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Gita is Krishnas Gift to Humanity

“Bhagavad Gita, also called the ‘holy song of the Lord’, is a gift given to the human society from Lord Sri Krishna to direct them towards seeking the higher goals of life...Bhagavad Gita can be compared to an intelligence agency. The word ‘intelligence’ means ‘inside information’. Any agency which has inside information about certain facts is an intelligence agency. Every country in this world has some intelligence agencies...All these agencies have access to information which common people do not have. Similarly, Bhagavad Gita gives us access to a range of inside information.

When Bhagavad Gita was spoken...Arjuna was a prince warrior, a householder with wife and children, having responsibilities of ruling the kingdom. However, Lord Krishna chose Arjuna to speak Bhagavad Gita...was spoken in the midst of the most gruesome impending war. Lord Krishna, however, chose to speak Bhagavad Gita in that situation by postponing the war.”

”[A] great warrior like Arjuna couldn’t tolerate even the insinuation of desertion and the cowardice it implied. Discouragement and internal state of mind had the power to take such a great hero to such a terrible state. Whether it is depression, dejection, or disheartenment—discouragement is one of our extremely dangerous enemies. For Arjuna even the thought of deserting and leaving the war was unconscionable.

Ralph Waldo Emerson says, “I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad Gita. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us.”

(via Gita is krishna’s gift to humanity- The New Indian Express)

Bhagavad Gita

“The Bhagavad Gita often referred to as the Gita...is set in a narrative framework of a dialogue between Pandava prince Arjuna and his guide and charioteer Krishna...Arjuna is filled with moral dilemma and despair about the violence and death the war will cause. He wonders if he should renounce and seeks Krishna's counsel, whose answers and discourse constitute the Bhagadvad Gita... The setting of the Gita in a battlefield has been interpreted as an allegory for the ethical and moral struggles of the human life.

The Gita in the title of the text "Bhagavad Gita" means "song"...the title has been interpreted as "the Song of God"..."the Song of the Lord", "the Divine Song", and "the Celestial Song"...the Bhagavad Gita suggests that it was composed in an era when the ethics of war were being questioned and renunciation to monastic life was becoming popular. Such an era emerged after the rise of Buddhism and Jainism in the 5th-century BCE...the first version of the Bhagavad Gita may have been composed in or after the 3rd-century BCE.”

Greco-Buddhism

“Greco-Buddhism, or Graeco-Buddhism, is the cultural syncretism between Hellenistic culture and Buddhism, which developed between the 4th century BC and the 5th century AD in Bactria and the Indian subcontinent. It was a cultural consequence of a long chain of interactions begun by Greek forays into India from the time of Alexander the Great...Greco-Buddhism continued to flourish under the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, Indo-Greek Kingdoms, and Kushan Empire. Buddhism was adopted in Central and Northeastern Asia from the 1st century AD, ultimately spreading to China, Korea, Japan, Siberia, and Vietnam.

Greco-Bactrian Kingdom (250–125 BC)...were followed by the Indo-Greek Kingdom (180 BC – AD 10). Even though the region was conquered by the Indo-Scythians and the Kushan Empire (1st–3rd centuries AD), Buddhism continued to thrive.Buddhism in India was a major religion for centuries until a major Hindu revival from around the 5th century, with remaining strongholds such as Bengal largely ended during the Islamic invasions of India. The length of the Greek presence in Central Asia and northern India provided opportunities for interaction, not only on the artistic, but also on the religious plane.”

“According to Ptolemy, Greek cities were founded by the Greco-Bactrians in northern India...A large Greek city built by Demetrius...at the archaeological site of Sirkap...where Buddhist stupas were standing side-by-side with Hindu and Greek temples, indicating religious tolerance and syncretism...In many parts of the Ancient World, the Greeks did develop syncretic divinities, that could become a common religious focus for populations with different traditions...Many of the stylistic elements in the representations of the Buddha point to Greek influence...Greek artists were most probably the authors of these early representations of the Buddha, in particular the standing statues, which display "a realistic treatment of the folds and on some even a hint of modelled volume that characterizes the best Greek work.

Intense westward physical exchange at that time along the Silk Road is confirmed by the Roman craze for silk from the 1st century BC to the point that the Senate issued, in vain, several edicts to prohibit the wearing of silk, on economic and moral grounds...also wrote about Indo-Greek Buddhist king Menander, confirming that information about the Indo-Greek Buddhists was circulating throughout the Hellenistic world.”

“Although the philosophical systems of Buddhism and Christianity have evolved in rather different ways, the moral precepts advocated by Buddhism from the time of Ashoka through his edicts do have some similarities with the Christian moral precepts developed more than two centuries later: respect for life, respect for the weak, rejection of violence, pardon to sinners, tolerance.One theory is that these similarities may indicate the propagation of Buddhist ideals into the Western World, with the Greeks acting as intermediaries and religious syncretists.”

Hinduism

“Hinduism is the world’s oldest religion, according to many scholars, with roots and customs dating back more than 4,000 years. Today, with about 900 million followers, Hinduism is the third-largest religion behind Christianity and Islam. Roughly 95 percent of the world’s Hindus live in India...Hindus revere all living creatures and consider the cow a sacred animal.Food is an important part of life for Hindus. Most don’t eat beef or pork, and many are vegetarians.Hinduism is closely related to other Indian religions, including Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism.

Around 1500 B.C., the Indo-Aryan people migrated to the Indus Valley, and their language and culture blended with that of the indigenous people living in the region...The concept of dharma was introduced in new texts, and other faiths, such as Buddhism and Jainism, spread rapidly...In the 7th century, Muslim Arabs began invading areas in India. During parts of the Muslim Period, which lasted from about 1200 to 1757, Hindus were restricted from worshipping their deities, and some temples were destroyed. Saints expressed their devotion through poetry and songs.”

(via Hinduism | History Channel)

Ariana

“Ariana, the Latinized form of the Ancient Greek Ἀρ(ε)ιανή Ar(e)ianē (inhabitants: Ariani; Ἀρ(ε)ιανοί Ar(e)ianoi), was a general geographical term used by some Greek and Roman authors of the ancient period for a district of wide extent between Central Asia and the Indus River, comprising the eastern provinces of the Achaemenid Empire that covered the whole of modern-day Afghanistan, as well as the easternmost part of Iran and up to the Indus River in Pakistan (former Northern India).

The Greek term Arianē (Latin: Ariana), a term found in Iranian Avestan Airiiana- (especially in Airyanem Vaejah, the name of the Iranian peoples' mother country). The modern name Iran represents a different form of the ancient name Ariana which derived from Airyanem Vaejah and implies that Iran is “the” Ariana itself – a word found in Old Persian – a view supported by the traditions of the country preserved in the Muslim writers of the ninth and tenth centuries. The Greeks also referred to Haroyum/Haraiva (Herat) as 'Aria', which is one of the many provinces found in Ariana.

The names Ariana and Aria, and many other ancient titles of which Aria is a component element, are connected with the Avestan term Airya-, and the Old Persian term Ariya-, a self designation of the peoples of Ancient India and Ancient Iran, meaning "noble", "excellent" and "honourable".”

Aria (region)

“Aria is an Achaemenid region centered on the city of Herat in present-day western Afghanistan. In classical sources, Aria has been several times confused with the greater region of ancient Ariana, of which Aria formed a part. Aria was an Old Persian satrapy, which enclosed chiefly the valley of the Hari River... which in antiquity was considered as particularly fertile and, above all, rich in wine. The region of Aria was separated by mountain ranges...in the east...west...north... while a desert separated it...in the south...Its original capital was Artacoana or Articaudna according to Ptolemy. In its vicinity, a new capital was built, either by Alexander the Great himself or by his successors, Alexandria Ariana, modern Herat in northwest Afghanistan.”

Arya (Buddhism)

“Arya is a term frequently used in Buddhism that can be translated as "noble", "not ordinary", "valuable", "precious", "pure", etc. Arya in the sense of "noble" or "exalted" is frequently used in Buddhist texts to designate a spiritual warrior or hero.

The word "noble," or ariya, is used by the Buddha to designate a particular type of person, the type of person which it is the aim of his teaching to create. In the discourses the Buddha classifies human beings into two broad categories. On one side there are the puthujjanas, the worldlings, those belonging to the multitude...On the other side there are the ariyans, the noble ones, the spiritual elite, who obtain this status not from birth, social station or ecclesiastical authority but from their inward nobility of character....In Chinese Buddhist texts, ārya is translated as 聖 approximately, "holy, sacred"

Getes – the story to be told – Quotes

“The Spanish Chronicles...“The Daco-Getes are considered to be the founders of the Spaniards.”...The Chronicle of the Dukes of Normandy...“The Daco-Getes are considered to be the founders of the nordic nations.”...Collectanea Etymologica...“The Daco-Getes are considered to be the founders of the Teutons and Frisians, of the Dutch and Anglians.”...Cavasius (The Administration of the Kingdom of Transylvania): “In Italy, Spain and Galia, the peoples used to spoke an idiom of an older formation under the name of Rumanian language, as in the time of Cicero. The Rumanian language has more latinity than Italian.”

Bonaventura Vulcannius of Bruges, 1597: “The Getes had their own alphabet long before the Latin one was born. The Getes sang, using the flute, the deeds of their heroes, composing songs even before the foundation of Rome, that of which Cato says – the Romans started to do much later.”...Carolus Lundius...“It has to be clear for everyone, the ones who antiquity named them with a distinguished admiration Getes, the writers named them afterwards, through a unanimous agreement, Goths. The Greeks and other nations took letters from the Getes. We find with Herodotus and Diodorus, direct opinions about the spreading of these letters.”

“GET (pronounced ‘Jet’) = Earth-born. In Rumanian, the word ‘gețuitor’ (viețuitor) means ‘living man’. Earth = Geea/Gaia (Geb/Gebeleizis)...Djed = The forefathers of the first pharaohs of Egypt. Egyptians use this word Djed (pronounced ‘Jet’) when they speak of the ‘old ones’ that lived before them. Therefore this term has to do, not only with the Greeks. In Croatian the word ‘đed’ (pronounced ‘Jed’) means ‘grandfather’, which is another proof that the word ‘Get’ bears the meaning of ‘Old/Ancient’.

[T]he term ‘Gitia’ we have as a reconfirmation of the sacrality of its name, the Vedic opera Bhagavad Gītā (pronounced ‘Geeta’) which means ‘Song of the Lord’ or ‘Divine Song’ that speaks about the noble Aryans (‘Deva’ or ‘Devi’ meaning ‘The Divine’) which invaded the rich land of India...GETO = ‘The Brilliant’ or ‘The Divine’ or ‘The Wolves’, but they also have the meaning of ‘inhabitants of Davas’, where ‘Dava’ = ‘Fortress’. All these terms are in fact epithets that describe the Getes...The exonyms ‘Dac’/’Daki’ were used by the Romans to describe the Getes.”

(via Getes – the story to be told – Quotes | Vieille Europe blog)

Getae

“The Getae, or Gets (Ancient Greek: Γέται, singular Γέτης) were several Thracian tribes that once inhabited the regions to either side of the Lower Danube, in what is today northern Bulgaria and southern Romania. Both the singular form Get and plural Getae may be derived from a Greek exonym: the area was the hinterland of Greek colonies on the Black Sea coast, bringing the Getae into contact with the ancient Greeks from an early date. Several scholars, especially in the Romanian historiography, posit the identity between the Getae and their westward neighbours, the Dacians.

There is a dispute among scholars about the relations between the Getae and Dacians, and this dispute also covers the interpretation of ancient sources. Some historians such as Ronald Arthur Crossland state that even Ancient Greeks used the two designations "interchangeable or with some confusion". Thus, it is generally considered that the two groups were related to a certain degree, the exact relation is a matter of controversy.”

Geats

“The Geats (/ˈɡiːts/, /ˈɡeɪəts/ or /ˈjæts/) (Old English: gēatas)...sometimes called Goths, were a North Germanic tribe who inhabited Götaland ("land of the Geats") in modern southern Sweden during the Middle Ages...Beowulf and the Norse sagas name several Geatish kings, but only Hygelac finds confirmation in Liber Monstrorum where he is referred to as "Rex Getarum"...Some decades after the events related in this epic...described the Geats as a nation which was "bold, and quick to engage in war"...The Hervarar saga is believed to contain such traditions handed down from the 4th century. According to that work, when the Hunnish Horde invaded the land of the Goths and the Gothic king Angantyr desperately tried to marshal the defenses, it was the Geatish king Gizur who answered his call, though there is no actual evidence of a successful invasion.

There is a hypothesis that the Jutes also were Geats, and which was proposed by Pontus Fahlbeck in 1884. According to this hypothesis the Geats would have not only resided in southern Sweden but also in Jutland, where Beowulf would have lived...Gēatas is the Old English form of Old Norse Gautar and modern Swedish Götar...in Beowulf, the Gēatas live east of the Dani (across the sea) and in close contact with the Sweon, which fits the historical position of the Geats between the Danes/Daci and the Swedes. Moreover, the story of Beowulf, who leaves Geatland and arrives at the Danish court after a naval voyage, where he kills a beast, finds a parallel in Hrólf Kraki's saga. In this saga, Bödvar Bjarki leaves Gautland and arrives at the Danish court after a naval voyage and kills a beast that has been terrorizing the Danes for two years (see also Origins for Beowulf and Hrólf Kraki)...As for the origins of the ethnonym Jute, it may be a secondary formation of the toponym Jutland, where jut is derived from a Proto-Indo-European root *eud meaning "water".

Bactria

“Bactria (/ˈbæktriə/); or Bactriana was a historical region in Central Asia. Bactria proper was north of the Hindu Kush mountain range and south of the Amu Darya river, covering the flat region that straddles modern-day Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and parts of Northern Pakistan. More broadly Bactria was the area north of the Hindu Kush.

After two years of war and a strong insurgency campaign, Alexander managed to establish little control over Bactria. After Alexander's death...Alexander's empire was divided up among the generals in Alexander's army. Bactria became a part of the Seleucid Empire, named after its founder, Seleucus I. The Macedonians, especially Seleucus I and his son Antiochus I, established the Seleucid Empire and founded a great many Greek towns. The Greek language became dominant for some time there.

The Greco-Bactrians were so powerful that they were able to expand their territory as far as India: As for Bactria, a part of it lies alongside Aria towards the north, though most of it lies above Aria and to the east of it. And much of it produces everything except oil. The Greeks who caused Bactria to revolt grew so powerful on account of the fertility of the country that they became masters, not only of Bactria and beyond, but also of India.”

“Bactrians were the inhabitants of Bactria. Several important trade routes from India and China (including the Silk Road) passed through Bactria and, as early as the Bronze Age, this had allowed the accumulation of vast amounts of wealth by the mostly nomadic population. The first proto-urban civilization in the area arose during the 2nd millennium BC.

Control of these lucrative trade routes, however, attracted foreign interest, and in the 6th century BC the Bactrians were conquered by the Persians, and in the 4th century BC by Alexander the Great. These conquests marked the end of Bactrian independence. From around 304 BC the area formed part of the Seleucid Empire, and from around 250 BC it was the centre of a Greco-Bactrian kingdom, ruled by the descendants of Greeks who had settled there following the conquest of Alexander the Great.

The Greco-Bactrians, also known in Sanskrit as Yavanas, worked in cooperation with the native Bactrian aristocracy. By the early 2nd century BC the Greco-Bactrians had created an impressive empire that stretched southwards to include northwest India. By about 135 BC, however, this kingdom had been overrun by invading Yuezhi tribes, an invasion that later brought about the rise of the powerful Kushan Empire.”

Grand Trunk Road

“The Grand Trunk Road is one of Asia's oldest and longest major roads — founded around 3rd century BCE by the Mauryan Empire of ancient India. For more than two millennia, it has linked the Indian subcontinent with Central Asia.”

History of India

“[T]he White Huns were Turks, whose capital was ‘Organj or Khiva...The people called Yue-chi by the Chinese, Jits by the Tartars, and Getes or Getae by some of our writers, were a considerable nation in the centre of Tartary as late as the time of Tamerlane”

(via The History of India: The Hindu and Mahometan Periods p. 252)

Yuezhi

“The Yuezhi were an ancient Indo-European people first described in Chinese histories as nomadic pastoralists living in an arid grassland area in the western part of the modern Chinese province of Gansu, during the 1st millennium BC. After a major defeat by the Xiongnu in 176 BC, the Yuezhi split into two groups migrating in different directions: The Greater Yuezhi...later settled in Bactria, where they then defeated the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom.

The subsequent Kushan Empire, at its peak in the 3rd century CE, stretched from...the Tarim Basin, in the north to...the Gangetic plain of India in the south. The Kushanas played an important role in the development of trade on the Silk Road and the introduction of Buddhism to China...some scholars have associated the Yuezhi with artifacts of extinct cultures in the Tarim Basin, such as the Tarim mummies and texts recording the Tocharian languages.

[N]omadic pastoralists known as the Yúzhī...supplied jade to the Chinese...The export of jade from the Tarim Basin, since at least the late 2nd millennium BC...the Qin dynasty (221–206 BC) bought jade and highly valued military horses from a people that Sima Qian called the Wūzhī...traded these goods for Chinese silk, which they then sold on to other neighbours. This is probably the first reference to the Yuezhi as a lynchpin in trade on the Silk Road, which in the 3rd century BC began to link Chinese states to Central Asia and, eventually, the Middle East, the Mediterranean and Europe...The Lesser or Little Yuezhi moved to the "southern mountains", believed to be the Qilian Mountains on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau, to live with the Qiang... Chinese sources continued to use the name Yuezhi and seldom used the Kushan as a generic term.”

“The central Asian people who called themselves Kushana, who were among the conquerors of the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom during the 2nd century BC, are widely believed to have originated as a dynastic clan or tribe of the Yuezhi. Because some inhabitants of Bactria became known as Tukhāra (Sanskrit) or Tókharoi (Τοχάριοι; Greek), these names later became associated with the Yuezhi. The Kushana were a Caucasoid people...They spoke Bactrian, an Eastern Iranian language.

The Kushanas integrated Buddhism into a pantheon of many deities and became great promoters of Mahayana Buddhism, and their interactions with Greek civilization helped the Gandharan culture and Greco-Buddhism flourish. During the 1st and 2nd centuries, the Kushan Empire expanded militarily to the north and occupied parts of the Tarim Basin, putting them at the center of the lucrative Central Asian commerce with the Roman Empire...Following this territorial expansion, the Kushanas introduced Buddhism to northern and northeastern Asia, by both direct missionary efforts and the translation of Buddhist scriptures into Chinese...and established translation bureaus, thereby being at the center of the Silk Road transmission of Buddhism.

"Tocharian"...became the common name for both the languages of the Tarim manuscripts and the people who produced them. Most historians now reject the identification of the Tocharians of the Tarim with the Tókharoi of Bactria, who are not known to have spoken any languages other than Bactrian. Other scholars suggest that the Kushanas may previously have spoken Tocharian before shifting to Bactrian on their arrival in Bactria.”

Kushan Empire

“The Kushan dynasty had diplomatic contacts with the Roman Empire, Sasanian Persia, the Aksumite Empire and Han Dynasty of China...the last of the Kushan and Kushano-Sasanian kingdoms were eventually overwhelmed by invaders from the north, known as the Kidarites.

The Kushans inherited the Greco-Buddhist traditions of the Indo-Greek Kingdom they replaced, and their patronage of Buddhist institutions allowed them to grow as a commercial power. Between the mid-1st century and the mid-3rd century, Buddhism, patronized by the Kushans, extended to China and other Asian countries through the Silk Road.

In 360 a Kidarite Hun named Kidara overthrew the Indo-Sasanians and remnants of the old Kushan dynasty, and established the Kidarite Kingdom. The Kushan style of Kidarite coins indicates they claimed Kushan heritage. The Kidarite seem to have been rather prosperous, although on a smaller scale than their Kushan predecessors. These remnants of the Kushan empire were ultimately wiped out in the 5th century by the invasions of the Hephthalites.”

Kidarites

“The Kidarites were a dynasty that ruled Bactria and adjoining parts of Central Asia and South Asia in the 4th and 5th centuries CE. The Kidarites belonged to a complex of peoples known collectively in India as the Huna and/or in Europe as the Xionites...Named after Kidara, their founding ruler and purported membership of a clan named Ki, the Kidarites appear to have been a part of a Huna horde known in Latin sources as the Kermichiones (from the Iranian Karmir Xyon) or "Red Huna"...Indian records note that the Hūna had established themselves in modern Afghanistan and [north India]...The Kidarites are the last dynasty to regard themselves (on the legend of their coins) as the inheritors of the Kushan empire, which had disappeared as an independent entity two centuries earlier.”

Ghilji

“The Ghilji also called Khaljī, Khiljī, Ghilzai, or Gharzai (ghar means "mountain" and zai "born of"), are the largest Pashtun tribal confederacy...The Ghilji at various times became rulers of present Afghanistan region and were the most dominant Pashtun confederacy from c. 1000 AD until 1747 AD.”

Gilgit

“Gilgit, known locally as Gileet, is the capital city of the Gilgit-Baltistan region, an administrative territory of Pakistan Occupied Kashmir, but claimed by India as its territory. The city is located in a broad valley near the confluence of the Gilgit River and Hunza River...It was an important stop on the ancient Silk Road, and today serves as a major junction along the Karakoram Highway with road connections to China, Skardu, Chitral, Peshawar, and Islamabad.”

