscan walls, we found ourselves in the mediaeval Convent of San Francesco. It seemed to me that during few minutes we were brought by the time machine from the Etruscan civilization to Ancient Rome and then to the Middle Ages.
 

The square in front of the church was very unusual. When we entered a lateral gate, we found ourselves in front of a sober little church and on our left there was a small loggia. The pavement was overgrown with grass and that gave the whole scene a bucolic country look. A pathway paved with big irregular stones was beginning right near the steps of the main entrance and led to the left. When we came nearer, I looked to the left and saw that there was a smooth descent to the belvedere with a breathtaking panorama. Of course, I rushed there to make photos. Florence was in full view, veiled in a haze of late afternoon light. Right below I saw the Brunelleschi cupola of the Duomo and all the city. The blue Apennine mountains could be hardly seen in the background.

The church and convent of San Francesco were founded in 1399 on the site of an Etruscan, and then Roman, acropolis. In former times, there was the church of St Mary of the Flowers which served for a small order of Florentine women called the Recluses of St Alexander.   In 1352, the ladies moved out to Pietrafitta on the Mugnone river.

The facade of a rather modest and austere Gothic church is built of blocks of light stone. The main portal is decorated by a fresco of San Francesco.  Right above the portal, there is a rose window with a clearly cut geometric flower.
I was very glad that church's interior was also designed in my favorite Gothic style. In fact, you can very seldom find a  church in Italy designed in the unique style. This happened because Italians were always fond of modernizing their churches and that sometimes resulted in a rather eclectic appearance of churches. I think that the San Francesco church has been a happy exception because it belonged from the very beginning till now to the Franciscan order.

 

The church has a single nave but it is divided by painted pilasters into four bays. It appeared that a small gothic-arched space is featured by four lateral altars situated in the 1st and 3rd bays.

They host beautiful paintings of late Middle Ages - the Immaculate Conception  by Piero di Cosimo, the Annunciation by Raffaellino del Garbo, the Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine by Cenni di Francesco, and the Adoration of the Magi by the school of Cosimo Rosselli.

In the second bay, there are a neo-Gothic marble pulpit and the magnificent triptych of the Enthroned Madonna and Child with Angels and Saints by Bicci di Lorenzo. The fourth bay is entirely occupied by the presbytery, surrounded by a marble balustrade. Behind the main altar, there is the Crucifixion by Neri di Bicci and the Renaissance apse covered with a barrel vault.

The convent is situated to the right of the church. The building of the convent is organized around three cloisters which are simply named - the grand, the intermediate and the small cloisters. The most beautiful of them is the 15th century grand cloister. A portico surrounded by three covered galleries is decorated by a fresco of San Francesco talking to the birds, while at the center of the cloister is a picturesque stone well.

We passed the cloisters which were so peaceful and serene. I'd like to stay there much longer but Ugo wanted to show me other remarkable things.  One of them was the Franciscan Missionary Museum, which contains Egyptian and Chinese collections gathered by numerous missionary fathers to those lands. It was rather unusual to meet all these oriental artefacts in a mediaeval Tuscan monastery.

After that, Ugo assumed a mysterious air and led me up a narrow staircase. He put a finger to his lips and we silently entered a long corridor. There were monastic cells on both sides of the corridor which were preserved intact from the 15th century. They were ascetically furnished with worn wooden desks and chairs. Instead of beds, there were simple benches. In some of them, we saw an open book, a small crucifix, an inkpot and even spectacles. We observed a very modest cell of San Bernardino da Siena who was the Guardian of the Convent in 1418.

After the Convent, we made a short walk around the historic center of Fiesole. Unfortunately, there was a mass in the Duomo so we couldn't enter it. I'm going to write about the  Duomo and the historic center in my following posts.

Related posts
The King's Mountain 
The National Etruscan Museum in the Medieaval Stronghold
Dont Miss This Small but Very Rich Museum in Viterbo!

Useful links
Foto di Fiesole
http://www.fratifiesole.it/

The Chimera in its various manifestations

This chimera comes from a game called "ghost trappers" Isn't it wonderful? And it shows the incredible resilience of myths

God Bless America! She deserves it.

Daenerys Targaryen: the Return of the Goddess

Daenerys Targaryen is, no doubt, one of the most interesting characters of the TV series "the Game of Thrones." An assertive, dominating queen portraited in a positive light; a character that would have been inconceivable in the fiction of just some decades ago. Something seems to be changing in the human mindscape.

