Fascinating Words’ Wonder With Wings 😳😯👍
I can just participate With my Whisky in the jar😊🙏👏❤
Wacky whippersnappers wildly wallopped with wordmongers watchwords....Wisenheimer whistles whimsical wisecracks wagering wool gathering waifs wanderlust.... watching wryly, weeping wallflowers waltz-- -wrecking wisdom's wavelength...Wordsmitheries wean wistful wannabes wrapping wholesome words with wackadoodle wackos Who wreak worrisome wordishness... # Tautogram poem
A worthy read 🙏💖🙏
…as a very clever man called Ernest Hemingway used to say, ‘Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight’…hope that helps.”
A brilliant Lecture 👇👇 🙏💖
A long, long time ago in a land where night was always day and day always night and where the clocks ticked anti-clockwise there was once an old blind man who collected all the spare daydreams others no longer had any use for. He kept them in a stovepipe top hat bequeathed to him by a dying failed magician turned useless impresario upon what was to become the poor chaps deathbed.
As any collector worth his stuff would do he would wait until the titfer was full to the brim whereupon he would sort out the meritorious daydreams from the dull or flighty ones. It was then and only then, providing there was a sufficiency of imaginations, he would leave the sanctuary of his clifftop cottage and follow the sound of the cooing wood pigeons into the nearby fishing village. There he would exchange them for clothing, shoes, socks, cutlery…
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There is no miss, We can learn every day, in every way of communication 🙏💖😊
I know that it is common belief that in these desperate times of pandemic outbreak, teachers are those lucky ones who stay at home – it has been almost 5 weeks – paid to do nothing, but redecorating the house, baking soft bread, delicious cakes and biscuits all day, with the only concern about what to make for dinner, soon after lunch is over. Long days passed watching all the series Netflix, Prime, Sky can offer and, of course, reading, surfing the net here and there and, it cannot be forgotten, a few necessary gym sessions, as I suspect all those calories will deposit somewhere I don’t wish to very soon. In short: a paradise. Well, if you are one of them, I feel like reassuring you, as nothing of the kind has happened since March 5th: there is no paradise, but rather, a hell.
At first it was like…
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Of course, I couldn’t begin this without a mention from the master of the Dark-Side.
This creature is one of my most favourites in all fairytales which I have swallowed at an early age as a child and still onto now! The Div (Demon) in old Persian fairytales have a great presence and unusually as a man might expect, for me, they were very interesting! Their essential came from Gnome or as Irish folklore leprechaun.
As I remember it was almost normal to see such creatures in the bathrooms or elsewhere.
And Yes! They play a huge role in the Persian fairy tales, of course, I’m not talking about the “Thousands and one night”, there are so many more fairy tales of that kind in our history.
Though, in the time as a child; for us two (Al, my brother and me) our parents had no time to read out or aloud these wonderful stories for us. We had to get used to reading them by ourselves. And we were just hungrily got them in.
I found here some interesting different name for this subject.;
The Infernal Names
Abaddon—(Hebrew) the destroyer.
Adramalech—Samarian devil.
Ahpuch—Mayan devil.
Ahriman—The Mazdean devil. (This is in old Perian culture as mighty as the God-self; Ahuramazda: The Duality.
Amon—Egyptian ram-headed god of life and reproduction.
Apollyon—Greek synonym for Satan, the archfiend.
Asmodeus—Hebrew devil of sensuality and luxury, originally “creature of judgment”(? 😮😉😅) via: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_infernal_names
To be shared is here a nice article about the way of the “Imagination of this creature”. Let see and read. 💖🙏
The Foot-Licking Demons & Other Strange Things in a 1921 Illustrated Manuscript from Iran
Few modern writers so remind me of the famous Virginia Woolf quote about fiction as a “spider’s web” more than Argentinian fabulist Jorge Luis Borges. But the life to which Borges attaches his labyrinths is a librarian’s life; the strands that anchor his fictions are the obscure scholarly references he weaves throughout his text. Borges brings this tendency to whimsical employ in his nonfiction Book of Imaginary Beings, a heterogenous compendium of creatures from ancient folk tale, myth, and demonology around the world.
