A Journal of the Plague Year

by Daniel Defoe, Cynthia Sundberg Wall (Editor), Anthony Burgess (Introduction) 

Actually written sixty years after the plague of 1665 swept through London, Defoe brings the city to life in all of its hardship and fear. With a wealth of detail, “A Journal of the Plague Year” seems almost a firsthand account, taking readers through the neighborhoods, houses, and streets that have drastically changed with the rising death toll. The bustle of business and errands gives way to doors marked with the cross to signify a house of death, as well as the dead-carts transporting those struck down to the mass graves as the dead rise in number to nearly 100,000. As the epidemic progresses and the narrator encounters more stories of isolation and horror, Defoe reveals his masterful balance as both a historical and imaginative writer.

(Goodreads.com)

White supremacists fetishise ancient Rome – but antiquity was more diverse and polychromatic than racists will admit

The figure of a sportsman, sculpted to reflect classical Roman statuary, is one of many constructed during Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship that adorn the Stadio dei Marmi, located alongside the Olympic Stadium in Rome. Photo by Filippo Monteforte/Getty

Jamie Mackay is a writer and translator whose work has appeared in The Guardian, Frieze and The Times Literary Supplement, among others. He is the author of The Invention of Sicily (July 2021). He lives in Florence, Italy. 

25 June 2021 (psyche.co)

Edited by Marina Benjamin

Aeon for Friends

At the dawn of the 20th century, Italian patriots were struggling to overcome a profound inferiority complex. Ever since 1861, when Giuseppe Garibaldi unified the country’s disparate regions into a nation-state, politicians and intellectuals had been anticipating the arrival of a glorious new era. Decades on, however, the economic, diplomatic and cultural results were wanting. Nationalists knew they needed a new mythos to boost public confidence, something to make Italy seem strong and competitive on the world stage. Several options were on the table. Some saw religion as a source of potential unity. Others pointed to the Renaissance, and the long tradition of democratic republicanism as admirable blueprints. After much debate, however, most statesmen came to settle on ancient Rome. The classical legacy, so they reasoned, while admittedly rather distant, was a moment when the peninsula had been at the centre of European and, arguably, world affairs. They set out, quite consciously, with this history in mind, to tell their fellow citizens a new story: that they would make Italy great again.

What this meant in concrete terms was imperialism. In 1912, to demonstrate its global aspirations, Italy launched a ferocious attack against Ottoman Libya. As the bombs fell over Janzur, the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio wrote the ‘Songs of Our Exploits Overseas’, in which he conjured up the spirit of Vittoria, the Roman goddess, to call on all patriots to re-connect with the ‘eternal memory’ of the ancient past, and overcome the stifling ‘crust of centuries’ in order to set out again, under a new flag, to dominate the world. Other nationalists followed suit. The essayist Alfredo Oriani’s 1889 tract describing the need for the country to ‘sail once more on its sea’ as the ‘bringer of a new civilisation’ was republished in 1912, while the journalist Enrico Corradini went as far as to suggest that there was a hidden Roman road concealed under the Mediterranean Sea that linked the modern Italian nation to the African colonies over which it had a ‘historic claim’. Notably, all of these writers referred to the water by its ancient Roman name, Mare Nostrum (‘Our Sea’).

Like all modern colonialism, Italy’s propagandising had racist overtones. In fact, one of the main reasons that the country’s intellectuals were so anxious to present themselves as a homogeneous group was, ironically, a byproduct of their nation’s Mediterranean geography. Over generations, people from both sides of the sea, from Tangier to Istanbul, had mixed with one another to the point that the Italian peninsula’s inhabitants couldn’t feel certain of their ethnic ‘purity’. In response, in the 1920s, philosophers such as Julius Evola posited esoteric theories about an Aryan ‘super-race’, a kind of spiritual nobility that had apparently always existed in Italy since Roman times, and which gave the ‘true’ Italians the moral right to dominate non-Europeans. These strands of thought combined in the ideology of fascism.

When Benito Mussolini came to power in 1922, he did so wielding Roman imagery – the eagle, the fasci and a fictitious ‘ancient’ salute – even more aggressively than D’Annunzio and his forbearers had. At the same time, Mussolini opportunistically supported the burgeoning field of race science, encouraging anthropologists and eugenicists such as Alfredo Niceforo and Sabato Visco to produce ‘empirical’ evidence for what he called the ‘innate vitality’ of the Italian race.

In 1934, Italy’s fascist regime commissioned an installation to visualise their destiny as the righteous inheritors of a white Roman empire. The work, which was realised by the architect Antonio Muñoz, was comprised of five maps that were displayed along the exterior walls of the ancient Basilica di Massenzio in Rome. Four showed Roman civilisation at different stages of its evolution, from the age of Romulus to that of Trajan. The final image, however, which Muñoz completed during Italy’s campaigns in Ethiopia in 1936, depicted Mussolini’s own plan, to obtain control over the entirety of East Africa. This wasn’t all. Muñoz also designed his maps according to an anachronistic and ideologically charged colour scheme, rooted in ‘race science’. Everything inside the ‘Italian’ world – in both the ancient and modern images – was designated by white travertine marble. Everything beyond it was black.

Today, it’s tempting to disregard Mussolini’s use of classical antiquity as a minor quirk of Italian fascism. The uncomfortable truth, however, is that all the major European powers have drawn comparisons of a similar sort that leaned on ancient Rome. Britain, for example, which led the opposition to Axis forces in the Second World War, had long appealed to this kind of symbolism to justify its own imperial expansion. In the 19th century, intellectuals across the political spectrum, including Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Curzon, Arthur Balfour and Rudyard Kipling, all cited Rome as a moral justification for British incursions in India, on the basis that they, the white Europeans, were, as they thought, ‘bringing civilisation’ to the brown and Black natives. In London in 1912, the painter Sigismund Goetze began a series of D’Annunzio-esque murals for the Foreign Office, in which he invented his own white fantasy of Roman antiquity. Like the fascists, Goetze used Latin and neoclassical figures to celebrate his country’s victories over various nonwhite peoples. One image, which professes to show God’s kingdom on Earth, is particularly disturbing. At the centre we see Britannia, clad in her Roman imperial armour. She is surrounded by an array of highly stereotyped devotees, including a Japanese geisha and a Persian warrior. Africa, meanwhile, is depicted at the very bottom of the racial hierarchy, as a naked servant boy, carrying fruit on his shoulders

The myth of a white Rome is so embedded in the Western imagination that it has even found advocates outside Europe. It’s well known that the founding fathers of the United States held the ancient republic in high esteem. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were great admirers of Cicero, whom they saw as a defender of justice, while Alexander Hamilton and Patrick Henry identified Cato the Younger as the incarnation of liberty.

Their idealism, though, can’t be disentangled from the realities of racism and slavery on which the US was actually built. Indeed, it’s hardly surprising, given the rhetorical efforts to disguise such unpalatable realities, that anti-abolitionists would later turn to Rome to justify white supremacism. In 1852, Thomas Roderick Dew, a well-respected professor from Virginia, argued that ancient Rome, where ‘the spirit of liberty glowed with the most intensity’, was able to do so only because ‘slaves were more numerous than the freemen’. In 1916, following emancipation, the lawyer and zoologist Madison Grant tried to exploit the fears of many white Americans by appealing to a story of Black people ‘breeding out their masters … [as] in the declining days of the Roman Republic’.

