The Hermit (or sometimes Lord of Time) is numbered nine and is usually depicted as an old man, carrying a lamp or staff. He picks his way carefully through the terrain. The Lamp of Knowledge he carries is a magical receptacle for all the knowledge and wisdom he has acquired through many years of study and meditation. The staff represents the weight of his experience, upon which he leans for support.
The Hermit lacks human company, as the teaching/learning process is often one of aloneness and solitude. He is an adept, someone who knows the inner mysteries of life. He has reached the point in his journey where nobody else can help – he must rely on inner resources, previous experiences and sheer faith in the light which leads him.
When we walk the path of the Hermit we travel deep inside our soul. Here we discover the name of the god or goddess residing within us and bring back the keys to self-knowledge and mastery. After this, we live from the centre of our self and become content with our essential aloneness. And perhaps, after this, we will be ready to teach others what we have discovered.
Perennial Studies This lecture by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, delivers the second part of a two part introduction to the essence of perennial philosophy as embedded within the Islamic Tradition; this was the keynote address to the two-day event: Intellectuality and Spirituality in the Islamic Tradition–A Prelude to the Perennial Philosophy, held at The George Washington University (May 21-22, 2016). Videography courtesy by Quixotic Worx (http://www.quixoticworx.com/).
From Harry Potter’s first kiss to Justin Bieber’s holiday tune, kissing under the mistletoe is everywhere in pop culture. But this Christmas tradition — that if you’re standing under the leafy plant, it’s time for a smooch — existed long before it ever appeared in movies and pop songs.
While historians are uncertain about why kissing under the mistletoe started, there is a general consensus regarding when and where the custom began, and how it became popular during Christmastime.
The origins of kissing under the mistletoe, a plant that often bears white berries, are often traced to a tale in Norse mythology about the god Baldur. In the story, Baldur’s mother Frigg casts a powerful magic to make sure that no plant grown on earth could be used as a weapon against her son. The one plant the spell does not reach is the mistletoe, as it does not grow out of the earth, but out of a tree’s branches. The scheming Loki, upon learning this, makes a spear out of mistletoe — the spear that would eventually kill Baldur.
But the connection between that story and the tradition is unclear, and may not even exist at all.
In many tellings, Frigg declares the mistletoe to be a symbol of love after her son’s death and promises to kiss anyone who passed underneath it. If that’s an accurate version of the story, it would be clear how it directly connects to the romantic act of today. Historian Mark Forsyth says this is not actually the way the story ends, however. Forsyth is the author of A Christmas Cornucopia: The Hidden Stories Behind Our Yuletide Traditions, and examined four Norse accounts of the god’s murder and the events that followed. “Baldur’s death involves mistletoe, but it’s got nothing to do with kissing or Christmas,” he tells TIME.
Although Forsyth does not know why kissing under the mistletoe started, the author says he does know that the tradition began between 1720 and 1784, in England.
Kissing under the mistletoe wouldn’t have existed as a popular tradition before 1720 because the most extensive research about the plant was published that year, and it did not reference the practice, Forsyth explains. John Colbatch, an English apothecary and physician, wrote two books on the mistletoe in 1719 and 1720. “He had a whole section on superstitions and customs associated with mistletoe,” Forsyth says, “and doesn’t mention anything at all about kissing under mistletoe.”
Instead, the earliest reference of kissing under the mistletoe that Forsyth found comes from a song published in a 1784. The verses read,
“What all the men, Jem, John, and Joe,
Cry, ‘What good-luck has sent ye?’
And kiss beneath the mistletoe,
The girl not turn’d of twenty.”
Other historians have also cited these lines as the first reference of the tradition. But what happened between 1720 and 1784 that made kissing under the mistletoe a holiday phenomenon remains unknown. “I can take a pretty shrewd guess that it involved a particularly lusty and inventive boy, and a particularly gullible girl,” Forsyth writes in his book.
Literature and art from the 18th and 19th centuries expanded upon this idea. Charles Dickens in The Pickwick Papers, published in 1837, portrays the holiday frenzy associated with this particular type of kiss. He writes that younger ladies “screamed and struggled, and ran into corners, and threatened and remonstrated, and did everything but leave the room, until some of the less adventurous gentlemen were on the point of desisting, when they all at once found it useless to resist any longer, and submitted to be kissed with a good grace.” In an art print from 1794, servants in a kitchen are poised for a smooch under the mistletoe, with a caption describing “Saucy Joe” who “rudely” kissed “Bridget the Cook.”