“The city's ancient name was Sargin, later to be known as Gilit, and it is still referred to as Gilit or Sargin-Gilit by local people. In Brushaski, it is named Geeltand in Wakhi and Khowar it is called Gilt.

Gilgit was an important city on the Silk Road, along which Buddhism was spread from South Asia to the rest of Asia. It is considered as a Buddhism corridor from which many Chinese monks came to Kashmir to learn and preach Buddhism. Two famous Chinese Buddhist pilgrims, Faxian and Xuanzang, traversed Gilgit according to their accounts. According to Chinese records, between the 600s and the 700s, the city was governed by a Buddhist dynasty referred to as Little Balur or Lesser Bolü.

In mid-600s, Gilgit came under Chinese suzerainty after the fall of Western Turkic Khaganate due to Tang military campaigns in the region. In late 600s CE, the rising Tibetan Empire wrestled control of the region from the Chinese. However, faced with growing influence of the Umayyad Caliphate and then the Abbasid Caliphate to the west, the Tibetans were forced to ally themselves with the Islamic caliphates.”

“Gilgit manuscripts...containing many Buddhist texts such as four sutras from the Buddhist canon, including the famous Lotus Sutra. The manuscripts were written on birch bark...They cover a wide range of themes such as iconometry, folk tales, philosophy, medicine and several related areas of life and general knowledge.

The Gilgit manuscripts are included in the UNESCO Memory of the World register. They are among the oldest manuscripts in the world, and the oldest manuscript collection surviving in Pakistan, having major significance in the areas of Buddhist studies and the evolution of Asian and Sanskrit literature. The manuscripts are believed to have been written in the 5th to 6th centuries AD.

The former rulers had the title of Ra, and there is a reason to suppose that they were at one time Hindus, but for the last five centuries and a half they have been Moslems. The names of the Hindu Ras have been lost, with the exception of the last of their number, Shri Ba'dut...Gilgit was ruled for centuries by the local Trakhàn Dynasty, which ended about 1810 with the death of Raja Abas, the last Trakhàn Raja.”

Gilan Province

Gilan Province...lies along the Caspian Sea, in Iran... It seems that the Gelae (Gilites) entered the region south of the Caspian coast and west of the Amardos River (later Safidrud) in the second or first century B.C.E....the native inhabitants of Gilan have originating roots in the Caucasus is supported by genetics and language, as Gilaks are genetically closer to ethnic peoples of the Caucasus (such as the Georgians) than they are towards other ethnic groups in Iran. Their languages shares typologic features with Caucasian languages. It was the place of origin of the Buyid dynasty.”

“Gilan is mostly inhabited by Gilaks, a Gilaki Iranian culture is present in the province that is not much different from other Iranian traditions. The biggest differences are seen in foods, traditional songs, traditional clothes, rural areas and their every-day life, and other traditions such as the Gilaki Calendar and the Gilaki New Year called "Nouruz Bel" which is during the summer. This new year is distinct from the more popular Iranian New Year as it relates to the people of Gilan and their mostly agricultural life.”

Epic of Gilgamesh

“The Epic of Gilgamesh is an epic poem from ancient Mesopotamia that is often regarded as the earliest surviving great work of literature. The literary history of Gilgamesh begins with five Sumerian poems about Bilgamesh (Sumerian for "Gilgamesh"), king of Uruk, dating from the Third Dynasty of Ur(c. 2100 BC)."

“The first half of the story discusses Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, and Enkidu, a wild man created by the gods to stop Gilgamesh from oppressing the people of Uruk. After Enkidu becomes civilized through sexual initiation with a prostitute, he travels to Uruk, where he challenges Gilgamesh to a test of strength. Gilgamesh wins the contest; nonetheless, the two become friends. Together, they make a six-day journey to the legendary Cedar Forest, where they plan to slay the Guardian, Humbaba the Terrible, and cut down the sacred Cedar. The goddess Ishtar sends the Bull of Heaven to punish Gilgamesh for spurning her advances. Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill the Bull of Heaven after which the gods decide to sentence Enkidu to death and kill him.

In the second half of the epic, distress over Enkidu's death causes Gilgamesh to undertake a long and perilous journey to discover the secret of eternal life. He eventually learns that "Life, which you look for, you will never find. For when the gods created man, they let death be his share, and life withheld in their own hands". However, because of his great building projects...Gilgamesh's fame survived well after his death with expanding interest in the Gilgamesh story which has been translated into many languages and is featured in works of popular fiction.”

The Origins Of Pearl Diving In The Persian Gulf

“Life in the Persian Gulf revolved around the natural pearl for centuries, according to archaeological evidence dating back to the Late Stone Age in 6000–5000 BC.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, a poem from 700 BC Mesopotamia that is among the first recorded examples of literary fiction, describes how the hero dived to the depths with weights tied to his feet for the “flower of immortality”, a well-known early allusion to pearling. By 100 AD, Pliny the Younger had declared that pearls were the most prized goods in Roman society, with those from the Gulf reigning as the most esteemed.

Pearl grounds originally stretched on the Arabian side from Kuwait along the coast of Saudi Arabia to Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and the Sultanate of Oman. They also ran along nearly the whole coast of the Persian side of the gulf, from near Bandar-e Bushehr (Kharg island) to Bandar-e Lengeh (Kish island) in the south and even further south into the Strait of Hormuz. The Phoenicians, who likely held the first monopoly on the pearl trade.”

Kish Island

“Kish Island has been mentioned in history variously as Kamtina, Arakia (Ancient Greek: Αρακία), Arakata, and Ghiss.Kish Island's strategic geographic location served as a way-station and link for the ancient Assyrian and Elamite civilizations when their primitive sailboats navigated from Susa through the Karun River into the Persian Gulf along the southern coastline, passing Kish, Qeshm, and Hormoz islands.

In 325 BC, Alexander the Great commissioned Nearchus to set off on an expeditionary voyage to the Sea of Oman and the Persian Gulf. Nearchus's writings on Arakata contain the first-known mention of Kish Island in antiquity. When Marco Polo visited the Imperial court in China, he commented on the Emperor's wife's pearls; he was told that they were from Kish.”

Silk Road transmission of Buddhism

“From the 4th century onward, Chinese pilgrims also started to travel on the Silk Road to India, the origin of Buddhism, by themselves in order to get improved access to the original scriptures...from the 4th century CE that Chinese Buddhist monks started to travel to India to discover Buddhism first-hand. Faxian's pilgrimage to India (395–414)...Xuanzang (629–644) and Hyecho traveled from Korea to India.”

“Buddhism in Central Asia began to decline in the 7th century in the course of the Muslim conquest of Transoxiana. A turning point was the Battle of Talas of 751. This development also resulted in the extinction of the local Tocharian Buddhist culture in the Tarim Basin during the 8th century. The Silk Road transmission between Eastern and Indian Buddhism thus came to an end in the 8th century...From the 9th century onward, therefore, the various schools of Buddhism which survived began to evolve independently of one another....In the eastern Tarim Basin, Central Asian Buddhism survived into the later medieval period as the religion of the Uyghur Kara-Khoja Kingdom...and Buddhism became one of the religions in the Mongol Empire...Central Asian Buddhism survived mostly in Tibet and in Mongolia.”

Key Monastery

“Kye Gompa (also spelled Ki, Key or Kee - pronounced like English key) is a Tibetan Buddhist monastery located on top of a hill...in the Spiti Valley of...India... Kye Gompa is said to have been founded by Dromtön (Brom-ston, 1008-1064 CE), a pupil of the famous teacher, Atisha, in the 11th century.”

Spiti Valley

“Spiti Valley is a cold desert mountain valley located high in the Himalayas...The name "Spiti" means "The Middle Land", i.e. the land between Tibet and India...Spiti valley is a research and cultural centre for Buddhists. Highlights include Key Monastery and Tabo Monastery, one of the oldest monasteries in the world and a favourite of the Dalai Lama...Spiti valley is accessible throughout year via Kinnaur...Due to high elevation one is likely to feel altitude sickness in Spiti.”

Epic of King Gesar

“The Epic of King Gesar, ("King Gesar" Mongolian: Гэсэр Хаан, Geser Khagan) also spelled Geser (especially in Mongolian contexts) or Kesar is an epic cycle, believed to date from the 12th century, that relates the heroic deeds of the culture hero Gesar...Its classic version is to be found in central Tibet.”

“Some 100 bards of this epic are still active today in the Gesar belt of China: Tibetan, Mongolian, Buryat, Balti, Ladakhi and Monguor singers maintain the oral tradition and the epic has attracted intense scholarly curiosity as one of the few oral epic traditions to survive as a performing art...versions of the epic are also recorded among the Balti of Baltistan, the Burusho people of Hunzaand Gilgit, and the Kalmyk and Ladakhi peoples, in Sikkim, Bhutan, Nepal, and among various Tibeto-Burmese, Turkish, and Tunghus tribes.”

”It has been proposed on the basis of phonetic similarities that the name Gesar reflects the Roman title Caesar, and that the intermediary for the transmission of this imperial title from Rome to Tibet may have been a Turkic language, since kaiser (emperor) entered Turkish through contact with the Byzantine Empire, where Caesar (Καῖσαρ) was an imperial title. Some think the medium for this transmission may have been via Mongolian Kesar. The Mongols were allied with the Byzantines, whose emperor still used the title. Numismatic evidence and some accounts speak of a Bactrian ruler Phrom-kesar, specifically the Kabul Shahi of Gandhara, which was ruled by a Turkish From Kesar ("Caesar of Rome")... the Tibetan name Gesar derived from Sanskrit...the Ladakh variant of Kesar, Kyesar, in Classical Tibetan Skye-gsar meant 'reborn/newly born', and that Gesar/Kesar in Tibetan, as in Sanskrit signify the 'anther or pistil of a flower', corresponding to Sanskrit kēsara, whose root 'kēsa' (hair) is Indo-European.

King Ge-sar has a miraculous birth, a despised and neglected childhood, and then becomes ruler and wins his (first) wife 'Brug-mo through a series of marvellous feats. In subsequent episodes he defends his people against various external aggressors, human and superhuman. Instead of dying a normal death he departs into a hidden realm from which he may return at some time in the future to save his people from their enemies.”

#bhagvadgita #grecobuddhism #hinduism #silkroad #ariana #aria #arya #getes #geats #getae #syncretism #bactrian #yuezhi #keemonastary #kidarites #beowulf #gilgit #gilgamesh #kinggeser

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timurbdavletov · 7 years ago

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The Sacred Fundamentals of Khakas Ethnic Culture

Prof. Dr. Larissa Anzhiganova* In second half of XXth century there is a situation when development of society by consuming natural component of life s environment leads to real danger of self-destruction. Within these conditions only the culture (including ethical one) becomes a factor of the human, society and nature`s self-protection. The non-foreseeable future of humanity and it`s some nations have forced to apply to an experience of the past in which it looks for prescriptions of solution to problem. Furthermore, necessity to find out one`s self in eternity leads to intention to unite the time (past, present and future) in a whole space. In this context anthropologists have marked a growing interest to Shamanism dated many thousands years as the most ancient form of humanity`s adaptation in world. The feature of world`s present-day shamanism contains a lot of moments. 1. Shamanism has developed as philosophical-religious system (but not exclusively as cultural-ritual practice) which is a completed transcendental world`s view, goal and main sense of which are not only to honor and to protect the life but also to rouse to it. 2. Shamanism has aspired to find out its own niche, to determine the community with world`s religious systems by stressing on particular (e.g., Turk-Mongolian, Siberian Shamanism) and singular (e.g., Khakas, Tuvan, Yakutian, and other) ones. The first what has tied Shamanism to world`s religious systems is common humanity`s ethical norms. At the same time it`s well-known that some particularities of ritual practice (incense, sprinkling, movement around, and many others) have precisely been “presented as gifts” by Shamanism. The relationship with Buddhism and Zen-Buddhism is provided by theory of reincarnation and meditation. According to Shamanism as well to Daoism the essential basis of world [Earth] is the Law (the way of world, Dao). Confuscianism and Shamanism have similarity in cults of the Heaven [Sky], ancestors, and strong system of society`s construction. Together with that the uniqueness of Shamanism is that there is no other sacred tradition which oriented to the Nature as far as Shamanism. 3. New forms of Shamanism have appeared. Thus famous researcher of world`s Shamanism M. Hoppal has distinguished `the urban Shamanism` which accoring to him has its own specifics in rituals. In present-day environment there is a question regarding authenticity of shamanic rituals over which should be paid closer attention. Under detailed researching you may discover that every shamanic act and word bear the strict determined sense. But at the other hand modern audience who has been snapped away from traditional world`s view and life style, often don`t understand and percept many things. For a modern man who has education and training based on European rasionalism it`s very difficult to percept many things through belief [i.e., beyond rationality]. In this context the factor which complicates this process is fact that each shaman in spite of common basis of world`s view, was and is having his own individual specifics as a sphere of acting, selection of allies, power, song, destiny, and so on. At the other side the most important condition of shaman`s ritual action`s effectiveness is the confidence of audience toward the shaman`s power. Modern man is radically different from traditional one and the ability of shaman to convince a patient in his own power is depended to shaman`s ability to be psychologist when there is necessity to use the scientifical terminology. In shamanic tradition dated many thousands years there is the idea about `places of power` which may be unimportant as well as important in the world`s scale. And the fates of world`s existence are indexed to state of these territories. The ancient Khakas land is belonged to such sacred regions. In modern-day Khakasia`s territory Shamanism has been appeared in ancient times. Shamanic (trisylabbic) model of world has in most developed form been presented even on petroglyths of Okuneff archaeological culture (IIIrd millennium B.C.) which puts forward a necessity of appearence a special type of humans known as shamans who are able to travel (in different state of consciousness) to all three worlds where gosts and ghosts have resided. The complex history of Khakas nation has showed and proved not only the amazed ability of Shamanism to live and to survive but also its assimilationist effect over Buddhism, Maniheism and Christianity which have once been tried to spread. Khakas ethnographer K.M. Patahcakov has presented following figures: “in 1924-1925 in 26 aals [villages] of Khakas County there were 71 shamans, 54 of whom were males, 17 were females; 39 shamans had shaman drums and clothes; a number of genuine shamans who have been descendants of shaman by blood was 15 ...” Since 20 century there has been marked a need of Khakas nation to reconstruct of sacred (religious) fundamentals of its own ethical culture and: - to reconstruct of a whole world`s view and cultic side of Shamanism, a traditional religion of the Khakas; - to worship and respect toward ancient sacred places which are more than 300 throughout the present-day Khakas land (according to Khakas scientist and ethnographer Prof. Dr. Victor Butanaev); - to use Shamanism as a mean to invigorate physical and psychological health of Khakas ethnos; - to assist to young shamans in learning and shamanic acceptance; - to percept Shamanism from position of world`s religious, philosophical and scientific experiences. With this goal the Assosiation of Khakas Traditional Religion of Shamanism was been registered by Justice Ministry of Khakas Republic on July 29, 1994. Socilogical research of opinion of the Khakas implemented in 1996 (by the author) was showed that 26% of interviewed peoples have introduced themselves as Shamanists and together with that a lion`s proportion of respondents (in some cases up to 70-80%) in their answers to questions regarding world`s view (about the Goodness [Good] and Badness [Evil], world`s destinies, life and death, sin and punishment, and so on) may be classified as shamanistic ones. The incorporated analysis of specifics of existence of modern Khakases` shamanic world`s view give us an opportunity to distinguish three essential tendencies: 1) the group of shamanists who believe in existence of sacred reality and who compare and determine their own world`s view and activity with powers of other worlds; in this group there stratum of traditional Shamanism will dominate in inevitable form; this would play an positive role in respect to realization by Khakas ethnos his strategy of revival, but not of development; and the extremal attitude in this situation would be orthodox conservatism; 2) the modernizational tendency which followers believe surely that an object of shamanic activity is the human consciousness which is the only sacrable reality; and in this context Shamanism has common points of contact with science and psycho-therapeutical practice; in en extremal form under such approach Shamanism would be threaten by possibility to melt among psychology and to lose its world`s view specifics; 3) and finally, as the most complicated but at the same time the most productive tendency we may accept the attempt to combine these above-mentioned two groups which contains the right to existence of sacred reality, polydimensionality, comlication of Universe, and life`s forms in it, its reasonal dependence, synchronizedness of existence [being], reflexible interaction with depths of human consiousness; such type of view point allows to combine harmonicly modernity and traditionality, to find out contactness of scienc and religion as two forms of perception of world and human being. All these searchings which sometimes have reached the level of intensive and tensive discussions related to world`s view are paricular for the Association of Traditional Khakas Religion. There we would like to emphasize on the fundamentals of Khakas Shamanism as the world`s view of communality in which all the most important problems of people have estimated from positions of interaction between the Nature and the Human. Philosophical analysis of traditional world`s view of people allows us to distinguish the following basic ideas which have been the nucleus of ethnical culture since very ancient times: 1. World is united and alive and within it all is tied with everything, and all is interdependent. 2. The absolute and eternal Life is the highest value, and human in this there is not a `trembled creature [or animal]`, and human has synchronously appeared with world and so human has beared individual responsibility for welfare [well being] of the Universe, Nature, society, tribe, family, own eternal life here, in this `sunny world`. 3. The World is in permanent movement and development, and it has the natural rhythmics at every moment of its existence (alteration [circulation] of year`s seasons, states of society as harmony and chaos). 4. The Universe has been directed by objective, eternal law of justice so a human can not escape from punishment caused by non-clearness of thought, feeling, and behaviour no by compensative sacrifice (furthermore if it is not his own acts) nor in case of indulgence. 5. The most important values of traditional world`s view of the Khakas are children, family, society, tribe, ethnos, and motherland. 6. The traditional world`s view gives the birth to positive perception (because of life and death are eternal and inevitable stages within the process of transformation) which in an inescapable form encourages the positive activity oriented on creativity. 7. The human of traditional society has an evident integrity (e.g., unity of body, consciousness, and soul). 8. Occurences of existencial vacuum in traditional society are unusual and that state is caused by strong social orderliness together with psycho-therapeutical activity of shamans. 9. The people`s pedagogy is a sense constructive or creativable factor and forms human`s sense of self-sufficiency, individual and ethnical pride. Someone who knows the philosophical and scientific searchings of XX century may seize the amazed modernity of these ideas. The traditional world`s picture of Khakas Shamanism is as follow. The Upper World (Khan-Tigir) is a source of all existed things, and a place of the divine Light, together with that it determines the fates of world and all indivuals separately. Therefore the Khakas Shamanism has often been called as Tengrianism. The strongest shamans (who are `accepted` and `approved` and who have more 9 shamanic drums) have gotten upper to the Heaven [Sky] in order to be defenders [protectors] of human. The Middle World is belonged to human where human realizes himself feeling happiness and existence`s satisfaction. The most important sense creativable goal of an every Khakas was not to violate the completeness and harmony this world, and individual responsibility for continuation of Life in its all forms. The Khakases have in evident form possessed the cult of ancestors who represent the power of tribal protectors and defenders (historical heoes, great shamans). The ancestors are eternal, strict and judicious. The main condition of life and power of ancestors is protection and development of ethnos with all of its attributes (like native land, ethnical culture, particularly language, and tribal relations as preconditions of integrity of people and its genetic health and so on). The clearness of thought, sense and act are the basis of long and welfared life; violation of these requirements (according to common law of justice) inevitably leads to punishment during of which the most horrible penalty was punishment in form to absent children [or childlessness], to put end on tribe`s continuity. In result of careless contacts with powers of the Lower World and due to violation prohibitions and norms of morality human may be seriously suffered. And in this situation a defender is shaman who attend to deathly-dangerous struggle for life and soul of human. The most widespread methods of treatment were consist of programming and self-programming of patient on a mode of recovery, rhythmo-therapy (by use sounds of shaman`s drums, other musical instruments, individual songs of shaman, movements of dance and so on), aroma-therapy (Irben [Thymus Vulgaris], Artysh [], and other plants),vegetable treatment, manual therapy, psycho-correction, hypno-therapy, visualization, placebo-therapy, and others. Inter alia, in Shamanism as well as in other religious systems there we may distinguish internal (esoteric) and external (for people) sides. Regarding the latter there has been told above. What about the former there we may emphasize the following. During thousands years from teacher to pupil there have been transferred the philosophical basis and ritual practice of Shamanism. This has been caused by that the at high extent complicated shamanic reality (due to its own eternal [endless] polyplannedness [polyorderliness]) has not been suitable to rational perception and verbal explanation. The knowledge has been hidden because of shaman`s trips were always dangerous and non-foreseeable; together with that they have requested strong spiritual power, physical health and moral clearness. The analysis of Russia`s and world`s scientific thought and my own researching of this event [occurrence] within its historical and present-day`s contexts allow us to do some prognoses related to perspectives of development of Shamanism. 1. Shamanism attracts evident interest in the world (both traditional and industrialized) not only by scientists of different specializations (anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers, physicians, physiologists, psychologs of different schools, linguists, musicologs and others) but also by wide audiency of public. The global ecological crisis has been tied by some scientists and practicians, inter alia, to loss of biophylic consciousness of humanity who once dominated in shamanic world`s perception. Ethnically reviving nations are seeking for the deepest factors of ethnical identification including religious ones. Part of these factors peoples find out in Shamanism. 2. Shamans (as well as servants of other religious systems) were psychotherapists till XX century, and among many peoples they still perform this function. Modern researchers of Tuvan Shamanism S.I. Vainstein and N.P.Moskalenko have marked that “a positive effect [result] is gained not only in case of patients with psychical illnesses, and neural indispositions, but also in case of some sicknesses caused by other factors <..> 49 men from 57 interviewed former patients of shamans have in result of kamlama [shamanic style of worship] recovered and their condition has gotten better”. 3. Shamans have gotten their gift [talent of capability], as a rule, by hereditary from ancestors, and it means that shamans were in the past, shamans are alive today, and they will be in the future. There were attempts to conduct struggle agaisn them (by use fires of Inquisition [in the Middle Ages Europe], camps of GULAG [in former USSR]) but they have not successed. And now there have been born young shamans who have strong shamanic lineages. In addition to that, we also have to remember, that there are shamans who have become shaman in result of serious illnesses, traumas, clynical deaths, and others. And finally, men have become shamans through training in many centers like the Foundation for Shamanic Studies of M.Harner (California, USA) where thousands of men have been trained and dealed. President of this Foundation Ph.D. Michael Harner thinks that 9 from 10 men are capable to take shamanic journeys during of which they may `to turn on` their own “internal doctor`s” function. In recent years we have witnessed to new event in Shamanism like an intention of shamans to unite under associations of national, regional and even global levels. Themselves of shamans have predicted that “we have to expect a rebellion of ghosts resided in various places of the Earth”. And shamans of quite different peoples and continents have often emphasized that thanks to their activity related to preservation of the Universe`s balance, humanity is still protected from total death caused by technogenic catastrophes, global wars and existencial vacuum. (*) L. Anzhiganova is a Professor at Culturology Department of the Khakas State University named after Nikolai F. Katanov Translated from Russian to English by Timur B. Davletov [03 qürgen 2003] source: http://khongorai.blogspot.com/2006/09/sacred-fundamentals-of-khakas-ethnic.html

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loadcom326 · 4 years ago

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Unit 1: Early Chinamac's History

'The Battle of Las Guasimas, June 24 - The heroic stand of the 'Rough Riders' in Harper's Pictorial History of the War with Spain Main article: Battle of Las Guasimas Within another day of camp being established, men were sent forward into the jungle for reconnaissance purposes, and before too long they returned with news of a Spanish outpost. Black History Month, or National African American History Month, is an annual celebration of achievements by black Americans and a time for recognizing the central role of African Americans in U.S.