Most of us would, I hope, oppose this kind of racist discourse on moral grounds. Yet it’s important to recognise that, while there are big differences between Italian fascism, British colonialism and pro-slavery groups in the US, all have contributed to a fantasy idea about Rome’s whiteness that’s still a feature of Western civilisation. Of course, a diverse cast of high-profile figures in these countries, from Antonio Gramsci to Franklin D Roosevelt, have, in different ways, worked to rebuff this abuse of history. Here, however, I want to focus on two lesser-known arguments that are particularly relevant for our own postcolonial times: firstly, that the Romans didn’t have a sense of race in the modern sense of that word. Secondly, and just as importantly, that their empire, unlike modern equivalents, was one in which people we’d now consider nonwhite played a leading role.

Before turning to the ancient world, it’s important to confront any lingering suspicions that race is a legitimate scientific concept. This shouldn’t be contentious. Numerous studies have demonstrated that the vast majority of human genetic alleles are shared across the entire species, and that, even among groups we habitually call ‘races’, variation is too great to identify distinctive, stable categories. The consensus on this matter is now so great that Craig Venter himself, the pioneer of DNA sequencing, has stated that ‘the concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis’.

This caveat aside, my main interest here is not the biology of race but how we imagine race though narratives of whiteness. White skin is a neutral physical trait. The idea of whiteness, however, has strong cultural connotations. Postcolonial theorists, inspired by the seminal work of Frantz Fanon and Edward Said, now agree that European powers invented this concept during the Enlightenment as a pseudoscientific justification for their political expansion. Whiteness was, as these figures demonstrated, both an explanation for and a condition of European supremacy. This normative system, which inequitably required a Black other to inhabit all corresponding inferior concepts, is the basis on which modern racism thrives today.

There is a case to be made that the Romans, through the Latin language, were the progenitors of Western culture. As members of an ancient Mediterranean society, however, they didn’t have any notion of whiteness. One straightforward reason for this is that they weren’t, or weren’t primarily, what we’d now term white. In the past, such discussions were largely speculative. Today, though, thanks to research from Stanford University published in 2019, we have a full genetic history of Rome showing that, in the 1st century CE, the city-state was populated by many peoples of Near Eastern and North African descent. So the fascist idea that ‘it is a mere legend that large masses of migrants came into [Italy]’ – as the authors of the country’s ‘Race Manifesto’ argued in 1938 – has now been proven wrong definitively.

Archaeological and literary sources add further nuance to this picture. Virgil himself, of course, wrote in his Aeneid that Rome’s founding fathers weren’t Europeans but Trojans, a mix of Anatolians and other Asian and Middle Eastern peoples who crossed sea to create a new cosmopolis. Meanwhile, the remains of houses, temples and other artefacts in Sicily and southern Italy clearly show that Asian Greeks and Middle Eastern Phoenicians were integrating with Italic tribes as early as the 7th century BCE.

Some scholars have suggested that the Romans didn’t have any concept of race as a category. This isn’t quite correct. They actually had several words, including ethnos, genos and natio, by which they distinguished peoples according to familial lineage, and which, at times, overlapped with race. Their main organising principle, however, was geographic. The Romans divided the tribes of modern-day France and Germany into groups including the Belgae, Aquitani and Celtic Gauls; and they distinguished these groups in turn from the Spanish Iberians and Gallaecians. As far as Africa is concerned, they carved up the continent to establish distinctions between Egyptians, Algerian Berbers, whom they called mauri, and the ‘Punic’ Phoenicians.

Almost all white marble works were originally painted in polychrome blues, reds and yellows

One term that does present some issues is aethiops. Originally, the Romans used the word to refer to a particular tribe: the Kush peoples of Nubia. Over time, however, writers came to use it rather generically to refer to all peoples from Sub-Saharan Africa. Unusually for a Latin ethnic distinction, the word itself, which has its etymological origin in the Greek for ‘burntfaced’, does seem to evoke physical appearance. In practice, however, this isn’t how Romans used it. When they did need to describe dark skin as a physical property, they turned to other concepts, such as melas, ater and fuscus – terms used to describe individual people. Aethiops was a geographical and value-neutral term that, just like Gauls, referred to cultures with origins south of the imperial frontiers in Tunisia and Libya.

Roman writers were certainly guilty of what we’d now call ‘racialism’, which is to say they speculated that certain cultures of certain areas exhibited certain behavioural traits. A lot of this was tied to their ideas about the weather. Vitruvius, for example, notes that Africans were healthy and intelligent, but that the sun had dried up their blood which, he thought, made them cowardly. He describes the Germans, by contrast, as being stupid people, but who, having had to deal with cold weather, were strong, with a healthy blood flow. Crucially, there’s no hierarchy here in which ‘white people’ might be seen as being ‘above’ Black people: while Juvenal warns that Africans are cannibals and criminals, Seneca celebrates them as being naturally freedom-loving which, in his own personal schema, is a virtue. It’s important to note that these were subjective remarks. There is no evidence that Roman institutions made any attempt to develop either of these positive and negative judgments into a system, let alone a science with a claim to objectivity. In fact, even the most bigoted writers fell short of extrapolating from whiteness as a signifier of supremacy. Juvenal might have despised Africans, but he also reserved a disgust for the Germanic tribes, whom he considered degenerate and unnatural in part on account of their pale skin and blue eyes.

Many people, wittingly or otherwise, have failed to grasp the importance of these distinctions. In the 18th century, the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann identified ‘The Apollo Belvedere’, a 2nd-century sculpture, as a paradigm of classical beauty, something he attributed at least in part to its whiteness. Like others to this day, he made the mistake of assuming that the abundance of plain marble statues that remain from antiquity are evidence that Roman populations preferred white bodies to Black ones. This is wrong for many reasons. Firstly, because there are plenty of examples of statues that were made from grey, pink and green marble. More importantly, though, because literary sources tell us that almost all such works were originally painted in polychrome blues, reds and yellows.

Some particularly obstinate critics have responded to this by arguing that most statues nevertheless demonstrate a ‘European physiognomy’. Leaving aside the question of what this might actually mean, we can see from other artforms, such as paintings, that Roman ideas of beauty weren’t exclusively white. The Fayum portraits, from the 1st to 3rd centuries, depict brown-skinned, dark-eyed people in a manner that clearly suggests them worthy of admiration. Poets too have left numerous odes celebrating Black bodies: Asclepiades, an Asian physician, likens the object of his desire to a ‘coal’ that, when heated, comes to ‘glow like rosebuds’, and Martial describes a woman who is ‘darker than night, than an ant, pitch, a jackdaw, a cicada’ as an ideal of beauty.

There might be no evidence to suggest that African Romans experienced any serious discrimination based on their skin colour. Nevertheless, much like the English and Germans, these people did struggle to overcome their reputation among Romans for being ‘provincial’. While Rome’s imperial elite was multiethnic, the ruling class was dominated by patrician families who claimed ancestry to the founding nobility. This made it difficult for citizens born in more distant territories to rise through the ranks. It wasn’t, however, impossible. In fact, there are plenty of examples of nonwhite individuals achieving respectable positions. One of the most common ways of doing so was through a military career. Lusius Quietus, a cavalry commander, born in modern-day Morocco, obtained such prestige on the battlefield that Trajan actually named him as his successor to be emperor (unfortunately for Quietus, though, he was assassinated in 118 CE and thus unable to take up the position). Maris Ibn Qasith, a dashing soldier from Asia Minor, became a celebrity following his successes in fighting the Gauls.

