today I browse reading room: June 2024

Saturday, June 29, 2024

unicorn (legendary creature)

The unicorn, by Nancy Nathaway

Hathaway, Nancy, 1946-

The unicorn.

1. unicorns.

GR830.U6H37 1984

398.2'254

84-6190

introduction

I then ancient unicorn

the first animal named

the eastern beginnings

the fierce karkadann

the unicorn-boy of India

II the medieval unicorn

the hunt of the unicorn

the lion and the unicorn

the unicorn, wild people and wood nymphs

the magical horn

III the progress of the unicorn

centuries of search

the false unicorn

myth and mass culture

the celestial unicorn

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicorn

The unicorn is a legendary creature that has been described since antiquity as a beast with a single large, pointed, spiraling horn projecting from its forehead.

In European literature and art, the unicorn has for the last thousand years or so been depicted as a white horse- or goat-like animal with a long straight horn with spiralling grooves, cloven hooves, and sometimes a goat's beard. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, it was commonly described as an extremely wild woodland creature, a symbol of purity and grace, which could be captured only by a virgin. In encyclopedias, its horn was described as having the power to render poisoned water potable and to heal sickness. In medieval and Renaissance times, the tusk of the narwhal was sometimes sold as a unicorn horn.

A bovine type of unicorn is thought by some scholars to have been depicted in seals of the Bronze Age Indus Valley civilization, the interpretation remaining controversial. An equine form of the unicorn was mentioned by the ancient Greeks in accounts of natural history by various writers, including Ctesias, Strabo, Pliny the Younger, Aelian,[2] and Cosmas Indicopleustes.[3] The Bible also describes an animal, the re'em, which some translations render as unicorn.[2]

The unicorn continues to hold a place in popular culture. It is often used as a symbol of fantasy or rarity.[4] In the 21st century, it has become an LGBT symbol.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lion_and_the_Unicorn

The Lion and the Unicorn are symbols of the United Kingdom. They are, properly speaking, heraldic supporters appearing in the full royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom. The lion stands for England and the unicorn for Scotland. The combination therefore dates back to the 1603 accession of James I of England who was already James VI of Scotland. By extension, they are also used in the arms of Newfoundland since 1637, the arms of Hanover between 1837–1866, and the arms of Canada since 1921.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixiu

Tiānlù

There are two types of Pixiu that are categorised by their antlers. The one with two antlers is the female and is called a Bìxié, and the one with one antler is the male and is called a Tiānlù.[4]

Bìxié (辟邪; bìxié; pi-hsieh; lit. "to ward off evil spirits"): The female of the species wards off evil. It is also believed that Bìxié have the ability to assist anyone who is suffering from bad feng shui from having offended Tai Sui (太歲).

Tiānlù (天祿; tiānlù; t'ien-lu): The male of the species is in charge of wealth. It is said to go out into the world to search for gold and other forms of wealth. When it returns to its master's house, the Bìxié is then said to guard the riches. Displaying Tiānlù at home or in the office is said to prevent wealth from flowing away.

Pixiu crave the smell of gold and silver and like to bring their masters money in their mouth. Statues of this creature are often used to attract wealth in feng shui.[5][6]

Today, Pixiu are a popular design on jade pendants.

gardener and the carpenter (Alison Gopnik)

https://sive.rs/book/GardenerCarpenter

The Gardener and the Carpenter - by Alison Gopnik

Derek Sivers' notes

I would not evaluate the quality of an old friendship by whether my friend was happier or more successful than when we first met.

The most important rewards of being a parent come from the moment-by-moment physical and psychological joy of being with this particular child, and in that child’s moment-by-moment joy in being with you.

Love’s purpose is not to shape our beloved’s destiny, but to help them shape their own.

Don't change the people we love, but give them what they need to thrive.

The purpose of loving children is to give those helpless young human beings a rich, stable, safe environment - an environment in which variation, innovation, and novelty can blossom.

Our adult children are and should be foreigners - inhabitants of the future.

Childhood is designed to be a period of variability and possibility, exploration and innovation, learning and imagination.

Being a parent is like being a gardener.

Being a good parent can help create a new generation that is robust and adaptable and resilient, better able to deal with the inevitable, unpredictable changes that face them in the future.

Our job is not to shape our children’s minds; it’s to let those minds explore all the possibilities that the world allows.

Our job is not to tell children how to play; it’s to give them the toys and pick the toys up again after the kids are done.

We can’t make children learn, but we can let them learn.

Parents are not designed to shape their children’s lives. Instead, parents provide the next generation with a protected space in which they can produce new ways of thinking and acting that, for better or worse, are entirely unlike any that we would have anticipated beforehand.

The virtues of chaos - variability, stochasticity, noise, entropy, randomness, disorder - are the wellspring of freedom, innovation, and creativity.

A system that shifts and varies, even randomly, can adapt to a changing world in a more intelligent and flexible way.

Children influence the way their parents behave as much as parents influence children.

Young brains are designed to explore; old brains are designed to exploit.

Meet variability with variability by varying how they think and develop, and what they learn from others.