The article by Gunnar Bjornson reproduced below (from "Katehon") reflects this mindscape change. It is dedicated to exploring the idea that some of the themes of "The Game of Thrones" are influenced by a return of the Goddess in the mindsphere; a creature that he identifies as "Cybele", the Graeco-Roman version. 

This article is highly questionable in several respects; not the least one that of dividing the human views of the world into three well-defined categories, inspired to Apollo, Dyonisius, and Cybele. It is a much more complex story than that and this kind of forcing the narrative into categories often has quite some problems in maintaining even a minimum contact with reality: See, for instance, this sentence: 

The Logos of Cybele thus concerns materialism, the dominance of the female over male, progressivism (development from highest to lowest), linear time, and the possession of wealth as the sole purpose of life.

Hmmm.... did I say "questionable?" Yes, I did. VERY questionable with its negative view of women in power. You can say a lot of bad things about some women who have been in power in the past, but it will always be difficult for women to beat the records of cruelty, madness, and wanton violence of most male rulers in history. 

Yet, I thought that it was worth reproducing this piece in the "Chimera Myth" blog, where I have often discussed the theme of the Goddess. 

_________________________________________________________


GAME OF THRONES: THE TRIUMPH OF CYBELE

30.06.2016

Gunnar Bjornson


The sixth season of the popular fantasy saga "Game of Thrones" has concluded. True fans are worrying about the events of the last 10 episodes. The series has turned out to be surprisingly successful, with a both sudden and drastic development of story lines and in terms of the actors' performances and music and special effects. But most importantly, the last season demonstrates the triumph of well-defined archetypes underlying modern Western civilization. Perhaps not a single piece of recent popular culture has revealed this so vividly as “Game of Thrones.” Thus, it is necessary to turn once again to the mythology and philosophy of this popular show.


The victory of women

One of the most important results of the storyline at the end of the sixth season is the triumph of the female characters in the saga. Cersei Lannister takes the Iron Throne of Westeros and kills all of her opponents. In the kingdom of Dorn as well, all power goes to women. Having killed ruler Prince Doran Martell and his cousin, Ellara Sand declares that the government no longer "belongs to weak men." In the North, Sansa Stark makes a decisive contribution to the victory over Ramsey Bolton. Arya Stark begins to implement her plan of revenge and stabs Walder Frey. On the Iron Islands, the lesbian Yara Greyjoy aims to become the first woman on the throne, and then joins Deyneris Targaryen, another strong woman who seeks to conquer the whole of Westeros. Both Dorn and the House of Tyrell, which is also headed by a woman, Olenna Tyrell, are ready to join Deyneris. And even Northern lords are humiliated by young Lady Mormont.

The unconditional domination of the feminine is thus the main feature of the sixth season. Male characters go by the wayside in a context of female domination. In medieval surroundings, an entirely strange picture is recreated. Of course, the European Middle Ages knew the reign of Queens. But not on this scale. The Middle Ages were foremost the era of the dominance of patriarchal relations and the male heroic type.

The rise of power-hungry women in the series is clearly consistent with the trends of real politics. Hillary Clinton, in the country where the series is produced, enjoys the sympathy of its creators. However, it is not only in this way that the series’ authors are trying to promote Clinton. Rather, there is another reason tied to the working of myths.

European society ceased to be the Christian one of the Middle Ages when it became “modern.” The modern world triumphed because it killed, crucified, and subjected directly to genocide (as in Ireland and the Vendee) the “old order,” the spirit of the old patriarchal-aristocratic and traditional Europe. Because of this, any clash between modernity in the Middle Ages is always hysterical. In this feminine hysteria, modernity reveals its true nature.


Gynecocracy

The series, like any other product of mass culture that works with images of the past, projects such on current trends. Romantic and unnatural surroundings are made more brighter and more visible than they are in real life. Gynecocracy, or women's dominance, is a feature unnatural to patriarchal Indo-European civilization, and especially for the type of thinking that dominated the historical era of the Middle Ages. This thinking was based on the celestial Apollonian philosophy of Platonism, which was adopted by Christianity. In its origins, it was based on the domination of celestial male deities over the chthonic creatures of Mother Earth (Titanomachy and Gigantomachy of ancient mythology) and the paternal principle over the mother’s one, heaven over earth and the chthonic, a priority that in religious and philosophical systems was given to the idea of the world. This was characteristic of the Indo-European worldview before the adoption of Christianity. The dominance of spirit over body, hierarchy, discipline, duty, sacrifice, honor, order, tradition, faith, and patriarchal family were the principles inherent to this particular civilization of true Europe.

