Great God Research Articles

The 18th Annual International Veterinary Acupuncture Society (IVAS)

Hurricane Iniki had her way with the island of Kauai and the leeward side of Oahu, but the great god Peld and the demigod Maui were benevolent and receptive to a last minute change of venue. From Friday, when the devastating storm struck and caused major damage to the Coco Palms Resort onKauai, until the following Wednesday an intrepid group oforganizers moved the site ofthe WAS congress to the Stoeffer Hotel on Wailea Beach on Maui for a very successful meeting. The IVAS does not reject other allied health systems and the program presented several opinions of animal health care including vetefimiy chiropractic, herbology, nutrition and the combination of these modalities on several species of animals. Dr. Allen Schoen, a well-known veterinary practitioner and lecturer from Sherman, CT delivered several lectures during the congress and initiated the program with a discussion regarding the philosophy of acupuncture and the physiology. He described the principles of this type of health care, reminding the new members of the group that it is still a major form of medical treatment for nearly one quarter of the world's population, originating in the Orient over 4000 years ago. Only recently has Western medicine recognized this treatment as a

Seeing Traces of the Ox: Scripture and Interreligious Dialogue

Once when the great God Siva sported with his equally great consort, the goddess Parvati, she covered Siva's eyes with her hands. Suddenly, the whole universe was plunged into darkness, for when Siva's eyes are closed, the universe is like a black hole with no light anywhere-except for the hidden fire in Siva's third eye that always threatens the destruction of worlds. Hindu deities are allseeing and are said never to close their eyes. From the near disaster of Siva's and Parvati's play, it is a good thing that they do not; the well-being of the world depends on the open eyes of the gods.1 This essay takes its first clue from the importance of seeing in the Hindu religious Way, but it is not about how Hindu gods or how Hindus God. The clue is this: it is not only the gods who must keep their eyes open; so must we, in order to make contact with them and our deepest selves and in the process reap their blessings and secrets. Keeping our eyes open is called darsan, and this essay is about how to keep our eyes open to the reality of religious pluralism so that we might reap new possibilities for creative transformation. But this essay is also about how scripture both hinders and enhances seeing. How does scripture-any scripture-help us or hinder us from seeing? Is there some unity, mostly glimpsed darkly through our scriptural glasses, over and beyond what any scripture or tradition leads us to expect to see? Here, my second clue is from Zen Master Hakuin Zenji's (1685-1768) comment on the second of the Ten Ox Herding Pictures, which also provides the title of this essay.2 It is by the aid of the scripture and study of the teachings that we begin to comprehend the Ox of religious pluralism. That is, we see the traces of the truth of a Religious Way's faith and practice-ours or someone else's-lurking behind scripture and teachings. Or, as Master Hakuin has