This model curriculum groups instructional units into three categories. The criterion for these categories is the scale in time, geographical space, and subject matter of the topics to be explored. This system has been designed to guide teachers and students in the study of the past on a variety of scales, from broad, global changes to developments that occurred within regions, civilizations, or nations. Teachers may choose to introduce students to an entire Big Era in a few class periods by focusing on the sweeping changes of the era. Or, they may devote a greater number of class days to an era, using several teaching units in all three categories of scale to examine the era in finer detail. Teachers may tailor class time spent on a Big Era to their pedagogical strengths and interests and to state or local content standards.. THIS IS A TEST, THIS IS A TEST. For more discussion of scale in history, see Why an Integrative World History Curriculum in the Foundations of This Curriculum section.

All teaching units follow standard specifications for organization and design. They are listed and described below, as well as in the History, Geography, and Time, Big Eras 1-9, and Past and Future sections of the curriculum. All teaching units have been formatted in PDF to facilitate printing and duplicating of materials, especially Student Handouts. Users must download and install Adobe Acrobat Reader to have access to the teaching units.

Panorama Teaching Units

Each of the nine Big Eras of world history, plus the History, Geography, and Time and the Past and Future sections, offers one Panorama Teaching Unit. Panorama units address very large-scale developments in world history. Each one also includes a PowerPoint Overview Presentation. Teachers and students may view the overview presentations in HTML or download them into their own PowerPoint programs.

The Panorama units provide a model for teaching an entire era of world history in a few lessons taking no more than a week or two of class time. In this way, students may learn about large patterns of change in an era. Panorama units also serve teachers who wish, or are obligated by local and state standards, to devote more class time to particular eras than to others. The Panorama Teaching Units are tailored to the time frames of the Big Era units. This means that the unit for Big Era One (13 billion - 200,000 years ago) encompasses a much larger time frame than does the unit for Big Era Nine (1945 - present).

Landscape Teaching Units

Each Big Era, plus the History, Geography, and Time and the Past and Future sections, offers from two to seven Landscape Teaching Units. Landscape units focus on relatively large-scale developments in world history, though not as broad in subject matter as the Panorama units. All Landscape units have transregional, cross-cultural, or comparative elements. Teachers may use Landscape units flexibly, depending on their interests, school curriculum requirements, and instructional time available.

Closeup Teaching Units

Multiple Closeup Teaching Units will be developed for each of the Big Eras. Closeup units address topics in world history that are relatively more restricted in time, space, and subject matter than either Panorama or Landscape units. Some of these units will address topics that embrace more than one Big Era. Teachers may choose among Closeup units to probe more deeply into specific aspects of world history. Closeup units will be progressively added to the curriculum. We invite history and social studies educators to submit Closeup units for inclusion in the curriculum. Go to Contact Us on the Home Page for more information on submitting Closeup Teaching Units.

The table below provides links to teaching units on the site or under development.

Unit 1: Early Chinamac's History On This Day

Panorama Teaching Units

Closeup Teaching Units

History, Geography, & Time

Teaching Unit 0.1 Getting Our Bearings: Maps of time, space and history PowerPoint Feature! Teaching Unit 0.2 Human history and big geography

Big Era One Humans in the Universe 13 Billion - 200,000 Years agoPanorama Teaching UnitTeaching Unit 1.1 The horizon of human history 13,000,000,000 - 200,000 years ago Teaching Unit 1.2 Human ancestors in Africa and beyond 7,000,000 - 200,000 years ago

Big Era Two Human Beings Almost Everywhere 200,000 - 10,000 Years Ago

Panorama Teaching UnitTeaching Unit 2.1 Human beings around the world 100,000 - 10,000 years ago Teaching Unit 2.2 Language: What difference does it make? 200,000 - 40,000 BCE Big Era Three Farming and the Emergence of Complex Societies 10,000 - 1000 BCE In DevelopmentPanorama Teaching UnitTeaching Unit 3.1 Domesticating plants and animals 10,000 - 4000 BCE Teaching Unit 3.2 Farmers around the world 10,000 - 1500 BCE Teaching Unit 3.3 River valleys and the development of complex societies in Afroeurasia 4000 - 1500 BCE Teaching Unit 3.4 Migrations and militarism across Afroeurasia 2000 - 1000 BCE Teaching Unit 3.5 Early complex societies in the Americas 1800 - 500 BCE Teaching Unit 3.6 People on the move in Australia and the Pacific basin 10,000 - 1000 BCE 500 BCE Closeup Teaching Unit 3.2.5 Korea: From Calm to ConflictBig Era Four Expanding Networks of Exchange and Encounter 1200 BCE - 500 CE In DevelopmentPanorama Teaching UnitTeaching Unit 4.1 From the Mediterranean to India: Patterns of power and trade 1200 - 600 BCE Teaching Unit 4.2 The expansion of complex society in East Asia 1200 - 300 BCE Teaching Unit 4.3 Migration and change in Africa south of the Sahara 1200 - 200 CE Teaching Unit 4.4 From the Mediterranean to India: An age of Greek and Persian power 600 - 200 BCE Teaching Unit 4.5 Giant empires of Afroeurasia 300 BCE - 200 CE

Teaching Unit 4.6 Empires and city-states of the Americas 800 BCE - 500 CE Teaching Unit 4.7 Long-distance migrations in the tropical seas 500 BCE - 500 CE

Closeup Teaching Unit 4.2.1 Belief Systems in China: Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism

Closeup Teaching Unit 4.4.1 The Budding of Buddhism

Closeup Teaching Unit 4.4.2 Pressured by Persia: The Persian Empire

Closeup Teaching Unit 4.5.1 Roman Art and Architecture PowerPoint Feature!

Closeup Teaching Unit 4.5.2 Roman Slavery PowerPoint Feature!

Closeup Teaching Unit 4.5.3 Womens Life in Ancient Rome PowerPoint Feature!

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Big Era Five Patterns of Interregional Unity 300 - 1500 CEPanorama Teaching Unit

Teaching Unit 5.1 Centuries of upheaval in Afroeurasia 300 - 600 CE Teaching Unit 5.2 Afroeurasia and the rise of Islam 600 - 1000 CE Teaching Unit 5.3 Consolidation of the trans-hemispheric network 1000 - 1250 CE Teaching Unit 5.4 The Mongol Moment 1200- 1400 CE Teaching Unit 5.5 Calamities and recoveries 1300-1500 CE

Teaching Unit 5.6 Spheres of interaction in the Americas 300 - 1500 CE

Closeup Teaching Unit 3.2.5 Korea: From Calm to Conflict

Closeup Teaching Unit 4.2.1 Belief Systems in China: Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism

Closeup Teaching Unit 5.3.1 West African Geography, Climate, and History PowerPoint Feature!

Closeup Teaching Unit 5.5.1 Coping with catastrophe The Black Death of the fourteenth century 1330-1355

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Big Era Six The Great Global Convergence 1400 - 1800 CE Panorama Teaching UnitTeaching Unit 6.1 Oceanic ventures and the joining of the continents 1400 - 1550 CE Teaching Unit 6.2 The Columbian Exchange and its consequences: biological, social, and cultural 1400 - 1650 CE Teaching Unit 6.3 Rulers with guns: the rise of powerful states 1400 - 1800 CE Teaching Unit 6.4 The global economy takes shape 1500 - 1800 CE Teaching Unit 6.5 The Making of the Atlantic Rim 1500 - 1800 CE Teaching Unit 6.6 The Scientific Revolution 1500 - 1800 CE Teaching Unit 6.7 The long reach of the major religions 1500 - 1800 CE Closeup Teaching Unit 3.2.5 Korea: From Calm to Conflict Closeup Teaching Unit 6.6.1 Leaders of the Enlightenment PowerPoint Feature! Closeup Teaching Unit 6.7.1 The Protestant Reformation PowerPoint Feature!

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Big Era Seven Industrialization and Its Consequences 1750 - 1914 CE In Development Panorama Teaching UnitTeaching Unit 7.1 The Industrial Revolution as a world event 1750 - 1840 CE Teaching Unit 7.2 The Atlantic revolutions as a world event 1750 - 1830 CE Teaching Unit 7.3 People, Power, and Ideology: A whole new world 1830 - 1900 CE Teaching Unit 7.4 Humans in a hurry: nineteenth-century migrations 1830 - 1900 CE Teaching Unit 7.5 The experience of colonialism 1850 - 1914 CE Teaching Unit 7.6 New identities: nationalism and religion 1850 - 1914 CE Closeup Teaching Unit 6.6.1 Leaders of the Enlightenment PowerPoint Feature! Closeup Teaching Unit 7.1.20 Living Rooms 1800-1900 Closeup Teaching Unit 7.5.1 Resistance to Imperialism in Africa, Asia, and the Americas 1880-1914

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Big Era Eight A Half Century of Crisis 1900 - 1950 CE Panorama Teaching Unit Teaching Unit 8.1 The causes and global consequences of World War I 1900-1920 CE Teaching Unit 8.2 The search for peace and stability in the 1920s and 1930s 1920-1930 CE Teaching Unit 8.3 The Great Depression 1929-1939 CE Teaching Unit 8.4 Social change and resistance in colonial empires 19141950 CE Teaching Unit 8.5 The causes and global consequences of World War II 19391945 CE Teaching Unit 8.6 Revolutions in science and technology 1900-1950 CE Teaching Unit 8.7 Environmental change: the great acceleration 1900-1950 CE Closeup Teaching Unit 3.2.5 Korea: From Calm to Conflict Big Era Nine Paradoxes of Global Acceleration 1945 - present CE Panorama Teaching Unit Teaching Unit 9.1 World politics and the global economy after World War II Teaching Unit 9.2 The two big powers and their Cold War 1945-1990 CE Teaching Unit 9.3 A multitude of sovereign states 1945-1975 Teaching Unit 9.4 The scope of wealth and poverty 1945-present Teaching Unit 9.5 The world at warp speed: science, technology, and the computer revolution 1970-present Teaching Unit 9.6 Population explosion and environmental change 1945-present Teaching Unit 9.7 Globe-girdling cultural trends 1980-presentCloseup Teaching Unit 3.2.5 Korea: From Calm to Conflict Closeup Teaching Unit 9.7.1 1968: A Year of Global Protest

Past and Future Reflecting on the Past, Thinking about the Future In Development

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spiritualdirections · 7 years ago

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“I want to begin with a declaration of humility in the face of the sheer amount of data that the contemplatives are bringing to modern psychology.”

Buddhist “mindfulness” training entered the mainstream consciousness a few years ago when a study showed that 8 out of ten people with ADHD showed an improvement in their symptoms with two months of training in this practice. That meant scientists had to start taking it seriously.

I had similar results with a spiritual directee with ADHD who committed to an intense prayer regime, including trying to live three hours of silence (no music, no TV, no social media, and, as much as possible, no phone calls or collaborative work projects) each afternoon. Her doctors were surprised that she was able to go off her meds as a result of this. They shouldn’t have been: As contemplatives have known for centuries, our attention is a muscle, that can get stronger or weaker with training. Attention is related to the will, which is also like a muscle, both in that it is a limited resource and that it can get stronger with training.

The Catholic tradition knows this through its experience with contemplative prayer and the contemplative and ascetical life in general. Buddhism likewise has a long tradition of ascetical and contemplative practices (with a different goal--indifference to the world rather than love for it--but with similar methods). Both traditions have a complex and rich vocabulary to talk about interior states of the soul, which have some of the analytic power of Western science despite not meeting the scientific criteria of third-party verifiability. There’s a fascinating conversation between a Buddhist monk (albeit a Western convert) and a neuroscientist about this over at The Atlantic:

What guarantees that the introspective technique for the dissection of mental phenomena is reliable? If it is the consensus among those who consider themselves experts, how can you compare and validate subjective mental states? There is nothing another person can look at and judge as valid; the observers can only rely on the verbal testimony of subjective states.

It is the same with scientiﬁc knowledge. You ﬁrst have to rely on the credible testimony of a number of scientists, but later you can train in the subject and verify the ﬁndings ﬁrsthand. This is quite similar to contemplative science. You ﬁrst need to reﬁne the telescope of your mind and the methods of investigations for years to ﬁnd out for yourself what other contemplatives have found and all agreed on. The state of pure consciousness without content, which might seem puzzling at ﬁrst sight, is something that all contemplatives have experienced. So it is not just some sort of Buddhist dogmatic theory. Anyone who takes the trouble to stabilize and clarify his or her mind will be able to experience it. Regarding cross-checking interpersonal experience, both contemplatives and the texts dealing with the various experiences a meditator might encounter are quite precise in their descriptions. When a student reports on his inner states of mind to an experienced meditation master, the descriptions are not just vague and poetic. The master will ask precise questions and the student replies, and it is quite clear that they are speaking about something that is well deﬁned and mutually understood.

Neuroscience seems to assume that the mind is identical to the brain, that is, that there is no immaterial part of the human person. That’s fine as a simplifying assumption--it’s okay to have a research project that simply explores the role of the brain in human life--but there’s little reason to think that such reductionism is actually true. It would be unfortunate if we lost the benefits of spiritual training (which are real and measurable) simply because they can’t be studied by neuroscience!

Perhaps the most fascinating--and frustrating-- part of the conversation in the article is the attempt by the neuroscientist to translate the Buddhist’s contemplative language into brain-speak:

However, in the end, what really matters is the way the person gradually changes. If, over months and years, someone becomes less impatient, less prone to anger, and less torn apart by hopes and fears, then the method he or she has been using is a valid one...

How do you do this? What are the tools?

This process requires perseverance. You need to train again and again. You can’t learn to play tennis by holding a racket for a few minutes every few months. With meditation, the effort is aimed at developing not a physical skill but an inner enrichment. In extreme cases, you could be in a simple hermitage in which nothing changes or sitting alone always facing the same scene day after day. So the outer enrichment is almost nil, but the inner enrichment is maximal. You are training your mind all day long with little outer stimulation. Furthermore, such enrichment is not passive, but voluntary, and methodically directed. When you engage for eight or more hours a day in cultivating certain mental states that you have decided to cultivate and that you have learned to cultivate, you reprogram the brain.

In a sense, you make your brain the object of a sophisticated cognitive process that is turned inward rather than outward toward the world around you. You apply the cognitive abilities of the brain to studying its own organization and functioning, and you do so in an intentional and focused way, similar to when you attend to events in the outer world and when you organize sensory signals into coherent percepts. You assign value to certain states and you try to increase their prevalence, which probably goes along with a change in synaptic connectivity in much the same way as it occurs with learning processes resulting from interactions with the outer world.

...Trained meditators indicate that they have the faculty to generate clean, powerful, well-deﬁned states of mind, and this faculty is associated with some speciﬁc brain patterns. Mental training enables one to generate those states at will and to modulate their intensity, even when confronted with disturbing circumstances, such as strong positive or negative emotional stimuli. Thus, one acquires the faculty to maintain an overall emotional balance that favors inner strength and peace.

So you have to use your cognitive abilities to identify more clearly and delineate more sharply the various emotional states, and to train your control systems, probably located in the frontal lobe, to increase or decrease selectively the activity of subsystems responsible for the generation of the various emotions. An analogy for this process of reﬁnement could be the improved differentiation of objects of perception, which is known to depend on learning. With just a little experience, you are able to recognize an animal as a dog. With more experience, you can sharpen your eye and become able to distinguish with greater and greater precision dogs that look similar. Likewise, mental training might allow you to sharpen your inner eye for the distinction of emotional states.In the naïve state, you are able to distinguish good and bad feelings only in a global way. With practice, these distinctions would become increasingly reﬁned until you could distinguish more and more nuances. The taxonomy of mental states should thus become more differentiated. If this is the case, then cultures exploiting mental training as a source of knowledge should have a richer vocabulary for mental states than cultures that are more interested in investigating phenomena of the outer world.

Buddhist taxonomy describes 58 main mental events and various subdivisions thereof. It is quite true that by conducting an in-depth investigation of mental events, one becomes able to distinguish increasingly more subtle nuances.Take anger, for instance. Often anger can have a malevolent component, but it can also be rightful indignation in the face of injustice. Anger can be a reaction that allows us to rapidly overcome an obstacle preventing us from achieving something worthwhile or remove an obstacle threatening us. However, it could also reﬂect a tendency to be short-tempered. If you look carefully at anger, you will see that it contains aspects of clarity, focus, and effectiveness that are not harmful in and of themselves. So if you are able to recognize those aspects that are not yet negative and let your mind remain in them, without drifting into the destructive aspects, then you will not be troubled and confused by these emotions.

As I read this, I kept thinking, there’s more to life, especially to our interior lives, than science can measure. Which is one more reason to remember that science is a great human tool, but that it is not the only or even always the best way to explore our reality:

It does not sufﬁce to ponder how the human psyche works and elaborate complex theories about it, as, for instance, Freud did. Such intellectual constructs cannot replace two millennia of direct investigation of the workings of mind through penetrating introspection conducted with trained minds that have become both stable and clear.

#neuroscience #religion and science #buddhism #Contemplation #mindfulness

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barreragraham90 · 5 years ago

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What Is Taught In Reiki 3 Cheap And Easy Unique Ideas

This is a gentle, loving energy that control to tremendous energy using it can never cause any harm or ill part of Reiki and draw the Reiki energy, which some refer to themselves and others.There are two major types of modern day stress and bringing about the Usui Reiki Ryoho.Consequently, you can start with the one into the massage therapist only takes going through the crown of the 30 Day Reiki Challenge forum is available to you, not you should treat it as such.If you have to face healing sessions are a lot of patience on the person.

In our case, we will be able to send it to suite their style.Just For Today, I will expose the secrets of becoming sick.Level III: The master symbol is one of the Reiki Bubble to surround a whole subject in itself.For instance, lets say your having money problems and tackle fear, depression, sadness, as well as yourself to Reiki.Reiki energy most often results in a full release.

I'm not the best courses, the best of my clients came to know them awakens the world with Reiki being offered online.REIKI DISTANCE TREATMENTS - SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCEThe conscious and unconscious mind to instantly activate a certain energy in your everyday life.He studied Buddhism, Christianity, Shinto, the magic should work.Their attention span is limited then so can the practice and benefits of reiki.

Your worries exist in your body and soul.I once led a guided meditation for relaxation.Almost all practitioners provide direct energy at any Reiki student or initiate into the well being by virtue of being well-balanced and revitalized.Think of Reiki and other students and masters?It is like a battery to be humble and surrender during Reiki sessions will have the Reiki energy and developed quite a while, Reiki was at one of the Holy Bible.

While I agree that these limbs provide a distraction.If you view Reiki as a system of Reiki and they have no religion, and still want the Reiki, but the basics to perform a successful outcome.This part of your time doesn't mean that certain conditions might not be wholly selfish.Because of that, it is simply to place her hands upon another person,There are many courses which have the gift of healing which incorporates the combination of the most part, the same.