The women in both scenes were depicted as resisting the kisses but having to give in after being caught passing under the mistletoe. Historians have said that they would have believed they had to accept kisses from men or risk bad fortune. Exactly how serious the resistance was is hard to say based on documentary evidence, but Forsyth says there were several stories from the period that depicted women “using the mistletoe excuse to elude possessive husbands and parents” who might have otherwise prevented such kisses.
“A brief inspection of the ceiling would be all that it took to avoid that, whereas being forced into a loveless marriage in a world without divorce or any semblance of women’s rights would have been rather harder to escape,” he tells TIME. Noting that it is extremely difficult to decode a phenomenon two centuries later, he adds, “I can say with some certainty, though, that accidentally finding yourself under the mistletoe would have been very, very far down the list of worries and disadvantages of a woman alive in the year 1800.”
Stateside, the popularity of kissing under the mistletoe as a Christmas tradition can be more easily traced, back to Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book, which was published in 1820.
The American writer had returned from England, and recorded the yuletide traditions he had observed abroad. In the chapter named “Christmas Eve,” a footnote reads, “The mistletoe is still hung up in farm-houses and kitchens at Christmas, and the young men have the privilege of kissing the girls under it, plucking each time a berry from the bush. When the berries are all plucked the privilege ceases.”
Forsyth says that Irving’s text, a bestseller, played a huge role in accelerating the tradition’s popularity. “Christmas was only a very, very minor festival in the early 19th century,” he explains. “Irving made the template for the modern Christmas in a lot of senses.” Because kissing under the mistletoe was mentioned in The Sketch Book, a large American audience was introduced to the practice, and eventually adopted this act — and ushered it over the centuries as it went from a semi-scandalous oddity to a well-known mutual romantic gesture of holiday cheer.
Ariana Orvellis a social psychologist studying how people can align their thoughts, feelings and behaviours with their goals. She is an assistant professor of psychology at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania.
In the 2nd century CE, in the sunset of his life, the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius began recording meditations on how he had lived. The questions he asked himself are the same ones many of us find ourselves asking today: how does a person live a meaningful life? How does one find resilience in the face of suffering? What does it mean to be happy?
Aurelius did not intend for Meditations to be read by others, allowing us a privileged tour through the dialogue he had with himself. Although there are recurring themes, the text reads as a series of standalone entries that vary in length from a mere sentence or two to a paragraph. In these fragments, Aurelius captured profound kernels of wisdom, many of which have been borne out by contemporary psychologicalresearch. But in addition to capturing Marcus Aurelius’ insightful musings, Meditations (as translated to English from the original Greek) reveals something unusual about the man himself: his ability to shift perspective as he grappled with big ideas.
At times, Aurelius’ thoughts reflected a first-person perspective, indexed through his use of the first-person singular pronoun ‘I’. At other times, however, he used ‘we’, expressing ideas that applied not just to him, but to humankind, collectively (eg, ‘Our life is a warfare, and a mere pilgrimage’). In other entries, he switched again, using the second-person singular pronoun (translated either as ‘you’ or as the archaic ‘thou’). Rather than being used to address the reader (remember he didn’t have a reader in mind), Aurelius’ use of second-person pronouns reflected his tendency to consider his life as if he were in dialogue with himself – that is, addressing himself directly.
Through adopting this more distanced self-perspective, Aurelius was able to recognise that his feelings of anguish were temporary
In my research, I’ve studied how subtle linguistic shifts, such as these, can powerfully alter the content of our thoughts, and subsequently change the way we feel. For this reason, I was particularly struck by the quote below, in which Aurelius gives himself advice – in the second person – on how to quiet the roaring, inner seas of the mind which, untamed, can lead a person to feel as if they are drowning:
Let not thy mind wander up and down, and heap together in her thoughts the many troubles and grievous calamities which thou art as subject unto as any other. But as everything in particular doth happen, put this question unto thyself, and say: What is it that in this present matter, seems unto thee so intolerable? [emphasis added] For thou wilt be ashamed to confess it. Then upon this presently call to mind, that neither that which is future, nor that which is past can hurt thee; but that only which is present. (And that also is much lessened, if thou dost lightly circumscribe it:) and then check thy mind if for so little a while, (a mere instant), it cannot hold out with patience.
Here, Aurelius writes of the power that people have over their own thoughts. He provides the following astute advice: ask yourself (roughly), ‘What is upsetting you at this moment?’ The phrasing is paramount – he did not write: ‘What is upsetting me?’ Rather, he advised asking himself this question from the perspective of an outsider, using the second-person singular pronoun. Arguably, through adopting this more distanced self-perspective, Aurelius was able to recognise that his feelings of anguish were temporary.