Borges himself sometimes remarks on how these ancient stories can float too far away from ratiocination. The “absurd hypotheses” regarding the mythical Greek Chimera, for example, “are proof” that the ridiculous beast “was beginning to bore people…. A vain or foolish fancy is the definition of Chimera that we now find in dictionaries.” Of what he calls “Jewish Demons,” a category too numerous to parse, he writes, “a census of its population left the bounds of arithmetic far behind. Throughout the centuries, Egypt, Babylonia, and Persia all enriched this teeming middle world.” Although a lesser field than angelology, the influence of this fascinatingly diverse canon only broadened over time.
“The natives recorded in the Talmud” soon became “thoroughly integrated” with the many demons of Christian Europe and the Islamic world, forming a sprawling hell whose denizens hail from at least three continents, and who have mixed freely in alchemical, astrological, and other occult works since at least the 13th century and into the present. One example from the early 20th century, a 1902 treatise on divination from Isfahan, a city in central Iran, draws on this ancient thread with a series of watercolors added in 1921 that could easily be mistaken for illustrations from the early Middle Ages.
As the Public Domain Review notes:
The wonderful images draw on Near Eastern demonological traditions that stretch back millennia — to the days when the rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud asserted it was a blessing demons were invisible, since, “if the eye would be granted permission to see, no creature would be able to stand in the face of the demons that surround it.”
The author of the treatise, a rammal, or soothsayer, himself “attributes his knowledge to the Biblical Solomon, who was known for his power over demons and spirits,” writes Ali Karjoo-Ravary, a doctoral candidate in Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Predating Islam, “the depiction of demons in the Near East… was frequently used for magical and talismanic purposes,” just as it was by occultists like Aleister Crowley at the time these illustrations were made.
“Not all of the 56 painted illustrations in the manuscript depict demonic beings,” the Public Domain Review points out. “Amongst the horned and fork-tongued we also find the archangels Jibrāʾīl (Gabriel) and Mikāʾīl (Michael), as well as the animals — lion, lamb, crab, fish, scorpion — associated with the zodiac.” But in the main, it’s demon city. What would Borges have made of these fantastic images? No doubt, had he seen them, and he had seen plenty of their like before he lost his sight, he would have been delighted.
A blue man with claws, four horns, and a projecting red tongue is no less frightening for the fact that he’s wearing a candy-striped loincloth. In another image we see a moustachioed goat man with tuber-nose and polka dot skin maniacally concocting a less-than-appetising dish. One recurring (and worrying) theme is demons visiting sleepers in their beds, scenes involving such pleasant activities as tooth-pulling, eye-gouging, and — in one of the most engrossing illustrations — a bout of foot-licking (performed by a reptilian feline with a shark-toothed tail).
There’s a playful Bosch-ian quality to all of this, but while we tend to see Bosch’s work from our perspective as absurd, he apparently took his bizarre inventions absolutely seriously. So too, we might assume, did the illustrator here. We might wonder, as Woolf did, about this work as the product of “suffering human beings… attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.” What kinds of ordinary, material concerns might have afflicted this artist, as he (we presume) imagined demons gouging the eyes and licking the feet of people tucked safely in their beds?
See many more of these strange paintings at the Public Domain Review.
Yes, today according to Christian history, is the day in which Jesus has been crucified. In Germany this day called Karfreitag as in English they call it Good Friday and I can’t say why is it so different; as I read somewhere; it once has been called God’s Friday and then it became for Good!