Having different people take care of children also ensures that children are exposed to a wide variety of information and models.

The variability of each child’s own temperament stand a better chance of survival when things change.

Children actively interpret and try to understand both what people do and why they do it.

Children actually learn more from the unconscious details of what caregivers do than from any of the conscious manipulations of parenting.

Children learn by watching and imitating the people around them.

And they learn by listening to what other people say about how the world works.

The cure for imposter syndrome is to realize that all the other people are just convincing imposters, too.

Children imitate only intentional actions. They try to reproduce what the actor wanted to do - not just the action itself.

Children not only imitate, they overimitate.

Children seem to assume that other people are out to teach them important things about the world unless they get direct evidence to the contrary.

Adults explicitly mark the supernatural by using phrases such as “I believe.” No one ever says, “I believe in oranges.”

Children really do want answers to their questions, really do look for good explanations, and really do learn from them.

Children don’t just want more information about the world; they want causal information that will let them understand the world in a deeper and broader way - information that will enable future learning.

Early rough-and-tumble play is associated with better social competence later on.

Good scientists should be more interested in evidence that contradicts their theories than evidence that confirms them.

Figuring out what’s going on in other people’s minds: It’s the most important kind of learning people ever do.

People who read a great deal of fiction are consistently more empathetic and better at understanding other people.

Teaching seemed to discourage the children from discovering all the possibilities the toy had to offer. The children were more eager to imitate the teacher than to discover things themselves. When the adult said that she had no idea how the toy worked, the children discovered the more intelligent strategy.

Imagine if we taught baseball the way we teach science. Until they were twelve, children would read about baseball technique and history, and occasionally hear inspirational stories of the great baseball players. They would fill out quizzes about baseball rules. College undergraduates might be allowed, under strict supervision, to reproduce famous historic baseball plays. But only in the second or third year of graduate school, would they, at last, actually get to play a game.

Managing wide-ranging networks of friendships and alliances, divisions of labor, negotiations, compromises, and interests is among our most significant human challenges. When school-age children play with their friends, they are developing these abilities.

Games that children organize themselves are more interesting and profound.

Socrates feared that reading and writing would undermine the kind of interactive, critical dialogue that was so important for reflective thought. Socrates was completely right. On balance, though, the benefits outweighed the drawbacks.

The shift to new technologies and cultures wouldn’t be possible if caregivers didn’t pass on their own discoveries, traditions, skills, and values to their children, even if they can’t and shouldn’t expect that children will simply replicate those traditions.

We give children a structured, stable environment, and that’s exactly what allows them to be variable, random, unpredictable, and messy. We give them a world to re-create.

A parent is a person whose self has been expanded to include the values and interests of another person, even when those values and interests are different from his.

https://sive.rs/book

Derek Sivers

Books Derek Sivers have read

Tiny summary but detailed notes for each.

Thursday, June 27, 2024

Ted Sorensen

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Sorensen

Theodore Chaikin Sorensen (May 8, 1928 – October 31, 2010) was an American lawyer, writer, and presidential adviser. He was a speechwriter for President John F. Kennedy, as well as one of his closest advisers. President Kennedy once called him his "intellectual blood bank".[1] Notably, though it was a collaborative effort with Kennedy, Sorensen was generally regarded as the author of the majority of the final text of Profiles in Courage, and stated in his memoir that he helped write the book. Profiles in Courage won Kennedy the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Sorensen helped draft Kennedy's inaugural address and was also the primary author of Kennedy's 1962 "We choose to go to the Moon" speech.

source:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2013/11/john-f-kennedys-inaugural-address-who-wrote-jfks-speech.html

ceph (software) blogpost

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/01/20/0613202/ceph-a-journey-to-1-tibs

It's "a free and open-source, software-defined storage platform," according to Wikipedia, providing object storage, block storage, and file storage "built on a common distributed cluster foundation". The charter advisory board for Ceph included people from Canonical, CERN, Cisco, Fujitsu, Intel, Red Hat, SanDisk, and SUSE.

And Nite_Hawk (Slashdot reader #1,304) is one of its core engineers — a former Red Hat principal software engineer named Mark Nelson. (He's now leading R&D for a small cloud systems company called Clyso that provides Ceph consulting.) And he's returned to Slashdot to share a blog post describing "a journey to 1 TiB/s". This gnarly tale-from-Production starts while assisting Clyso with "a fairly hip and cutting edge company that wanted to transition their HDD-backed Ceph cluster to a 10 petabyte NVMe deployment" using object-based storage devices [or OSDs]...)

I can't believe they figured it out first. That was the thought going through my head back in mid-December after several weeks of 12-hour days debugging why this cluster was slow... Half-forgotten superstitions from the 90s about appeasing SCSI gods flitted through my consciousness...

Ultimately they decided to go with a Dell architecture we designed, which quoted at roughly 13% cheaper than the original configuration despite having several key advantages. The new configuration has less memory per OSD (still comfortably 12GiB each), but faster memory throughput. It also provides more aggregate CPU resources, significantly more aggregate network throughput, a simpler single-socket configuration, and utilizes the newest generation of AMD processors and DDR5 RAM. By employing smaller nodes, we halved the impact of a node failure on cluster recovery....