On the contrary, matriarchal traits, such as the dominance of earthly sensuality and material wealth, were always associated with women in Indo-European families and cults. This, together with the legalization of every form of perversion and degeneracy, a distinctive feature of modern times in Europe, broke with traditional institutions. The famous traditionalist philosopher Julius Evola noted that the modern civilization of the West is based on the ideas which the ancient Indo-Europeans attributed to the feminine principle:

With the advent of democracy, the proclamation of 'immortal principles’, the 'rights of man and citizen’, and the subsequent development of these 'conquests' in Europe into Marxism and Communism, it is exactly the 'natural right', the leveling and anti-aristocratic law of the Mother, that the West has dug up, renouncing any ‘solar', virile Aryan value and confirming, with the omnipotence so often granted to the collectivist element, the ancient irrelevance of the individual to the 'telluric' conception.

Three Logoi

The contemporary Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, in his complex project “Noomahy", (“war of minds” in Greek) offers an interesting interpretive model in which he reviews the structure of the three fundamental paradigms of thought corresponding to the three types of philosophy, religion, mythology, ritual, symbolism, epistemology and anthropology, which correspond to three mythological figures from Greek mythology: Apollo, Dionysus and Cybele.

The Apollonian Logos is related to Platonism and the traditional Indo-European solar theme. It emphasizes eternity, heaven, the paternal, and the spiritual, as opposed to the earthly, temporal, maternal, and material. This paradigm of thought states that only the divine and celestial, for example Platonic ideas, really exist. The world, as the organized cosmos, has a hierarchical structure which is aimed at the apophatic horizon of the inaccessible One. In politics, such a logos preaches monarchy, the reign of the philosophers, the idea of an eternal empire, hierarchy and caste society.

The Dionysian Logos is that of mysteries, battle and marriage, death and resurrection, the interpenetration of earth and heaven, earth’s subordination to the heavens, and the soul reigning over body, as form over matter. This is the philosophy of Aristotle, the metaphysics of the Son in Christianity, and Catholic Thomism. In politics, this is the idea of the imperial, eschatological savior king. It entails a distinctly messianic eschatology.

The Logos of Cybele, named after the Goddess of Asia Minor, is a matriarchal cult of the Great Mother, the Earth, believed to generate all. This is the idea of the material origin of things and the solely material nature of the world. This is the philosophy of Epicurus and Democritus, the ancient materialists, and the ideas of the Roman Titus Lucretius Carus of the evolution of species and the spontaneous generation of life from Mother Earth.

In fact, this logos is an extrapolation of the ancient feminine chthonic myths that have since become the axioms of modern science. These were chtonic cults where the dogmas of modern science first originated. The is the dominant Logos in modern times which manifests itself in the form of scientific thinking. At the same time, however, it is still an archaic mythology inherent to pre-Indo-European ethnic groups in Europe. The Logos of Cybele thus concerns materialism, the dominance of the female over male, progressivism (development from highest to lowest), linear time, and the possession of wealth as the sole purpose of life.

The religious centers of the matriarchal goddesses, such as the temple of Artemis in Ephesus, served as the first banking centers. The Greek philosopher and atomist Democritus was one of the first to put into practice the method of speculation and considered democracy to be the ideal political system (Plato and Aristotle considered it to be the worst). The same Democritus blinded himself in order to refrain from looking at women, a fact which resembles the ritual self-castration of the priests of Cybele in Asia Minor.


The Face of Cybele

Democracy, progressivism, evolutionism, feminism, egalitarianism and the destruction of traditional hierarchies, the revolt against the gods, gender ideology, atomism, materialism, capitalism - all of these ideas are very archaic phenomena that have become modern only because Europe chose them in the early modern period and abandoned its former identity. These are in fact integral elements of the cult of the Great Mother. And the further we are from the historical Middle Ages, the more the ancient goddess veils her face under the guise of modernity.