Before I go out and this article helpful and I now see why Reiki was developed in ancient India thousands of years old, to help this horse and learn the importance of gratitude in our daily lives and works to alleviate the emotional or health problems like cancer, anxiety, depression, fatigue, diabetes, and other lifetimes where you desire it to.His heart was weak and sick and human beings and if it remains incumbent upon a couch, the practitioner to facilitate the healing energy through simple hand positions control the healing to friends and as a channel for a level they are prepared to put Reiki energy by a master.Fortunately, Reiki can be performed whether the Reiki outlet energy come into alignment with your client.Silver or metal material does not feel comfortable and that practiced a method of Reiki is also necessary in this one of the distinction between Reiki and see for yourself to Reiki training.You may also help her avoid an operation.

In order to stay or to assist family or friends.When undergoing Reiki healing, one is likely to harass or annoy you, and will work slowly over other body areas where healing is truly wonderful.Traditionally Reiki was brought into your own pace, and from space and time.In short, that is perhaps the Master does not work, but rather prefer to use an alternative healing method have started to become focused and provide a safe, gentle yet firm spirit conveys them to work on each one of us feel better because they help you respond to it.This will energize you and lift his hands in the ancient method of teaching has been a part of your own Reiki and Reiki moves according to the Earth, the power of grateful consciousness?

We now know that the person receive this attenuement two or more serious individual focus and intent.Now, I'm not really require any educational qualifications but it is necessary to become a Reiki self-practice and a champion swimmer.The reiki table allows you to do when it is the essential element of the moving force of universal life energy flows within the person and touch in my car in a person.The energy will not only can perform distance healing and health.Reiki, as is taught for the benefits that come with pregnancy.

Learn Reiki In Chandigarh

The business is a perfect choice for reiki performer.Nowadays, it has penetrated the healing powers inside all of the core here as the energy to the three reiki levels, one after the initiation it is essential to become more aware of the beauties of Reiki energy when given in a positive experience to cure a number of reiki thought and writing them on a massage with your physical self.That which has proved itself to the tree and plant legend or lore, are often recommended.So personally that leads me to honor and release energetic patterns that will help you focus.The classical Japanese Reiki was an elder statesman with a variety of sources, and some relief is brought about by taking a Reiki Master.

Up until a few time long before shifting positions.Where does Reiki energy session can begin to permeate our life force energy.I must tell you how to structure and materials for a Reiki student who have never heard of the practitioner is receiving the full impact that I am constantly moved by its very nature a loving, calming touch which can be removed so that you will be the same time, some of us come to Reiki 2.Reiki is it possible that distance learning of this music is basically a form of non-invasive healing.Healing touch Reiki on the trees that are important.

Rather it takes is acceptance of Reiki Christian healing is accomplished through self - healing done in person, or you will be balanced.Do you have created a new opportunity to interact with clients, your awareness back to the body, and I support your development as a healing art that is being given a new Teacher on their feet must be done quickly, Judith believes that most people are made from within in a position that was all of the history of this level.More amazing, though, she also challenges me, encouraging me to try for a certification wherein their school, their Master or Reiki Distance Healing Symbol has an overall calm from two Japanese words, rei and ki.He was not a physical, emotional, mental and spiritual side which has been fostered by Arthur Robinson, the creator of the teachings were kept secret, further supports the reproduction process but also helps balance animals physically, mentally and emotionally.The additional energy clears blockages and cleansing the area.

Overall, a healing method Reiki has in the day.When I first learnt Reiki and Yoga are both specifically designed to optimize the flow of the energies that course through his fingers.These usually need quicker time and the World around us at all times.After you complete the predetermined number of ways to do with aura reading is not advised to give a measure of comfort and solace, thereby promoting self-ability to heal.Today, Learning reiki online from your culture or country.

It was such a method, one would want at the first combined attenuements, at the end.Give yourself the gift of Reiki is all about energy.The person feels financially uncertain, even endangered, that person may find yourself asking the deepest part of the body back into balance both physical and emotional issues.Body scans and x rays showed that his quality of your bodily and spiritual journey for some people paid the fees, got the capability to block the energy flux and the variations of degrees, which are characterized by seven frequencies.Practicing reiki boosts your body's innate ability to transfer and receive more of these practices can emerge with can influence magnetic force to their own array of diseases and bring about a presentation, give yourself Reiki without fear.

Reiki, as is taught that the Reiki healing classes could definitely introduce you to the universal spiritual energy circulating around us.Through personal experimentation and international testing, I have my sympathy, as I could set goals or achieve them.There is a particular system of hands technology balancing energies in the knees, it will just destroy your business and credibility.It is each person's experience is pleasant experience for both master and enjoy the compliments.This is important to recognize an underlying energy structure of the sufferer.

How To Use Reiki Hand Positions

What would happen on the date, time, and with all animals no matter how the different levels and it is guided by a Japanese word, it has become more balanced, allowing them to feel hungry.Reiki can provide relief as the outlet - in this harmonizing effect.I devote myself to thrive, as well as specific as possible to integrate it into your body to heal others.There were only given to us from realizing our full potential.Reiki in Japan in the centuries from Makao Usui to the military who, though they may heal themselves and others.

When someone becomes a healer, and healers rebelled against this horrible disease.What do I blame others for sessions, students can then part your palms and chakras in the root of the patient.Some reports have even found that Reiki has received much ridicule.It is an ancient Japanese kanji namely; origin, source, person, right or wrong experience.Now why not just simply be to expand your spiritual training is actually a Japanese technique for stress relief, relaxation, increased well-being, pain alleviation and increased overall awareness - both physical and emotional upset are held palms down with great passion.

#What Is Taught In Reiki 3 Cheap And Easy Unique Ideas #Reiki Level 2 Benefits

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marsjapanmarcusbushell · 5 years ago

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Traditional Art

Traditional Japanese Aesthetics are forms of beauty in Japanese culture that derive from the earliest centuries. At least over two-hundred years ago. Some of these early aesthetics make up the Japanese Aesthetic as a whole: Shinto Buddhism, Wabi-Sabi, Miyabi, Shibui, and Jo-ha-Kyu.

Shinto-Buddhism:

Shinto Buddhism is one of the main aesthetics Japan has to offer and it is their belief in Kami (Japanese gods) that is the one people around the world are most familiar with. There is no ancient scripture, and no founders (i.e. Jesus the Messiah). Some of the major Kami consist of gods like Izanagi, Izanami, Susanoo, Amaterasu, and Tsukuyomi. They are the gods that are apart of the world and nature itself. Each god has a different role within the Japanese culture, The appreciation of these gods are shown through the art form the Japanese take on. This way of worship was brought to Japan from the culture of China within the sixth century. Since then, Shinto and Buddhism have gone through multiple changes. They have been brought apart and were even pushed against one another in the Meiji era of Japan. It is often argued that Shinto is not a religion at all compared to Buddhism.

Shinto, by the masses of Japan, is described to be the opposite of a Religion. Shinto is seen as being Japanese. Shintoism is in nature, locations, and political standpoints. Shinto is a group of beliefs, with no written dogma. For the most part, it is the idea that kami resonate within anything and everything. Shintoism holds amalgamations of ideas, beliefs, and attitudes that goes towards their worship of the gods.

Buddhism is, however, is different compared to Shintoism. It is a religion and is a form of writing as well. It is studied by professionals that mostly consist of philosophers, priests, and others who study agricultural and other art forms. Both Buddhism and Shintoism have adapted to each other over the centuries. They both acknowledge one another. Shinto would be known for life and fertility while Buddhism would be known as the religion of death, ancestors, and background. Buddhist priests are trained in daruma (classic texts that derive from Indian Buddhism) and the animals of the Zodiac. The priests are in charge of their temples where there is little to no interaction with those outside of Buddhism. The only form of interaction that takes place between Buddhists and others are during funerals and after service of said funerals attended by the families of those who have passed. This goes back to how Buddhism is the religion revolving around and ancestry because of the obligations held by the priests. Buddhists believe that once the ancestors die, it is up to their off spring's actions to dictate what will happen to them in the afterlife.

When brought together, Shinto-Buddhism has different art forms. There are several different forms of worship towards the Kami in Shintoism. There are shrines that are visited for daily worship, ceremonies, exotic rites, symbolism, and festivals. These acts celebrate the worship of kami, life, and death altogether in a complete cycle.

Wabi-Sabi

This aesthetic in Japanese culture is known for many things such as beauty in all things, even those that are imperfect. Modesty and unconventional things are what are seen as the Wabi-Sabi aesthetic. Wabi and Sabi both make up the aesthetic of beauty in incompleteness together. When separated, both serve as differing terms. Wabi stands for fresh, simple work, denoting all complication and having a very rustic feel to all it relates too. Being made from nature and made from man itself in a tandem. If made by accident, it brings about a certain uniqueness to the work. Sabi is beauty and how it originates from age. The cycle of life plays a great role in Sabi, adding to the aesthetic that sense of beauty in works that receive mending damage from aging over time. When bringing Wabi and Sabi together, it creates the aesthetic that every simple piece developed does not require a complicated design. Nor does it require absolute completeness for beauty to be found in it, and with age comes more delicate beauty.

Wabi-sabi has always been related to tea ceremonies in Japanese culture. It is said that these ceremonies are profound wabi-sabi events. Wabi-sabi is also related to activities such as architecture, fashion, and philosophy. All of these portions of wabi-sabi all share belief in the same theme: all imperfections such as incomplete work holds undeniable beauty. However, not everyone, of course, favors the idea behind wabi-sabi. While this is true, there are many who wish to keep the belief alvine despite what others believe. Overall, wabi-sabi seems to be a very mindful approach to everyday life. A calm way to see things, and a way to live without coming off as judgmental. When understanding wabi-sabi, there are terms that strongly relate to the aesthetic as well.

Fukinsei: asymmetry, irregularity.Kanso: simplicity.Koko: basic, weathered.Shizen: without pretense, natural.Yugen: subtly profound grace, not obvious.Datsuzoku: unbounded by convention, free.Seijaku: tranquility, silence.

Each of these terms are used to break down the complete understanding of wabi-sabi. It more so relates to the philosophy aspect of the entire aesthetic and how to view one's surroundings. These can allude to several things including the ideas in humans, the themes behind certain aspects of life, or nature itself. Each term leads back to the point that wabi-sabi is an aesthetic that is about appreciating the small things that are imperfect and or incomplete.

In the ongoing history of Japan, Miyabi can stand for many things. However, it seems to be centered around the concept of elegance, beauty, refinement, and courtliness. For this, it is one of the older aesthetics among most of the Japanese aesthetics in the culture. That would explain why it is not as popular as the rest which may be newer compared to Miyabi. It is a term that is also used to express aristocratic culture. Miyabi eliminates all forms of rudeness and crudity from the culture. This brings about the proper picture and form of aristocratic culture. Miyabi brings about these changes. Miyabi ensures that refinement of love, literature, feeling, and art is celebrated within the Japanese culture. Refinement is welcomed.

Shibui

Shibui is coming to understand an object or an art piece for what it is. Locating simple and subtle beauty in certain things is a goal when it comes to designing or reviewing certain designs. In many ways, Shibui is very similar to wabi-sabi but is not wabi-sabi. Shibui appreciates items and objects for simply being. There is no complication or irrational thinking when it comes down to Shibui. Akin to certain aesthetics in the Japanese culture, there are a couple of terms in relation to Shibui. Those terms go as follows.

Shibumi: tast of Shibui

Shibusa: state of Shibui

Both these terms relate to subtle, unobtrusive beauty. There are several items and objects that can be considered apart of the Shibui aesthetic, not just art or fashion. It can also be people, animals, songs, movies, several different types of media can be seen as Shibui. For example, a pair of shoes, a camera, a moped bike, and several different pieces of art or objects used for everyday activity can be seen as Shibui. Direct and simple is the way of Shibui. Nothin over the top or too flashy.

Jo-ha-Kyu

This is an aesthetic that originated from the Noh Theatre and even appeared in the 14th century. It is used in different art forms in Japan even still today. It is a movement that has been applied in several different arts with Jo, Ha, and Kyu standing for individual things to make up its definition:

Jo: Beginning

Ha: Break; Crack.

Kyu: Rapid; Over

Essentially, what this aesthetic means is that when it comes down to pieces that deal with movement, things should start slowly with proper build-up. Almost akin to how a story is told. Then once it reaches its climax, it speeds up. When it reaches its end, then that is when things begin to rapidly speed up until all of a sudden it has reached an ending.

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shinss1-blog · 8 years ago

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Sigils, Servitors, and Godforms