Dr. Horace Wells and the Conquest of Surgical Pain: A Promethean Tale

DR. HORACE WELLS AND THE CONQUEST OF SURGICAL PAIN: A PROMETHEAN TALE RICHARD B. GUNDERMAN* Prometheus, the Titan who stole fire from heaven for the benefit of mankind; whom, in punishment, Zeus chained to a rock where a vulture came each day to eat his liver, which Zeus renewed each night. Such ¿s the reward you reap of your man-loving disposition.—Aeschylus [1:28] On the evening of January 23, 1848, one of the great figures in nineteenth-century medicine, Dr. Horace Wells, sat brooding in a New York City jail cell, composing his last will and testament. He was alone, with nothing familiar to gaze on except his watch, his penknife, a vial labeled "chloroform," and his razor. He had been arrested 2 days previously in a state described by the police as "mental derangement" for annoyances committed on Broadway. Specifically, he was charged with throwing sulfuric acid on two prostitutes. He readily admitted to the crime, though he regretted it with his whole heart. Of his present situation he wrote: "I am now in the most miserable condition in which it is possible for man to be placed" [2]. Today Dr. Wells is a hero, memorialized as one of seven "immortals of dentistry" on the mace of the American College of Dentists, and celebrated in numerous plaques, portraits, busts, and statues from Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago, to Bushnell Park in Hartford, Connecticut, to the Place des Etats-Unis in Paris. He is a patron of surgical patients throughout the world, a benefactor to mankind , whose discoveries have relieved the sufferings of millions. On that cold, dark night in January, though, Wells's own suffering ?Lecturer in the Biological Sciences and New Collegiate Division and fellow, Department of Medicine, University of Chicago. Address: 5107 S. Blackstone Ave. #1204, Chicago , Illinois 60615.© 1992 by The University of Chicago. AU rights reserved. 0031-5982/92/3504-0777$01.00 Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 35, 4 ¦ Summer 1992 531 was more than he could bear. Unaware that 2 weeks previously he had been elected an honorary member of the Faculty of Medicine of Paris and heralded internationally as the discoverer of one of the pillars of modern surgical practice, Dr. Horace Wells was in despair. Great God! has it come to this? Is it not all a dream? Before 12 o'clock this night I am to pay the debt of nature. Yes, if I was to go free tomorrow, I could not live and be called a villain. God knows I am not alone. O, my dear mother, brother, and sister, what can I say to you? My anguish will only allow me to bid you farewell. I die tonight, believing that God, who knoweth all hearts, will forgive the dreadful act. I shall spend my remaining time on prayer. Oh! what misery I shall bring upon all my near relatives, and what still more distresses me is the fact that my name is familiar to the whole scientific world, as being connected with an important discovery; and now, while I am scarcely able to hold my pen, I must bid it all farewell! May God forgive me! Oh! my dear wife and child, whom I leave destitute of the means of support—I would still live and work for you, but I cannot—for were I to live on, I should become a maniac. I feel that I am but little better than one already. [2] The next morning, the lifeless body of Dr. Horace Wells, the discoverer of surgical anesthesia, was found by the jail guard. He had completely severed his left femoral artery with his razor, having first inhaled chloroform to deaden the pain, or perhaps to lessen his abhorrence at the act he was about to commit. At the time of his death, Horace Wells was 33 years old. The story of Wells's scientific discoveries occupies an important position in the history of nineteenth-century medicine. The story of Wells the man—pious, inquisitive, compassionate, creative, and selfless—and of how he came to this desperate pass, is one of the more engrossing and tragic in the annals of medical history. That...

Outres enflées de rire. A propos de la fête du dieu Risus dans les « Métamorphoses » d'Apulée

Goatskins filled with laughter. The feast of the god Risus in Apuleius' « Metamorphoses ». In the Metamorphoses Apuleius based the feast of the god Risus on Greek and Roman models, though Risus cannot be completely assimilated with any specific Greek or Roman deity. What is original about this episode, as several specialists have confirmed, is its role in the economy of the narrative. In this essay the author puts forward a new hypothesis for interpretation : at Hypata, the Thessalonian city of magic, Risus was undoubtedly a great god, a "probaskanion" god. Moreover, the goatskin episode, the nucleus of the feast of the god Risus, would appear to originate from a Greek source : in Aristophanes' "Thesmorphorazusae" goatskins are sacrificed for the first time in comic theatre.

Counterfeiting Nature: Artistic Innovation and Cultural Crisis in Renaissance Venice

Venice faced serious political and economic setbacks in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The future of the Eternal Republic seemed bleak when, in 1509, nearly bankrupt, her commercial empire in the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean slipping away, Venice's army was routed at Agnadello by the forces of the League of Cambrai. Even the elements seemed to have turned against Venice around this time, visiting the city with earthquake, storm, flood, famine, and the plague. Well might the prominent banker Girolamo Priuli have feared that “great God has permitted and ordered this severe ruin of the Venetian Empire”

Christ, The Animist

The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! The sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not. Great God! I'd rather be A pagan suckled in a creed outworn. So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