The initial single-OSD test looked fantastic for large reads and writes and showed nearly the same throughput we saw when running FIO tests directly against the drives. As soon as we ran the 8-OSD test, however, we observed a performance drop. Subsequent single-OSD tests continued to perform poorly until several hours later when they recovered. So long as a multi-OSD test was not introduced, performance remained high. Confusingly, we were unable to invoke the same behavior when running FIO tests directly against the drives. Just as confusing, we saw that during the 8 OSD test, a single OSD would use significantly more CPU than the others. A wallclock profile of the OSD under load showed significant time spent in io_submit, which is what we typically see when the kernel starts blocking because a drive's queue becomes full...

For over a week, we looked at everything from bios settings, NVMe multipath, low-level NVMe debugging, changing kernel/Ubuntu versions, and checking every single kernel, OS, and Ceph setting we could think of. None these things fully resolved the issue. We even performed blktrace and iowatcher analysis during "good" and "bad" single OSD tests, and could directly observe the slow IO completion behavior. At this point, we started getting the hardware vendors involved. Ultimately it turned out to be unnecessary. There was one minor, and two major fixes that got things back on track.

It's a long blog post, but here's where it ends up:

Fix One: "Ceph is incredibly sensitive to latency introduced by CPU c-state transitions. A quick check of the bios on these nodes showed that they weren't running in maximum performance mode which disables c-states."

Fix Two: [A very clever engineer working for the customer] "ran a perf profile during a bad run and made a very astute discovery: A huge amount of time is spent in the kernel contending on a spin lock while updating the IOMMU mappings. He disabled IOMMU in the kernel and immediately saw a huge increase in performance during the 8-node tests." In a comment below, Nelson adds that "We've never seen the IOMMU issue before with Ceph... I'm hoping we can work with the vendors to understand better what's going on and get it fixed without having to completely disable IOMMU."

Fix Three: "We were not, in fact, building RocksDB with the correct compile flags... It turns out that Canonical fixed this for their own builds as did Gentoo after seeing the note I wrote in do_cmake.sh over 6 years ago... With the issue understood, we built custom 17.2.7 packages with a fix in place. Compaction time dropped by around 3X and 4K random write performance doubled."

The story has a happy ending, with performance testing eventually showing data being read at 635 GiB/s — and a colleague daring them to attempt 1 TiB/s. They built a new testing configuration targeting 63 nodes — achieving 950GiB/s — then tried some more performance optimizations...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceph_(software)

Ceph (software)

Ceph (pronounced /ˈsɛf/) is a free and open-source software-defined storage platform that provides object storage,[7] block storage, and file storage built on a common distributed cluster foundation. Ceph provides completely distributed operation without a single point of failure and scalability to the exabyte level, and is freely available. Since version 12 (Luminous), Ceph does not rely on any other conventional filesystem and directly manages HDDs and SSDs with its own storage backend BlueStore and can expose a POSIX filesystem.

Ceph replicates data with fault tolerance,[8] using commodity hardware and Ethernet IP and requiring no specific hardware support. Ceph is highly available and ensures strong data durability through techniques including replication, erasure coding, snapshots and clones. By design, the system is both self-healing and self-managing, minimizing administration time and other costs.

Large-scale production Ceph deployments include CERN,[9][10] OVH[11][12][13][14] and DigitalOcean.[15][16]

Design

see Wikipedia article

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceph_(software)

History

Ceph was created by Sage Weil for his doctoral dissertation,[33] which was advised by Professor Scott A. Brandt at the Jack Baskin School of Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), and sponsored by the Advanced Simulation and Computing Program (ASC), including Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).[34] The first line of code that ended up being part of Ceph was written by Sage Weil in 2004 while at a summer internship at LLNL, working on scalable filesystem metadata management (known today as Ceph's MDS).[35] In 2005, as part of a summer project initiated by Scott A. Brandt and led by Carlos Maltzahn, Sage Weil created a fully functional file system prototype which adopted the name Ceph. Ceph made its debut with Sage Weil giving two presentations in November 2006, one at USENIX OSDI 2006[36] and another at SC'06.[37]

After his graduation in autumn 2007, Weil continued to work on Ceph full-time, and the core development team expanded to include Yehuda Sadeh Weinraub and Gregory Farnum. On March 19, 2010, Linus Torvalds merged the Ceph client into Linux kernel version 2.6.34[38][39] which was released on May 16, 2010. In 2012, Weil created Inktank Storage for professional services and support for Ceph.[40][41]

In April 2014, Red Hat purchased Inktank, bringing the majority of Ceph development in-house to make it a production version for enterprises with support (hotline) and continuous maintenance (new versions).[42]

In October 2015, the Ceph Community Advisory Board was formed to assist the community in driving the direction of open source software-defined storage technology. The charter advisory board includes Ceph community members from global IT organizations that are committed to the Ceph project, including individuals from Red Hat, Intel, Canonical, CERN, Cisco, Fujitsu, SanDisk, and SUSE.[43]