Literature and philosophy provided an alternative path for success. Terence, who was from modern-day Tunisia, authored several popular comedies that in later centuries would influence such European luminaries as William Shakespeare and Molière. Apuleius, from modern-day M’Daourouch in Algeria, authored the only surviving Roman novel, The Golden Ass. Marcus Cornelius Fronto, an orator and grammarian, was of Berber origins, though he clearly encountered no obstacles that prevented him being selected to tutor two future emperors, Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus.

Not even Caracalla’s most vocal critics forwarded objections based on the emperor’s skin colour

The rise of Septimius Severus is perhaps the most clear-cut example of someone we’d now call a ‘Black Roman’ reaching the top levels of the establishment. Born in 145 CE in Leptis Magna, in what is now Libya, Septimius moved to the capital in his teens and worked his way slowly through the political ranks, attacking corruption in the senate as he went. In 193 CE, having secured considerable public support, he launched a successful military coup and took power as emperor. However, what’s most interesting about Septimius, for our purposes, is how he both downplayed and celebrated his African identity. On the one hand, the emperor was anxious not to appear provincial. He worked hard to disguise his Punic accent, and made a concerted effort to travel to the extreme north, as far as Scotland, to demonstrate his worldliness. At same time, Septimius was clearly proud of his roots. His closest advisor, Plautianus, was a friend from Libya, and he established a new imperial corps, filled with Punic soldiers, to replace the Praetorian Guard in Italy. Septimius invested large sums of money in Leptis Magna throughout his reign and commissioned both a triumphal arch and a sizeable forum for the city. By the end of the 2nd century, his once unremarkable hometown was, along with Alexandria, one of the wealthiest metropolises in the empire.

The most remarkable aspect of the Severan story, though, is not so much Septimius’s individual achievements as what his dynasty tells us about politics of race in the empire. Septimius’s elder son Caracalla was, by most accounts, a poor, vengeful and intemperate ruler. Nevertheless, it was he who in 212 CE passed one of the most ‘progressive’ works of Roman legislation, the Antonine Constitution, which declared that all free peoples residing within imperial territories were entitled to full citizenship.

Historians have often sought to downplay the importance of this measure, arguing that Caracalla introduced the policy only to increase tax revenues for his own benefit. His personal motivations, though, are hardly relevant here. The fact remains that in the 3rd century, a fledgling, peripheral dynasty successfully united all peoples from Germany to Syria into the same body politic. Caracalla’s contemporaries attacked the emperor for his decadence, his narcissism, his superstition and his bloodthirstiness. Not even his most vocal critics, however, such as the historian Cassius Dio, forwarded objections based on skin colour. We can’t ignore this silence. Indeed, it arguably tells us as much about the Romans’ attitudes to race as the few fragmented chronicles that do remain.

It’s not difficult to see why modern colonial powers turned to Rome for inspiration. The republic and empire were both patriarchal societies that, at times, condoned military expansionism. And although they were cosmopolitan in a sense, they were also xenophobic, and intolerant of other cultures that proposed to govern according to their own rules. However, as I’ve shown, the idea that Rome has ever been white is unsustainable on just about every count. Unfortunately, to this day, this hasn’t stopped far-Right groups from reproducing a distorted and racist version of the classical past for their own benefit. In 2016, members of Identity Evropa (later called the American Identity Movement), a now-disbanded neo-Nazi organisation, began deploying classical statues as avatars in their forums. This trope has since become a hallmark of white supremacist communities.

Meanwhile, Richard Spencer, the US conspiracy theorist, has openly called for the formation of a new ‘ethno state’ that would, he claims (contrary to all historical truth), represent a ‘reconstitution of the Roman empire’. His supporters include members of the chauvinist group the ‘Proud Boys’, and the incels once associated with the Reddit forum called the Red Pill and who are now producing ‘classical’ gifs, in which they attribute fictional ‘racist’ quotes to ancient writers in order to ‘own the Libs’ on Twitter and Facebook. There’s nothing trivial about this phenomenon. As the classicist Donna Zuckerberg warned in 2018, these groups aren’t just joking around: they’re ‘[turning] the ancient world into a meme’ in order to project their ideology into the world.

It might be reasonable to simply ignore this propaganda if it wasn’t increasingly visible offline too. In 2017, when far-Right activists marched in Charlottesville, they did so behind images of Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius, over which they superimposed phrases such as ‘Protect Your Heritage’ and ‘Every Month Is White History Month’. Several of the rioters who stormed the Capitol building in Washington, DC earlier this year were wearing T-shirts with Rome’s golden aquila, as well as tattoos of the letters SPQR, the motto of the ancient Republic. One demonstrator even attended the rally with a placard in which Donald Trump’s face had been Photoshopped over of the face of Maximus Decimus Meridius, the fictional hero of the film Gladiator (2000), above the message ‘Cross the Rubicon’ (a reference to the moment when Julius Caesar ascended to the role of dictator).

How many TV shows are produced each year about the Celts and Gauls, how few about Berbers and Aethiops?

The Washington, DC rioters planned their insurrection to contest what they saw, falsely, as a ‘rigged’ presidential election. Yet their actions had a symbolic meaning too that’s inseparable from uncomfortable truths about US history. The organisers were clearly aware that the Roman iconography of the Capitol building, which was built by enslaved people, does indeed represent a fraught duality of democracy, on the one hand, and racism on the other. By ‘occupying’ the space in such a bizarre theatrical fashion, and sharing selfies among the Corinthian columns, they were eking out the unresolved contradictions still present at the heart of the institutions themselves. By re-animating a US version of the white-Rome fantasy, they were, like many before them, providing an anachronistic justification for racism.

Since the 1980s, and the publication of Martin Bernal’s seminal three-volume history Black Athena (1987-2006), classicists have been trying to decolonise their discipline to prevent misappropriations of just this sort. Today, there’s a new urgency to this discussion. In 2015, Zuckerberg founded Eidolon, an online, open-access journal that aims to provide a platform for ‘Classics without fragility’, and, by extension, better educate the public on the nuances of how ancient peoples actually approached subjects including race. In 2017, in a similar vein, a coalition of scholars set up Pharos, a web project that’s working to counteract the far-Right distortion of the past by ‘documenting and responding to appropriations of Greco-Roman antiquity’ in the form of a fact-checking database. It’s clear, however, that serious changes are still needed within the academy itself. In 2019, during a meeting in San Diego of the Society of Classical Studies, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, a Classics scholar at Princeton University, was publicly accused by a white classicist of having reached his position thanks only to his skin colour. Peralta responded provocatively, stating that if Classics doesn’t prioritise diversity immediately, it will never confront its own complicity in constructing the ideology of whiteness and, as such, the field should be dissolved for the good of humanity.

Inevitably, the discussion about how to actually improve representation, and so transform the canon, will have to take place in universities. Those of us watching from the outside, though, need look no further than our TV screens to see where else things might usefully change. Think, for example, of how white our cinematic ideas of Rome are. How many films have been made that explore the assassination of an improbably Caucasian Julius Caesar? And how few engage with the realities of life in, say, Leptis Magna? How many narratives are produced each year about the Celts and Gauls, and how few about ancient Berbers and Aethiops?