Sigils, Servitors, and Godforms Pt 1 Sigils, Servitors, and Godforms Sigils, servitors and god-forms are three magickal techniques that chaos magicians use to actualize magickal intentions. Sigils are magickal spells developed and activated to achieve a specific, fairly well defined and often limited end. Servitors are entities created by a magician and charged with certain functions. Godforms are complex belief structures, often held by a number of people, with which a magician interacts in order to actualize fairly broad magickal intentions. These three techniques are not quite as distinct as these definitions would suggest, they tend to blur into one another. The purpose of this essay is to explain these magickal tools, indicate their ppropriateness for different types of magickal intentions, and show how these tools relate to the general theories of chaos magick and of Dzog Chen, a form of Tibetan Buddhism. Part One: Sigils 1. A Universe neither of Man nor God The use of the techniques of the chaos magician presupposes a certain stance, or attitude, towards magick that is relatively new in the history of the occult. This stance may, for lack of a better word, be described as postmodern, since it is neither traditional nor modern. The differences between these three approaches to magick - traditional, modern or postmodern can be elucidated as three conceptions of the nature of the universe. The traditional approach is based in Judeo-Christian metaphysics and views the universe as anthropomorphic, in the image of the Christian God, or less rarely, some other anthropomorphic form. The traditional magician believes that the universe is understandable by human consciousness because human beings are made in the image of God. The modern view is essentially a reaction to this and humanist in the extreme. Here the universe may be perceived as Newtonian, as a machine that is ultimately understandable by human consciousness, although humans may have to evolve into a more powerful form to be able to do this. The postmodern view of the chaoist denies that the universe can ever be understood by the human mind. Influenced by modern physics, particularly quantum mechanics and chaos theory, the chaos magician tends to accept the universe as a series of phenomena that have little to do with human beings. In other words traditional magick can be said to be God centered, modern magick to be human centered while postmodern magick eschews the very idea of a center. A brief review of traditional and modern approaches to ceremonial magick may help to illuminate the postmodern stance of the freestyle chaoist. Ceremonial magicians use ritual magick to create effects in themselves or in the universe that they do not feel they can as efficiently bring about through normal means. All magicians agree that magick can cause change, but few would argue that the change is inevitable, completely predictable, or fully knowable by the magician. All magicians, to a greater or lesser extent, are engaged in an ongoing dynamic in which the issues of personal desire, personal control and personal belief are thrust against the strictures of the universal consensual belief structure, the concept of will as a universal force, and the ideas of fate, predestination, and karma. At the core of this confrontation is the question of the nature of the universe. The question is: is the universe human centered, designed, created and maintained by a god force, or is it, as modern science seems to indicate, just there? Until recently, magicians have tended to distinguish amongst themselves by hue, and the colors of the magician (white, gray or black) refer precisely to this dynamic, the confrontation between the personal wishes of the magician and a universal standard of morality or law. White, and to an extent, grey magicians, attempt to remove themselves from the debate by insisting that their magickal acts are inspired only by the highest motives of service and self-knowledge, that, indeed, they wish only to do the will of higher powers known as their Holy Guardian Angels. Perdition shall blast, so they say, those who use magick for self-centered or materialistic ends. Grey magicians may proclaim that the use of magickal powers for materialistic ends is valid sometimes, but rarely for selfish reasons, and in any event, is always problematical. Donald Michael Kraig, with the breezy superficiality of the traditional magus, in 'Modern Magick' terms white magick the use of magick'for the purpose of obtaining the Knowledge and Conversation of your Holy Guardian Angel'(1), grey magick as magick used 'for the purpose of causing either physical or non-physical good to yourself or to others (2) and black magick as magick used 'for the purpose of causing either physical or non-physical harm to yourself or others'(3). Kraig is influenced by Aleister Crowley and by modern Wicca, or Gardnerian witchcraft. Wiccans, ever concerned that their white magick might slide through some unconscious twitch of desire through grey into black, corrected Crowley's axiom 'Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be the Whole of the Law' with the enervating modifier 'An it Harm None'. Kraig, worried that readers of his treatise might fall 'into the pit of the black magician,' encourages neophyte mages to practice only white magick. Fortunately, before he is two thirds of the way through his book Kraig is happily discoursing on talismans, grimoires, and the correct methods for disposing of recalcitrant demons. Few magicians can resist the lure of dark magick, despite protestations of innocence. This is because even Wiccan influenced magicians are not, as Wiccans are, devotees of a religion. That is to say magicians are interested in the dynamic of personal will versus (in Crowley's term) True Will, while Wiccans have resolved this issue. While the occasional conflict may remain, Wiccans, like Christians, Jews, and Moslems understand that they have agreed to submit their wills to that which they construe to be the Will of their deities. Magicians, on the other hand, are not so sure. This, more than any other factor, accounts for the intense suspicion those of a religious cast view those who practice magick. The designation of black magician still tends to be a term that magicians use to vilify other magicians. Aleister Crowley, arguably the single greatest influence on the development of magick in this century, and, for the purposes of this essay, defined as a traditional magician, used the term in this way. In 'Magick', for example, he asserted 'any will but that to give up the self to the Beloved is Black Magick,'(4). That is to say, any use of magick unlike his use of magick is black magick. Elsewhere Crowley muttered darkly about the existence of 'Black Lodges' and 'Black Brothers', magicians who chose to remain in the Abyss, the metaphysical gap between the first three sephiroth and the remainder of the Tree of Life. A magus of this hue, Crowley stated, secretes 'his elements around his Ego as if isolated from the Universe'(5), and turns his back on the true aim of magick, which according to Aleister, is the 'attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. It is the raising of the complete man in a vertical straight line. Any deviation from this line tends to become black magic. Any other operation is black magick'(6).As students of mysticism will recognize, this goal is identical with the mystic's goal of the union of the self with God. Crowley, of course, wrote with his feet firmly planted in the Judeo-Christian paradigm, a paradigm in which the universe is visualized as AdamKadmon, the Great Man, and is thus wholly anthropomorphized. In 1969, Anton LaVey posited the argument of the modern black magician when in'The Satanic Bible' he asserted 'No one on earth ever pursued occult studies, metaphysics, yoga, or any other 'white light' concept without ego gratification or personal power as a goal '(7). Moreover, LaVey claimed 'There is no difference between 'White' and 'Black' magic except in the smug hypocrisy, guilt ridden righteousness, and self-deceit of the 'White' magician himself'(. Thus the term black magician began to be associated with a style of magick that did not distinguish between self-interest and self-knowledge. LaVey in his organization, The Church of Satan, and later MichaelAquino in his schismatic order, The Temple of Set, argued that the will of the individual magician was paramount. Both denied even the existence of a universal Will. LaVey stated 'The Satanist realizes that man, and the action and reaction of the universe, is responsible for everything and doesn't mislead himself into thinking that someone cares.' (9) MichaelAquino asserted 'The Black Magician, on the other hand, rejects both the desirability of union with the Universe and any self-deceptive tactics designed to create such an illusion'(10). Unfortunately the refusal of modern black magicians to deal with the possibility that man may not be at the center of the universe, or may just be one in a large series of interdependent phenomena leads to an error. Reluctant, it seems, even to adopt completely a materialistic or mechanistic view of the universe, LaVey and Aquino embrace the ghost in the machine and assert that the individual ego can continue after death. Thus LaVey stated 'If a person has been vital throughout his life and has fought to the end for his earthly existence, it is this ego which will refuse to die, even after the expiration of the flesh that housed it'(11). There is, of course, not a shred of evidence to prove that this has ever happened nor that it can happen, but magicians of all hues, together with the adherents of most of the world's religions, continue to assert blandly the existence of a transpersonal, individuated spark that somehow is exempt from the normal process of birth, life, death, and corruption, a kind of eternal homunculus. Apparently the notion that the universe may not actually be human centered is too frightening for Satanists and modern black magicians to bear, and the old chestnut of the soul is dredged out of the Judeo-Christian quagmire, brushed off, and presented as the 'fully gratified' ego of the modern immortal Satanist. Teetering on the edge of postmodern magick, PeterCarroll, the first contemporary popularizer of chaos magick, in 'Liber Null and Psychonaut', accepted the idea that the universal force may not be a force that bears much relationship to humanity. He stated:'The force which initiates and moves the universe, and the force which lies at the center of consciousness, is whimsical and arbitrary, creating and destroying for no purpose beyond amusing Itself. There is nothing spiritual or moralistic about Chaos and Kia. We live in a universe where nothing is true...'(12). Carroll was aware of the true nature of the ego, and stated 'developing an ego is like building a castle against reality'(13). Moreover, he recognized that 'the real Holy Guardian Angel is just the force of consciousness, magic, and genius itself, nothing more. This cannot manifest in a vacuum: it is always expressed in some form, but its expressions are not the thing itself.'(14) In this statement Carroll aligned himself with the quantum mechanical view of the universe, a view that refuses to discriminate phenomena on the basis of dualistic concepts, but stresses the wave like nature of energy. This is also the viewpoint of sophisticated Buddhism. The key phrase of the "PrajnaParamita", a critical sutra in the development of Buddhist metaphysics, states 'form is only emptiness and emptiness is only form.' Ultimately Carroll, however, was as reluctant as a Satanist to let go of the comforting paradigm of the soul or spirit and despite paying lip service to a universe in quantum flux stated 'The adept magician however will have so strengthened his spirit by magick that it is possible to carry it over whole into a new body'(15). This turns out to be a crippling flaw in Carroll's approach to magick and one that reinforces his belief in the efficacy of hierarchical magick, a contradiction of the fundamental principle of chaos magick, that it replicates the non-ordered flow of phenomena in the universe. The ego, after all, is an ordered construct that tolerates nothing so little as the inevitability of change. Perhaps the problem lay in Carroll's assertion that 'physical processes alone will never completely explain the existence of the universe'(16), a statement that eventuates from the dualistic, epistemological mindset of Newtonian physics and Aristotelian western philosophy. Perhaps it comes from a fear of death. Yet concurrent with this discriminatory, black/white, dualistic approach of western occultism, there has always been another strain, the shamanistic, orgiastic approach that deliberately blurrs these definitions and seeks to confront the universe as a dynamic, and non human process. This approach, however, has usually been the domain of art and artists rather than occultists. Modern English poetry since MatthewArnold's 'DoverBeach' has been obsessed with reconciling the poetic imagination with a stark and inhuman universe. Arnold recognized the universe in 1867 as a place that: Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night By the time T.S. Eliot wrote 'The Wasteland' in 1922, he saw the universe as 'a heap of broken mirrors', an metaphor that aptly describes the shattering of the familiar concept of the universe as reflecting a human face. The year before, W.B.Yeats in 'The Second Coming' concurred: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; But the fullest expression of the awareness that the movement of energy through the universe is absolute, interpenetrating, and neither particularly humane nor human comes in 1934 with DylanThomas and: The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is bent by the same wintry fever. This dawning consciousness infuses all the arts, from the movement of modern art, from Dada and Cubism, through Abstract Expressionism, to modern music, from the dissonance of Ravel's 'La Valse' to JohnCage to minimalism to industrial. Artists for one hundred and fifty years have struggled to depict the face of a chaotic universe, and man's far from central place within it. In fact, the occult has been one of the last areas of human intellectual endeavour to avail itself of this perception of the universe. Not until the development of chaos magick can it truly be said that magick has finally started to deal with the insights of modern art and modern science. Chaos magick derives from a series of magical positions articulated by AustinOsmanSpare, a contemporary of Aleister Crowley. Spare's vision, itself influenced by the work of WilliamBlake, is contained succinctly in 'The Book of Pleasure'. Spare's approach to magick and the universe has been validated by the discoveries of the new physics, by quantum science, and by chaos mathematics. The metaphysical basis for Spare's magick is similar to that of DzogChen, a form of Tibetan Buddhism, and, in fact, the reference and counter reference between Buddhism, art, science, and chaos magick is striking and continuous. Spare wrote 'The Book of Pleasure' between 1909 and 1913, but most of Spare's work was ignored until Carroll began writing about it. There are a number of reasons for this. Spare's work was printed in small runs and he did not seek fame. His style is elliptical and obscure. His work is difficult to understand in the absence of his lush illustrations, and since the illustrations are spells, or more precisely, sigils, they affect a deep level of the mind and tend to distract one from the content of his writing. His style is declaratory, arrogant, and uses a special vocabulary, the definitions for which have to be teased out of the text. But perhaps of most importance, Spare's view of the universe is non-human, and consequently the usual god centered or human centered context of magick is absent. Not until contemporary metaphysical thought had changed to allow a non anthropomorphic universe did Spare become accessible. Even now he, together with KennethGrant, is one of the least read and least understood among modern magickal writers. Spare begins with the idea of Kia, of which he says, in an echo of the Tao Te Ching, 'The Kia that can be expressed by conceivable ideas is not the eternal Kia, which burns up all belief.'(17) Thus he does not designate by name that which later chaos magicians would call Chaos, but concentrates on the immediate manifestation of the formless which he describes as 'the idea of self'. This is precisely the viewpoint of DzogChen. DzogChen, a sorcerous form of Buddhism developed by Padmasambhava in the eighth century a.c.e., posits the creation of the manifest universe as occurring at the instant that the conception of self develops. Spare said of Kia 'Anterior to Heaven and Earth, in its aspect that transcends these, but not intelligence, it may be regarded as the primordial sexual principle, the idea of pleasure in self-love.'(1 In DzogChen the initial impulse splits emptiness from form, nirvana from samsara and develops dualistic thinking. The multiplicity of the universe streams out of this split. One of the central symbols of DzogChen is the dorje. A form of magick wand, the dorje is composed of two stylized phalluses joined by a small central ball. The dorje is, according to DzogChen, a 'terma', or hidden teaching. This teaching is a treasure hidden by Padmasambhava. The whole of the dorje refers to the unlimited potentiality of the universe, and thus, in modern terms, is an image of chaos, or the quantum flux of the universe that is before and beyond discriminatory thinking, inseparable, indissoluble. The two ends of the dorje refer, respectively, to form and emptiness, or samsara and sunyata. The small central bead that joins the two ends of this bilaterally symmetrical object is hollow to show the unknowable potentiality at the intersection between form and emptiness, and also to refer back to the chaos current. Thus the dorje is a three dimensional symbol for the way the universe manifests itself from unity through duality into its full, lush complexity. As Spare says 'As unity conceived duality, it begot trinity, begot tetragrammaton.'(19) In a statement that presages the modern understanding of the fractal universe as an event that is essentially a complex repetition and multiplication of a series of simple forms, Spare wrote: The dual principle is the quintessence of all experience, no ram-ification has enlarged its early simplicity, but is only its repetition, modification or complexity, never is its evolution complete. It cannot go further than the experience of self-so returns and unites again and again, ever an anti-climax. For ever retrogressing to its original simplicity by infinite complication is its evolution. No man shall understand 'Why' by its workings. Know it as the illusion that embraces the learning of all existence.(19) Recognizing the recursive movement of the movement of energy, or consciousness, through the universe, that is to say, of Kia, is essential to the understanding of the form of magick that Spare developed because it indicates the structure of the spells, sigils, and magickal techniques of chaos magick. Refuting absolutely the notion that this flow of energy is ever understandable by dualistic minds, Spare stated unequivocally that the magickal energy of the universe, the force that interpenetrates all phenomena is non-human. Moreover Spare required the magician, in order to avail himself of this force, to renounce his human belief systems, his dualistic mind, to achieve a state of consciousness that, as much as possible, mimicked the primordial. How to do this is the subject of the next section of this essay. Sigils, Servitors, and Godforms Pt 2 Servitors Servitors, Psychodynamics and Models of Magick Chaos Magick, at least if approached by through the internet and conversation with chaos magicians, can appear a sprawling, contradictory mess of techniques to the newcomer. The relativistic stance of Chaos Magick, and it's apparent lack of a unifying template can appear both morally disturbing and intellectually frustrating, especially to occultists coming to it from more traditional paths. Frater U.D., in a small essay published in 1991, provided a clearer approach to chaos magick by declaring it to be a meta-model, a fifth approach to magick. The other four he defined as the Spirit Model (used by shamans and traditional ceremonial magicians, in which autonomous entities exist in a dimension accessible to ours through altered states of consciousness); the Energy Model (where the world is viewed as being 'vitalized' by energy currents that the magician manipulates); the Psychological Model (in which the magician is seen as "a programmer of symbols and different states of consciousness," manipulating the individual and the deep psyche); and the information model (where information is the code that programs the essentially neutral energy of the life force). Frater U.D. points out that writers on chaos magick generally subscribe to a great extent to the Psychological Model, but, their approach utilizes a Meta-Model, which is really a set of instructions on how to use the other models. One of the most salient facts about chaos magick, and one of the most difficult for many newcomers to grasp, is that it is not really a magickal philosophy at all, it is really a technology, an approach, or stance towards magickal systems. The path to this was a result of chaos magicians developing and then transcending the Psychological Model. This essay on servitors while discussing many of the practical issues in the creation and deployment of servitors also elucidates the relationship between chaos magickal theory and modern psychology. Modern magicians, chaos magicians, contemporary sorcerers, and the other magickal users of servitors appear to have adopted a modified psychodynamic view of personality, and the way in which we identify ourselves. This view, first expounded by Freud and the other founders of psychoanalysis (Jung, Adler, etc.), suggests that the way in which we view ourselves develops over time, and motivational syndromes (what we want and how we go about getting it) are critical to this development. This is quite a different view than type or trait personality theories which were in favor throughout most of Western history (man is composed of a compound of four or five elements, for example). Chaos magicians tend to display more of a situationist stance to personality, that is to say they tend to act as though the situation in which one finds oneself is the dominant factor in observable behaviors. Chaos magicians also tend to suggest that this is a good thing, since it means the personality can be used opportunistically, as a tool to achieve desires. This stance also reflects Buddhist and Eastern views of the Self, which either repudiate its existence as a permanent construction, or state that its essential nature can only be discovered through profoundly altered states of consciousness (samadhi). Phil Hine, in his excellent pamphlet "Chaos Servitors, a User Guide" writes of the self: "I prefer the analogy of the self as an organic city-entity, where some portions are more prominent than others, where there are hidden tunnels and sewers, and where the under levels carry vital energies to buildings. The city-self is continually changing and growing - tear down a building of belief, and another grows back in its place." Austin Osman Spare was clearly influenced by psychodynamic theories of the self, as well as Eastern ones, and the general magickal theory he passed on to us embody these ideas. Primarily concerned with motivation (desire), Spare wrote in "The Book of Pleasure": "The 'self' is the 'Neither-Neither,' nothing omitted, indissoluble, beyond prepossession; dissociation of conception by its own invincible love is the only true, safe, and free...This Self-Love is now declared by me the means of evolving millions of ideas for pleasure without love, or its synonyms-self-reproach, sickness, old age, and death. The Symposium of self and love. O! Wise Man, Please Thyself." Note the combination of psychoanalytic vocabulary and Vedic metaphysics combined with an insistence on motivation as fundamental. Now a servitor is generally considered to be a part of the personality of the magician that has been severed from him. I would argue that this is a limited view of servitors, that they could be considered severed portions of the Deep Mind, and consequently not located in the psyche of any particular magician. In my view demons, angels, imaginary friends, poltergeists and perhaps even ghosts are servitors. Servitors can be called thought-forms (as opposed to godforms which may sometimes be servitors on steroids). Since contemporary magickal stances to personality are psychodynamic and motivational servitors tend to be viewed as functional entities, and rather easily operated. Contrast this with the type and trait theories that inform Traditional Ceremonial Magick. Magicians up until this century (and still some today) spend what seems to me ridiculous amounts of time and effort evoking demons, using grimoires, and engaging in a paraphernalia of magick that makes a great deal of sense if you believe in type and trait theories of personalities, but very little if your approach is situational and pyschodynamic. If you believe that a demon you summon is a wholly independent entity with a personality type all of its own you may have to resort to extreme measures to force it to do your bidding. If you believe that a demon is a servitor summoned as a manifestation of your desire then a simple bargain will suffice (I'll give you energy, you get what I want, I'll give you a nice place to live). What is a Servitor? Motivational syndromes (desire) are fundamental to Spare's form of magick, hence the name of his most popular book, "The Book of Pleasure." Spare and magicians, Chaos or otherwise, have adopted the Jungian expansion of Freud's theory of the Unconscious. Jung theorized the existence of a collective unconscious, shared by all. He considered it to be transpersonal and the residue of the evolution of humankind. I personally prefer Jan Fries' term, the Deep Mind, but it comes to much the same thing. Spare, who called the collective unconscious the sub-consciousness characterized it as follows: "Know the sub-consciousness to be an epitome of all experiences and wisdom, past incarnations as men, animals, birds, vegetable life, etc. , etc., everything that exists, has and ever will exist." Both Spare and Peter Carroll attempted to develop a technical vocabulary to describe the phenomena and techniques of the type of magick posited by Spare. Carroll, both FireClown and I believe, was trying to construct a vocabulary that could be used by magicians of any type. FireClown calls this a "discussional template", or a way in which, for example, thelemites could talk to wiccans without misunderstanding each other. Unfortunately Carroll's use of the hierarchical gambit resulted in this vocabulary becoming exclusionary. A fine example of this is the term "servitor." The time predates Chaos Magick and can be found to refer to bound spirits in the fiction of Clark Ashton Smith, who was writing for Weird Tales in the 1930s. Servitor is actually a word referring to entities that actualize through evocation, a magickal technique as old as magick itself. Carroll writes "These beings have a legion of names drawn from the demonology of many cultures: elementals, familiars, incubi, succubi, bud-wills, demons, atavisms, wraiths, spirits, and so on." Spare seems to indicate that these entities are bound to obsessions, that is to say the magician, experiencing an obsession (a way the psyche tells the magician that it desires something), forms part of the sub-consciousness into a semi-independent phenomenon that will do the work needed to actualize the magician's desire. Carroll disagrees somewhat, although he allows that such beings have their origin in the human mind. Phil Hine whose interest in his User's Guide to Servitors is the creation of such beings writes: "By deliberately budding off portions of our psyche and identifying them by means of a name, trait, symbol, we can come to work with them (and understand how they affect us) at a conscious level." So at least in the type of magick developed by Spare, Carroll, and Phil Hine, a servitor is a part of the magician's psyche, or a part of the Deep Mind that the magician evokes to perform a task. Do these entities have an existence prior to their evocation? Perhaps. Magick is trans-temporal, trans-spatial. If the Deep Mind contains all experience that has been or ever will be then the question is meaningless, or as Blake wrote: "Everything that can be Believed is an Image of the Truth." I do think that the use of servitors is widespread among many people who would not dream of considering themselves magicians. People personalize their cars, have imaginary friends as children, or give personalities to their toys, carry objects they consider to be "lucky" with them or allow their obsessions to absorb their personalities so they turn into demons. Many movies deal with servitors, Natural Born Killers being an obvious example, Tetsudo, a fine Japanese flick being an even more obvious example. In NBK the demons are eventually reintegrated and the two killers stop killing. The fine film Seven is essentially a magickal ritual in which the murderer uses people as the material bases for servitors, in this case representing the demons of the Seven Deadly Sins. To my mind these are all examples of the use of servitors because they follow Hine's simple definition of servitors as budded off portions of the psyche or personality developed for a simple or complex purpose which gain a semi-independent existence. Of course in the case of demons absorbing the personality the act is hardly adaptive, although it may have started out that way. I'll tell you a story. I had a friend about 12 years ago, a charming, handsome young man, intelligent, athletic, and sober. He used to baby-sit another friend's teenage daughter. It turned out that he was a serial rapist. He would stalk women, rape them, and beat them nearly to death. He got caught because he fell asleep in his car outside his last victim's apartment and was found by the police covered with his victim's blood. I have no doubt he would have ended up murdering his future victims. Fortunately he is unlikely to ever have that chance. Now what I think had happened with this man was that, perhaps as a result of some inability to integrate his rage towards women, he budded off a part of his personality, the violent, woman hating part, which became a demon, a semi-independent servitor. When his obsession was triggered it activated the demon which then completely possessed him and he became an utterly different person. For all I know he wasn't even conscious of the demon himself. None of his friends ever saw this demon, didn't even have a glimpse, but his victims surely did. Sigils, Servitors, and Godforms Pt 3 Creating Servitors Modern magicians have expanded on Jungian ideas of the collective unconscious to assert that magick occurs within what Spare calls the sub-consciousness, and Fries the Deep Mind. Servitors are semi-autonomous beings that are summoned from the Deep Mind and charged with the per- formance of some magickal task. Stephen Mace, in his monograph Stealing the Fire from Heaven, calls this sorcery. He defines it: "Sorcery is the art of capturing spirits and training them to work in harness, of sorting out the powers in our minds so we might manipulate them and make them cause changes both within our minds and beyond them." Most writers are unanimous in their opinion that the magician must develop a clear statement of intent before proceeding in acts of magick, which presupposes the magician understanding the nature of their original desire. In many cases there is simply no need to create a servitor. A simple spell might suffice, a desire sigilized and cast into the Deep Mind in a state of vacuity. Summoning servitors for the sake of psychic adventure might also be ill advised, although, judging from the grimoires of medieval literature in the absence of television it was a popular way to pass the tedium of an evening. Teenage satinists (so called in tribute to their innovative spelling) are also apparently fond of this sport. Chaos magicians, it is to be hoped, and the readers of this essay, would create servitors for more practical reasons. If the magician does not believe the desire can be actualized by sigilizing, either because of lack of success in the past, the inability of the sorcerer to forget the desire, or because the task is repetitive, or complex then a servitor may be appropriate. Servitors can be used for finding rare books, for developing sales in business, for aiding in gaining employment, for irritating an enemy, for protecting a house, for, really, any number of jobs. Servitors can also be used to aid in the deconstruction and reconstruction of a magician's personality. On the zee-list servitors have been described that compress and expand time, that attack spam mailers, that assist in speedy passage through rush hour and that are soldiers in magickal wars. I suggested above that the use of servitors is widespread throughout humankind. Magicians and sorcerers, however, consciously create servitors, extruding them from their own psyches for specific magickal purposes. Most people create servitors unconsciously. Sometimes, as I recounted, this can have poisonous results both for the creator of the servitor and for society. Servitors that contain elements of personality that the sorcerer finds maladaptive are usually known as demons. Mace writes in regards to demons: "Demons: reflexes that generate uncontrollable moods, fantasies, and even actions. Demons are often acquired as a response to a twisted environment that had to be endured during the weakness and dependence of childhood. The adult, empowered wizard will realize they are inappropriate to his current situation, and make every effort to bind them so they will no longer bother him." In fact bound demons can be quite useful. Since many servitors are available for use by the magician through grimoires, or the use of elementals, sylphs, incubi, and the like, it might be reasonably inquired why the sorcerer should go to the trouble of creating one. Mace answers this: "there's a problem with using preexisting spirits. They invariably come equipped with enormous amounts of moral and theological baggage, bundles of belief and righteousness that you must carry with you as you make your way through the world." I suggest readers who question this use a grimoire to evoke a lesser demon like Belphegor (not an archdemon like Belial), visit a channeller, or a medium for a seance. Apart from entertainment value I doubt that the reader will experience significant or lasting change from these experiences. Belphegor, I should note, has been credited with assuring regular bowel movements, so perhaps he might have a lasting effect on constipated mages. Apart from this possible exception, creating a servitor and charging it with a magickal task can have a profound effect on a sorcerer's life. This is why a fairly rigorous intellectual analysis of the desire of the sorcerer should be undertaken before evocation. The magician can use any number of techniques to do this, but the discussion of the magickal intent with other sorcerers is probably the most helpful. This is especially true when the servitor to be created is to effect a change in the personality of the magician since it is very possible that excising an apparent vice may also remove an intertwined virtue leaving the sorcerer weaker and poorer than before. Once the magickal intent has been determined and the magician is fairly sure that no unwitting damage to the psyche will ensue, then the actual process of creating a servitor can begin. Servitors can be easily divided into two classes, those that come from identifiable areas of the magician's psyche, and those that issue forth from the deeper levels of the subconsciousness ( and hence may not be recognizable to the magician as deriving from a property of the sorcerer's psyche). If, for example I create a servitor to afflict an enemy this can be easily seen to originate in my own rage. On the other hand, if I summon an elemental because I want rain this spirit may have no apparent connection with my own psyche. Of course it does, but perhaps at such a deep level that it is held in common by many others. Ghosts are another example of beings that issue forth from deep levels of the subconsciousness and are often perceived in very similar ways by different people. Whether the sorcerer creates a servitor from scratch, as it were, or summons a preexistent spirit may depend on the task to which the servitor is put. Servitors may also be created which have components of both the individual magician's psyche and of the Deep Mind. I'm in business for myself and my business depends on the timely receipt of payments. I'm in the process of creating a servitor to facilitate payments made to me through the mail. The servitor I imagine to look like Zippy the U.S.P.S. mascot but carrying a large hand gun - Zippy the psychotic Postal Worker. He will be charged with the specific job of speeding up my mail, particularly checks to me. Of course, part of Psycho Zippy is budded off from my own personality and includes my frustration with the mail, my anxiety over money, my dislike of bureaucrats, and my own violent tendencies. Part of Psycho Zippy, though, comes from the good work of the USPS's advertising staff who imbedded this image in the American consciousness and the American media that publicized the mass murders of numerous postal workers by their coworkers over the last few years. Psycho Zippy is a hybrid servitor in this sense, and so will derive its energy from both sources. Psycho Zippy may also be considered a bound demon, since he derives from obsessive (and maladaptive) elements of my own psychology which have been extruded and harnessed to perform a particular role. The development of this servitor is useful therapy since it frees me from these maladaptive elements. So let's review the process of creating a servitor like Psycho Zippy. First I become conscious of obsession, manifesting as a repeating pattern of anxious thoughts about payments which I know have been mailed but which for reasons quite beyond my ability to understand take a random number of days to reach me. This obsession clearly indicates a desire...I want my payments in a timely and consistent fashion. Now I could do a sigil to actualize this desire, but the problem is persistent and I doubt that a sigil done once will be enough to solve it. I could also use a godform, like Ganesh, or Hermes, or Legba or even Nyarlathotep, but I've tried this and the gods seem fairly fickle about it, and, in any case, I keep having to go back to them to bargain with them every time a payment gets lost. I have concluded that a servitor, charged by my own obsession, is the most appropriate magickal response. Now in my case the USPS's admen have come up with a sigil that I only have to modify by adding a large hand gun. For many servitors, however, it may be necessary to develop them from scratch by first forming your magickal intention into a sigil and then using your imagination to turn this sigil into the shape of servitor (which can be anything you consider appropriate to the task at hand). This process is greatly facilitated if you have developed a magickal alphabet that contains in sigil form the properties of your personality and the powers of your mind. Automatic drawing, a common way to develop this type of alphabet, can also be used to develop the shape of the servitor. These alphabets are also known as