“Write a Dance”: Lazarus Laughed as O'Neill's Dithyramb of the Western Hemisphere

Eugene O'Neill pushed his habitual experimentation with theatrical forms toward the establishment of a radically new esthetic in The Great God Brown (1925) and Lazarus Laughed (1926). He groped toward a poetic theatre with religious and ceremonial overtones that involved further visual and aural departures from the accepted norm of Broadway productions. In the first of these plays, O'Neill's mastery of visceral effects continues to cast a spell over spectators in occasional imaginative and skillful productions. But the second remains his least accessible; ever since its first production at the Pasadena Playhouse in April 1928, it has continued to mystify or repel both theatre people and litterateurs.

The Play of the Misbegotten

O'Neill's dramas often imitate their own existence as theater, as actions people put on for themselves or others. The climactic music and dance of The Moon of the Caribbees, the emperor costume of Brutus Jones, the compelling but awkward masks of The Great God Brown, the infamous production demands of Lazarus Laughed, the Aeschylean presence that hovers around Mourning Becomes Electra, the safety of recovered roles in Harry Hope's bar, the posture and self-parody of Can Melody: O'Neill's audiences and readers experience many forms of theatrical self-consciousness in the plays. The production of meaning in O'Neill can unfold for us in those moments when his theater illuminates itself and OUf awareness of its own representational status . This element of his dramaturgy comes into particularly clear focus in A Moon for the Misbegotten. "More than any other of his late plays," Timo Tiusanen states, .. this drama ... seems to presuppose a theatre production." The last work O'Neill was able to finish, A Moon for the Misbegollen seems to gather a life's work for the theater into a final synthesis of life with theater.

O'Neill and Otto Rank: Doubles, "Death Instincts," and the Trauma of Birth

O'Neill and Otto Rank: Doubles, "Death Instincts," and the Trauma of Birth Stephen Watt "You were born afraid." Mary Tyrone to Edmund "But he's dead now [Major Melody]. And I ain't tired a bit. I'm fresh as a man new born." Con Melody "She loves me. I'm not afraid! . . . She is warmly around me! She is my skin! She is my armor! Now I am born — I — the I! — one and indivisible." Dion Anthony In one extremely defensive interior monologue in Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude (1928), Charles Marsden contemplates the widespread influence of Sigmund Freud's thought on the American intelligentsia. In doing so, Marsden also predicts what interpretive tools many readers of O'Neill's plays will employ when digging through characters' psychological strata: "O Oedipus, O my king! The world is adopting you" (I, 34).1 Blithely dismissing the Freudian emphases on dream interpretation and "sex" as constitutive of an "easy cure-all," Marsden also anticipates O'Neill's own frustration with the unrelenting stream of Freudian, especially Oedipal, readings of his plays.2 The literary critical "world," insofar as O'Neill is concerned, has indeed adopted "Herr Freud," as Marsden refers to him, and King Oedipus as well. Even in studies only remotely psychoanalytic , Freud and Oedipus often appear as "givens," figures STEPHEN M. WATT, a member of the English Department at Indiana University , is chiefly interested in modern and Renaissance drama and critical theory. He has previously published in a number of journals, including Comparative Drama. 211 212Comparative Drama who on the basis of admittedly very persuasive biographical evidence must be acknowledged.3 Perhaps the most valuable addition to current understanding of O'Neill's appropriation from and manipulation of Freudian psychoanalysis is Robert Feldman's recent examination of the "death-instinct" in Strange Interlude and Mourning Becomes Electra (1931).4 First elaborated by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), the "death-instinct"—an "expression of the conservative nature of living substance" to "restore an earlier [inorganic] state of things"5—becomes for O'Neill's Nina Leeds and Orin Mannon not an instinct but a choice. As Feldman argues, correctly I think, these characters consciously choose to escape the pain of life by a sterile marriage in Nina's case and suicide in Orin's. And Feldman's point might be amplified to include a host of O'Neill characters who freely select either death—John Brown in the early Bread and Butter (1914), Reuben Light in Dynamo (1928), and others—or seclusion from the world of "life"—Orin's sister Lavinia, Deborah Harford in More Stately Mansions (1938; reconstructed and published in 1962), and of course Mary Tyrone. For a variety of reasons, some of them biographical, this fact overshadows the presence of the Oedipal project in the plays of O'Neill's middle and later periods.6 My purpose here is twofold: to describe the determinative effect of this non-Oedipal problematic in O'Neill's plays—one which concerns desire for a regressive, oral return to the mother and, in several cases, prompts character splitting or "doubling"—and to suggest the interpretive value of Otto Rank's work in undertaking such investigations of O'Neill's drama. Readers of Contour in Time (1972) might recall Travis Bogard's supposition that the "possible implications" of Rank's The Double (1914; abstracted in The Psychoanalytic Review, 1919) for "an understanding of the complex personality of Eugene O'Neill are many." Fascinated by O'Neill's representations of a man divided into "opposed but clearly bound beings" in plays such as Mourning Become Electra, Bogard discovered in Rank's work an especially appealing explanation of "fraternal rivalry toward the hated competitor in love for the mother and ultimately the death-wish of the subject."7 Nevertheless, fraternal rivalry over the love-object and the so-called "death wish of the subject" are two rather different phenomena. Moreover, the fraternal rivalry over the love-object (Mother, Mother surrogate, Stephen Watt213 or not) so prominent in, say, Bread and Butter, Beyond the Horizon (1920), Desire Under the Elms (1924), and The Great God Brown (1925) recedes into the background...