Thankfully, over the past two decades, increasing numbers of artists have been working to address this imbalance, and some have even taken up the invitation to ‘rediscover’ Rome’s forgotten cosmopolitan frontiers. Bernardine Evaristo’s novel The Emperor’s Babe (2001), which follows a young girl from Sudan who has an affair with Septimius Severus in ancient Londinium, is an exciting and energetic work of fiction. By conjuring up the Black voices of imperial Rome, however, it’s also a political text that challenges readers to rethink their assumptions about ancient societies. Beya Gille Gacha’s Venus Nigra (2017), a black bust of the classical Roman love goddess, is a beautiful and enigmatic work in its own right. Like Evaristo’s novel, though, it too serves a didactic purpose, in this case to educate the public about the racist appropriation of white marble statues.

The significance of Rome changes with every generation, and ours is no exception. Yet there is an opportunity here, as well as a threat. While classicists face the urgent question of how to redeem their discipline from colonial bias, cultural practitioners have an unprecedented chance to help the wider public engage with an idea of Rome that’s more diverse, realistic and interesting than the monochrome fantasy that has dominated our recent past. As white supremacists storm the centres of Western governance, this is not just a niche issue. It could play a vital role in strengthening our democracies.

The ancient worldRace and ethnicityNations and empires

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN (1860 – 1935)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, born on this day in 1860, was a prominent American humanist, author, socialist, and feminist, probably best known today for her loosely autobiographical short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”.

Gilman served as a role model for future generations of feminists due to her unorthodox concepts and lifestyle, such as leaving her husband (rare for the era) and living with another woman in what was possibly, though unconfirmed, a romantic relationship.

Gilman is possibly best known today for her semi-autobiographical short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, authored after a severe bout of postpartum psychosis. The story depicts the way in which sick women are maligned in a sexist society.

She was also an advocate for assisted suicide for the chronically ill, and died from a self-inflicted chloroform overdose in 1935 after a struggle with breast cancer.

“To attain happiness in another world we need only to believe something, while to secure it in this world we must do something.”

• Charlotte Gilman

(Contributed by Gwyllm Llwydd)