In November 2018, the Linux Foundation launched the Ceph Foundation as a successor to the Ceph Community Advisory Board. Founding members of the Ceph Foundation included Amihan, Canonical, China Mobile, DigitalOcean, Intel, OVH, ProphetStor Data Services, Red Hat, SoftIron, SUSE, Western Digital, XSKY Data Technology, and ZTE.[44]

Ceph: A Journey to 1 TiB/s

Jan 19, 2024

Mark Nelson (nhm)

https://ceph.io/en/news/blog/2024/ceph-a-journey-to-1tibps/

Tuesday, June 25, 2024

Indian fairy tales, myth and legend

Indian fairy tales

Indian myth and legend

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Indian Fairy Tales, Edited by Joseph Jacobs, Illustrated by John D. Batten and Gloria Cardew

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/7128/7128-h/7128-h.htm

Project Gutenberg's Indian Myth and Legend, by Donald Alexander Mackenzie

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/47228/47228-h/47228-h.htm

Sunday, June 23, 2024

Max Müller (sacred books of the east)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_M%C3%BCller

Friedrich Max Müller (German: [ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈmaks ˈmʏlɐ];[1][2] 6 December 1823 – 28 October 1900) was a British philologist and Orientalist of German origin. He was one of the founders of the Western academic disciplines of Indology and religious studies. Müller wrote both scholarly and popular works on the subject of Indology. He directed the preparation of the Sacred Books of the East, a 50-volume set of English translations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_Books_of_the_East

Sacred Books of the East

The Sacred Books of the East is a monumental 50-volume set of English translations of Asian religious texts, edited by Max Müller and published by the Oxford University Press between 1879 and 1910. It incorporates the essential sacred texts of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism, and Islam.

All of the books are in the public domain in the United States, and most or all are in the public domain in many other countries.[1] Electronic versions of all 50 volumes are widely available online.

The Project Gutenberg EBook of India: What can it teach us?, by F. Max Müller

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20847/20847-h/20847-h.htm

Books by Müller, F. Max (Friedrich Max) (sorted by popularity)

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/787

Lectures on the Science of Language by F. Max Müller

Author Müller, F. Max (Friedrich Max), 1823-1900

Title Lectures on the Science of Language

Language English

LoC Class P: Language and Literatures

Subject Language and languages

Subject Comparative linguistics

Category Text

EBook-No. 32856

Release Date Jun 17, 2010

Most Recently Updated Jun 16, 2020

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32856

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/32856/pg32856-images.html

Chips from a German Workshop, Volume 1 by F. Max Müller

Author Müller, F. Max (Friedrich Max), 1823-1900

Title Chips from a German Workshop, Volume 1

Essays on the Science of Religion

Credits Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Geetu Melwani, Thierry

Alberto, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at

http://www.pgdp.net

Language English

LoC Class PJ: Language and Literatures: Oriental languages and literatures

Subject Folklore

Subject Literature -- History and criticism

Subject Mythology

Subject Religions

Subject Comparative linguistics

Category Text

EBook-No. 24686

Release Date Feb 26, 2008

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24686

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/24686/pg24686-images.html

sun myth

myth is a disease of language

____________________________________

Bernie Clark., From the Gita to the Grail : exploring yoga stories & western myths, 2014

3. "Mythology, which was the bane of the ancient world, is in truth a disease of language." Lectures on the Science of Language delivered at the Royal Institute of Great Britain in April, May and June, 1861 by Max Muller, (Charles Scribner and Company), 1886, page 21.

(From the Gita to the Grail : exploring yoga stories & western myths,

____________________________________

Nancy Hathaway, Friendly guide to mythology, [2000]

pp.126─128

Max Müller and the disease of Language

If you accept the theories of Max Müller, myth is basically one big misunderstanding. A German Sanskrit scholar who translated the Rig Veda and became a professor at Oxford, Müller based his theories on a widely accepted notion that stated that Sanskrit and most European languages were derived from a primitive language brought to India by prehistoric invaders called Aryans. Müller believed that the Aryans revered nature and were anxious to communicate their thoughts about it.

Their efforts were stymied by a paucity of vocabulary. Limited to concrete nouns and root verbs, they were unable to express many ideas directly. Instead, clubbing their listeners with words Müller called “heavy and unwieldy,” they personified physical processes and explained nature in ways that were largely metaphorical and focused on one topic: the sun. “Where we speak of the sun following the dawn, the ancient poets could only speak and think of the Sun loving and and embracing the Dawn. What is with us a sunset, was to them the Night giving birth to a beautiful child; and in the Spring they really saw the Sun or the sky embracing the earth with a warm embrace, and showering treasures into the lap of nature.” These metaphors, which obscured meaning as much as they communicated it, required explanation and elaboration; myth provided just that. Thus myth was in essence “a disease of language”.

