Cool Book

Warrior Women!

NO. 1

Many women were able to fight in battles, defend their kingdoms, and take up leadership roles, titled ‘warrior women,’ throughout the centuries. Their stories are inspiring and motivational for women everywhere to continue to be independent, strong, and courageous. The Dahomey Amazons were a real-life all-female warrior militia that existed from the 17th century to the 19th in the kingdom of Dahomey, today Benin of West Africa. They resulted from the male population facing high casualties from war and frequent violence from neighboring West African states, and the king at the time, King Houegbadja, implemented them. They called themselves the Mino, meaning ‘Our Mothers,’ in the Fon language, and were recruited as young as eight. Some voluntarily enrolled, while others involuntarily by their fathers or fathers. The Dahomey women warriors earned their reputation as fierce warriors, often earning the praise of enemies that they defeated in battle.

NO. 2

For the Greeks, they had the Amazonians; several tales from Greek mythology have been written about them. They were raised to fight from birth, where they would defeat and kidnap male warriors and keep them as enslaved peoples, mated with them, and kept their daughters raised as Amazons while having their sons be returned to their fathers. In one tale, the fight against the mythical Heracles, where one of his labors was to obtain the girdle from queen Hippolyte, the queen of the Amazons. They weren’t just mythical though; they were just real as well. Many burial sites revealed that ‘‘In the grasslands of inner Asia, from the Black Sea to western China, Scythian women had the same skills as their men: wielding bows, riding and herding animals, fighting – and dying from their injuries. Their remains have been found in tomb mounds from Crimea to western China.’’

NO. 3

The Valkyries were the Norse equivalent of female warriors, who, in mythology, guide the souls of the noblest of the dead to Valhall. Many famous poems and Eddas are centered around these famous warriors of Odin, king of the gods. Still, we’re not talking about mythology but actual female Viking warriors. In 2019, archaeologists uncovered the remains of a decorated female warrior from the 10th century, proving women held high-status positions in Viking culture. ‘‘Several weapons were buried alongside the body, including a sword, armor-piercing arrows, a battle knife, an axe, a spear, and two shields, indicating that the skeleton was likely that of a warrior. Accompanying the wide array of weapons were two horses, a full set of game pieces, and a gaming board. The gaming pieces suggest that the person buried was a high-ranking combatant who was knowledgeable of strategies and tactics.’’

The Labyrinth

Labyrinths from mythology are described more as mental quests, a challenge of the mind for the hero to overcome. Labyrinths are a deadly loss of misdirection, physically and mentally. The most famous story is the creation of the labyrinth, created by Daedalus, the greatest inventor and master craftsmen in all of Athens, Greece, for King Minos of Crete to conceal his monstrous son, the Minotaur, a creature half-man, and half bull. Theseus, the son of Zeus, was sentenced as a sacrifice for the Minotaur but was helped by King Minos’ daughter Ariadne, who gave him a pure thread to retrace his steps and slay the monster.

Several films, poems, and books talk about labyrinths and then some. Labyrinths are seen as grand symbols, as human beings have been fascinated with them since the beginning of time. The journey of the maze is the main character having to dive into a physical as well as mental underworld of sorts. ‘‘ ‘Labis’ is the Greek term for the double-headed ax. The earliest images of labyrinths. Their passageways like ripples or echoes radiating from the form of a double-headed ax; The acquisition of language, the mind-body problem, the question of meaning, of free will, consciousness. And the nature of that innate faculty of the ethical. Robert Morris says, ‘‘ideals, the admirable, right and wrong, the good, logic, principles. All connected in any given form of life. But maybe down deeper things are simpler.’’