by Astro Butterfly One of the most anticipated transits of the decade is Pluto in Aquarius. Pluto enters Aquarius on March 23rd, 2023, retrogrades back into Capricorn on June 11th, 2023, and then back in Aquarius on January 21s, 2024. Pluto leaves Aquarius on January 19th, 2044.Yes, you read that right – that’s 20 years of Pluto in Aquarius! Some of us might even be thinking “20 years! Will I even be alive in 2044?”. And as gloomy as this may sound, this is exactly the type of question a Pluto transit usually triggers.When Pluto enters a new sign (and this only happens once every 20 years on average), our lives, and society as a whole changes in unprecedented ways. Pluto is still in Capricorn for a while, and some might say it’s too early to talk about Pluto in Aquarius. But perhaps now is the best time to talk about Pluto in Aquarius.Saturn and Jupiter’s recent transit through Aquarius (2020-2023), have given us a good taste of Aquarius and the themes that are relevant in today’s world. Pluto in Aquarius – We, The People Pluto takes 248 years to go around the Sun. The last time Pluto was in Aquarius was between 1778 and 1798, a period of massive change all over the world.The American constitution, still considered the pinnacle of democracy, was written when Pluto was in Aquarius.The Constitution’s first three words – We the People – are perhaps the first modern expression of the “Aquarius entity”. This entity is not a king, a ruler, nor the government. This is exactly what the European settlers were running away from.“ We the people” is the people – an entity without a leader, an entity that self-governs and self-regulates according to the interests and well being of everyone. In Aquarius, it is this plural entity that takes priority over the individual.“We the People” is also a reminder that people’s representatives – rulers, governors, politicians, and policy makers – are here to represent and serve their citizens (an important principle that we will come back to later in this article).Pluto in AquariusTo understand Pluto in Aquarius, let’s remind ourselves what Pluto and Aquarius stand for. Pluto is the last planet in our solar system, the ‘final frontier’ of reality as we know it. Pluto is perhaps the most mysterious planet, because it holds the key to the unknown, to what’s on “the other side”.Common keywords associated with Pluto are: power, depth, transformation, crisis, surrender, resilience, the big natural cycles of birth, death, and rebirth.Pluto is the higher octave of Mars. Mars is the planet of personal will; when we take action and assert ourselves, that’s Mars. When you go to the grocery store, you act from your Mars. No one can tell you not to go to the grocery store. You go there when you want to.But if the council decides to close down the grocery store and build a warehouse for Amazon, there’s not much you can do. Of course, you can try to fight the council or sign petitions, but the council is a force greater than yourself, it is the sum of personal interests of multiple individuals.Similarly, Pluto is the collective dimension of Mars, so it is the sum of all the wills of all the individuals, it is the life force itself.Pluto is the power of nature. When our personal will (Mars) is aligned with the collective will (Pluto) all is fine… but when it’s not, this ‘collective will’ will simply crush our personal will.Indeed, when Pluto strikes, we often feel we have no say and that we are at the mercy of powers greater than ourselves.With Pluto, the secret is not to put up a stronger fight, since this is a battle we cannot win – but to surrender, and trust in the workings of the universe.At the same time, Pluto doesn’t like wimps. So if you think that doing nothing and ‘going with the flow’ is a good way to keep Pluto happy, think again. Pluto wants you to get stronger and to put up a fight if necessary… but Pluto also wants you to know when to call it quits.Pluto is a Mars that is more strategic, thinks long term, and understands how society works. Politicians, businesspeople, strategists, psychologists oftentimes have a strong Pluto in their chart, and it is exactly their ability to channel the raw force of Mars into long-term, complex projects that makes them successful. Pluto’s role is to keep the engine of the universe going, by eliminating what can no longer sustain life. If something is rotten, Pluto will eliminate it, to leave space for healthy growth.Knowing what’s rotten is a good thing. If your tooth rots, you go to the dentist and fix the problem… and save your other teeth. If you want your tree to grow healthy, you trim the dead branches.At a personal level, Pluto helps you eliminate what’s no longer working in your life, helping you build resilience and true personal power – a personal power based on a deep understanding of yourself and the world around you.At a society level, Pluto will eliminate what’s corrupted and rotten, so that society can grow stronger and be more equipped to withstand difficult conditions. What about Aquarius? Aquarius is an Air sign, and we know that Air signs are concerned with communication and the intellect. If Gemini is our internal communication, Libra, one-on-one communication, – Aquarius is a collective sign, so it rules one-to-many and many-to-many communication. That’s why the internet and social media are ruled by Aquarius! Aquarius wants to bring the light of knowledge to as many people as possible.“Communication” is not only verbal communication, but in general, the “distribution” of thoughts, words, energy, people, resources. It’s interesting that in the human body, Aquarius rules the circulatory system. Aquarius makes sure that information, resources, energy get distributed and shared where they are needed.We all know that Aquarius rules friends and groups of people. But not only that. Organizations, committees, infrastructure, and councils are all Aquarius. Marketplaces, from the small farmer markets to Amazon, the stock exchange – the largest marketplace in the world – are Aquarius as well.Because Aquarius rules groups of people, and society is a large group of people, we say that Aquarius rules society as a whole. Society is a sum of all the individuals, plus all the multiple interactions between these people. Society is the most complex Aquarius system out there.Aquarius has two ruling planets: Saturn (the traditional ruler) and Uranus (the modern ruler). Saturn gives Aquarius an interest in policy-making, and a focus on building solid foundations for the future.If the cardinal sign of Capricorn, the other Saturn-ruled sign, represents the executive power – the president, the prime minister or the CEO – Aquarius is the Congress, the Supervisory boards, the Unions, and all other entities where people get elected to represent a large group of people, and quality-control the executive power.Aquarius is also ruled by futuristic Uranus, which gives Aquarius the drive to continuously challenge the status quo, make changes, and innovate. Uranus is the planet of the sky, so Aquarius is also connected with sky-related topics like broadbands, air transportation, astronomy, astrology, electricity, reiki, intergalactic communication, and artificial intelligence. Pluto in Aquarius will expose what is rotten (Pluto) in our society (Aquarius) so that we can build a better structure and infrastructure for everyone here on Earth.Pluto in Aquarius will initially expose what is no longer working in our society, because this is how Pluto operates: it purges what’s toxic and no longer needed.Like with any Pluto transit, it won’t be pretty at first.But this process of a complete overhaul of the very fabric of society is very much needed – and it will be totally worth the intrusive workings of Plutonic transformation. The result? A more resilient, autonomous society that can self-regulate and quickly adapt to circumstances.Pluto in Capricorn Vs. Pluto In AquariusPluto has been in Capricorn since 2008. 2008 is when we had the big economic crisis, so we had a Pluto in Capricorn experience pretty much straight away.Oftentimes, Pluto’s ingress into a new sign comes to correct the flaws of the previous transit. Pluto’s transit in expansive Sagittarius has coincided with the housing and economic bubble, rising inflation and interest rates, production outsourcing, and over reliance on foreign trade.Pluto in Capricorn has fixed the interest rates issues, but of course, has created different types of issues, like too much consolidation of power at the top.When Pluto will ingress into Aquarius in 2023, it will most likely correct some of the excesses of Pluto in Capricorn. The Capricorn Tower of Babel, the Capricorn house of cards, will most likely collapse, allowing for a reorganization and rescheduling of the centers of power, from the bottom up, rather than top-down. If a country, or a business is ruled by a king, or an owner, all the decisions and everything that happens is pretty much one direction. From top to bottom. Aquarius is not just top down, but is also bottom up, left to right, right to left, and everything in between.Pluto is the planet of power. With Pluto in Capricorn, the state/government/big institutions were ‘in charge’ and had all the power. Pluto in Capricorn is that Big Father that gives directives, but also looks after their children.With Pluto in Aquarius there is no more Big Father. With Pluto in Aquarius, we will have to (by choice, or by force) stop relying on Capricorn, top-down systems or parent figures.In Aquarius, we the people have the power, with the opportunities and obligations that come with it. Pluto in Aquarius – Society, Systems, Infrastructure Aquarius rules all the systems, routes, and multiple, complex networks and infrastructure.Since we are in the process of migrating into the Age Of Aquarius, we have already noticed Aquarius’ archetype embedding itself into all of the aspects of our lives.Our decisions are driven more and more from the bottom up. We are no longer sold vacation packages. Now we check Tripadvisor to learn other people’s experiences. We select our accommodation based on Airbnb’s feedback, and feedback systems used by companies like Airbnb and Uber discourage fraud and encourage ‘good behavior’.These platforms are not perfect, but they have definitely solved some of the problems of the previous systems, and now, most of us can’t imagine our lives without them.All the big companies that have become successful in the last few decades have Aquarius qualities. Amazon, Google, Facebook, Airbnb, and Uber, are all platforms that facilitate the exchange of goods and information, that bring together demand and supply.None of these companies produce anything palpable, yet they create value by offering an infrastructure to make information and services exchange more transparent, creating value in the process.Of course, many of these companies are now also known for shady business practices, and this is something that Pluto in Aquarius will likely correct. Still, these are good examples to illustrate how society has, and will continue to shape under the new Aquarian operating model.Pluto In Aquarius – The Circle Without The DotThe good news is that Pluto should feel quite good in Aquarius.Pluto has been assigned the rulership of Scorpio, and there is not much research on how Pluto ‘behaves’ in other signs.Given that Pluto, the King of the Underworld, is pretty much the antithesis of the Sun, the light-giver, we can expect Pluto to express itself in a more dignified way when it is in signs where the Sun is NOT dignified: that is Libra (because the Sun is in fall in Libra), and Aquarius (because the Sun is in detriment in Aquarius).Pluto’s role is to kill the ego (the Sun) so that it can find a power that goes beyond the superficial concerns of the Ego, to get to the bottom of consciousness itself. Scorpio, with its natural connection to the 8th house and planet Mars, has of course a natural affinity with the Plutonic process of transformation.But so does Libra, and Aquarius. We can expect Pluto to feel quite good in a sign where the Sun doesn’t. This doesn’t mean we will not go through the trials and tribulations that Pluto always exposes us to.Pluto in Aquarius will be as demanding and transformative as any other Pluto transit. It is just that Pluto behaves more naturally in the sign of Aquarius, and will put on less of a fight than Pluto in Leo, or Pluto in Cancer would.Pluto In Aquarius – Power To The PeopleWhen you read the title of this write-up, “Pluto – Power to the people”, you perhaps rejoiced, thinking something along the lines of: “Great! no more power to the government, corrupt politicians, or greedy businesses … finally, power to ME”.And the title is a bit ironic when we think of it this way, because “power to the people” doesn’t mean power to you, or to me, or to any other individual. It doesn’t mean that we get to do whatever we want.It means exactly that: “power to the people”, to that autonomous entity where the majority decides. This means that on average, half of the time, this is not what YOU want – it is what the majority wants.This concept is very difficult to grasp, because even when reading this, most of us still think “yes, of course, and what I want is what people want”. “I want equality, peace, justice etc, and of course this is what people want, too”.The thought that power to the people is not necessarily a good thing for you, as an individual may be almost impossible to grasp. But it is something to keep in mind, as the Plutonian Aquarification begins to unfold.Aquarius And The Fear Of Public SpeakingAccording to research, many people fear public speaking more than they fear death.Researchers and historians have tried to explain why this happens. In the past, if you did something wrong, you were dragged in front of the tribe/village/small community, for the community to decide what to do with you.In many cases, the community would decide to eliminate you, either by excluding you from it, which pretty much meant death, or by killing you straightaway.Stoning is a good example of Aquarius “punishment”. It was not one individual that killed you, so the individual was exempt from personal responsibility. It was the people’s power, people coming together, that killed the ‘outcast’.This may have been a practice that served its purpose back in the day, but we can see how “power to the people” can easily translate into “herd mentality”, and not something that we would look forward to now.These examples may sound horrific, and of course, there is not all gloom and doom, but we’re talking about Pluto here, so we all need to toughen up a bit for our own sake. Pluto will eventually empower you, but at first, it will kill your ego.The Aquarification process can be very humbling, and especially so when Pluto transits Aquarius. Aquarius is the opposite sign from Leo, so it is everything Leo is not. If Leo is about “Me”, Aquarius is about “We”.Leo encourages us to express our individuality, while Aquarius asks us to conform to the group. This is another Aquarian paradox. We all know Aquarius is ruled by Uranus, and Uranus is all about being original, eccentric, and a genius. So what does this have to do with conforming? Pluto In Aquarius – “Normal” Is The New Cool People with Aquarius energy are indeed original and unique… but perhaps a better word to describe the Aquarius energy is “liberated”.In the safe, inclusive Aquarius container, people find the freedom to be themselves. This is not the same thing as trying to get people’s attention by dressing weirdly, for example. Pluto doesn’t like wannabes, or people who try to be cool, because when we copy someone else we distance from who we truly are.If someone dresses like Liberace to make a statement, that’s probably uncool by Pluto’s standards. Liberace was, of course, genuinely cool – because he was himself – and he was genuinely eager to show it to everyone (he had Pluto conjunct an out-of-bounds Venus on the Descendant).If you genuinely want to wear a 1-meter yellow hat, then you are definitely cool, because this is who you are. Chances are, not many of us will wear yellow hats when Pluto is in Aquarius.Perhaps the real you likes white t-shirts and jeans. When Pluto is in Aquarius, “normal is the new cool”. Normal not in the sense of boring, but in the sense of self-aware, authentic, breezy and relaxed. It is ok to be you, whoever you are.Pluto In Aquarius – The Light At The End Of The Tunnel“The light at the end of the tunnel” is such a common phrase, that it has lost its significance. Yet, it beautifully describes the silver lining of a Pluto transit.It is only in Pluto’s underworld that we can find the sacred light of pure consciousness, stripped of ego.While Pluto always asks us to let go of something that we find it incredibly difficult to live without, while Pluto may want to break our ego, Pluto never wants to break our spirit. On the contrary.Pluto in Aquarius will help you find your true power. Not a power that seeks to control, take advantage of, and win; but a power that seeks to express one’s truth in a way that serves the best interests of humanity at large.The Aquarian ‘revolution’ will eventually democratize our society. Pluto in Aquarius is that freedom we can only find when we take responsibility for our lives and become fully autonomous.Join The Age Of AquariusIf you want to explore this Aquarian version of the future, there’s no better place than our Age Of Aquarius Community.Age Of Aquarius is built on Aquarian values, such as inclusion, freedom, bias-free content, and collaboration.If you want to deepen your knowledge of astrology, here you will find quality and varied content.If you’re interested in the Community aspect, this is a drama-free space, where people are eager to share, and are genuinely interested in you.If you resonate with these values, join hundreds of happy members here: Age Of Aquarius Community