When these primitive people swept out of Asia and into Europe, they brought their round about constructions with them, making the myths of the Greeks a devolution of the Aryan attempts to express their thoughts about the natural world. So no matter how “silly, savage, and senseless” a myth might seem (and Müller was appalled by the brutality and cannibalism of the Greeks, whose stories, he wrote, “would make the most savage of Red Indians creep and shudder”), the words, and the names in particular, if traced back to their etymological roots, would reveal the original meaning. Müller noted, for instance, that Athena is meaningless in Greek, but that in Sanskrit, ahana meant dawn; thus stories told about Athena must originally have been about sunrise. Using this method, all kinds of seemingly complex myths could be reduced to a solar analogy.

For perhaps half a century after the publication of his essay “Comparative mythology” in 1856, anyone studying mythology had to grapple with Müller theory, which saw every myth as an etymological screen behind which lurked a natural phenomenon. This idea stirred up enormous publicity and even stimulated variant theories, such as the idea that the thunderstorm, not the sun, is at the center of ancient myth. It also gained Müller a lifelong opponent in the form of Andrew Lang, a Scottish scholar best known today for his twelve (12) fairy tale collections. Lang got the last word in when, having outlived Müller, he dismissed solar mythology in the celebrated 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica as “destitute of evidence.” Other scholars have called it untenable, distasteful, racist, elephantine, and obsessive, reducing mythology into “spirited chatter about the weather.”

Müller was not unaware that many people thought his ideas ridiculous, and he struggled to defend himself. “What we call Noon, and Evening, and Night, what we call Spring and Winter, what we call year, and time, and Life, and Eternity ── all this the ancient Aryans call Sun,” he wrote. And yet wise people wonder and say, how curious that the ancient Aryans should have had so many solar myths. Why, every time we say ‘Good morning’, we commit a solar myth. Every poet who sings about ‘the May driving the Winter from the field again’ commits a solar myth. Every ‘Christmas number’ of our newspaper ── ringing out the old year and ringing in the new ── is brimful of solar myth. Be not afraid of solar myths. . . .”

Müller

‘’•─“”

(Friendly guide to mythology / Nancy Hathaway, 1. mythology., BL311 .H38 2000, 291.1'3──dc21, 00─034967, )

____________________________________

golden bough (James George Frazer)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Bough

The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (retitled The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion in its second edition) is a wide-ranging, comparative study of mythology and religion, written by the Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer. The Golden Bough was first published in two volumes in 1890; in three volumes in 1900; and in twelve volumes in the third edition, published 1906–1915. It has also been published in several different one-volume abridgments. The work was for a wide literate audience raised on tales as told in such publications as Thomas Bulfinch's The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes (1855). The influence of The Golden Bough on contemporary European literature and thought was substantial.[1]

Frazer attempted to define the shared elements of religious belief and scientific thought, discussing fertility rites, human sacrifice, the dying god, the scapegoat, and many other symbols and practices whose influences had extended into 20th-century culture.[2] His thesis is that the most ancient religions were fertility cults that revolved around the worship and periodic sacrifice of a sacred king in accordance with the cycle of the seasons. Frazer proposed that mankind's understanding of the natural world progresses from magic through religious belief to scientific thought.[2]

J. M. W. Turner's 1834 painting of the Golden Bough incident in the Aeneid

Frazer's thesis was developed in relation to an incident in Virgil's Aeneid, in which Aeneas and the Sibyl present the golden bough taken from a sacred grove to the gatekeeper of Hades to gain admission. The incident was illustrated by J. M. W. Turner's 1834 painting The Golden Bough. Frazer mistakenly states that the painting depicts the lake at Nemi, though it is actually Lake Avernus.[3] The lake of Nemi, also known as "Diana's Mirror", was a place where religious ceremonies and the "fulfillment of vows" of priests and kings were held.[4]

Frazer based his thesis on the pre-Roman priest-king Rex Nemorensis, a priest of Diana at Lake Nemi, who was ritually murdered by his successor. The king was the incarnation of a dying and reviving god, a solar deity who underwent a mystic marriage to a goddess of the Earth, died at the harvest and was reincarnated in the spring. Frazer claims that this legend of rebirth was central to almost all of the world's mythologies.

Frazer wrote in a preface to the third edition of The Golden Bough that while he had never studied Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, his friend James Ward, and the philosopher J. M. E. McTaggart, had both suggested to him that Hegel had anticipated his view of "the nature and historical relations of magic and religion". Frazer saw the resemblance as being that "we both hold that in the mental evolution of humanity an age of magic preceded an age of religion, and that the characteristic difference between magic and religion is that, whereas magic aims at controlling nature directly, religion aims at controlling it indirectly through the mediation of a powerful supernatural being or beings to whom man appeals for help and protection." Frazer included an extract from Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1832).[5]

The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion by James George Frazer

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3623

The Golden Bough

A Study in Comparative Religion

James George Frazer, M.A.

Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge

In Two Volumes.

Vol. I.

New York and London

MacMillan and Co.