Every corner of the world covers the symbolism of the linear one-way labyrinth as a pathway towards the center, towards salvation, God, and the tree of life. Trees play an important role, as they are connected to the labyrinth, they too are connected to the symbols of life, in Christianity and paganism. It is the archetype of the human experience and self idealization and leads us down a quest where the only way is through, emotionally, psychologically, and physically. The labyrinth is an ancient symbol that relates to wholeness, combining the imagery of the circle and the spiral into a meandering but purposeful path. It represents a journey to our own center and back again out into the world. ‘‘They [Labyrinths] have long been used as meditation and prayer tools. They have been found in ancient Crete, Egypt, and Etruscan; they have been inscribed on Neolithic tombs. They are a call to the center, a worship structure where the eternal beloved waits to be encountered. The labyrinth has always been associated with unity with God and conversation with the divine, with spirituality, worship, and the sacred mystery. Long ago, Christians were expected to travel to the holy land at least once during their lives. But as travel was often both difficult and dangerous, labyrinths were designed as alternative pilgrimages. If travel was out of the question, spiritual merit could be gained by walking a labyrinth.’’

Just saying💁🏾

People really don’t believe Ancient Egyptians were ethnically African?

Homelessness in America

Homelessness in America is rampantly occurring, and we could all blame it on the recent COVID-19 disease, but we could all agree it is because of poverty. In New York City, and other huge cities all over the world, the gap between extreme wealth and extreme poor have always co-existed. Politicians have wholly ignored such issues, in favor of giving attention to other social issues.

The recent poll, taken in January 2020, ‘‘New York had an estimated 91,271 experiencing homelessness on any given day, as reported by Continuums of Care to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Of that total, 15,151 were family households, 1,251 were Veterans, 3,072 were unaccompanied young adults (aged 18-24), and 7,515 were individuals experiencing chronic homelessness. Public school data reported to the U.S. Department of Education during the 2017-2018 school year shows that an estimated 153,209 public school students experienced homelessness over the course of the year. Of that total, 5,939 students were unsheltered, 44,678 were in shelters, 3,157 were in hotels/motels, and 99,435 were doubled up.’’

The numbers continue to grow because legislation is slow, and most shelters are up to their capacity. Most people who have little to no income cannot survive only on government benefits and as it limits to nothing, homelessness increases. ‘‘There is a general consensus that, while not necessarily preventing homeless, the generosity and comprehensiveness of welfare systems of welfare systems shape the degree to which households will experience homelessness and housing exclusion, as well as the characteristics of those households (Allen et al, 2002.) The basic pattern, developed by Stephens and Fitzpatrick, (2007), is that the more generous and comprehensive a welfare system, the fewer the number households who experience homelessness will be largely single-person households and will have experienced other forms of exclusions, substance misuse, and various disabilities. On the other hand, more miserly and constrained welfare systems will generate a much higher number of households experiencing homelessness due to poverty, and housing affordability, rather than individual-level disabilities.’’

My name is Arielle, I am a social scientist, and I am a New Yorker speaking about homelessness in my state because I feel that, especially now, everyone should speak up and give their voice as a show of solidarity. I will continue to write and post about social issues impacting my community, state, and the world. There are links to help and donate to all these shelters down below.

1) Hoboken Homeless Shelter (hobokenshelter.org)

2) Urban Pathways

3) DonateNYC

4) Siena House - Siena House (weebly.com)

Who created the manuscript?

 NO. 1

  Ever since the rise of modernism, it feels like people have only looked to see such medieval manuscripts in museums or hear about them in lecturers. The beginning of medieval, or illuminated manuscripts were beautiful but so very old and have to be handled with great care. Archaeologists and anthropologists have discovered and studied such manuscripts as a testament to keeping record of humanity’s past forms of writing. But would we ever get to such technological advancements, in forgetting our past, without it? This report explains the creation of how medieval manuscripts came to pass.

NO. 2

From the met museum, ‘Unlike the mass-produced books of our time, an illuminated manuscript is unique, handmade object. In its structure, layout, script, and decoration, every manuscript bears the signs of the unique set of processes and circumstances involved in its production, as it moved successively through the hands of the parchment maker, the scribe, and one or more decorators or illuminators.’’ Illuminated manuscripts began in Ireland after the fall of the western Roman empire. Christianity came to Ireland around 431 A.D, introduced by Palladius and reinforced by the ministry of a Roman Briton named Patricius, or St. Patrick as he’s called today. He was kidnapped at the age of sixteen, and spent six years in captivity before escaping back to Britain. Upon returning, he was met with ‘distrustful druids’, and ‘murderous bandits’, and by bribing tribal kings did he made it out alive.