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Portrait of Emma Curtis Hopkins from High Mysticism.

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Emma Curtis Hopkins (September 2, 1849 – April 8, 1925 age 75) was an American spiritual teacher and leader. She was involved in organizing the New Thought movement and was a primary theologian, teacher, writer, feminist, mystic, and healer, who ordained hundreds of people, including women, at what she named (with no tie to the Christian Science church in Boston) the Christian Science Theological Seminary of Chicago. Emma Curtis Hopkins was called the “teacher of teachers” because a number of her students went on to found their own churches or to become prominent in the New Thought Movement.

Biography in Brief

Emma Curtis Hopkins was born Josephine Emma Curtis in 1849 in Killingly, Connecticut, to Rufus Curtis and Lydia Phillips Curtis.^[1] She worked as a secondary-school teacher, in math, science, and the languages, and married George Irving Hopkins on July 19, 1874, which, by law ended her teaching career. Their son, John Carver, was born in 1875, graduated from the merchant marine academy and died in 1905.^[2] Her husband divorced her in 1901. She discovered Christian Science in 1883 when a neighbor healed her family of a difficult respiratory illness^[3] and later broke away, teaching and healing patients a broader understanding of mental healing and mysticism until her death, in her family home, in 1925. Hopkins is often referred to as the “Teacher of teachers” or “the mother of New Thought.” Those who studied with Hopkins included the Fillmores, founders of Unity; Ernest Holmes, founder of Religious Science; Malinda Cramer and Nona L. Brooks, founders of Divine Science; and Harriet Emilie Cady, author of Unity’s cornerstone text Lessons in Truth.

Career

Hopkins was initially a student of the Christian Science of Mary Baker Eddy, who had been healed of a long-term back condition by Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, who had discovered what he believed to be “the science of Christ,”^[4] and went on to teach his “mental healing” methods around New England,^[5] Eddy claimed, after Quimby’s death in 1866, to have found in the Christian Bible a science behind the alleged healing miracles of Jesus which could (as taught by Quimby and demonstrated in her own work) be practiced by anyone. Eddy went on to found the Massachusetts Metaphysical College in 1876, and Hopkins studied with her in 1883. Hopkins would afterwards (see below) leave Christian Science to develop her own more eclectic form of metaphysical idealism, known later as New Thought with, like it, certain mystical traits of Gnosticism, Theosophy, and a wide variety of early Christian and Eastern teachings (detailed in her last book, High Mysticism.

Hopkins came to differ from Eddy in the fundamental idea of matter: where Eddy taught that “there is no intelligence in matter,”^[6] Hopkins logically deduced that if God as Intelligence is omnipresent, then God’s intelligence must be present in matter, and every other aspect of the universe.^[7] She also moved away from Eddy’s lead in speaking of God as both Mother and Father, Hopkins conceptualized the Trinity as three aspects of divinity, each playing a leading role in different historical epochs: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Mother-Spirit or Holy Comforter. Hopkins believed (as did Eddy, though not as parochially) that spiritual healing was the Second Coming of Christ into the world. Hopkins also believed more specifically that the changing roles of women indicated their emerging prominence in the Godhead, signaling a new epoch identified by the inclusion of the Mother aspect of God.

While Phineas Parkhurst Quimby is sometimes described as the founder of New Thought, he died in 1866, leaving his notes to his students, the Dresser family, to compile and publish, which didn’t happen until 1907.^[8] New Thought, therefore, did not formally organize until Hopkin’s students brought together and focused the national movement, leading to the formation of the International New Thought Association in 1918, with Hopkins elected as its first president.^[9]

Her first work, Class Lessons 1888, was based on her notes from Eddy’s classes, modified as she had begun teaching on her own. She went on to author a prolific body of written work (see bibliography below), which evolved with her own understanding. She was acclaimed for the giftedness of her personal lectures. Those who heard her speak noted her charismatic oratory, and many cases were documented of attendees experiencing healings during, or shortly after, attending.^[10]

Relation to Christian Science and work with Mary Plunkett

Hopkins completed the first course of study at Eddy’s Metaphysical college in December 1883, and worked as a practitioner in Boston and New Hampshire starting in February 1884. She was brought on as editor of the Christian Science Journal, then in October 1885, just over a year later, was relieved of the post—apparently for writing an editorial syncretizing too wide an Asian influence for Eddy’s increasing identification with Christianity and suggesting the Mrs. Eddy was not the only mystical writer and teacher worth studying.^[11]

She had earlier criticized A.J. Swartz for plagiarism of Eddy’s work in his Mind-Cure Journal but, apparently through the help of another of Eddy’s students, Mary Plunkett, was asked to edit Swartz’s magazine for a period during 1886, while he was out of the country. That required a move to Chicago, where Hopkins remained for the next decade.

In Chicago, Hopkins and Plunkett established the Emma Hopkins College of Christian Science and the Hopkins Metaphysical Association, appropriating the then-common term Christian Science. Hopkins and Plunkett believed the term appropriately described their work, in spite of their breach with Eddy, who by that time had changed the name of her operation to the Church of Christ, Scientist. Their first class graduated in 1886 and were, as were all Hopkins’ students henceforth, enjoined to both “make these ideas your own” and “teach these principles to ensure their power in you.”^[12]

Plunkett asked Eddy for a division of Eddy’s Christian Science movement, with Eddy to yield everything west of the Mississippi, and then took offense at Eddy’s rebuff.^[13] Hopkins and Plunkett would in time take in other disaffected students of Eddy, such as Ursula Gestefeld, who were dissatisfied with either the teachings or Eddy’s promotional methods.^[14]

Among the several hundred students who attended the college over the next 2 years were Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, who also began to use the term as they, too, began to heal others and to teach.