And in Game of Thrones, the Gestalt of Cybele is extremely open. One of the key characters of the series, Princess Daeyneris Targaryen, embodies this archetype more than any other character. Let us recall that the Great Mother (Cybele, Rhea, Ishtar) in Greek, Asia Minor’s and Semitic mythologies is surrounded by chthonic monsters. Her priests practiced ritual castration and, in addition to the court of monsters and eunuchs, there were also dwarfs. Throughout the whole story, Deyneris is accompanied by chthonic monsters, dragons, to which she refers as to her children, and she is worshipped by an army of castrated slaves. Other male characters finally come to Cybele-Deyneris having experienced the act of castration, such as the eunuch Varys and Tyrion Greyjoy, whose sister Yara is also an embodiment of the archetype of the insurgent Cybele.

Naturally, the only dwarf in the series, Tyrion Lannister, is also in the end included in the court of Daeyneris. She destroys social hierarchy in the conquered cities, eradicates slavery and introduces election management insisting on equality and multicultural democracy. The egalitarian masses proclaim her to be “Mother" (Misa). As the Mother of Dragons and mother of rebellious slaves, it is is symbolic that the Phrygian cap, the headdress of Cybele’s lover Attis, became a symbol of the rebel slaves in Rome, and then the symbol of the French Revolution.

The main centers of Cybele’s cult were located in Asia Minor. Coincidentally, in these cults was the culture and geographical design of the continent of Essos, where Daeyneris begins the invasion of Westeros, which resembles ancient Asia Minor. Thus, her war is a war of Cybele’s Logos destined to conquer Europe and suppress all the remains of old traditional order.

Of course, she is not the only embodiment of this principle. Other facets of the archetype of Cybele are revealed in the character of Cersei Lannister who creates children from sexual relations with her own twin brother, the person most biologically identical to herself. In this can be seen the myth of parthenogenesis, the birth of Mother Earth’s children by and out of herself. They are destined to fail and be killed as are many of the creatures of the earth like the numerous offspring of the goddess Gaia in the Greek myths of the Olympic gods. Everything that she likes is associated with death since her love is insatiable and proprietary and killing is the love of Cybele. It is this archetype which leads those she loves (like her lover Attis) to their death.

In modern mass culture, we see the resurgence of ancient myths earlier veiled by the hypnosis of scientific thought, rationality or “common sense.” But, as the prominent German conservative and specialist in Greek mythology, Friedrich Georg Junger, said, when the gods are gone, the titans occupy their place.

Rejecting the celestial spirituality of Christianity, the West was doomed to chthonic matriarchal cults and to the resurgence of ancient mythical figures in its imagination. Cybele’s trend in Game of the Thrones is just one example of the changing gender mythology of the West which is renouncing its masculinity in psychological self-castration. From imagination, this will turn into real politics to the point that we will soon see the deadly incarnation of the bloody goddess enthroned.


Catastrophe

Catastrophe is the fate of the titans, the sons of Gaia, just as it is her own. The catastrophic absence of a “happy ending” is a distinct feature of Game of Thrones. The series’ credibility and success is largely due to the fact that the authors allow the myth to work. The myth of female domination and titanic power, as the above-mentioned Friedrich Georg Jünger noted, is inevitably linked with the prospects of disaster and catastrophe. The Greek word for catastrophe literally means to turn to the bottom, to matter and the Great Mother. The disaster awaits those who stand on the side of chthonic power, who follow their passions, and stand in the ranks of the army of titans. Their lack of the harmony given by God to the world will be punished. The disaster is always present where there is an immoderate desire for power. Another leitmotif of Game of Thrones. In the world of Game of Thrones, the Middle Ages without Christ, there is no other possible outcome than one of total destruction. The imaginary world of the West shares the fate of and projects the future of the real world.


GUNNAR BJORNSON

Walking around Fiesole

Walking About Fiesole: From the Etruscan Civilization to the Middle Ages

 by Tatiana Yugay (from the blog "Medieval Walks")

 

I fell in love with  Fiesole even before visiting it. I first knew about this charming town from Ugo Bardi's photo blog. Ugo published there his photos with brief or sometimes long comments. I liked very much his pictures of nature and its creatures, sunrises and sunsets, historic sights, old postcards and local folks. He also wrote about historic and modern political, scientific and cultural events in Fiesole. I write in the past time because, unfortunately, Ugo didn't update his blog since December 2015. Though he wrote in Italian, I highly recommend you to visit the blog because his photos speak by themselves. It was a kind of chronicle of Fiesole's everyday life which was made with such a love and mild humor that I became dreaming to see Fiesole with my own eyes.