This is an explanation about its meaning in German; Karfreitag is the day where Christians remember the crucifixion of Christ. According to Duden, the Kar in Karfreitag comes from the Mid High German word chara, which means “wail,” “sorrow” or “lamentation.” Another, less common word for Karfreitag is stiller Freitag – “silent Friday.” via https://www.thelocal.de/20190419/karfreitag
Here I’ve found an interesting article about the culprit who was responsible for this event: Pontius Pilate. The question is; what actually had happened to the malefactor? It isn’t clear what, but the fact is that he’s never been turned in to stone! In any case if one wants to damn him to the highest level in the hell, I would say in my opinion; he might do his order to make this day an unforgettable day. 🙏💖
The enduring legacy of the Roman governor who faced the ultimate politician’s dilemma. Kevin Butcher | Published 25 March 2016
Christ before Pilate, Mihály Munkácsy, 1881
Towards the end of the second century AD the pagan intellectual Celsus wrote an anti-Christian treatise mocking belief in Jesus Christ. If Jesus really had been the Son of God, he asked, why hadn’t God punished Pontius Pilate, the man responsible for crucifying him? Why had Pilate not been driven insane or torn apart, like the characters in Greek myths? Why had no calamity befallen him?
While there are plenty of later Christian traditions about the punishment of Pontius Pilate, all of these seem to belong to a period long after Celsus was writing. Celsus’ challenge, and the response of early Christians to it, suggests that there was more than a kernel of truth in the claim that the Prefect of Judaea had evaded misfortune. This is implicit from the efforts early Christians made to absolve him of responsibility for the Crucifixion.
The only reliable statement we have about Pilate’s life after his time in Judaea comes from the pen of the Jewish writer Josephus. In his Antiquities of the Jews, written about 60 years after the events, Josephus states that Pilate was recalled to Rome after his mishandling of a riot involving the Samaritans in AD 36. For this he would have expected to face a hearing before the Emperor Tiberius, the aged but uncompromising ruler who had appointed him ten years earlier. Pilate hurried back, but by the time he arrived, in March AD 37, the ailing Tiberius had died. A new emperor, Caligula, had taken up the reins of power.
What happened next is guesswork. Josephus says nothing more about him, implying that there was no hearing. Perhaps, in the general euphoria surrounding Caligula’s accession, his case was put on hold, or simply forgotten. Maybe the hearing did go ahead and he was acquitted. For all we know, he was given another posting.
The lack of a suitably grisly fate for Pilate put Christian apologists in a quandary. As governor, it was Pilate’s job to pass judgement in capital cases: he was the one who condemned Jesus to suffer on the cross. There was no circumventing his guilt. Divine punishment should have followed.
Yet in the early years of Christianity it was difficult to make such claims. The Roman state was suspicious of the new cult and, if Christians wanted to avoid confrontation, it was best not to accuse one of Rome’s officials of deicide. The canonical Gospels stressed that Pilate was not fully to blame. He could find no fault in Jesus: ‘I have found in him no grounds for the death penalty. Therefore I will have him punished and then release him’, Pilate declares in Luke’s Gospel. John has Pilate twice announce ‘I find no basis for a charge against him’. The apocryphal Gospel of Peter, thought by many scholars to be among the earliest Christian texts, went even further. In this, Pilate and his soldiers play no part in the crowd’s mocking or torturing of Jesus. He himself declares ‘I am pure from the blood of the Son of God’ and, together with his soldiers, who guard the tomb of Jesus, he conspires to keep the miracle of the Resurrection secret from the Jewish priests.
The tradition of a blameless Pilate, a witness to the Passion, led to a strange early Christian fascination with him. By the second century AD, fake letters of Pilate, recounting the wondrous story of Jesus, circulated among the faithful. The so-called Acts of Pilate, allegedly deriving from the governor’s own records, portray Pilate as a convert. Tertullian, the late second-century Christian theologian, described Pilate as someone ‘who himself also in his own conscience was now a Christian’ and alleged that Tiberius was so convinced by Pilate’s reports that he would have placed Jesus among the Roman gods had not the Senate refused. So influential were the various versions of the Acts of Pilate that in the early fourth century the Roman state created and promoted an anti-Christian, ‘true’, pagan version in an attempt to discredit the Christian ones. Needless to say this was no more reliable than its rivals.