Brecht in Context: Comparative Approaches by John Willett, and: Beyond Brecht ed. by John Fuegi, Gisela Bahr, and John Willett (review)

Brecht in Context: Comparative Approaches by John Willett, and: Beyond Brecht ed. by John Fuegi, Gisela Bahr, and John Willett (review)

Nefer's Inscription: On the Death Date of Queen Ahmose-Nefertary and the Deed Found Pleasing to the King

the one with whom his (i.e., the king's) ka was pleased when the divine consort AhmoseNefertary, justified with the great god lord of the West, flew to heaven. Linking the death of the famous Queen -Mother to the reign of her son was a natural connection2 with which other scholars3 concurred until Gitton's study of documents pertaining to the Queen's lifetime and posthumous cult clearly demonstrated that Ahmose-Nefertary survived into the reign of Thutmose I.4 Even so, the brief inscription published by Edwards has not been reexamined for the considerable light it sheds on the obscure period inaugurating the house of the Thutmosids (fig1). Gitton submitted three pieces of evidence5 as proof that Queen Ahmose-Nefertary lived into the reign of Thutmose I: 1) the king's twin

The Great God of Competition

The Great God of Competition

Unhinging Śiva from the Indus civilization

When books on Hinduism begin with a discussion of the Indus Valley civilization, one of the main postulates to illustrate the influence of the Indus upon Hinduism is that Śiva originates from this prehistoric civilization. The postulate is based on three types of objects found in the Mature Harappan context (c. 2500–1900 B.C.) which strongly evoke the personality of the great Hindu god. These objects are phallic emblems and baetyls, seals, and some sculptures. As to the first, conical shaped objects of stone, shell, faience, paste or clay were found in the Indus cities and an outpost, and these emblems are found to bear considerable resemblance to the later conventionalized Śivz-lingas. So too the Indus ring stones are likened to the later yonī-rings, objects representing the female organ and located at places holy to the Goddess (her pīṭhas). Regarding the second, a seal from Mohenjo-daro portraying a central figure with ithyphallic and tricephalic features, seated in yogic fashion and surrounded by four animals is identified as a proto-Śiva figure whose paśupati nature is already recognized. This famous seal, Mohenjo-daro seal No. 420, incorporates the most extensive range of symbols shared by a set of Indus seals, which are, on that account, all thought to exhibit proto-Śaivite symbolism. Lastly, two sculptures are suggestive evidence that the Indus region visualized something akin to the aspects that later comprise Śiva's nature. As such, a small, broken stone sculpture from Harappa is conjectured, when its missing limbs are reconstructed by modern scholarship, to assume a dancer's pose; in consequence the piece is understood as evocative of a Śiva Natarāja.