In 1888 Plunkett, dissatisfied with the limitations of their work in Chicago, left Hopkins and used her own past ties to Eddy to build a following in New York City. She fell into public disgrace after the scandal of her parting with her husband John, who had fathered neither of her children, in favor of a free love relationship with A. Bentley Worthington. Within a month after her adoption of his name Worthington was exposed as an embezzler and multi-state bigamist. Plunkett moved to Australia, where she committed suicide.^[15]

It was only in the late 1890s, when it became clear that Eddy was determined that only her teachings could be called Christian Science that the term was let go, by Hopkins and other students of the philosophy and methods.

The Theological Seminary

Plunkett took with her the mailing list and other files associated with their joint venture, which left Hopkins in a difficult situation. She applied the principles and methods she taught to help her through is, and in the process realized that what she had to offer was not a profession, but a ministry.^[16] She rebounded from Plunkett’s departure by launching a new journal, which she called Christian Science, and sent it to those who had studied with her to promulgate the idea of healing as a ministry, and, with the help of a local Methodist minister, founding a seminary,^[17] which focused on training spiritual leaders – especially women. Hopkins believed that mankind was supposed to live through three spiritual ages, corresponding with the Holy Trinity. God the Father represented the patriarchies of the past. God the Son represented Jesus Christ and the freeing of human thought. The present age of God the Holy Spirit would place women in charge. Hopkins thought of the Holy Spirit in terms of the Shekinah, the Mother Comforter.^[18] Her focus on women as leaders was made evident in both her creation and support of the Hopkins’ Association chapters around the world and in maintaining a booth in the Women’s Pavilion at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893.

She led the seminary and, with a dozen faculty, taught classes to hundreds of students, with 110 graduates becoming ordained over the years. (see list of well-known New Thought leaders, below) Then, following the graduation ceremonies of June, 1896, she abruptly shut it down.^[19][20]

12 Lessons

Building on what she learned from Mrs. Eddy, Hopkins taught 12 lessons, the content of which evolved as she taught and practiced. She describes them in her early book, Scientific Mental Practice,

There are twelve aspects of consciousness, represented by the twelve Apostles of the early Christian church, and you must be awake in every one. The twelve lessons herein teach us to realize them all, leaving nothing undone.

There are twelve conditions of human life that may be met with twelve truths, to be found in all religions, around the world. These twelve conditions are represented by the twelve Apostles and, when they have been met by Truth, you may be sure that your life will be free, glad, and powerful.

Mind is composed of twelve powers. When your mind exercises these twelve powers, the twelve aspects of consciousness shine like polished jewels. They make a perfect foundation for an absolute demonstration of the Spirit within each of us, and so are described in the biblical Revelation as “foundation stones.”

The first six lessons in this work describe the beautiful powers of your mind as to your own experience and judgment. The last six relate to your surroundings.

Let the mind go step by step: one lesson seems to be all, then the next takes you to another level of realization, then the next—till the twelve gates of understanding are opened.^[21][22]

Except for compilations of her articles, Class Lessons of 1888, and High Mysticism, each of the books that has been published under Hopkins’ name is a transcription of her lectures, prepared by her students, and, since Hopkins spoke without notes and in a stream of consciousness, offers a slightly different version of the principles and methods. As a result, modern readers sometimes find the material difficult to follow. For this reason, Ruth L. Miller, a New Thought minister, has “translated” some of her works into modern prose and style, under the titles Unveiling Your Hidden Power^[23] and The Spiritual Science of Emma Curtis Hopkins.^[24]

A Wandering Mystic

For nearly 30 years after the closing of the Seminary, Hopkins traveled. She was seeking, as she said in High Mysticism, to own as little as possible and, through service to others, allow her divine Source to be her supply and protection. She wrote and lectured and offered individual healing sessions. She spent winters in New York, participating in the “season” of plays and concerts, and summers on the family farm in Connecticut. Among many other luminaries, she came to know the socialite Mabel Dodge before she married and became Mabel Dodge Lujan, and visited her in Taos, New Mexico, where Georgia O’Keefe and D.H. Lawrence had homes.^[25]

In 1918 she was elected the first president of the newly formed International New Thought Association. There, her many students honored her for giving them the gift of New Thought healing methods, her final book, High Mysticism, was presented at that time. and a persistent young man sought an interview, but she refused—not agreeing to see him until October 1924, when he became her last student: Ernest Holmes, who went on to write The Science of Mind, as a result.^[26]

In 1923 Hopkins was diagnosed with congenital heart failure, which she called “not so much an illness as God’s ending a career,”^[27] and spent most of that year on the family farm. She returned to New York in the fall of 1924, where she shared her teachings with Ernest Holmes, but was back on the farm come spring. There, some of her students, members of what were once Hopkins Associations but now called the High Watch Fellowship, had bought a home across the road. They met almost daily, working through the daily practices Hopkins had described over and over in her classes and lectures. On April 8, 1925, they came to see her and she was in bed. She asked them to read her favorite Bible verses, and as they did, she breathed her last.^[28]

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Curtis_Hopkins

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Nana Arielis a writer, literary scholar and lecturer in the Faculty of Humanities at Tel Aviv University, a fellow of the Minducate Science of Learning Research and Innovation Center, and a guest lecturer at Harvard University. She specialises in theoretical and practical rhetoric and in adventurous pedagogy. She lives in Tel Aviv.

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23 December 2020 (psyche.co)

This week, a woman was strolling in my street, walking in circles and speaking out loud to herself. People were looking at her awkwardly, but she didn’t particularly mind, and continued walking vigorously and speaking.

Yes, that woman was me.

Like many of us, I talk to myself out loud, though I’m a little unusual in that I often do it in public spaces. Whenever I want to figure out an issue, develop an idea or memorise a text, I turn to this odd work routine. While it’s definitely earned me a reputation in my neighbourhood, it’s also improved my thinking and speaking skills immensely. Speaking out loud is not only a medium of communication, but a technology of thinking: it encourages the formation and processing of thoughts.

The idea that speaking out loud and thinking are closely related isn’t new. It emerged in Ancient Greece and Rome, in the work of such great orators as Marcus Tullius Cicero. But perhaps the most intriguing modern development of the idea appeared in the essay ‘On the Gradual Formation of Thoughts During Speech’ (1805) by the German writer Heinrich von Kleist. Here, Kleist describes his habit of using speech as a thinking method, and speculates that if we can’t discover something just by thinking about it, we might discover it in the process of free speech. He writes that we usually hold an abstract beginning of a thought, but active speech helps to turn the obscure thought into a whole idea. It’s not thought that produces speech but, rather, speech is a creative process that in turn generates thought. Just as ‘appetite comes with eating’, Kleist argues, ‘ideas come with speaking’.

A lot of attention has been given to the power of spoken self-affirmation as a means of self-empowerment, in the spirit of positive psychology. However, as Kleist says, talking to oneself is also a cognitive and intellectual tool that allows for a wider array of possible use cases. Contemporary theories in cognition and the science of learning reaffirm Kleist’s speculations, and show how self-talk contributes not only to motivation and emotional regulation, but also to some higher cognitive functions such as developing metacognition and reasoning.