1894

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/41082/41082-pdf.pdf

____________________________________

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_George_Frazer

Sir James George Frazer OM FRS FRSE FBA[1] (/ˈfreɪzər/; 1 January 1854 – 7 May 1941) was a Scottish social anthropologist and folk lorist[2] influential in the early stages of the modern studies of mythology and comparative religion.[3]

____________________________________

Hathaway, Nancy, 1964─

Friendly guide to mythology / Nancy Hathaway

1. mythology.

BL311 .H38 2000

291.1'3──dc21

00─034967

p.129

This barbarous ritual ── never mind its questionable veracity ── captured the attention of a shy Scottish antrhopologist and classicist, Sir James George Frazer, and led him to write one of the most influential, unwieldy, and intriguing works of its day. Upon publication in 1890, The Golden Bough: a study in magic and religion was a two-volume work but Frazer accumulated so much data about fertility rites, fire festivals, tree spirits, corn kings, scapegoats, dying-and-reviving gods, taboos, totoems, and human sacrifice that it ripened into 12 volumes. When the first abridged edition appeared in 1922, it still ran to over eight hundred pages, and many abridgments followed (to this day). But Frazer never found his Maxwell Perkins, and the book itself, despite it dramatic, vigorous style and unending parade of weird and fascinating customs, remains an undigestible feast.

James George Frazer, The golden bough: a study in magic and religion, [1890]

12 volumes

p.131

As a member of the myth and ritual school of Cambridge, Frazer believed that the two developed together, with the ritual representing a regular performed action and the myth providing a justification for that action (although myth could also arise to elucidate natural phenomena or as a distortion of historical events). Like other post-Darwinian thinkers, he believed that civilization evolved in stages. The first stage was magic, a world-view based on the supposition that events can be controlled. But magic inevitably disappoints, which leads to the second stage: religion, in which human beings acknowledge their powerlessness and appeal to higher beings for assistance. Eventually that too is rejected, and people turn to science, which Frazer, a committed rationalist, considered a “a golden key that opens many locks in the treasure of nature.”

Although Frazer's book explores strange and thrilling customs from around the world, he led the narrow life of an academic, spending so much time reading that, according to an early biographer, “The facts of Frazer's life consist essentially of a list of books.” He shunned publicity, but his wife Lilly Grove, an energetic widow whom he married in 1896, managed his career (and was given full credit for that by his friends). Frazer and his wife died in 1941 within hours of each other.

Today, Frazer is some times derides as an armchair anthropologist, and much about The Golden Bough has been discounted, including his evolutionary schema and many of his facts (including the sotry of the King of the Wood). None the less, he made sense of primitive myths and rituals, explained the development of religion, and opened up an incredible mine of metaphor and image buried within the recesses of human history. In so doing, he inspired genrations of anthropologists and scores of writers, including T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, who listened to The Golden Bough read aloud while posing for a portrait. More than that, he shook the foundations of established belief, and not just within the academy.

Jane Harrison, another Cambridge ritualist and an acquaintance of Frazer (they took the same Hebrew class), received direct evidence of his influence in a conversation she once had with a local policeman. “I used to believe everything they told me,” he confided. “But, thank God, I read The Golden Bough, and I've been a free-thinker ever since.”

‘’•─“”

Hathaway, Nancy, 1964─

Friendly guide to mythology / Nancy Hathaway

1. mythology.

BL311 .H38 2000

291.1'3──dc21

00─034967

____________________________________

buddhism (vietnam)

in vietnam buddhism, to assure that one doesn't beome attached to a philsophical concept, what are the three non-natures to prevent individual from becoming caught up in the doctrine of the three natures

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search term = in vietnam buddhism, to assure that one doesn't beome attached to a philsophical concept, what are the three non-natures to prevent individual from becoming caught up in the doctrine of the three natures

https://thuvienhoasen.org/images/file/qY5rgREI2AgQAHoe/the-history-of-buddhism-in-vietnam.pdf

Saturday, June 15, 2024

A man for all seasons (a play) (Robert Bolt)

A man for all seasons

a play

by Robert Bolt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Man_for_All_Seasons_(play)

A Man for All Seasons is a play by Robert Bolt based on the life of Sir Thomas More. An early form of the play had been written for BBC Radio in 1954, and a one-hour live television version starring Bernard Hepton was produced in 1957 by the BBC,[1] but after Bolt's success with The Flowering Cherry, he reworked it for the stage.

It was first performed in London opening at the Globe Theatre (now Gielgud Theatre) on 1 July 1960. It later found its way to Broadway, enjoying a critically and commercially successful run of over a year. It has had several revivals, and was subsequently made into a multi-Academy Award-winning 1966 feature film and a 1988 television movie.

The plot is based on the historical events leading up to the execution of More, the 16th-century Chancellor of England, who refused to endorse Henry VIII's wish to divorce his wife Catherine of Aragon, who did not bear him a son, so that he could marry Anne Boleyn, the sister of his former mistress.

The play portrays More as a man of principle, envied by rivals such as Thomas Cromwell, but loved by the common people and by his family.