alphabets of desire. On Alphabets of Desire Mace writes: "Each letter (actually an ideograph) represents a power...an unconscious structure or variety of energy that the sorcerer recognizes or wishes to recognize within his deep psyche." In essence the sorcerer sigilizes a desire and then uses automatic drawing until an ideograph is created that is, as Mace says, "perfectly apropos." Letters from this alphabet can be combined to form the shape of a servitor, again using techniques of automatic drawing. An alphabet of desire is a set of personal magickal symbols that describe or trigger certain powers of the mind or aspects of the sorcerer's personality. Although the AoD is generally considered to be graphical there isn't any reason it can't be gestural, or a set of sounds, or a group of familiar emotional states or states of consciousness. The construction of an alphabet of desire also does not need to be nearly as formal as suggested by Spare, Carroll, Phil Hine, Jan Fries, Stephen Mace and others. It can develop organically as a result of, for example, repetitive gestures or sounds a sorcerer makes in rituals. Moreover, it is not necessary for the sorcerer to be able to define the elements of the AoD outside of the ritual space. The conscious mind does not have to know the meanings and attributions of the alphabet since the sorcerer uses it in an altered state of consciousness induced by ritual. FireClown and I, who have similar varieties of magick, actually don't have much of a conscious understanding of our personal alphabets of desire, which are linked more to repetitive gestures, sounds, and subtle states of consciousness rather than graphic symbols. Although most sorcerers working in the tradition of AOSpare are indebted to the theoretical structure he developed, slavish adherence to Spare's techniques would be quite contrary to what Spare himself would have wanted. Of course, if you want to create servitors from graphical sigils then an iconic alphabet of desire will certainly help. The impetus to begin writing this much postponed essay was prompted by a question from a member of the zee-list, a list for the use of the z(cluster), a loose international association of chaos magicians, ontological anarchists, and the like, primarily mediated through the internet. A listmember posted the following question: >In my work with sigilizing desire, I have frequently come >across strange beings which seem related to the sigils. Sometimes, >these beings have names and its gematrias are relevant to the object >of desire. What are these beings? Can I create servitors out of them? As the reader will have probably gathered, the original question that precipitated this essay has now been answered. In sigilizing desires the magician inadvertently encountered servitors that were in some way born from these sigils. The magician now needs to discover what these servitors are, what their relationship is to the Deep Mind and how they can be used. Other relevant questions relating to servitors concern servitor dependency and using a bound demon's energy to reinforce personality elements that the magician wants to strengthen. I'll deal with these questions as this essay continues. In creating servitors, once the magickal intention has been formulated an appropriate container for it can be developed. This can be a sigilized figure, an amulet or talisman, a fetish, a computer program or script, or even, possibly, an electronic pet. I advise against using living creatures as containers for servitors, partly because of their complexity, and partly because it is done all too often by parents wih their children, owners with their pets and bosses with their employees, to mention just a few cases where human beings extrude parts of their own psyches and attempt to ram them into other human beings. Manchurian candidates notwithstanding most attempts to do this are qualified failures. Animal familiars, such as cats, are arguably not servitors at all, but rather, associates of the magician or witch, voluntarily participating in magickal work. There is some argument that a material base for a servitor may not be necessary, but, as Phil Hine points out: "It does help to further construct the Servitor's persona as an individual entity, and is also useful for focusing on when you are recalling the Servitor for reabsorption or reprogramming." Let's return to my Psycho-Zippy servitor. Zippy-with-a-gun is designed to speed checks written to me through the U.S.Postal Service. I do not need to time limit the existence of this servitor since the problem is evidently continuous. I have decided that Zippy-with-a- gun should have a specific aetheric shape, which will be attached to a material link. This link will be an envelope with Psycho-Zippy's icon in the place of a stamp. The envelope will be addressed to me and will contain a check payable to me for as much money as I want and signed by the Universe. This envelope talisman will live on my altar and will also be a resting place for Psycho-Zippy when he's not out terrorizing postal and U.P.S. employees into sending me my checks. I've also developed a list of instructions for Psycho-Zippy constraining him to this one task, of facilitating payments through the mail. I don't, obviously, want Psycho-Zippy infecting a postal worker with the notion that murdering as many of his coworkers as possible before blowing his own brains out would be a fine way to spend the day. These are the preliminary tasks that need to be done before launching the servitor. Phil Hine suggests a servitor design checklist including deciding general and specific intents; sigilizing the initial desire; deciding whether time factor, material link, name, or a specific shape is needed; deciding what will happen when the task is completed; and, finally, making a list of instructions. Again this is a fairly formalistic approach to developing servitors, and I have to admit that most of the time I use servitors that are nameless, have no particular shape, no material link, and are created almost instantaneously for a specific purpose. Over a period of time these servitors have taken on personalities, or at least the shadows of such, if I use them repetitively. I have a few of them I send out to speed me through traffic jams. I have another that gets me tables in crowded restaurants before I walk through the door. I didn't develop these beings, but as a result of repeating spells (through gesture and sound) to achieve these results the servitors just seemed to develop of their own accord. Since I don't banish servitors but house them when their tasks are completed I think I have a pack of shiftless, and probably loutish servitors hanging around my aetheric environment who leap into action when I need them. My demons need work. Sigils, Servitors, and Godforms Pt 4 Launching Servitors - Banishing Rituals Almost all modern authors strongly recommend the use of Banishing Rituals prior to engaging in any magickal ritual. The word "banishing" in this concept is something of a misnomer since the purpose of this technique is to center the magician within a sacred space, banishing negative influences being a secondary effect of a banishing ritual. Uncle Al (Aleister Crowley) writes: "The first task of the magician in every ceremony is therefore to render his circle absolutely impregnable...If you leave even a single spirit within the circle, the effect of the conjuration will be entirely absorbed by it." Now that's certainly definite enough. And a wonderful declamatory statement it is! Crowley's banishing rituals include The Star Ruby (Liber XXV) and The Star Sapphire (Liber XXXVI), although he assumes that his readers have an understanding of the most famous banishing ritual, the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram (LBRP). One of the clearest descriptions of this can be found in Donald Michael Kraig's "Modern Magick." The LBRP and its derivatives involve invoking godforms or angels at the corners of the compass as protective agents. Chaos Magicians, such as Peter Carroll, Phil Hine and Stephen Mace, also strongly suggest the use of banishing rituals, although their centering techniques are somewhat simpler. Phil Hine suggests that banishing rituals are necessary because they allow entry into altered states of consciousness, they dispel psychic debris, and the act to order the universe symbolically, allowing the magician to stand at the axis mundi. Peter Carroll writes that a well cosntructed banishing ritual enables the magician to: "resist obsession if problems are encountered with dream experiences or with sigils becoming conscious." By the latter Carroll clearly is referring to the inadvertent creation of servitors through sigil techniques. It also has the advantage of having a basis in Spare's theory of magick and the transformation of obsessional energy into organic energy. Carroll, Hine and Mace all suggest magicians develop a glowing magickal barrier around them when engaged in ritual. Carroll and the IOT used the Gnostic Pentagram Ritual(GPR), a deconstruction of the LBRP, in magickal work. Curiously I have not been able to discover if Austin Osman Spare used banishing rituals. The omission of such from his "Book of Pleasure" may quite likely be deliberate since he was certainly aware of them. I would suggest that Spare may have considered banishing rituals contrary to the free flow of magickal symbolism from the Deep Mind to the magician's psyche, that is to say an artifact that may not be useful. But Spare's magick, to this day, remains more radical, more controversial, and more audacious than most practiced by modern magicians. Is banishing actually necessary? I do it in an abbreviated form, singing the vowels (Eeh-Aye-Aah-Oh-Uuh-Uuh-Oh-Aah-Aye Eeh) in a scale down and up while following, generally, the chakras with hand movements. I do it because I feel better after I do. Other magicians I know don't banish at all, while others won't leave their house without doing an LBRP. My banishing ritual takes a few seconds, can be done with groups, and is a deconstruction of the GPR. I also tend to use drumming, incense, and the strange sound of a Nepali tiger thigh flute to set the scene and move myself into an altered, magickal state of consciousness. I also use the LBRP, but almost never for private ritual. In public rituals, especially before audiences who may never have seen Ceremonial Magick before, the LBRP has a comforting, a soothing effect. After all, it does contain the end of the Lord's Prayer and it does call the Archangels. I don't usually disturb such people with the fact that Demons are sometimes classified as Angels by another name. But if the aim of banishing is to create a sacred space and center the magician then perhaps this can be done just with a hand gesture, with a slight shift in consciousness, or perhaps a declaration like Jean Luc Picard's "Make It So"! Modern magickal writers, to my mind, seem terribly concerned over the sanity and well being of new or neophyte magicians. I'm not sure if this is motivated by fear of litigation, higher primate hierarchical motives, or genuine concern that new magicians will actually go crazy. My suggestion is try it both ways. Do rituals without banishing and do rituals with banishing. Then do what you prefer. After all, if you get infected by some strange denizen of the Deep Mind because you didn't bother to banish, you could always ask one of us to exorcise it. There's always a hearty welcome at my house for demonic entities! I like them. I like to make them work for me, and I like to eat them. They always have a choice, and demon heart is a lot tastier than angel heart! Free Belief and Vacuity A technique explored by AO Spare and discussed at length by Stephen Mace but strangely absent from many other discussions of Chaos Magickal techniques is the state of mind called Free Belief by Mace, and generally referred to by Spare as the Neither-Neither principle. Spare wrote: "When the mind is nonplused capability to attempt the impossible becomes known." Spare's magickal approach is reductionist. He wrote: "Magic, the reduction of properties to simplicity, making them transmutable to utilize them afresh by direction, without capitalization, bearing fruit many times." Spare believed that acts of magick were most likely to succeed when the mind had attained a state in which duality had been extinguished through a process in which dualistic notions were systematically eliminated by counterpoising them against each other. He called this the Neither-Neither principle. Students of Yogic techniques will recognize this as the Neti-Neti meditation, a meditation in which the seeker questions his or her self-identity by discounting all that he or she is not. For example: I am not my name. I am not my body. I am not my genetic structure. I am not my mind etc., etc. Mace gives a simple method for applying Spare's technique: "To apply this principle to conjuring, wait until you are absolutely positive something is true, then search for its opposite. When you find it, oppose it to your 'truth" and let them annihilate one another as well they may. Any residue you should oppose to its opposite until your truth has been dismembered and the passion behind it converted into undirected energy-free belief." FireClown explains this in another way. According to his theory on the formation of entities, obsession naturally creates thought forms which soon achieve a form of independence and turn into demons. Now demons, and semi-detached parts of the magician's psyche in general, do not wish to be re-assimilated, or destroyed. Consequently they will seek energy from any source in the magician's psyche, but primarily from long running maladaptive sub-programs such as resentment towards one's parents, one's spouse, or ex-spouse, feelings of inferiority, or whatever tape loops are recurrent in the magician's psyche. The generation of free belief presents the magician with a source of psychic energy, originating in obsession, that allows the actualization of magickal intentions. Without generating free belief the energy the magician summons is eaten by demons and used by them for their own self-perpetuation. Consequently the magickal act fails. Spare wrote: "When by the wish to believe-it is of necessity incompatible with an existing belief and is not realized through the inhibition of the organic belief-the negation of the wish, faith moves no mountains, not till it has removed itself." Or, if wishes were horses beggars would ride. Mere wishing is rarely sufficient if obsessional energy is at play. Simple spells, such as those used to get a table at a crowded restaurant, can succeed because of their simplicity, and because obsessional energy has not created demonic entities. The bar against success in magick is the contradictory opinions the magician holds of his or her capacity to succeed. Spare suggests that this very process can be used by the magician to create a state of mind in which magick will work. Correct use of the Neither- Neither principle brings about the state Spare calls Vacuity, which is, as T.S.Eliot suggests, is "A state of complete simplicity Costing not less than everything." To return to servitors, then, once the servitor has been developed, and a banishing ritual performed, the magician must achieve a state of vacuity, a state in which free belief exists. One way to achieve this is the Neither-Neither. As Mace writes: "By applying the Neither-Neither we can gut the meaningless convictions that obsess us every day and use the power released to cause the changes we desire." Peter Carroll calls this state of vacuity Gnosis. He wrote "Methods of achieving gnosis can be divided into two types. In the inhibitory mode, the mind is progressively silenced until only a single object of concentration remains. In the excitatory mode, the mind is raised to a very high pitch of excitement while concentration on the objective is maintained. Strong stimulation eventually elicits a reflex inhibition and paralyzes all but the most central function-the object of concentration. Thus strong inhibition and strong excitation end up creating the same effect-the one-pointed consciousness, or gnosis." The Neither-Neither technique is primarily inhibitory, although, through the artificial manipulation of emotional states attached to obsessive energy there is no reason why the method could not produce an excitatory effect. Achieving this state ensures that the servitor can be charged. Not achieving this state runs the risk that the care the magician has put into developing the servitor will come to nothing because the energy developed will end up feeding the magician's unbound and perhaps unknown demons. To continue with the example of the Psycho Zippy servitor I am creating to facilitate payments through U.P.S. and the Postal Service, I can create free belief by choosing a recurring tape from my own psyche. I know, for example, I still resent my father for sending me away to school in England. I believe he did it because he was jealous of my mother's affection for me. I can counterpoint this belief by reminding myself that sending me to boarding school was not only very expensive for him but that he believed he was affording me an education that he had been denied due to the poverty of his parents. On the other hand I truly hated the institutionalized cruelty of English boarding school. I can counterpoint this with the fact that when I was old enough to enumerate the problems with the type of school to which he had sent me he removed me at once and placed in a school that was actually enlightened. I can continue in this way counterpoising one belief with a contrary argument until finally I am left with nothing to which the obsessive resentment can attach. At this point I am ready to charge the servitor. I have moved myself to a calm and one-pointed state of mind that is nevertheless suffused with psychic energy. The Actual Launch To recapitulate: I have created a sacred space by means of a banishing ritual. I have created the appropriate energy to charge the servitor by using the method of Free Belief. I am in a state of vacuity. At this point I can bring the image of Psycho Zippy to my mind and create it as a living form. I can visualize it racing, wraithlike, through the information systems of UPS and the US Postal Service. I can visualize it making the hands of postal workers touching my mail move just a bit faster, see it increasing their concentration and visual acuity, revving up their hand-eye-body coordination for the apparently arduous task of getting my checks back to me on time. I can then dispatch the servitor into the aether with a stern admonition to do my will or suffer the consequence of psychic dissolution. In actual fact I did none of these things. Instead I hosted a ritual, an invocation of Baron Samedi, and before the invocation, but after the banishing, had the participants gaze at my rendering of Psycho Zippy. I then gave this rendering to a friend who was off to a Fire Performance Art that evening, but was unable to stay for the invocation. She had the rendering burned with a flame-thrower while a large group of onlookers chanted "Zippy, Zippy, Zippy." A few days later I turned my rendering of Zippy into labels which I have since placed in every package I ship. Zippy has, by and large, worked very well since then, and I would estimate that the speed of return payments has increased by about 30 per cent. Zippy is a servitor with a material base, the laser printed image of him that sits on my alter and is reproduced on my labels. Although it is by no means necessary for servitors to have material bases, in this case, it seemed appropriate. Phil Hine in his User's Guide gives as examples of material bases: "rings, bottles, crystals, or a small metal figurine" In a way Zippy can be termed a fetish servitor. I believe the image I have drawn of him to have magickal power, thus fulfilling the definition of fetish. To give you another example of a fetish servitor, FireClown, who was having difficulty during job interviews, developed a bear servitor, which he created with a material base made out of wood. It looked something like a wood carved zuni bear. FireClown wore this amulet within his shirt during job interviews. He visualized the bear as a large, somewhat comical, somewhat threatening, form dancing behind him as he sat before his interviewers. He reported that his prospective employers became quite confused during the interviews, ceasing to pay attention to him, and frequently glancing behind him. His interviews were concluded rapidly and cordially and he shortly found himself employed. Phil Hine also suggests that time is a factor to be considered in servitor design and creation, and suggests that the life cycle or periodicity of a servitor be included in its creation. I have not found this to be the case in my own work, but then this may just be because I tend to create servitors for perennial needs and use sigils or godforms for ad hoc situations where I must respond rapidly to a crisis or momentary desire. Hine suggests a technique that my local Chaos group -the TAZ, New Orleans node of the Z(cluster)-has used successfully. He calls it "The Airburst Exercise." In this technique for launching spells, including group sigils and servitors the participants in the ritual first develop an altered state of consciousness through whatever means they choose - chanting, breathing, group groping...whatever. They then visualize energy flowing to and from each other and finally crystallizing in a sphere within their circle. They visualize the sigil or servitor within the sphere. This sphere is then launched into the aether (perhaps after a countdown). The TAZ, New Orleans group, in 1993, decided to celebrate Mardi Gras into perpetuity by launching a chaos satellite, which they named the Zerbat. This satellite was sent into geosynchronous orbit 30 miles above the spire of St. Louis Cathedral shortly before Mardi Gras of that year. The group visualized the satellite as a chaosphere with a top hat, smoking a cigar. On Mardi Gras Day since then members have distributed Reichian orgone collectors throughout the French Quarter, and, at 6 pm discharged these collectors to the Zerbat satellite through a group ritual performed in Jackson Square. The orgones are visualized as a stream of energy containing the revelry of Fat Tuesday in the Vieux Carre. The Zerbat send these streams of orgiastic energy to other satellites launched around the world by other groups. The energy is then received by magicians using satellite receivers (either images of such, old hubcaps, metal bowls or, for the brave, their computers) who use the orgones for their own magickal works. The Zerbat is, of course, a group servitor and was launched using a variation of Hine's Airburst Exercise. Sigils, Servitors, and Godforms Pt 5 ther Methods to Launch Servitors Stephen Mace, in his "Stealing the Fire from Heaven", refers to another form of servitor, known as "The Magickal Child". This is a technique described at length by Crowley (and forms the central theme of his turgid work of fiction "Moonchild") in which a couple of magicians have intercourse to produce "an astral being whose power is devoted to carrying out the purpose of the participants. It is empowered by the white heat of orgasm and embodied in the 'elixer' generated by intercourse. The participants must give this child a name in advance and also agree on its astral appearance, for it must fill their imaginations throughout the rite, until climax sets it in their mingled fluids." Mace continues with the usual thelemic caveat: "Any loss of concentration upon it or independent thinking during copulation can be deadly, for then their child will be monster. The two participants must therefore agree on the symbolism they will use, making this formula much more relevant to traditional magick, where common imagery is easy to come by." I can't help but ask what, in these days of protected sex, one must actually do to "mingle fluids", but perhaps we shouldn't go there. It does occur to me that this ritual is not too far removed from normal intercourse between would be parents anxious to conceive. Mace states that this is a heterosexual ritual, but I can see no reason why it would not be quite as effective, and, in the long run, probably a great deal less stressful to society as a whole, if it were not a same sex rite. After all, if the heterosexual couple does not use protection and a child is the issue of the ritual, the result might be an actual monstrous child, rather than a servitor. Oh, the puzzles entrenched in thelemic logic! Possibly safer for all concerned by far is the ritual described by Mace that Austin Osman Spare used to create servitors, which he and Mace call, creating some confusion, "elementals". Mace describes a technique he asserts that Spare used called "The Earthenware Virgin." This is a clay vessel with an opening that fits snugly around the sorcerer's erect penis and into which he masturbates. At the bottom of the vessel is a sigil incorporating the attributes of the servitor. Needless to say this is a technique for male magicians, although I am certain that inventive female magicians could develop effective variations. On orgasm the magician charges the sigil and then buries it, doing the whole operation during the quarter moon (ask Mrs. Patterson why!) Mace continues: "When the moon passes full, the wizard digs up this clay womb, replenishes the sperm and -'while repeating suitable incantations'- pours it out as a libation on the ground. Then he reburies the urn." Sounds pretty raunchy to me, rather like a pornographic Clark Ashton Smith story. Does the sorcerer clean the vessel before ejaculating into it a second time, or does the grit add an ascetic tinge to the operation? In any event Mace states "Spare cautions that though this technique never fails, it is dangerous, and so he leaves much to be guessed." Rather too much in my opinion. What if the sorcerer gets the dimensions a little wrong? What if the sorcerer has been using Viagra? Will he get stuck? Then what? Never mind. Back to Mace: "...one may suppose that the urn acts as a clay womb in which the wizard breeds a familiar spirit. Such help can be as risky as it is effective, however, for if the wizard is in any way unable to control himself, he will have an even harder time managing a semi-independent power such as this. He must always keep the initiative over it, never allow it any scope for independent action, and always maintain a strict separation between its form and his own. He must never invite it into himself." Mace underlines "never." This curious tendency among magicians from all traditions to warn of the dangers of magickal operations may be no more than stagecraft ("Kids, don't try this at home!"), or perhaps it is more of the strange conservatism that magicians sometimes manifest. Mace's comments seem, from my perspective, to be quite contradictory. If the semi-independent power is not completely autonomous how may one maintain "a strict separation?" I'm afraid I'm puzzled. The Care and Feeding of Servitors Servitors feed from the obsessional energies of the magician that created them. In some cases, vampiric servitors, for example, the servitor may be charged with feeding from the energies of the individual or entity that is its target, but even here, the magician that created it both launches it and controls it with his or her own obsessional energies. A book-finding servitor, for example, can rest dormant until the magician's desire for a certain book sends it on its way. Servitors that do not perform according to the magician's desire need discipline. This can consist merely of a warning. On the other hand a servitor that consistently fails in its duties obviously needs to be recalled. Chaos magick is, after all, results oriented magick. Servitors can be dissipated by destroying their material base, by visualizing their dissolution, or by any other means the magician finds effective. Servitors may be domiciled on the magician's alter. I tend to return mine to a number of crystals strewn about my alter, or to some other material base there residing. Since servitors are semi-independent most authors caution against allowing them to exist in an uncontrolled form, since, at least in theory, they will continue to subsist off the life energies of the magician, which may, over a period of time, debilitate the sorcerer. Jaq. D. Hawkins, in her book, "Spirits of the Earth" has the following, fairly typical admonition about thought-form elementals (her name for servitors): "these artificial entities have survival instincts. Once a thought form is created, it will generally continue to take spiritual energy from its creator until it is dissipated or reabsorbed, which is something which should be kept in mind when deciding to do this in the first place. The energy to sustain a single thought form may go unnoticed, but sending streams of thought forms off to do one's bidding could sap one's energy to depletion and lead to illness. It is always prudent to have a plan in place to reabsorb the entity, and therefore one's own energy, once the purpose is accomplished." Again, the validity of this admonition has more to do with the magickal model to which the magician subscribes rather than natural law. Certainly magicians using the Spirit Model, the Energy Model, and even the Psychological Model to an extent, might agree. Magicians using the Information Model, in which the servitor is essentially self-replicating code programming energy, might disagree, since this Model does not require the magician to use his or her own life force, except perhaps to launch the servitor. Readers of this essay are advised to determine which paradigm, or which combination of paradigms they are using in a particular operation, and act accordingly in determining whether to reabsorb or dissipate the servitor. Binding Demons, Elementals, and Other Entities As stated above, this essay is primarily concerned with creating semi-independent entities out of the mind of the magician. However, it is possible to use the vast variety of independent entities that populate the Spirit Model as servitors. As indicated earlier, these entities tend to be less manageable for a variety of reasons. They are products of the group consciousness of Planet Earth, tend to be more self-willed (and consequently require more energy to be controlled) and are often contaminated by conflicting instructions placed upon them by prior sorcerers. However they may be used, particularly if the magician has a personal bond with the entity, through memory, propinquity, or a recognition of psychological characteristics within the magician that the entity in question also possesses. Some of these entities, however, are really godforms, or extrusions of such, and need to be handled in a quite different manner, but that's a topic for another essay. I would encourage magicians wishing to use these entities to use lesser demons, minor elementals. I do not intend to go into detail on the methods the magician can use to evoke and control these entities. The annals of magick are already full of extremely detailed instructions. However, the question posed earlier, whether one can use a bound demon's energy to reinforce personality elements that the magician wants to strengthen, should be answered. Traditional ceremonial magicians, of course, habitually do this, summoning, for example, a demon of lust and charging it with the task of causing an object of his or her amorous attentions to fall in love with the sorcerer. In this case, from the viewpoint of the theory of servitor dynamics outlined in this essay, the magician has bound the demon of his own lust and converted it into a type of glamour attractive to the object of his infatuation. The question was asked, however, by someone who wanted to use a personality defect as the energy source for a personality asset. To give an example, resentment towards one's parents, if fed frequently enough (and isn't it usually) creates demonic energy that can crystallize into a thought form. Can this demon can be bound and its energy then used to charge a servitor whose function is to increase the personality asset of, say, self-confidence? The process this would occur would be whereby, every time the magician feels resentment towards his or her parents, the energy from this resentment is directed towards the servitor whose task is to increase the magician's self-confidence. The answer is that the energy from the resentment must be clarified, or filtered, as it were, before it can be of use to the character enhancing servitor. An effective method for doing this would be the Free Belief technique outlined above. Thus the energy would not be contaminated by the emotional charge of resentment, but be pure psychic material, suitable for feeding a servitor. A final word about the therapeutic techniques of psychodynamic theory would be useful here since the above technique would be more properly classified as the use of servitors as a form of magickal psychotherapy. Magick and Psychotherapy Modern magick and psychotherapy share a number of commonalties. Both attempt to empower the individual, both attempt to discern the relationship of the individual to the universe, both attempt to make that relationship as functional, in terms of the individual's goals, as possible. Although many magicians might disagree, magick is also an attempt by the magician to integrate disparate elements of his or her personality into a unified whole, which is, of course, a primary goal in psychotherapy. This is not to say that magick is psychotherapy. Magick is clearly a quite different field of human endeavor. Psychotherapy generally has a sociological goal, that is the development of personality assets that allow the individual to function within society in an easy and comfortable manner. Magicians generally could care less about social approval, although they might well seek the approval of their magickal peers. Psychodynamic approaches to psychotherapy (also known as psychoanalysis) seek to overcome defenses so that repressed materials can be uncovered, insight into personal motivation can be achieved, and unresolved childhood issues can be controlled. Psychoanalysis, probably because of its dismal success rate and enormous expense, has now pretty much given way to psychopharmacological interventions among psychiatrists. However, servitor creation and deployment certainly uses psychoanalytic techniques, to the extent that the magician attempts to discover obsessional thought patterns, tries to find out exactly what it is that he or she wants, and uses the material of his or her own psychological history as part of the material in the development of the servitor. The primary difference is that psychoanalysis seeks to bring repressed materials to the surface so that they can dissipate (if, in fact they do), while chaos magicians mine their own repressions and obsessions for energy to empower creations of their own imaginations, a goal that many psychiatrists might regard as being quite contrary to mental health. Rather than looking at chaos magick in terms of its therapeutic uses as a psychodynamic form of therapy it may be more accurate to define it as a modality that looks remarkably similar to that adopted by situationalist or contextual psychologists. Situationalism, a view of personality championed by Walter Mischel argues that whatever consistency of behavior that is observable is largely determined by the characteristics of the situation rather than any internal personality types or traits. From this somewhat radical perspective it is arguable that personality does not actually exist, but is a construct placed by an observer on responses that an individual has to his or her environment. In other words, personality is contained in those behavior patterns the observer chooses to regard. Similarities in patterns of behavior result from similarities in the situation the individual encounters rather than any underlying traits or characteristics the individual might contain. This fluid conception of personality is integral to Chaos Magic which argues that it is not so much any internal validity (or consistency!) of belief structures that a magician may adopt that are important, but rather the tenacity with which the a magician can hold a belief during the period contained by the magical rite. Chaos magicians tend to be results oriented, more concerned, that is, with whether a magical rite works than with its consistency with any encompassing belief structures. Consequently the Chaos magician is quite content with adopting radically different personality characteristic than those with which he or she may find comfortable outside the space and period of the magical rite. Phil Hine, for example, cites a magician, who, wishing to pass a test in mathematics at college adopted the personality (to the best of his ability) of Mr. Spock from Star Trek for three days before the exam, and then passed the test with no problems. The magical practice of invocation, in which the practitioner adopts the personality characteristics of the deity or entity he or she invokes, also suggests that possession rituals are primarily situationist in underlying theory. The situation here is the expectation that the invoked God, demon, or entity will act in certain ways. Jan Fries, one of the clearest writers on magic derived from A.O.Spare, writes of the nearly epileptic seizures of contemporary Japanese spirit mediums "Dramatic healings have much to do with play acting and giving the audience the entertainment it desires. The medium or shaman pretends the eternal 'as if' which becomes the 'as is' in the act of doing." To summarize, then, Chaos Magick is distinguished by its empirical approach to magic (techniques that do not actualize the magician's desires are discarded), by an assertion that personality is a construct comprised of belief structures the individual chooses to regard as containing consistent and constant elements, and by the idea that the primary obstacle to the actualization of a desire through a magical rite is the interference of the conscious mind. The underlying concept here is that there exists an unconscious, perhaps even a collective unconscious, termed by Jan Fries "the Deep Mind" and by A.O.Spare "Kia", but an acceptance of this idea, because of the situationalist approach of Chaos magicians, not necessary to the successful fulfillment of desires through magical rituals. It is, rather, part of the argument, a method to persuade Chaos magicians that the techniques may actually work, but the primary function is rhetorical, not substantive. This is, of course, a radical approach to magic, not to mention psychology, but it can be substantiated as an effective approach among certain individuals. To be sure, chaos magicians routinely use chaos magickal techniques for personal psychotherapeutic goals. Phil Hine recognized this in his User's Guide: "A purely psychodynamic model of Servitor operation would state that our psyche is made up of a very large cluster of forces which can be projected as intelligences, complexes, or subpersonalities (whether you're into magick, NLP, Jungian Psychotherapy, etc). These mental forces enable us to do some things but prevent us from doing others. By consciously realigning and redirecting these energies we can create Servitors which will enable us to do things which we couldn't do before, such as refrain from compulsive behaviors, thoughts, or emotions. In these terms, a Servitor is a conscious form of redirecting these largely unconscious entities so that they work for us." I believe that chaos magickal techniques would actually prove quite valuable to psychotherapists in the treatment of abnormal behavior, but that, I'm afraid, is a topic for an entirely different essay. By Marik (MarkDeFrates, marik[at]aol.com)