All of this might seem merely capricious, but the absolution of Pilate came at a terrible cost. The early Christians shifted the blame for the Crucifixion onto others. A rebuttal of the arguments of Celsus, written by the third-century bishop Origen, shows this clearly: ‘It was not so much Pilate that condemned Him,’ he wrote, ‘as the Jewish nation’. Celsus had chosen the wrong culprit; and the fact that the Jewish nation had been torn apart by the Romans and dispersed across the face of the earth was proof of God’s retribution. The fake letters and the Christian versions of the Acts of Pilate said much the same thing, as did other Christian apologists. The Acts went so far as to have the Jewish crowd telling Pilate that they willingly accept the blood-guilt, an echo of the Gospel of Matthew, which has the same crowd shouting ‘his blood be on us and our children!’ These claims formed a basis for Christian persecution of the Jews right up to modern times.
Video: Professor Kevin Butcher of the University of Warwick on the real Pontius Pilate
Pilate’s costly absolution was the product of specific religious and political circumstances. When the Roman Empire became a Christian state in the fourth century, there was no longer any need to emphasise his innocence. The Nicene Creed, formulated under Emperor Constantine in AD 325 and emended in AD 381, stated bluntly that Christ ‘was crucified under Pontius Pilate’. It became acceptable to cast Pilate as a villain and a range of myths developed describing his grisly end.
Some influential Christians demurred, however. Saint Augustine, writing in the sixth century, argued that when Pilate wrote on the cross ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews’, he really meant it: ‘It could not be torn from his heart that Jesus was the King of the Jews.’
While the West went on to develop the tradition of a ‘bad’ Pilate who was punished for his misdeeds, the Eastern Church preferred a more sympathetic interpretation. Not only was Pilate a Christian; he was a confessor and even a martyr. One eastern text, The Handing Over of Pilate, has Tiberius ordering the governor to be beheaded for having allowed the Crucifixion to go ahead. First Pilate repents and then a voice from heaven proclaims that all nations will bless him, because under his governorship the prophecies about Christ were fulfilled. Finally an angel takes charge of his severed head. In some accounts he is buried with his wife and two children next to the tomb of Jesus – the ultimate martyr’s sepulchre.
In the Gospel of Matthew, Pilate’s wife warns her husband not to harm Jesus and for this she achieved sainthood among Orthodox Christians. The Copts and Christians of Ethiopia took the next step and canonised Pilate himself. An Ethiopian collection of hagiographies lists St Pilate’s Day as the 25th of the summer month of Sanne, a day shared with his wife Procla and the saints Jude, Peter and Paul:
Salutation to Pilate, who washed his hands
To show he himself was innocent of the blood of Jesus Christ
Those familiar with the western tradition may find the idea of St Pontius Pilate curious or even absurd. But the fascination with Pilate never abates. From the Acts of Pilate to Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margerita, the man who cross-examined and crucified Jesus remains an enigma, a shadowy metaphor for opposites: equivocation and stubbornness, cowardice and heroism, cruelty and clemency. His dilemma – to do the right thing or the popular thing – is every ruler’s quandary. Perhaps that is why people can sympathise with him: we too must sometimes face a difficult choice; though, fortunately for us, its legacy is likely to be less enduring.
Kevin Butcher is Professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Warwick and the author of The Further Adventures of Pontius Pilate.
Our friendFrancina – Poetry and Art wrote a post, Share the Light .
To view Francina’s post, click on pic!
Francina asks, “Why don’t we all share the light as a sign of hope? We can do this by posting for instance an image of a candle, a lamp, the light of a lighthouse etc. etc. in a blog post with the heading: Share the Light.”
Many of our blog pals have posted a “Share the Light” and Francina has reblogged them. I hope more join in with a post, and don’t forget to link to Francina’s blog!
She quotes the refrain from Leonard Cohen’s ANTHEM (1982) For those who don’t know it, here is the poet, himself. His opening statement also applies today.