Title

The title reflects 20th-century agnostic playwright Robert Bolt's portrayal of More as the ultimate man of conscience. As one who remains true to himself and his beliefs while adapting to all circumstances and times, despite external pressure or influence, More represents "a man for all seasons". Bolt borrowed the title from Robert Whittington, a contemporary of More's, who in 1520 wrote of him:

"More is a man of an angel's wit and singular learning. I know not his fellow. For where is the man of that gentleness, lowliness and affability? And, as time requireth, a man of marvelous mirth and pastimes, and sometime of as sad gravity. A man for all seasons."[2]

https://web.archive.org/web/20060111014236/http://thebestnotes.com/booknotes/Man_For_All_Seasons/Man_For_All_Seasons01.html

A Man For All Seasons

A Man For All Seasons by Robert Bolt Online Summary Study Guide

Robert Bolt

First published: 1960

TheBestNotes Study Guide by Jane Johnson

Any Further Distribution without written consent of is strictly prohibited.

Table of Contents

Literary Elements

• Setting

• Character List

• Conflict

• Short Summary (Synopsis)

• Themes

• Mood

• Robert Bolt - Biography

• Literary/Historical Information

Scene Summaries with Notes

• Preface

Act One

• Scene One

• Scene Two

• Scene Three

• Scene Four

• Scene Five

• Scene Six

• Scene Seven

• Scene Eight

Act Two

• Scene One

• Scene Two

• Scene Three

• Scene Four

• Scene Five

• Scene Six

• Scene Seven

• Scene Eight

• Scene Nine

• Scene Ten

Overall Analyses

• Character Analysis

• Plot Structure Analysis

• Themes - Theme Analysis

• Important Quotations/Quotes and Analysis

• Symbolism/Motifs/Symbols

• Key Facts

• Vocabulary

Questions

• Study Questions

• Answer Key

• Essay Topics - Book Report Ideas

Table of Contents | Next Page

A Man For All Seasons Free BookNotes Summary

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_More

Sir Thomas More PC (7 February 1478 – 6 July 1535), venerated in the Catholic Church as Saint Thomas More,[2] was an English lawyer, judge,[3] social philosopher, author, statesman, amateur theologian, and noted Renaissance humanist.[4] He also served Henry VIII as Lord High Chancellor of England from October 1529 to May 1532.[5] He wrote Utopia, published in 1516, which describes the political system of an imaginary island state.[6]

More opposed the Protestant Reformation, directing polemics against the theology of Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli and William Tyndale. More also opposed Henry VIII's separation from the Catholic Church, refusing to acknowledge Henry as supreme head of the Church of England and the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. After refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy, he was convicted of treason on what he claimed was false evidence, and executed. On his execution, he was reported to have said: "I die the King's good servant, and God's first".

Pope Pius XI canonised More in 1935 as a martyr.[7] Pope John Paul II in 2000 declared him the patron saint of statesmen and politicians.[8][9][10]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Cromwell

Thomas Cromwell (/ˈkrɒmwəl, -wɛl/;[1][a] c. 1485 – 28 July 1540), briefly Earl of Essex, was an English statesman and lawyer who served as chief minister to King Henry VIII from 1534 to 1540, when he was beheaded on orders of the king, who later blamed false charges for the execution.

Cromwell was one of the most powerful proponents of the English Reformation, and the creator of true English governance. He helped to engineer an annulment of the king's marriage to Catherine of Aragon so that Henry could lawfully marry Anne Boleyn.[3] Henry failed to obtain the approval of Pope Clement VII for the annulment in 1533, so Parliament endorsed the king's claim to be Supreme Head of the Church of England, giving him the authority to annul his own marriage. Cromwell subsequently charted an evangelical and reformist course for the Church of England from the unique posts of Vicegerent in Spirituals and Vicar-general (the two titles refer to the same position).[4]: 658, fn. 2

During his rise to power, Cromwell made many enemies, including Anne Boleyn, with his fresh ideas and lack of nobility. He duly played a prominent role in her downfall.[5] He later fell from power, after arranging the king's marriage to German princess Anne of Cleves. The marriage was a disaster for Cromwell, ending in an annulment six months later. Cromwell was arraigned under an act of attainder (32 Hen. 8. c. 62) and executed for treason and heresy on Tower Hill on 28 July 1540. The king later expressed regret at the loss of his chief minister, and his reign never recovered from the incident.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther

Martin Luther OSA (/ˈluːθər/;[1] German: [ˈmaʁtiːn ˈlʊtɐ] ⓘ; 10 November 1483[2]– 18 February 1546) was a German priest, theologian, author, hymnwriter, professor, and Augustinian friar.[3] Luther was the seminal figure of the Protestant Reformation, and his theological beliefs form the basis of Lutheranism. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in Western and Christian history.[4]

Luther was ordained to the priesthood in 1507. He came to reject several teachings and practices of the Roman Catholic Church; in particular, he disputed the view on indulgences. Luther attempted to resolve these differences amicably, first proposing an academic discussion of the practice and efficacy of indulgences in Ninety-five Theses, which he authored in 1517. In 1520, Pope Leo X demanded that Luther renounce all of his writings, and when Luther refused to do so, excommunicated him in January 1521. Later that year, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V condemned Luther as an outlaw at the Diet of Worms. When Luther died in 1546, Pope Leo X's excommunication was still in effect.