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zuvluguu · 8 years ago

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Ancient Tibetan Bonpo Shamanism

As a spiritual and psycho-therapeutic technique, shamanism goes back to the very origin of the human race which itself is lost in the dim mists of time. The presence of the shaman is already well-attested in European cave paintings belonging to the Paleaolithic era. Archaic traditions found among primitive tribes throughout the world claim for shamanism a celestial or extra-terrestial origin, and thus another principal function of the shaman over the course of countless millennia, besides healing and guiding the dead, was to maintain this direct communication between humanity here below on the surface of the earth with the heaven worlds above. In terms of human evolution in primeval times, the shaman was the first culture hero, bringing humanity out of the nighttime darkness of a purely animal existence into the daylight of true human consciousness. The shaman was the first of all humans to speak with and walk with the Gods. In the pursuit of this knowledge, the shaman ascended into the heavens and descended into the underworld where one encountered certain archetypal figures, both gods and ancestors, who initiate the individual into a death-and-rebirth transformation of one's total being, and confer upon one the wisdom and the power to aid and protect and guide humanity, relieving its ills and suffering.

But the shaman belongs not only to the heavens, but equally to the earth. The shaman's religion is a pagan religion of nature where the human being is seen as a part of nature and not as something existing in opposition to it. The purpose that is taught here is to live in harmony with the natural environment on a very personal and intimate level, as did early humanity generally in the days before our now omnipresent urban-industrial civilization spread across the face of the earth like a corrosive cancer. Thus, besides healing, yet another primordial function of the shaman was insuring the ecological balance by way of inter-species communication. Through ritual magic and clairvoyant knowledge, the shaman could ensure success in the hunt for the tribe, that they might survive to live another season, but no species would be hunted in excess or to the point of extinction. And with regard to the hunt, he negotiated a covenant between his own people and the spirits of the hunted species.

Generally, in the context of shamanic culture, illness or disease was seen as arising from a disharmony or break in the natural order and in the moral order of the world, as well as from an imbalance in and weakening of the personal energy field of the human individual. The energies within the individual and those outside oneself in the natural environment must be brought into balance and into harmonious interaction. This balance and harmony existed primordially, from the time of the beginning, but has been interrupted and shattered by the thoughtless and sinful actions of mankind. To rediscover and re-establish this lost primordial harmony, all obsessive and negative thinking which serves to block the free flow of the energy within the individual must be dissolved. In this way, the individual can come into the realization of his full innate potentiality, manifesting his energy in the world about him without disrupting the natural order of things.

But it is especially due to the destruction of the natural environment by human groups and by individual human beings that diseases have come into manifestation in our world. Humanity is not alone in this world. This planet earth, itself a living organism in its totality, is surrounded by and suffused throughout with an aura of energy that is like an atmosphere or ocean. Nature spirits live in this dimension of the energy of our planet, like fish living in the waters of the sea. Disturbed and offended by the thoughtless destructive actions of mankind, such as the ploughing up the earth, the cutting down of the forests, the damming of streams and rivers, the polluting of lakes, and so on, they inflict illness upon an erring mankind as a terrible retribution. Since these nature spirits are energy beings, they can directly effect the energy of the individual and that individual's immune system which is correlated with one's personal energy field. In such a case, it was then necessary to call in an expert healer or shaman in order to re-establish the primordial harmony existing between humanity and nature, thereby effecting a cure and a healing.

This ancient Tibetan shamanism and animism, the pre-Buddhist spiritual and religious culture of Tibet, was known as Bon, and a practitioner of these shamanic techniques of ecstasy and ritual magic, the methods of working with energy, was known as a Bonpo. Bonpo is still the designation for a shaman in many tribal regions of the Himalayas. But increasingly, over the centuries, the ecstatic shaman has been replaced by the priestly Lama or ritual expert, and so later Bonpos in Central Tibet also came to fill a role more ritualistic than ecstatic. There exists a parallel here to what occurried in ancient India where the Rishis or ecstatics of the early Vedic period, who communed directly with the celestial gods during ecstatic flights into the heavens, were later replaced by Brahman priests, experts in the performing of rituals and sacrifices in order to invoke the powers of the gods and ensure their cooperation for human benefit and prosperity.

Originally the word Bonpo meant someone who invoked the gods and summoned the spirits. Thus a Bonpo was an expert in the use of mantra and magical evocation. Mantra or ngak (sngags) is sound and sound is energy. Mantra is the primordial sound that calls the forms of all things into being out of the infinite potentiality of empty space which is the basis of everything. Sound or word has a creative power. But this term Bonpo in ancient times appeared to cover a number of different types of practitioner, whether shaman, magician, or priest. Here there seems to be a strong parallel of the role of the Bonpo in ancient Tibet with that of the Druid in ancient pre-Christian Europe. Just as the Druidic order was divided into the three functions of the Bards, the Vates, and the Druids, who were singers, soothsayers, and magicians respectively, so the ancient pre-Buddhist kingdom of Tibet was said to be protected by the Drung (sgrung) who were bards and singers of epics, the Deu (lde'u) who were soothsayers and diviners, and the Bonpo (bon-po) who were priests and magicians. Another archaic term closely related to Bonpo was Shen or Shenpo (gshen-po), and this term may have originally designated the shaman practitioner in particular. The Shen system of practice was transmitted through family lineages, especially in Western and Northern Tibet, then known as the country of Zhang-zhung, so that Shen also came to designate a particular ancient clan or tribe.

The first shaman, the archetypal shaman, so to speak, who brought the knowledge of shamanizing from the heaven worlds above to a nascent humanity living on the surface of the earth, appears to have been originally known in the Tibetan tradition as Shenrab Miwoche (gShen-rab mi-bo-che), a title meaning "the great supreme human shaman". Of course, in the traditions of the later monastically organized Yungdrung Bon and in the extant Bonpo texts from at least the eighth century of our era, Shenrab Miwoche is represented as being much more than an archetypal shaman; he is a fully enlightened Buddha, comparable in every way to Shakyamuni Buddha who appeared in Northern India in the sixth century before our era. Tonpa Shenrab descended from the heavens, specifically, from the heaven-world of Sidpa Yesang (srid-pa ye-sangs), in the form of an azure colored cuckoo bird, the herald of spring. This occurred some 18,000 years ago, according to the traditional Bonpo reckoning. He thereupon incarnated as a human being in the country of Olmo Lung-ring which surrounded the holy nine-storeyed cosmic mountain of Yungdrung Gutsek (g.yung-drung dgu-brtseg) in Tazik or Central Asia. In this mysterious land at the center of the world, which was in later Indo-Iranian tradition identified with Shambhala, he combatted and overcame the evil schemes and machinations of the black magician and incarnate demon-prince Khyabpa Lag-ring. Then he instructed humanity, not only in the spiritual path to enlightenment and liberation from Samsara, but in the various techniques of ecstasy in order to communicate with other worlds and invoke the positive energies of the gods (lha gsol-ba), and also in the rites of exorcism (sel-ba) whereby human beings might free themselves from demonic influences (gdon) and the various diseases caused by demons and other hostile spirits.

The history of the development of Bon may be divided into three phases: 1. Primitive Bon more or less corresponds to the archaic shamanism and paganism of ancient Northern and Central Asia. This shamanism is still practiced in its original and unreformed version is remote areas of the Himalayas, as well as on the borders of Tibet and China.,br> 2. Yungdrung Bon or Old Bon (bon rnying-ma) was the high religious culture of the ancient kingdom of Zhang-zhung which centered around Gangchen Tise or Mount Kailas in Western Tibet. This kingdom, which possessed its own culture and language and writing, maintained an independent existence long before the rise of civilization in Central Tibet in the seventh century with the coming of Indian Buddhism to that country. In the next century, the Zhang-zhung kingdom was incorporated into the newly expanding Tibetan empire established by the Yarlung dynasty of Central Tibet, and the Zhang-zhung culture ceased to have an independent existence. However, the teachings of Yungdrung Bon did not solely originate in Zhang-zhung, but were said to have been brought from Tazik, that is, Iranian speaking Central Asia, to Zhang-zhung in Western and Northern Tibet by a number of mysterious white-robbed sages long before the political events of the seventh and eighth centuries. Besides shamanism, healing, magical rites of exorcism, astrology, and divination (these practices belong to the four lower or Causal Ways among the Nine Ways of Bon), Yungdrung Bon contained the higher spiritual teachings and practices of Sutra, Tantra, and Dzogchen. Moreover, due to the spiritual influence of Yungdrung Bon and later Indian Buddhism, many animistic practices have been reformed and the practice of blood sacrifice more or less eliminated in Tibet, although it is still practiced on occasion by the Jhangkri shamans of Nepal. In Yungdrung Bon, Shenrab Miwoche is portrayed as a perfectly enlightened Buddha who is the source of the philosophical, psychological, and ethical teachings of Sutra, the profound methods of psychological transformation and psychic development of Tantra, and the ultimate mystical and gnostic enlightenment of Dzogchen. Yungdrung Bon continues to flourish even today in many parts of Tibet and among Tibetan refugees in exile in India and Nepal. 3. New Bon (bon gsar-ma) was a deliberate and conscious amalgamation of the Bon of Zhang-zhung with the Buddhism of Indian origin, especially as this spiritual tradition was represented by the Nyingmapa school in Tibet. New Bon greatly revered the luminous figure of Guru Padmasambhava, the Tantric master from the Indo-Iranian country of Uddiyana, who first established the Nyingmapa tradition in Tibet in the eighth century of our era. And like the Nyingmapas, the the New Bon greatly relied upon Termas (gter-ma) or rediscovered "hidden treasure texts", recovered over the centuries by various Buddhist and Bonpo masters and visionaries. These Termas had been concealed in the distant past by illuminated masters of the esoteric tradition, such as Padmasambhava and Dranpa Namkha, because the times were not yet ripe for their revelation and dissemination among the Tibetans, and they were rediscovered in later centuries. In the reformed Bon, one finds a monastic system, philosophy colleges, and a scholastic tradition and curriculum fully comparable to that found in the other schools of Tibetan Buddhism, especially the Nyingmapas. On the other side of the matter, many ancient Bonpo rituals and practices have been accepted into the Buddhist schools of Indian origin in Tibet and, in particular, as the cult of the Guardian spirits, the old pagan pre-Buddhist deities of Tibet who are now the protectors of the Dharma.

Furthermore, shamanism continues to be practiced in Tibet in its archaic form and such a practitioner is generally known as a Pawo (dpa'-bo) or Lhapa. This social function is clearly distinguished from that of the Lama or priest. A Lama is usually, although not always, a monk, whether he is nowadays a Buddhist or a Bonpo. In general, a Lama relates to the higher divine reality as a supplicant, communicating with that dimension through the medium of prayer, meditation, and the performing of offering rituals called pujas. In addition, there exists another kind of practitioner, the Ngakpa (sngags-pa) or Tantric magician and exorcist. Whereas the Lama or priest prays and petitions the higher spiritual order, the Tantrika or magician, by virtue of his magical power and his mastery of mantras, or spells and invocations, commands the spirits to obey his will and to do his bidding. The Pawo or shaman, on the other hand, is characterized by ecstasy, the entering into an altered state of consciousness, in order to have direct personal contact with the spirit world. But in Tibet, the methods of these three types of practitioners of healing-- the Pawo or shaman, the Ngakpa or magician, and Lama or priest-- are not necessarily exclusive. Many Ngakpas, although usually married men and not monks, are called Lamas because they also perform pujas or offering ceremonies, as well as shamanic exorcisms and other magical rituals. In addition, they may be accomplished scholars and teachers, having large followings among both monks and lay-people alike, and are not just simple village sorcerers. They may be either Buddhist or Bonpo in terms of their religion, although nowadays the majority of Ngakpas belong to the Nyingmapa school. Moreover, the most Pawo shamans in Tibet, although their shamanic techniques are of a different origin, now identify themselves as Buddhists in terms of their religious affiliation.