As the matter of facts, the Fiesolans have two strong reasons to consider themselves superior than the Florentines. Firstly,  Fiesole is much more ancient than Florence and, secondly, the town literally overlooks the Arno valley where Florence is situated.

Fiesole is a hilltown located on a scenic height of 8 kilometres right above Florence.  It spreads over two hills, San Francesco and Sant’ Apollinare, and the modern town is situated in the saddle between them. Fiesole (Etruscan - Viesul, Viśl, Vipsul) was a flourishing Etruscan city which was probably founded in the 9th century BC.  It was surrounded by an imposing ring of city walls stretching for over two and a half kilometres which were erected to defend Fiesole from the Gauls' invasion. Even three millennia later, we can observe impressive Etruscan remnants in the town.

The Romans conquered Faesulae, as Fiesole was then known, in 283 BC. Under Roman rule, it became the seat of a famous school of augurs, and every year twelve young men were sent here from Rome to study the art of divination.
Fiesole had seen the  great victory of Roman general Stilicho over Germanic hordes of the Vandals and Suebi under Radagaisus in 406. Ugo Bardi wrote in his blog “Cassandra legacy” that he had visited the battle place in order to commemorate a anniversary of this victory.  During the Gothic War (536-53), Fiesole was besieged several times and in 539 Justinus, the Byzantine general, captured it and razed its fortifications.

In the early Middle Ages, Fiesole was more powerful than Florence in the valley below, and many wars arose between them. In 1010 and 1025 Fiesole was sacked by the Florentines, and was finally conquered in 1125.

Nowadays,  Fiesole is a charming and tranquil city and only landmarks of various epochs remind us about its glorious and turbulent history.
My first meeting with Fiesole took place last August when I visited the Bardi in their beautiful house near Fiesole. It was great to walk around the city with such a connoisseur of the place as Ugo. When driving  to  Fiesole, Ugo asked me, what would I like to see most of all. Of course, I wished to see the memorial place of  Stilicho's victory at the King's Mountain. It took us some minutes to get there. I'd better cite Ugo's post about this place.
“Of those remote times, little more than a few lines in history books remain. But, in the Mugnone Valley, you can still find a hill that takes the name of Montereggi, from the Latin "Mons Regis", the King's Mountain. It is the place where, it is said, King Radagaisus was beheaded. We can still walk there and find a small Christian church surrounded by cypress trees. There is also a pile of stones with a sign that says "Ave crux, spes nostra" (Hail, cross, our hope). We have no reason to believe that it was the exact point where the king was beheaded, but surely it is a suggestive place”.

The place looked exactly as Ugo depicted it. The little white church surrounded by secular cypresses and young olive trees looked very peaceful. Only an ancient cross kept the memory of those faraway days. The impression of serenity was emphasized by a naive statue of the Madonna under gazebo.

Surprisingly enough, we started our visit to Fiesole with so called Casa del popolo (People's House) built by local communists in the middle of 20th century. We had a nice talk with old communists who enjoyed their siesta playing chess and sipping coffee.

When Ugo parked the car near a wall made of huge wild stones, he told me that this was the best preserved fragment of ancient Etruscan walls. I was amused because they were in excellent condition and looked no older than mediaeval ones. I've seen Etruscan constructions before, namely, in Perugia and Viterbo.

Nonetheless, every time the same questions buzz in my head. How did the Etruscans manage to built such giant structures without any cement? How did these constructions survive till our days? While I was thinking about that, Ugo showed me another ancient piece of history.

He led me to the to the edge of the cliff and said that it was the best place to see the Roman amphitheater which was far bellow. And that wasn't all! Just near the parking, he showed me a fragment of an ancient Roman road. Black basalt stones were smoothly polished by centuries and half covered with grass. I'm passionate about ancient ruins and was happy to see and even touch Etruscan and Roman antiquities.