 NO. 3

   Eventually, he came back to Ireland in the 5th century. The island became lidded with monasteries in the 6th, and in the 7th the scribes of these centers of religious life were experimenting with new forms of decoration and bookmaking, the better to reflect God’s glory in the written word.

          The first illustrated book to be found by archaeologists was the Egyptian ‘Book of the Dead’, a guidebook for the afterlife in which those in question would come to face-to-face with the jackal headed god Anubis, where he would balance their heart against a feather to determine what would become of them. A fortunate soul would either be in the Elysian paradise, the ‘Field of Peace’, or travel the night sky with Ra in his sun-boat, or rule the underworld with Osiris; those less fortunate would be eaten by the chimera looking god Ammit the soul-eater, for her body was part crocodile, lion and hippo. From Keith Houston’s, The Book, ‘’One of the main reasons the Book of the Dead is so well studied is because so many copies have survived, their colorful illustrations intact for Egyptologists to pore over endlessly. And though their subject matter may have been a little monotonous, it is clear that the ancient Egyptians were past masters at the art of illustrating books.’’

NO. 4

Under Charlemagne’s the Great Holy Roman Empire, politics, religion and art flourished. Monks filled their libraries with tens to thousands of volumes, where they borrowed and copied books to expand their holdings and occasionally to sell to laypeople, and those who wrote and collected realized the importance of illustration was towards a society of illiterate people. The monks who were in charge of the survival of Europe’s history were very vocal about physical maladies and working conditions. The dismal chambers were called ‘scriptoria’ or the writing rooms, which was the most important features of a medieval monastery, other than the Church itself. But society within the empire was transformed. Skilled peasants were leaving their rural homes for towns and cities, while the cities themselves, such as Johannes Gutenberg’s hometown of Mainz fought to eke out some measure of independence from the old feudal aristocracy.  Money was assuming a progressively larger role, and it spoke louder than an inherited title. Always a reflection of the societies that had made them, books were changing in response. Gutenberg’s printing press, which churned out books too rapidly for them to be illustrated by hand, is often blamed for killing off the illuminated manuscript.

The Origins of the date of Christmas

Yesterday was Christmas, so Merry Christmas everyone! This is the holiday to be surrounded by family and friends and to look back on how far you’ve come, especially in this hellish year. Every year we celebrate this festive holiday on the 25th of December, but I’m curious, where did the celebration of Christmas originate? How did it become decided that this was when we would celebrate Christmas?

It’s a valid question! It is a fact that liturgical tradition, no matter how lauded, is no longer seen in a reliable manner any longer. The skepticism comes from the sixteenth-century Reformation, which inspired Protestant and particular Calvinist scholars to attack the ecclesiastical calendar. ‘‘As recent research has shown, it is the context of these early modern inquiries into the history of the liturgical year, which were often permeated by inter-confessional polemic, that the two basic approaches to understanding Christmas’ origins that continue to characterize the twenty-first-century debate on the subject first germinated. For lack of more appropriate labels, these two approaches may be referred to as ‘History of Religions Theory’ (henceforth: HRT) and the ‘Calculation Theory’ (CT). Roughly speaking, proponents of HRT interpret Christmas as a Christianized version or substitute for pagan celebrations that took place on the same date as the Roman Calendar, the most widely cited example being the birthday of Sol Invictus on December 25. By contrast, adherents to CT find evidence that the birth of Christ was determined independently, by resource to certain types of chronological speculation.’’