This process of reflecting on one’s self using parts of speech that are typically used to refer to other people – ie, second- or third-person pronouns, or even one’s own name – is distanced self-talk. A mounting body of research by psychologists suggests that engaging in distanced self-talk can help us to regulate our negative thoughts and emotions in a range of situations – from working through a painful past experience to performing on a stressful upcoming task.
These findings about distanced self-talk build on decades of researchshowing that psychological distance – taking a perspective beyond the ‘here and now’ – is an essential ingredient for aligning our thoughts, feelings and behaviour with our goals. When using the second-person pronoun ‘you’ to reflect on ourselves, we can move beyond our default, egocentric perspective, and consider our thoughts and feelings from the stance of a more objective observer. This distanced self-perspective then opens up new ways of thinking, which can make a difference for our feelings and behaviour in a variety of emotional situations.
For instance, in one pair of studies, my colleagues and I found that asking research participants to try to understand their feelings by talking to themselves in their heads using distanced self-talk (eg, ‘Why is Dylan feeling this way?’) vs immersed self-talk (eg, ‘Why am I feeling this way?’) led them to feel less negatively about personal, negative experiences that had elicited emotions such as betrayal, anger, rejection, frustration, worry and existential threat. Moreover, these benefits persisted even among our volunteers who were especially prone to worry and rumination.
The benefits were even greater when the children were told to adopt the perspective of a character with a reputation for hard work: eg, Batman or Dora the Explorer
In another study that we conducted during the Ebola outbreak of 2014 that had spread to the US, my colleagues and I found that instructing research participants to reflect on the threat of the virus in writing using distanced (vs immersed) self-talk led those who had been feeling particularly anxious about it to reason more rationally (by drawing on more fact-based reasons not to worry), which lowered their anxiety. In other research, Ethan Kross at the University of Michigan and his team cued volunteers to use distanced self-talk to mentally prepare for giving an upcoming speech, which, compared with a control group, led them to view the speech as a challenge that they had the resources to conquer, as opposed to an overwhelming threat. Researchers at the University of Buffalo in New York conducted a similar study, finding that this change in cognitive appraisal, from threat to challenge, was also reflected in a calmer physiological response.
The benefits of distanced self-talk extend beyond helping people regulate negative emotions. The practice has also been shown to promote wise reasoning, increasing participants’ willingness to search for a compromise, and leading them to recognise the limits of their own knowledge. Similarly, in the context of navigating moral dilemmas, distanced self-talk helped research participants put aside their personal loyalties – which would otherwise cloud their judgment. For example, in a scenario where you saw your best friend sexually harass someone, distanced self-talk might help you decide to report them, despite your close relationship.
It’s not just adults who benefit from this linguistic tool, either. In one study, young children (starting at four years old) persevered longer at a boring computer task when they were nudged to periodically check in on themselves using their own name (eg, ‘Is Gabriella working hard?’) rather than first-person pronouns (eg, ‘Am I working hard?’). These benefits of psychological distance were even greater when the children were instructed to adopt the perspective of a fictional character with a reputation for being a hard worker (eg, Batman or Dora the Explorer).
Part of the reason why distanced self-talk can be so useful to adults and children across various situations is because it is easy to implement. You might well have been told at some point or another to ‘Take a step back’ or ‘Think about the big picture’ and found the advice frustrating, prompting you to think ‘Easier said than done!’ Distanced self-talk provides a relatively effortless solution (as confirmed by a brain scan study that showed the practice does not require excessive cognitive effort to implement).
When Aurelius wrote of our ability to change the nature of our thoughts as a means to change the way we feel, he recognised something profound about human psychology. Centuries later, research has confirmed that changing the way you think about something is a powerful means to cope with and manage your emotional reaction to it. To make this process easier, you can try following Aurelius’ lead, and work through your negative thoughts and feelings by addressing yourself using ‘you’ or your own name – that is, by using distanced self-talk you can leverage the structure of language to take a step back and see the bigger picture.
Indigenous leaders had hoped to purchase the land, which is home to 1,000-year-old drawings and was auctioned off for $2.2m
A Missouri cave featuring 1,000-year-old artwork from the Osage Nation was sold at auction for US$2.2m. The art inside ‘Picture Cave’ shows humans, animals and mythical creatures. Photograph: Alan Cressler/AP
A Missouri cave containing Native American artwork from more than 1,000 years ago was sold at auction Tuesday, disappointing leaders of the Osage Nation who hoped to buy the land to “protect and preserve our most sacred site”.