Luther taught that salvation and, consequently, eternal life are not earned by good deeds; rather, they are received only as the free gift of God's grace through the believer's faith in Jesus Christ, who is the sole redeemer from sin. Luther's theology challenged the authority and office of the pope by teaching that the Bible is the only source of divinely revealed knowledge,[5] and opposed sacerdotalism by considering all baptized Christians to be a holy priesthood.[6] Those who identify Luther's wider teachings are called Lutherans, though Luther opposed the name, believing that those who professed faith in Christ should be called "Christian" or "Evangelic".

Luther's translation of the Bible into German from Latin made the Bible vastly more accessible to the laity, which had a tremendous impact on both the church and German culture. It fostered the development of a standard version of the German language, added several principles to the art of translation,[7] and influenced the writing of an English translation, the Tyndale Bible.[8] His hymns influenced the development of singing in Protestant churches.[9] His marriage to Katharina von Bora, a former nun, set a model for the practice of clerical marriage, allowing Protestant clergy to marry.[10]

In two later works, Luther expressed anti-Judaistic views, calling for the expulsion of Jews and the burning of synagogues.[11] These works also targeted Roman Catholics, Anabaptists, and nontrinitarian Christians.[12] Based upon his teachings, despite the fact that Luther did not advocate the murdering of Jews,[13][14][15] some historians contend that his rhetoric contributed to the development of antisemitism in Germany and the emergence, centuries later, of the Nazi Party.[16][17][18]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-five_Theses

discovery of time (J. T. shotwell)

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=j.+t.+shotwell%2C+the+discovery+of+time%2C+1915

https://www.pdcnet.org/jppsm/content/jppsm_1915_0012_0008_0197_0206

https://www.pdcnet.org//collection/fshow?id=jppsm_1915_0012_0008_0197_0206&pdfname=jppsm_1915_0012_0008_0003_0012.pdf&file_type=pdf

april 15, 1915

Art of Worldly Wisdom (Baltasar Gracian) (revisit)

The Art of Worldly Wisdom (Baltasar Gracian) (revisit)

The Art of Worldly Wisdom

(Spanish: Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia)

Baltasar Gracián y Morales, better known as Baltasar Gracian.[1]

The Art of Worldly Wisdom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Worldly_Wisdom

The Art of Worldly Wisdom (Spanish: Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia) is a book written in 1647 by Baltasar Gracián y Morales, better known as Baltasar Gracian.[1] It is a collection of 300 maxims, each with a commentary, on various topics giving advice and guidance on how to live fully, advance socially, and be a better person, that became popular throughout Europe.[2]

Title page of The Art of Worldly Wisdom

It was translated by Joseph Jacobs (London and New York City, Macmillan and co., 1892.[3] Other editions are also available from:

Nayika, 2009, ISBN 978-0-955-95831-1; edited with a light commentary/footnotes

Shambhala Publications, 2004, ISBN 1-59030141-2

Christopher Maurer (Doubleday) 1992

Dover Publications, 2005, ISBN 0-48644034-6

Google Books as a free digital edition via partnership with Princeton University Library

The Art of Worldly Wisdom

by Balthasar Gracian

translated by Joseph Jacobs

[1892]

Part life-coach, part Machiavelli, part Yoda, Balthasar Gracian [1601-1658], a Jesuit priest, wrote this collection of pithy sayings four centuries ago. Gracian speaks to the twenty-first century as well as the seventeenth. It's only a matter of time before someone markets Gracian's life advice to busy executives, like Sun Tzu or the Book of Five Rings (if it hasn't been already). In the meantime, Gracian can be our little secret.

Jacobs, the translator, is also the author of many books of folklore, etexts of which can also be found at this site, for instance, Celtic Fairy Tales, English Fairy Tales, and Indian Fairy Tales.

Production note: I have arbitrarily divided the body of the translation into files of 50 sayings each: Jacobs recommended reading the book 50 sayings at a time.

https://sacred-texts.com/eso/aww/

The Art of Worldly Wisdom public domain audiobook at LibriVox

The Art of Worldly Wisdom

Baltasar Gracián (1601 - 1658)

Translated by Joseph Jacobs (1854 - 1916)

300 short maxims by Spanish Jesuit Baltasar Gracian (1601-1658). The advice is still useful and insightful for our modern world. Gracian was considered one of the most interesting philosophers by both Nietzsche und Schopenhauer, and the latter translated The Art of Worldly Wisdom into German. This English translation was done by the famous Australian fairy-tale collector Joseph Jacobs (1854-1916). - Summary by Sandra Schmit

Genre(s): Early Modern

Language: English

https://librivox.org/art-of-worldly-wisdom-by-baltasar-gracian/

SECTION CHAPTER READER TIME

Play

01 Dedication, Preface and Testimonia Sonia