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A time it was, and what a time it was, it was
A time of innocence
A time of confidencesLong ago it must be
I have a photograph
Preserve your memories
They’re all that’s left you
These words are really a masterwork; those days Al and me, we were crazy about these two, and we have swallowed all their works like this one but I understand it now as I myself, getting aged and working with many old peoples, especially in these moments in which they might all feel lonely and scary.
This album actually was not so popular, because, there comes an old-friends talk in between; in a senior institution; we must just to listen to.
therefore, I would like to present this old but forever album to our old friends.
The poems are fascinating; Sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange to be seventy”. it is an imagination of the Arts: it means for me a creation.
Old friends
Old friends
Sat on their park bench like bookends
A newspaper blowin’ through the grass
Falls on the round toes
Of the high shoes
Of the old friendsOld friends
Winter companions, the old men
Lost in their overcoats, waiting for the sunset
The sounds of the city sifting through trees
Settle like dust
On the shoulders of the old friendsCan you imagine us years from today
Sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange to be seventyOld friends
Memory brushes the same years
Silently sharing the same fearA time it was, and what a time it was, it was
A time of innocence
A time of confidencesLong ago it must be
I have a photograph
Preserve your memories
They’re all that’s left youSource: LyricFindSongwriters: Paul SimonBookends Themes lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group
Take care all you old friends, just stay healthy and no fear, be safe 💖💖🥰
You might be surprised to see I’ve titled this with three Exclamation Marks instead of Nombre 3. I just wanted to show how I feel! 😁
I have mentioned, as I had a look back on the latest two chapters, that I have really a problem to write this story, my life story. I have known it as I read them, again and again, I’ve just thought: “what the hell; this man has a problem!! ” 😛
You know, I have learned in my life to get out of me, stay beside and look at myself as another person, I think it helps to get knowing oneself better and here I found this memorandum somehow poor. Here I must really thank you, dearest and adorable friends, despite all these poorness did support them. I am deeply grateful and appreciated.
As I might take the advantage of your kindness, let me analyse why I have such a problem with this story; since I got known psychology through Sigmund Freud, I have found out that I have many complexes in my life; When our mother lied us about father’s death, my unconsciousness knew there’s something wrong as I remember Al, who somehow got it clearly, tried to help mother’s secret on one side and to stop me not putting so many questions there all about, dear brother. I have found it out after some months later when I looked into the old magazine and saw the memorial ceremonies of the funeral which took place after father died (he was a famous writer in his time) and I asked her about the matter, her answer was just “get out and let me alone!” I went out, and of course, she came after me and we’ve taken us in arms wept together.
But these all have remained in my inner soul like deep tracks which I had to work with them, as I am still working on.
It’s surely a big problem but to this comes my inexperiences on writing too and also, two foreign languages which I have to struggle with; English and German. You know, I have learned both by myself; Al and I have learned English at home in Iran when we both began to work as a journalist and when we came in Germany, I’ve noticed that no matter if I can live and communicate in English with people I must learn German to better understand and be understood, therefore, bought some grammar books and did it myself! Now when I begin to think or write in English, both languages mixed up together; I am living here in Germany since 1985 and I speak, think, dream in German and when I want to switch into English, the conversant words for me are mostly German words; I have to translate them in English in my head! If you might notice in the last chapter, I’d written in the title; “Fufty” + Loneliness (2) It is just a mixed-up Fifty in English and Fünfzig in German!!
Here is an example by Master Dr Freud 😉😄
You might ask why I don’t write in German, and I might answer; I have the English language almost in my blood, maybe because since my childhood I’m listening to the English music and to be honest; writing in German is not so easy as the German believe in by themselves. 😉
Anyway, I wondered how many mistakes I’ve made, not only because of the languages but also my extremely humbleness plus a lot of excitement cause of lack of self-confidence.
Therefore, I dicided to make a stop to write about my life, I am sure I will back on this soon, thank you all again and again for your wounderful, inspiring suports and kind words. Blessing 💖🙏💖🙏
lampmagician 
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