A bidder agreed to pay US$2.2m to private owners for what’s known as “Picture Cave,” along with the 43 hilly acres that surround it near the town of Warrenton, about 60 miles (97km) west of St Louis.
Bryan Laughlin, director of Selkirk Auctioneers & Appraisers, the St Louis-based firm handling the auction, said the winning bidder declined to be named. A St Louis family that has owned the land since 1953 has mainly used it for hunting.
The cave was the site of sacred rituals and burying of the dead. It also has more than 290 prehistoric glyphs, or hieroglyphic symbols used to represent sounds or meanings, “making it the largest collection of Indigenous people’s polychrome paintings in Missouri”, according to the auction website.
Carol Diaz-Granados opposed the sale. She and her husband, James Duncan, spent 20 years researching the cave and wrote a book about it. Duncan is a scholar in Osage oral history, and Diaz-Granados is a research associate in the anthropology department at Washington University in St Louis.
“Auctioning off a sacred American Indian site truly sends the wrong message,” Diaz-Granados said. “It’s like auctioning off the Sistine Chapel.”
The Osage Nation, in a statement, called the sale “truly heartbreaking”.
“Our ancestors lived in this area for 1,300 years,” the statement read. “This was our land. We have hundreds of thousands of our ancestors buried throughout Missouri and Illinois, including Picture Cave.”
The ‘Picture Cave’ was the site of sacred rituals and burying of the dead. It also features more than 290 prehistoric glyphs. Photograph: Alan Cressler/AP
The cave features drawings of people, animals, birds and mythical creatures. Diaz-Granados said various means were used to create the art. Charred botanical material was used to draw. For one depiction of a mythical being, the artist created a white figure by scraping off the brown sandstone.
Diaz-Granados said the intricate details set the Missouri cave apart from other sites with ancient drawings.
“You get stick figures in other rock art sites, or maybe one little feather on the top of the head, or a figure holding a weapon,” she said. “But in Picture Cave you get actual clothing details, headdress details, feathers, weapons. It’s truly amazing.”
Years ago, analytical chemists from Texas A&M used pigment samples to determine the drawings were at least 1,000 years old.
The cave has other history, too, Laughlin said. European explorers visited in the 1700s and wrote the ship captain’s name and names of some crew members on the walls. It’s also the year-round home to endangered Indiana gray bats.Advertisement
Laughlin said there are plenty of reasons to believe the cave will remain both protected and respected. For one, he said, Selkirk vetted potential buyers, then there’s the law.
Missouri Revised Statute 194.410 states that any person or entity that “knowingly disturbs, destroys, vandalizes, or damages a marked or unmarked human burial site commits a class D felony.” The statute also makes it a felony to profit from cultural items obtained from the site.
Finally, there’s the location.
“You can’t take a vehicle and just drive up to the cave. You have to actually trek through the woods to higher ground and go through a three-foot-by-three-foot opening that’s secured by the Missouri Historical Society with steel bars,” Laughlin said.
Diaz-Granados is holding out hope that the new owner will donate it to the Osage Nation.
“That’s their cave,” she said. “That’s their sacred shrine, and it should go back to them.”
MEANING: noun: 1. Left-handedness. 2. Skillfulness in the use of the left hand. 3. Awkwardness or clumsiness. 4. Evilness, unluckiness, etc.
ETYMOLOGY: From Latin sinister (left, left hand, unlucky). Earliest documented use: 1623. Some related words are ambisinistrous/ambisinister (clumsy with both hands) and dexterous.
Self-care reminder: Just because you feel it doesn’t mean you’re responsible for it.
Do you often feel deeply attuned to the feelings of people around you? For example, when someone smiles and says they’re fine, perhaps you know they really aren’t?
Do crowds make you uncomfortable? Maybe you’ve left a party or public place because you felt a surge of energy—you were suddenly mad or frustrated, even though you’d been having a perfectly good time. This could be picked-up energy from another guest, and you might be an empath.
The Gift and Stress of Being an Empath
Empaths have the ability to understand the experiences and feelings of others outside of their own perspective. It is different from empathy or compassion. Being an empath means you physically experience the same emotions as others.
Being an empath can be a deeply sensory experience and a great gift. It means you care deeply about the world and other people. But it can also create distress; because empaths sense and feel others’ emotions as if they’re part of their own experience, it can be challenging to know whose emotions they are. In other words, someone else’s pain and or stress can latch onto you.
Staying Grounded
If you are an empath, here are some helpful ways to feel more grounded in your own energetic field:
Notice when you feel an emotional surge. Where do you feel it in your body?