If self-talk is so beneficial, why aren’t we talking to ourselves all the time? The dynamic between self-talk and inner speech might explain the dubious social status of the former. Self-talk is often seen as the premature equivalent of inner speech – the silent inner voice in our mind, which has prominent cognitive functions in itself. The tendency to express our inner thoughts in actual self-talk, typical of children, is internalised, and transforms to voiceless inner speech in adulthood, as the developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky already speculated in the 1920s.

Self-talk is deemed legitimate only when done in private, by children, by people with intellectual disabilities, or in Shakespearean soliloquies

Vygotsky’s view stood in opposition to a competing one from the psychological school known as behaviourism, which saw children’s self-talk as a byproduct of (supposedly) less competent minds. But Vygotsky claimed that self-talk has an active mental role. He observed children performing tasks while speaking to themselves out loud, and reached the conclusion that their ‘private-talk’ is a crucial stage in their mental development. Gradually, a child’s interaction with others turns into an uttered conversation with the self – self-talk – until it becomes muted inner speech in adulthood. Vygotsky’s successors, such as the psychologist Charles Fernyhough, have demonstrated that inner speech goes on to facilitate an array of cognitive functions including problem solving, activating working memory and preparation for social encounters. It is inner speech rather than self-talk, then, that has been the focus of research in adults.

However, the internalisation of self-talk isn’t necessarily evidence of cognitive maturity: rather, it could represent the degeneration of an essential cognitive skill in the face of social pressure. The sociologist Erving Goffman noted that self-talk is taboo because it is a ‘threat to intersubjectivity’ and violates the social assumption that speech is communicative. As he wrote in his book Forms of Talk (1981): ‘There are no circumstances in which we can say: “I’m sorry, I can’t come right now, I’m busy talking to myself”.’ Self-talk is deemed legitimate only when done in private, by children, by people with intellectual disabilities, or in Shakespearean soliloquies.

Yet self-talk enjoys certain advantages over inner speech, even in adults. First, silent inner speech often appears in a ‘condensed’ and partial, form; as Fernyhough has shown, we often tend to speak to ourselves silently using single words and condensed sentences. Speaking out loud, by contrast, allows the retrieval of our thoughts in full, using rhythm and intonation that emphasise their pragmatic and argumentative meaning, and encourages the creation of developed, complex ideas.

Not only does speech retrieve pre-existing ideas, it also creates new information in the retrieval process, just as in the process of writing. Speaking out loud is inventive and creative – each uttered word and sentence doesn’t just bring forth an existing thought, but also triggers new mental and linguistic connections. In both cases – speech and writing – the materiality of language undergoes a transformation (to audible sounds or written signs) which in turn produces a mental shift. This transformation isn’t just about the translation of thoughts into another set of signs – rather, it adds new information to the mental process, and generates new mental cascades. That’s why the best solution for creative blocks isn’t to try to think in front of an empty page and simply wait for thoughts to arrive, but actually to continue to speak and write (anything), trusting this generative process.

Speaking out loud to yourself also increases the dialogical quality of our own speech. Although we have no visible addressee, speaking to ourselves encourages us to actively construct an image of an addressee and activate one’s ‘theory of mind’ – the ability to understand other people’s mental states, and to speak and act according to their imagined expectations. Mute inner speech can appear as an inner dialogue as well, but its truncated form encourages us to create a ‘secret’ abbreviated language and deploy mental shortcuts. By forcing us to articulate ourselves more fully, self-talk summons up the image of an imagined listener or interrogator more vividly. In this way, it allows us to question ourselves more critically by adopting an external perspective on our ideas, and so to consider shortcomings in our arguments – all while using our own speech.

You might have noticed, too, that self-talk is often intuitively performed while the person is moving or walking around. If you’ve ever paced back and forth in your room while trying to talk something out, you’ve used this technique intuitively. It’s no coincidence that we walk when we need to think: evidence shows that movement enhances thinking and learning, and both are activated in the same centre of motor control in the brain. In the influential subfield of cognitive science concerned with ‘embodied’ cognition, one prominent claim is that actions themselves are constitutive of cognitive processes. That is, activities such as playing a musical instrument, writing, speaking or dancing don’t start in the brain and then emanate out to the body as actions; rather, they entail the mind and body working in concert as a creative, integrated whole, unfolding and influencing each other in turn. It’s therefore a significant problem that many of us are trapped in work and study environments that don’t allow us to activate these intuitive cognitive muscles, and indeed often even encourage us to avoid them.

Technological developments that make speaking seemingly redundant are also an obstacle to embracing our full cognitive potential. Recently, the technology entrepreneur Elon Musk declared that we are marching towards a near future without language, in which we’ll be able to communicate directly mind-to-mind through neural links. ‘Our brain spends a lot of effort compressing a complex concept into words,’ he said in a recent interview, ‘and there’s a lot of loss of information that occurs when compressing a complex concept into words.’ However, what Musk chalks up as ‘effort’, friction and information loss also involves cognitive gain. Speech is not merely a conduit for the transmission of ideas, a replaceable medium for direct communication, but a generative activity that enhances thinking. Neural links might ease intersubjective communication, but they won’t replace the technology of thinking-while-speaking. Just as Kleist realised more than 200 years ago, there are no pre-existing ideas, but rather the heuristic process by which speech and thought co-construct each other.

So, the next time you see someone strolling and speaking to herself in your street, wait before judging her – she might just be in the middle of intensive work. She might be wishing she could say: ‘I’m sorry, I can’t chat right now, I’m busy talking to myself.’ And maybe, just maybe, you might find yourself doing the same one day.

One of the most influential architects and designers of the 19th and 20th centuries, Frank Lloyd Wright helped define modern US architecture through his innovative style, which emphasised harmony between human structures and the natural world. In this 1957 interview, conducted just two years before his death and the opening of his polarising Guggenheim Museum building in 1959, the notoriously outspoken, often arrogant, Wright discusses why he’s wholly unimpressed by New York City’s iconic skyline, and how architecture can change lives for the better by reflecting the highest values of the people it serves – in his case, the ideals he sees in US notions of freedom.

Video by Blank on Blank, Quoted Studios

Producers: Amy Drozdowska, David Gerlach

Animator: Jennifer Yoo

Michael Cole says urban air mobility could free up congestion and help with emissions in cities

Joanna Partridge Tue 29 Jun 2021 (theguardian.com)

Flying cars will be a reality in cities around the globe by the end of this decade, according to a leading car manufacturer, and will help to reduce congestion and cut vehicle emissions.

Michael Cole, the chief executive of the European operations of South Korean carmarker Hyundai, said the firm had made some “very significant investments” in urban air mobility, adding: “We believe it really is part of the future”.

Cole conceded: “There’s some time before we can really get this off the ground.

“We think that by the latter part of this decade certainly, urban air mobility will offer great opportunity to free up congestion in cities, to help with emissions, whether that’s intra-city mobility in the air or whether it’s even between cities.”

He told a conference of industry group Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders: “It’s part of our future solution of offering innovative, smart mobility solutions.”

The company showcased its flying car concept, developed in conjunction with the ride-sharing firm Uber, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 2020.

Hyundai is also involved in the UK’s first airport without a runway, designed for aircraft that are capable of electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL), scheduled to open in Coventry later this year.

The “urban airport” could be used by aircraft including air taxis and autonomous delivery drones.