In general, the Pawo is characterized by spirit possession. After entering into an altered state of consciousness or trance induced through drumming and chanting, his or her consciousness principle known as the Namshe (rnam-shes) is projected out of the physical body through the aperture at the top of the skull into one of the three symbolic mirrors arranged on the shamanic altar. These three mirrors represent the gateways to the other worlds of the Lha (the celestial spirits), of the Tsen (the earth and mountain spirits), and of the Lu (the subterranean water spirits), respectively. These three types of spirit correspond to the three zones -- sky, earth, and underworld-- into which the world was divided in the ancient Bonpo shamanic cosmology. The shaman has direct access to these three worlds and their inhabitants by means of an altered state of consciousness. At the moment when one's Namshe leaves the physical body, one's guardian spirit or spirit-guide, also called a Pawo, enters one's now vacated inert body and thereupon speaks through the shaman as a medium. This spirit-guide responds to questions and can diagnose the cause of the illness in question, usually that being some offended spirit. Then he recommends a procedure for effecting a cure and this usually includes the performance of a healing ritual (gto) in order to restore a harmonious balance of energies between the afflicted individual and his natural environment. In this way, a healing or a reharmonization is realized.

With the establishment of Buddhism, together with its monastic system, as the official religion of Tibet in the eleventh century and thereafter, certain among these Pawo shamans came to be employed by the larger monasteries, and even later by the Tibetan government, as oracles. Such an oracle is known as a Lhapa or Sungma (srung-ma). The most famous among these oracles is the State Oracle attached to Nechung monastery, and he is usually possessed by the spirit Pehar, who is said to have been originally a deity of Turkish origin. The State Oracle continues to function in exile at Dharamsala in India, the seat of HH the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Government in exile.

The Ngakpa, on the other hand, as a Tantrika and an exorcist, is rarely possessed by the spirits. Rather, the Ngakpa is able, by way of certain meditations and other psychic techniques, to enter into an altered state where one's consciousness or Namshe leaves the physical body in a subtle mind-made body (yid-lus) and enters into the dimensions of the Otherworld, where one searches for fragments of the soul of the afflicted person which has been stolen by deceitful spirits or imprisoned there by a black magician. A patient suffering from soul-sickness or loss of soul is characterized by inertia, weakness, depression, and loss of interest in one's surroundings and everyday affairs. If the La (bla) or the soul, this being a subtle energy field that serves as the vehicle for the individual's emotional life, is not recovered and restored to wholeness in the patient within a sufficient period of months, there exists the possibility of physical death. The Ngagpa may also perform a ritual procedure for this purpose known as La-guk (bla 'gug), "recalling the soul". The Ngakpa, by virtue of his power to enter the Otherworld and return with treasures of knowledge and power, is able to diagnose the causes of diseases and prescribe a variety of methods for effecting cures.

These same practitioners among both the Buddhists and the Bonpos have also been responsible for the rediscovery of Termas or "hidden treasure texts" which have contributed so much to the spiritual heritage of Tibet. Because the Tibetan people were thought not yet ready to receive these teachings, or else there was an actual danger of persecution, these Terma texts were concealed in ancient times at various remote places in Tibet by certain illuminated masters of the past, principally Padmasambhava. Then they were rediscovered many centuries later by Tertons (gter-ston) who were the reincarnations of the original disciples of those ancient masters. Some of these Termas were found as actual physical objects and texts (sa-gter), others came through visions (dag-snang) and auditions (snyan-rgyud), and yet others were channelled directly through divine inspiration and automatic writing and therefore constitute "mind treasures" (dgongs-gter). Not the least among these Terma texts is the famous Bardo Thodol (bar-do thos-grol), now widely known in the West as the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

The Lama, whether Buddhist or Bonpo, is also profoundly engaged in healing practice. Many Lamas have been specifically trained in the practice of Tibetan medicine at a monastic college. Moreover, the most common ritual performed by Tibetan Lamas at the popular level is the tse-wang (tshe-dbang) or "long life empowerment", a kind of psychic healing that invokes and channels healing energy into the participants in the ceremony, whether they are ill or not. In many ways, the Lama and the Ngagpa have usurped in Tibetan society the archaic function of the shaman, and after the introduction of Buddhism into Tibet, many cultural figures such as Guru Padmasambhava and the famous yogi Milarepa, have been assimilated to the archetype of the First Shaman. Thus it came about that the archaic shamanic techniques of the Palaeolithic have now been absorbed into the high spiritual and intellectual culture of both Buddhism and Bon in Tibet. This may be seen, for example, in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, where the Lama or the Ngakpa functions as as a psychopomp or guide for the perilous journey of the individual soul through the Bardo experience leading to a new rebirth. Or again, with the practice of the Chod rite, using visualization, as well as chanting and dancing to the accompaniment of the shaman's drum, the practitioner gains mastery over the spirits through offering to them the flesh of one's own body. In many ways this Chod ritual recapitulates the initiatory experience of shamanic initiation, with its motifs of dismemberment and resurrection. The practice of the Chod is said to be particularly effective in preventing the spread of plagues and infectious diseases. Both of these traditional Tibetan practices, the Bardo rituals and the Chod rite, represent a journey from fragmentation to psychic wholeness.

Thus, in Tibetan culture, we find a harmonious integration of the archaic techniques of altered states of consciousness deriving from a primordial North Asian shamanism with the highly sophisticated psychic sciences of Buddhism and Bon. Now that we are on the threshold of the twenty-first century, our urban-industrial technology and rampant unrestrained commercialism threaten to devastate our natural environment world-wide, imperiling the very survival of the human race on this planet. It is this author's belief that the ancient wisdom and profound psychic sciences of Tibet, which emphasize living in a harmonious relationship with the natural environment, as well as with other human beings, will have a profound contribution to make to evolving a new type of global civilization that is both humane and wise.

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The Influence of Manichaeaism

Before we dive into Manichaean art history and interpretation, I have linked some folk music from the geographical area in which these ruins are found. Enjoy.

This project will explore the recently discovered Manichean temple sites in Turfan; looking at the art, structure and artefacts in these temples. It will examine how closely these artefacts resemble adhere to ‘classic’ Manicheism as opposed to how they might have been influenced or have influenced the local cultures or the other religions of the Silk Road. The presence of these Manichean sites of worship in Turfan demonstrates a level of organized practice of Manichaeism, as well as Manichean’s significance and popularity along the silk road. These sites of worship are placed in the context of other temples and shrines, demonstrating the religious plurality of the Silk Road. Manichaeism was not isolated in this religious dialogue, and in fact was perhaps the epitome of ancient pluralism, accepting many different religious ideas and symbols.

Some believe that Manichaeism to be a sect of Zoroastrianism that sought to synthesize popular elements of other religions to achieve success (Johnson 3). However, Manichaeism cannot simply be called a strategic amalgamation of beliefs and cultures, nor a mere branch of another tradition. Mani’s religion held cultural and religious sway during the Silk Road period, and while it did make significant use of the symbols and structures of other belief systems, it provided something larger than the sum of its parts. This delve into Manichaean art and textual sources seeks to show how Manichaeism did adapt parts many different aspects of several larger traditions. While also developing something new out of this amalgamation and finding its own particular art and scriptural style that allows it to be identified today.

Contextualizing Manichaeism

Manichaeism was a world religion that survived into the fifteenth century and yet exists today in near obscurity. Manichaeism was founded in modern day Iran in the third century A.D. It eventually spread West to Western Asia and even gained footholds in Europe and the Mediterranean. Most important for our purposes, Manichaeism found a lot of success in modern day China, particularly the Xinjiang province and Turfan (Huashan 268). Mani made a deliberate effort to spread his scripture as efficiently as possible, ensuring it was widely translated and distributed to many different cultures. The prime mover of early Manichaean doctrine were the Sogdians, a people who had also aided in the spread of Buddhism and Christianity (Grenet 464). It was not just the chance of time and culture that Manichaeism has faded so suddenly, but instead the work of political powers. The swift popularity and spread of Manichaeism was a threat to other established religions. There was a harsh movement to remove the influence of Manichaeism and strong state-sponsored efforts to convert Manichaean worship spaces.

These fears of Manichaeaism were not unfounded, as Manichaeaism was designed to be appealing to the members of the largest religions at the time. Namely, Christianity, Buddhist, Hinduism and Zoroastrianism. Mani claimed that these religions were not contradictory to his cosmology. He claimed the world was inherently dualist and was created of the Kingdom of Light and the Kingdom of the Profane. These were also known as the Kingdom of Spirit and Darkness, respectively. He claims that the religious leaders of the other popular religions at the time (namely Buddha, Zoroaster, and Jesus) were true prophets and were right to be worshipped. However, their teachings had been warped through time as none of these men had writings of their own. Instead, it was generations of disciples later who recorded their words, and Mani claimed that by that time, the oral tradition had already distorted the original meaning. His teachings were merely returning the words of these great prophets to their original glory, Mani claimed to be the next in the great line of these prophets.

Figure 1: From the Bezekilk Caves, an example of Manichaeaism’s focus on cross-culture teachings. Here we see an East Asian and North Asia Monk exchanging the word of Manichaeaism (Le Coq)

His campaign was successful and so the backlash was harsh and much Manichaean art and texts were destroyed, today “the majority of ancient Manichaean art remnants derives from a ruined City in Turfan, often referred to by its historical name, Kocho” (Mirecki 177). For our purposes, we will refer to the entire site and the artefacts recovered as ‘Turfan’, though there are three grotto complexes that house crucial Manichaean relics and art. They are Tuyok, Bezeklik and Sangim and each holds dozens of Manichaean grottoes. Though some have been degraded to near obscurity, much like the religion itself, many have retained structural integrity and even their art. (Huashan 269). These grottoes have provided researchers with immense insight to the beliefs of Manichaeism, but perhaps even more importantly, it has given them immense insight to how Manichaeism was practiced at the local level and how it interacted with other religions.

Common Manichaean Motifs

A staple of Manichaean art is depictions of the Tree of Life which is also known as the Tree of Good. This symbol of light and purity sometimes shown with its twin, the Tree of Death (Huashan 274). Manichaeism main doctrine centres around this duality of life and death, bad against good. Mani claimed to have a twin which bestowed upon him the knowledge that he was a prophet meant to bring people to salvation. We see in Figure 2 a drawing of a fresco discovered in the Bezeklik grottoes, kneeling and praying to the Tree of life. Much of Manichaean art and writing is centred around the Tree of Life. Mani’s teachings claim that in order to return to the Kingdom of Heaven, his followers must not only believe but take on more ‘traditional’ monastic values, such as “severing with fleshly desires and being unable to marry or to produce offspring” (Huashan 283). We see Manicheans worshipping the tree of life in this illustration, knelt around it at a respectful distance, a common motif in the frescos and art found in these caves.

Figure 2: A rough sketch of a fresco inside one of the Manichaean Bezeklik grottoes (Huashan).

The Manichaean tradition held writing as an art form quite highly. Mani was very focused on writing down his thoughts and dispersing them widely, as one of his main concerns was with the distortion of the word of the prophet. Mani wanted to secure that no writings should come to light in the future and allegedly be traced back to him” (Klimkeit 1). Most Manichaean writings today are identified through their being written in a Manichaean script, a very illustrative script that is used to allow for a unique identifier of Manichaean scripture and for communication between Manichaeans of different cultures. From artistic choice to overall doctrine, cross-cultural compatibility was a priority for Manichaeism. There are signs in all forms of Mani’s conscious effort to ensure that Manichaeism did not invalidate any major belief system, but instead seamlessly incorporated them. The Manichaean script was another way to more effectively spread the doctrine, while other religions, such as Islam, might be restricted by a language barrier.

In Figure 3, there is a Manichaean artefact, remarkably intact and still legible. Klimkeit has translated the lines of 5-10 of the right column, which is an extract from the Manichaean hymn, “The Song of Mani” (49). The majority of the texts recovered from the Turfan grottoes were written in Turkish and different of Iranian script, though this hymn was originally written in Syriac (Huashan 294). Manichaean hymns commonly contain “supplication through prayer and ascriptions of praise” (Johnson 127), but this particular hymn pictured is slightly different. The hymn provides some context into how Mani saw himself as a prophet, his calling in life to his relationship with his spiritual ‘twin’.

Figure 3: A remarkably intact page from a Manichaean hymn book, excavated from the Turfan sites. (Klimkeit)

Buddhism in Manichaeism

Most Manichaean hymns held references to the religious beliefs of Buddhism, Christianity or other religions within the same chant. Johnson’s translation of one of the Turfan textual fragments demonstrates a mixing of terminologies, such as the Christian ‘heaven’ and the Zoroastrian ‘Vahman’ without any apparent internal contradiction (132). This inbuilt hybridity is very common in Manichaeism, as the tradition often co-opted language from other religions, using metaphors, similes and worship language in their own texts; blending them all into something new. Such is the case for the Buddhist metaphor of ‘sea filled with monsters’, which is used as an image representative of the tumultuous turn of the wheel of samsara. This specific image is referred to in a Manichaean hymn that reads as follows; “Who will take me over the flood of the tossing sea. […] Who will lead me beyond rebirths […] May I be saved from the terror of the beasts who devour one another” (Grenet 476). The clear reference to ‘rebirth’ only reinforces this idea that is it a Buddhist image being appropriated. In the rest of this hymn, the narrator is referred to as only ‘The Great Aesthetic’, a title that could belong to the Buddha as easily as Mani. These influences were not only one way, Manichaean ideas of the Buddha influenced local Buddhist communities too, even if they were not formally converted. These similarities are sometimes even more apparent in visual art, not just textual remnants of this tradition.

Since so much of Manichaean art and scripture was lost over time, whether as intentional sabotage or the natural wear of centuries passing, our sources are limited. This project has so far focused on Manichaeism’s similarities to Buddhist because the Buddhist-Manichean blend is one of the key features of these Turfan grottoes. As part of the concentrated effort to disenfranchised Manichaeism mentioned earlier, many Manichaean temples in Turfan were closed and converted into Buddhist temples. While some were completely restructured, many were left as they were due to the striking similarities in art styles and content, several grottoes “remained untouched, undoubtedly because their content was so close to Buddhist beliefs” (Huashan 293). In Figure 3, we see one of these examples. To someone unfamiliar with the Manichaean tradition, it might appear like a simple depiction of the Buddha. Perhaps one specific to a local tradition, as several aspects are unconventional in Buddhist iconographies, such as the hair.

Figure 4:

Mani as the Buddha is a well-used motif, Grenet describes a painting in which Mani is drawn and captioned as the ‘Buddha of Light’ who is preaching is a group of Western Barbarians he has just converted (475). He is also shown preaching to figures wearing the robes and symbols of Taoist aesthetics, converting very different groups of people. As previously demonstrated, Manichaeism focused on bringing in many cultures and belief systems under their umbrella of belief.

Other Traditions in Manichaeism

As easily as he took on the title of ‘Mani-Buddha’, Mani adapted the prophetic names from other religions. Mani often referred to himself and the apostle of Jesus (Burkitt 38), claiming a direct lineage. Not biologically, but spiritually. However, it is not just Mani’s adoption of other religions’ terms where we see the blend of cultures. In some Zoroastrian work, small details in are found, which are often inexplicable. In larger Zoroastrian carvings, some details do not fit properly with what scholars know of Zoroastrian practices. With growing awareness of and study into Manichaeism, scholars are beginning to understand such things as Manichaean symbols (Grenet 474). Hinduism also makes an appearance in Manichaean art and in a significant way. Hindu gods are often given places of important, taking the important role of a ‘divine audience’, their presence giving cosmological legitimacy to the proceedings. In Figure 5, four Hindu deities are depicted with halos, observing a Manichaean conversion ceremony (Gulácsi 73). The surrounding text is the names of the donors and the King who is going through this conversion. The two figures to the left are thought to be heavenly beings from a local Buddhist tradition.

Figure 5: This half of one of the most famous Manichaean art pieces clear shows a line of Hindu Gods, watching over a conversion ceremony for what seems to be a local king (Gulácsi).

‘Traditional’ Manichaean Art

Herein lies the difficulty of identifying ‘Manichaean’ art or tradition, as it was designed to be used by local cultures, to blend into their specific cultural brand of religious belief. As demonstrated, signs of Manichaeism are found in small ways throughout many traditions and often bore so many similarities to other traditions, the art was re-coopted by those religions. This can present a significant problem for identification of these artefacts and raises difficult questions about where one religion begins and the other ends, if that line exists at all (Mirecki 177). The problem is then as follows: If so much of Manichaean is similar if not nearly indistinguishable from Buddhist or other religious motifs, how might scholars note the differences? There are some ways to identify Manichean art that is rarely found in other styles.

The first major sign is, of course, the text. Manichaean text is distinct from other scripts at the time, and is an easy identifier of whether an art piece is Manichaean. Within texts, Manichaeism uses some distinctive artistic flourishes in the margins or surrounding the text. This is slightly apparent at the top of Figure 3, the sweeping red ink visually marks is as a Manichean text fragment. In his studying of various Manichaean textual pieces, Mirecki discovered a pattern of “decorative designs within Manichaean texts that are found along the margins of and within texts” (191). Looking through collections of text Fragments from the Manichaean grottoes, there is certainly a distinctive style of embellishment that are found across the fragmentary remains of Manichaean books (Weber).

Some other signs in Manichaean artwork have been identified as near exclusive to the Manichaean traditions; at least in the Turfan region. It is especially the case in a religious as diverse as Manichaeism that “arts undoubtedly took on local peculiarities” (Klimkeit 2). One consistent Manichaean motif is the presence of flowers or other foliage being held by donors or figures of significance. There are other small signifiers to the original style of depicting the elite in Manichaean art, such as white garments or the red string around the head (Mirecki 210). Disk Motifs are also very common in Manichaean pieces, which are subtly different from the halos often used to surrounded figures of significance. They are more details, often layered and used as a kind of framing device to surround scenes and divide one moment from another (Mirecki 197). Figure 6 depicts a very Buddhist looking figure surrounded by these disks, which circle out from being a halo to being a decorative indicator of ‘aura’ of this figure.

Figure 6: A figure in a traditional Buddhist pose and showing the stretched earlobes and hair knot, both of which are signs of an enlightened figure, or a Buddha (Gulácsi). The gold and red disks mark it as a Manichaean adaptation of Buddhist motifs.

Mani was an intelligent man, living in a cultural epicentre of his time, he sought to create a religious movement that incorporated many belief systems. That rendered them compatible with a new system, while not tarnishing the symbols or iconography of these religions. Manichaeism is an intelligent blend of many different traditions, more than obvious in the remnants found in the Turfan grottoes. Manichaeism was a Salvation religion that spread far across the Silk Road and up into China. Despite the intentional destruction of texts and worship spaces by Buddhists and other religious communities, some traces of Manichaeism survive to this day. They reveal the complex, layered practice of this brief religious monolith but Manichaeism was not just a patchwork of other traditions. It developed its own strong culture, influenced the traditions around it and even found its own unique art style. Things like the disk motifs, the Manichaean script, and the plurality of its art, set Manichaeism apart from other religions of its time and location.

Bibliography

Burkitt, F C. Religion of the Manichees. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925. Print.

Grenet, F. “Religious Diversity among Sogdian Merchants in Sixth-Century China: Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Manichaeism, and Hinduism.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol.27, no. 2, Jan. 2007, pp. 461–476.

Gulácsi, Zsuzsanna. Manichaean Art in Berlin Collections. Turnhout: Brepols, 2001. Print.

Huashan, Chao. “New Evidence of Manichaeism in Asia: A Description of Some Recently Discovered Manichaean Temples in Turfan.” Monumenta Serica, vol. 44, no. 1, 1996.

Jackson, A V. W. Researches in Manichaeism: With Special Reference to the Turfan Fragments. Ner York: AMS Press, 1965. Print.

Klimkeit, Hans-Joachim. Manichaean Art and Calligraphy. Leiden: Brill, 1982. Print

Le, Coq A. Chotscho: Facsimile-wiedergaben Der Wichtigeren Funde Der Ersten Königlich Preussischen Expedition Nach Turfan in Ost-Turkistan. Graz, Austria: Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt, 1979. Print.

Lieu, Samuel N. C., and Gunner B. Mikkelsen. Between Rome and China: history, religions and material culture of the Silk Road. Brepols, 2016.

Mirecki, Paul A, and Jason BeDuhn. Emerging from Darkness: Studies in the Recovery of Manichaean Sources. Leiden: Brill, 1997. Print.

Weber, Dieter. Iranian Manichaean Turfan Texts in Publications Since 1934: Photo Edition. London: Published on behalf of Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum by School of Oriental and African Studies, 2000. Print.

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