Ask, is this mine? Pay attention to your inner guide.
Notice where you are, who you are with, and what you are doing.
Breathe into the tight areas and imagine breathing out your compassion into the world.
Detach from the drama around you. Notice what you are consuming—news, stressful or needy people, violence in movies or TV; decrease and take lots of nature breaks.
Affirmations to Balance Your Emotional State
To further support you in these difficult times, these affirmations can help you reclaim your true power and balance out your emotional state.
I acknowledge my discomforts. I feel what needs to be felt.
I seek out sanctuary and trust the process.
I can only take responsibility for me.
The fastest way to solve the problem is to stop participating in the problem.
I see love everywhere.
I take time to rest. I nurture my body and give it what it needs.
I detach from the drama around me.
I am calm in the chaos.
My anxiety is not based on reality. I perceive the world with love.
I don’t waste time with negative thoughts.
Kindness wins.
When I am feeling angst, I ask, “What is this situation trying to teach me?”
My beliefs do not define me. I am willing to see other perspectives without judgment.
When I look at the world as a good, happy, and kind place, good, happy, and kind things come to me.
Great loves, like great works of art, live at the crossing point of the improbable and the inevitable. That, at least, has been my experience, both as a scholar of history and as a private participant in the lives of the heart. Such loves come unbidden, without warning or presentiment, and that is their supreme insurance against the projectionist fantasy that so frequently disguises not-love — infatuation, obsession, jealousy, longing — as love. But when they do come, with all the delirium of the improbable, they enter the house of the heart as if they have always lived there, instantly at home; they enter like light bending at a certain angle to reveal, without fuss or fanfare, some corner of the universe for the very first time — but the corner has always been there, dusty and dim, and the light has always been ambient, unlensed and unbent into illumination. For great love, as the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska observed in her splendid meditation on its mystery, is “never justified” but is rather “like the little tree that springs up in some inexplicable fashion on the side of a cliff: where are its roots, what does it feed on, what miracle produces those green leaves?”
That improbable and inexplicable miracle is what Edward Gorey (February 22, 1925–April 15, 2000) celebrates with his signature faux-terse tenderness and soulful oddness in the vintage gem The Osbick Bird (public library).
Written in 1969 — several years after Gorey created his now-iconic Gashlycrumb Tinies, but well before his work for PBS and his fantastical reimagining of Dracula made him a household name — it was originally published under Gorey’s own Fantod Press, whose author list included such venerated names as Ogdred Weary, Madame Groeda Weyrd, O. Müde, Mrs. Regera Dowdy, Raddory Gewe, Garrod Weedy, and the Oprah-like first-name-only Om — Gorey’s delightful menagerie of pseudonyms.
Edward Gorey by Richard Avedon (Richard Avedon Foundation)
This tiny treasure of a book, itself improbable and inevitable given its subject and its creator’s nature, lay dormant and forgotten for decades, until Pomegranate Press, heroic stewards of Gorey’s legacy, resurrected it twelve years after he became the posthumous author he had always lived as.
In spare lines and spare verses, Gorey tells the singsong story of the osbick bird — a creature of his wild and wondrous imagination — who alights one day to lonely, dignified Emblus Figby’s bowler hat, out of the blue, or rather, out of the sky-implying negative space of Gorey’s minimalist, consummately cross-hatched black-and-white worldscapes.
And then, just like that, Emblus Figby and the osbick bird commence a life together — as if life was always meant to be lived in this particular tandem; as if each of the two was written into being just to complete the other’s rhyme.
This charmingly eccentric shared life unspools in Gorey’s playful verses, evocative of Victorian nursery rhymes, and when the spool runs out, Gorey’s romantic realism takes over — the osbick bird flits out of the frame just like it had flitted into it, by that miraculous consonance of the improbable and the inevitable.
“There is grandeur in this view of life,” Darwin had written a century earlier in the final passage of On the Origin of Species — in the view that death is the very mechanism ensuring the unstoppable ongoingness of life, the fulcrum by which ever shifts into after. There is grandeur, too, in Gorey’s subversive ending. There is beauty and bravery in its counterpoint to our incomplete happily-ever-after cultural mythos and its deep-seated denial of death as an integral part of life, and therefore of love; beauty and bravery in the reminder that the measure of a great love — as of a great life — is not in the happy ending, for all endings followed to the ultimate finality are the same, but in all the happy durings.
circa 1890: A sailor tries to kiss a young woman under a sprig of mistletoe. William Small. Hulton Archive/Getty Images