After a short walk along the Etruscan walls, we found ourselves in the mediaeval Convent of San Francesco. It seemed to me that during few minutes we were brought by the time machine from the Etruscan civilization to Ancient Rome and then to the Middle Ages.
The square in front of the church was very unusual. When we entered a lateral gate, we found ourselves in front of a sober little church and on our left there was a small loggia. The pavement was overgrown with grass and that gave the whole scene a bucolic country look. A pathway paved with big irregular stones was beginning right near the steps of the main entrance and led to the left. When we came nearer, I looked to the left and saw that there was a smooth descent to the belvedere with a breathtaking panorama. Of course, I rushed there to make photos. Florence was in full view, veiled in a haze of late afternoon light. Right below I saw the Brunelleschi cupola of the Duomo and all the city. The blue Apennine mountains could be hardly seen in the background.

The church and convent of San Francesco were founded in 1399 on the site of an Etruscan, and then Roman, acropolis. In former times, there was the church of St Mary of the Flowers which served for a small order of Florentine women called the Recluses of St Alexander.   In 1352, the ladies moved out to Pietrafitta on the Mugnone river.

The facade of a rather modest and austere Gothic church is built of blocks of light stone. The main portal is decorated by a fresco of San Francesco.  Right above the portal, there is a rose window with a clearly cut geometric flower.
I was very glad that church's interior was also designed in my favorite Gothic style. In fact, you can very seldom find a  church in Italy designed in the unique style. This happened because Italians were always fond of modernizing their churches and that sometimes resulted in a rather eclectic appearances of churches. I think that the San Francesco church has been a happy exception because it belonged from the very beginning till now to the Franciscan order.

The church has a single nave but it is divided by painted pilasters into four bays. It appeared that a small gothic-arched space is featured by four lateral altars situated in the 1st and 3rd bays.

They host beautiful paintings of late Middle Ages - the Immaculate Conception  by Piero di Cosimo, the Annunciation by Raffaellino del Garbo, the Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine by Cenni di Francesco, and the Adoration of the Magi by the school of Cosimo Rosselli.

In the second bay, there are a neo-Gothic marble pulpit and the magnificent triptych of the Enthroned Madonna and Child with Angels and Saints by Bicci di Lorenzo. The fourth bay is entirely occupied by the presbytery, surrounded by a marble balustrade. Behind the main altar, there is the Crucifixion by Neri di Bicci and the Renaissance apse covered with a barrel vault.

The convent is situated to the right of the church. The building of the convent is organized around three cloisters which are simply named - the grand, the intermediate and the small cloisters. The most beautiful of them is  the 15th  century grand cloister. A portico surrounded by three covered galleries is decorated by a fresco of San Francesco talking to the birds, while at the center of the cloister is a picturesque stone well.

We passed the cloisters which were so peaceful and serene. I'd like to stay there much longer but Ugo wanted to show me other remarkable things.  One of them was the Franciscan Missionary Museum, which contains Egyptian and Chinese collections gathered by numerous missionary fathers to those lands. It was rather unusual to meet all these oriental artefacts in a mediaeval Tuscan monastery.

After that, Ugo assumed a mysterious air and led me up a narrow staircase. He put a finger to his lips and we silently entered a long corridor. There were monastic cells on both sides of the corridor which were preserved intact from the 15th century. They were ascetically furnished with worn wooden desks and chairs. Instead of beds, there were simple benches. In some of them, we saw an open book, a small crucifix, an inkpot and even spectacles. We observed a very modest cell of San Bernardino da Siena who was the Guardian of the Convent in 1418.

After the Convent, we made a short walk about the historic center of Fiesole. Unfortunately, there was a mass in the Duomo, so we couldn't enter it. I'm going to write about the  Duomo and  the historic center in my following posts.

Related posts
The King's Mountain 
The National Etruscan Museum in the Medieaval Stronghold
Dont Miss This Small but Very Rich Museum in Viterbo!

Useful links
Foto di Fiesole
http://www.fratifiesole.it/

Опубликовано 4 minutes ago пользователем Tatiana Yugay

In the end, we are all chimeras

Image from early 18th century, by Anonymous. Source.

As I say in the title of this blog, "we are all chimeras."  This phylosophical piece, written by "Reason," from the blog "fight aging," is in perfect agreement with the concept.

