via the New Statesman by Richard Mabey
I’m not a conventional church-crawler. But I am intrigued by their iconography, especially the considerable proportion that is nature-based.
COLORS HUNTER - CHASSEUR DE COULEURS
The village of Woolpit (an Old English word for wolf-trapping pits) could stake a good claim to being the folkloric epicentre of Suffolk. The village sign depicts the legend of the Green Children, a 12th-century story of a boy and girl who emerged from a parish wolf-pit into a field. Their skins were green and they refused to eat or speak until they were offered beans. When they learned English they said they came from a land of perpetual twilight, beyond a great river.
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via lifesavvy by Elyse Hauser
Yanawut Suntornkij/Shutterstock
Ever wondered why that hotel doesn’t have a 13th floor, or why you’re supposed to throw salt after you spill it? Here’s the history behind some of the most common superstitions.
Some superstitions are so common that it’s easy to forget they’re kind of strange practices. If an alien were to visit Earth, not many people would be able to explain to them why we reflexively say “Bless you” when somebody sneezes.
But whether you adhere to these traditions or not, it’s certainly fun to find out where they come from. Each one has a story behind it, so keep reading for some cool trivia that will impress your friends!
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Carthage inherited the foundations of religion from Phoenicia.
The supreme pair of gods were Tanit and Baal Hammon, they are considered the most typical figures of the Carthaginian pantheon. The goddess Astarta was very popular in early times. In the midst of its cosmopolitan era, the pantheon of Carthage consisted of a large number of deities from the neighboring civilizations of Greece, Egypt and the city-states of the Etruscans.
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via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
I can open your eyes
Take you wonder by wonder
Over sideways and under
On a magic carpet ride
Credits: Hiskm and Dahlek88 (r/Aquariums, thanks Dustin Hostetler!)
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via Interesting Literature
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads Richard Aldington’s Life Quest, the modernist long poem that time forgot
The standout modernist long poem of the 1920s was The Waste Land. T. S. Eliot’s poem redefined what modernism could do in poetry, influenced by James Joyce’s example of the ‘mythical method’ in his novel Ulysses and the various Symbolist and imagist experiments in French and English verse. It captured a moment and mood of post-war desolation and uncertainty, a world in ruin plagued by fears and anxieties, ennui and a lack of self-confidence. But what happened to the modernist long poem in the 1930s at another moment of anxiety and transition has been less well-covered by scholars and critics of modernism.
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via Ancient Origins
Detail of the Devil portrait in the Codex Gigas. ( National Library of Sweden )
Ever since the days when magic first arose, people have been looking to manipulate the world with supernatural means and divine intervention – often for positive ends, but also to punish or send misfortune to enemies. Archaeological evidence shows a plethora of ancient curses. The history of curses certainly varies between cultures, locations, religions or beliefs, and times; however, such beliefs and practices have continued to the present day.
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via the OUP blog by Thomas Keymer
Dickey Beach by texaus1. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr. [that’s in Queensland, Australia]
Robinson Crusoe (1719) was Daniel Defoe’s first novel and remains his most famous: a powerful narrative of isolation and endurance that’s sometimes compared to Faust, Don Quixote or Don Juan for its elemental, mythic quality. Published 300 years ago this month, the work was an immediate popular success, and as one envious rival sneered, “there is not an old Woman that can go to the Price of it, but buys thy Life and Adventures.” It took longer to gain a foothold in the literary canon, in part because of Defoe’s lasting reputation as a political incendiary who had spent several months in prison for seditious libel. But in later generations Robinson Crusoe was championed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walter Scott and others, and its vivid combination of exotic adventure and pious introspection made it a classic for Victorian readers.
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via About History
During the Livonian War, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, speaking in 1561 in support of the Livonian Order, found itself in difficult conditions. In 1563, Ivan the Terrible took Polotsk, the largest city of the principality. There was a threat to the capital of the state of Vilna. In search of an ally, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania turned to the Kingdom of Poland, with which it had long-standing ties. However, the conditions proposed by the Polish crown, actually leading to the elimination of the statehood of the Grand Duchy, could not suit the Lithuanian side. Then the Kingdom of Poland annexed a significant part of the lands of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (the territory of modern Ukraine ), which put Lithuanian statehood on the brink of destruction.
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via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
James Verdesoto is the movie poster designer responsible for some of the more memorable posters of recent decades, including Pulp Fiction, Girl, Interrupted, and Training Day. In this short video, he gives a terrific presentation about the design aesthetics of movie posters from the 1930s to present day. I learned a lot from this; it was 10 minutes well-spent.
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How Virginia Woolf’s diaries chronicle the push and pull of her private and public lives.
via Arts and Letters Daily: Colin Dickey in The New Republic
Central Press / Getty Images
Every so often a book comes along and changes the way you see a classic of literature. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, published between 1977 and 1984, came out decades after Woolf’s death in 1941, and added a stunning lens through which to view her long and dynamic career. Her husband Leonard had carefully edited a volume initially in 1953, one that focused entirely on Woolf’s writing process and avoided personal details, but it was only when Woolf’s diaries were released in their totality that readers gained a precious glimpse inside a complicated mind at work.
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