It is well known that a lot of Christianity is used to subvert or covert most of the old world’s celebrations. The holidays, like Halloween, Easter, Spring, and Christmas were all re-used from pagan traditions. German philologist Herman Usener (1834-1905) was one of the pioneers in the modern academic study of religion. ‘‘According to his view, the celebration of Christ’s birth in midwinter was essentially the heritage of a syncretistic sun cult, which already bore traces of an incipient ‘pagan’ monotheism. The central turning point in this story comes from the year 274 CE when the emperor Aurelian allegedly elevated the original sun god Sol Invictus to the supreme deity of the Roman empire and established his cult on December 25. Threatened by the persistent popularity of these rituals among newly baptized Christians, the early Church was moved to incorporate traces of the cult into its own liturgy and thus re-interpreted the annual ‘birth’ of the sun at the winter solstice as the birth festival of Christ.’’

The ancient world was full of textile masterpieces we can only imagine… but most of them have rotted away. So few of them have come down to us in these days that we think of metal and stone as the primary mediums for the oldest artworks. But there were tapestries and fabric work that would have rivaled the finest wrought gold and iron and the first cave paintings.

the Irish Republican Army

The tactics and strategies that the Irish Republican Army used were expecting volunteers to go up against the British army in the fight against neo-colonialism and imperialism in the hopes for a socialist movement without other European interference. The Irish Republican Army started during the rise of guerilla warfare, from the last resort to a defeated enemy, or the archaic resource of thieves and bandits, it has now become the most advanced method of political mobilization. ‘‘Theories of guerilla warfare are common property and can be reduced to fairly simple formulate—perhaps to one word, diffusion. Diffusion in space, in that conventional military principle of the concentration of force, is replaced by dispersion, and diffusion in time, in so far as rapid military decisions thus become impossible, and an indefinite time-perspective is adopted. The purely military effects of guerilla warfare will usually be seen as subordinate to its political and psychological effects. Victory is achieved not so much by knocking the enemy’s sword from his hand as by paralyzing his arm. It might be argued that consciously modern guerrilla methods first emerged successfully in Ireland, where, between 1917 and 1921, a subversive movement grew up from grassroots and fought it’s way to the substantial achievement of its political program—the I.R.A.

Throughout its history, the IRA carried out a high-intensity campaign of terrorism, with the stated goal of bringing about the unification of the six countries of Northern Ireland with the Irish Republic and the end of British involvement in Northern Ireland. Growing out of a much longer history of conflict, the Provisional Irish Republic Army belongs separately from the Republican movement in 1969 when the group split off from what became known as the Official Irish Republican Party (Official IRA). Beyond the activities of Republican groups, the conflict also involves violence perpetrated by Loyalist organizations, which support continued English involvement in Northern Ireland.

Their words were very blunt in explaining that anyone wanting to join could die for their country; ‘’Tactics are dictated by the existing conditions. Here again, the logic is quite simple—the rule of thumb for all our actions can therefore be clearly seen to be that we must explain by whatever means we have at our disposal why we bomb, why we punish criminals, why we execute, etc. A War of attrition against enemy personnel, which is aimed at causing as many casualties and deaths as possible so as to create a demand from their people at home for their withdrawal; A bombing campaign aimed at making the enemy’s financial in our country profitable while the same time curbing long term financial investment in our country; To make the Six Counties as at present and for the past several years ungovernable except by colonial military rule; To sustain the war and gain support for its end by National and International propaganda and publicity campaigns; and by defending the war of liberation by punishing criminals, collaborators and informers.’’

Ron DeSantis just kidnapped a 13-year old boy.

Ron DeSantis just kidnapped a 13-year old boy.

Earlier this evening, at around 7 PM CT U.S., Rebekah Jones (notably one of DeSantis’ biggest political enemies right now) underwent a raid on her home by state police.

Guns were pointed in the face of her 13-year old son, Jack. They arrested him under the charges of digital terrorism and “on state orders.”

They are refusing to let him go home and they are refusing to let Jones see him.

These are her screenshots recounting the incident from earlier tonight. They were taken at 10:23 PM CT U.S.

Reblog. I don’t care who you are, reblog this. We have to make sure that this doesn’t get buried – it’s already happening.