 

The Slow Death of the Self that is Produced by the Normal Operation of Human Memory

Posted by Reason

People are terrified of dementia, by the loss of the self that results from the final stages of the accumulation of age-related damage in the brain. Whether this is loss of data or merely loss of access to data, that data being encoded in the structures of neurons and their connecting synapses, depends upon the details along the way. Either option amounts to the same thing for someone in the midst of the condition when there is only faint prospect of therapies arriving soon enough to matter. But if dementia is an asymptotic approach to 100% loss of data, what to make of the fact that we are, on a day to day basis, largely accepting of our normal relationship with the data of the mind, in which we lose 98% of everything that we experience within a few weeks of the event? A week from now you will not remember reading this, nor will there be any trace of what took place in the surrounding minutes before and after. You will have to guess at how you spent your time, what you were thinking, who you were at that moment. We are, every one of us, thin and translucent ghosts of our own history, mere summaries of a rich set of data that is now gone.

Yet we get by. Normal is normal, but that doesn't mean it is good, or that it should go unexamined. To put this another way, there was a person who lived a few decades ago in the UK, and got by. Later, there was another person who came to the US and spent time here, as people do. I know about as much about those individuals as I do about friends of long standing, perhaps just a little more. Yet both of them were me. All of that remains of them, of their richness of data, are the echoes I carry with me now. I have the memories burned in by adrenaline or, to a lesser extent, by sheer boring repetition, but those are just signposts in the mist by this point. Ask me who I was back then, and the answer will be largely extrapolation. Are those individuals dead? Am I so different that such a question makes sense to ask? To what extent is the self burning away and vanishing because we have a poor capacity for remembrance? To what extent is change death, in other words? Here of course I do little more than wave my hands at questions that have been debated at great length in the philosophy community.

Those of us who are generally opposed to the idea of being scanned, uploaded, and copied have the view that a copy of the self is not the self. It is its own separate individual. Individuality stems from the combination of pattern of information and the matter that the pattern is bound to. It isn't clear that, for example, an emulation running in an abstraction layer over computing hardware can be considered a continuous entity, rather than a unending series of nanosecond individuals assembled and then destroyed. In the continuity view of identity, a Ship of Theseus sort of a viewpoint, you are still you even if all your component parts are slowly replaced over time. There is a sizable grey area at the border between small parts and slow replacement, which is fine, and large parts and rapid replacement, which is the same as death. If someone removes half of your brain in one go and replaces it with a hypothetical machine that accepts exactly the same inputs and produces exactly the same outputs where it connects to the remaining brain tissue, I would say that this means that you just died, even though an entity that thinks in the same way as you did continues onward. Conversely, replacing neurons one by one with machines that perform the same functions, and allowing time for each neuron to reach equilibrium with its neighbors, seems acceptable.

Continuity comes attached at the hip to change of the self over time. Life is change, and we celebrate it. But we lose so very much in the course of that change that it seems matters really could be better managed. The figure for 98% loss of memory over weeks arises from self-experiments carried out by a determined fellow in the late 1800s, and which have been repeated every so often by the research community ever since. A replication paper was published just last year, for example. This enormous loss is the way things work for normal humans, and coupled with the adrenaline mechanism for selective additional memory of events that matter, one can see how this sort of a system might have evolved. A prehistoric lifespan is the same few tasks with very minor variations repeated over and again until death or disability, interspersed with a much smaller number of painful and terrifying learning experiences, with each new generation running the same rat wheel as the previous.

There are claims of people with extraordinary memory, or even eidetic or photographic memory, but the scientific community is far from settled on the question of the degree to which these claims result from (a) misinterpreting the top end of the curve for normal variation in memory capacity, versus (b) narrowly specialized memory training, versus (c) some form of genuinely unusual and exceptional ability based on neurobiological differences yet to be described. The mechanisms of memory are being deciphered in the laboratory, however, and there are various demonstrations of a modest degree of enhanced memory in animal studies. The question of whether greatly enhanced memory can be induced through near future medicine remains open: it will certainly happen eventually, but when will it start in earnest, and when will it go beyond adding only few more percentage points to the fraction of events we recall from our lives? It seems to me that this is a goal that should be given a far greater priority than is the case today. Consider that if we had perfect memory, what would we think of someone who forget near everything he or she did? We would call it a medical condition and offer support, in the same way that the medical community seeks to treat and aid people suffering age-related cognitive decline or amnesia today. If there were a great many of those people, there would be an enormous investment in the search for a cure, just as we do today for Alzheimer's disease. But because our disability is normal and shared, there is no such effort.