Eugene O’Neill’s New Language of Kinship by Michael Manheim

Reviews 85 Michael Manheim. Eugene O’NeilVs New Language of Kinship. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1982. Pp. 240. $24.00 (hardcover); $12.95 (paper). When, in the early 1920s, O’Neill wrote the program notes to a pro­ duction of Strindberg’s The Dance of Death—a play he greatly admired— he remarked on what he saw and heard as a “new language of kinship” beneath and beyond the acerbic surface dialogue. If that observation has supplied Michael Manheim with his title and one-half of his thesis, Travis Bogard, in Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill (1971), at least hinted at the direction of the second half by showing that O’Neill tire­ lessly wrote and rewrote the same play, a book of himself culminating in the late, openly autobiographical works. Manheim likewise sees O’Neill as “writing versions of Long Day’s Journey throughout his entire career” —though he does not always discriminate carefully enough between the playwright’s family as it was in real life and as it exists transmuted into art. In this reading, every one of O’Neill’s plays is, to some degree, dis­ guised autobiography, and so surveying the entire repertoire results in something akin to a psychobiography of the dramatist. Whereas earlier critics, however, have been satisfied, for instance, to point out that O’Neill gives us aspects of himself in Eben (Desire Under the Elms) and Orin (Mourning Becomes Electro) and Edmund, Manheim suggests more extensive links, ones that even, at times somewhat tortuously, cross the gender gap: in Mourning, for example, Lavinia is also O’Neill and Ezra Mannon is O’Neill’s mother; while Seth in that play and Charlie Marsden in Strange Interlude are both regarded as Earth Mothers. Manheim’s contention that what interests him “fundamentally” is not the life but the plays, whose ultimate appeal is “existential” rather than autobiographical, would perhaps have been borne out better had he kept to the focus on language that his title promises. Yet even granting that language-based analysis of dramatic texts is difficult at best, the one chapter (on Journey) where Manheim does annotate long passages of dialogue is disappointingly pedestrian. He does, however, provide a vocabulary for analyzing the systole and diastole of love/hate that commentators have long noticed in O’Neill’s works and that Manheim finds revealed through the contrapuntal rhythms and gestures of “hos­ tility and affection” and “abuse and embrace” that always exist concur­ rently. O’Neill’s dialogue, Manheim argues, is finally “life-sustaining”; human interrelatedness (kinship) becomes the only available counter to meaninglessness. Manheim initially denotes three periods in the develop­ ment of O’Neill’s dramatic voice, but when discussing the plays actually refines that division into five: from the beginning through Anna Christie; from Hairy Ape through Desire; from Great God Brown through Mourning; from Days Without End through More Stately Mansions', and from Iceman Cometh through Moon for the Misbegotten. In the first period, hope survives in spite of life’s pain because of human kin­ ship; in the next two periods, desperation, violence, and isolation reflect O’Neill’s own “suicidal self-hatred” that is linked to the deaths, in fairly rapid sequence, of his father, mother, and brother; the fourth period functions as a transition into the last, wherein the dialogue gives evidence 86 Comparative Drama of a rarified form of kinship: human relationships, subject though they are to “chaotic” fluctuations of love and hate, are the last remaining value. In several works from periods after the first, Manheim discerns a motif of characters withdrawing into the self—a pattern reflecting the withdrawal of Ella O’Neill into madness. Although O’Neill considers withdrawal an absolute denial of kinship, it does, sometimes, accompany heroism. Ephraim’s heroic endurance in Desire coincides with a “with­ drawal into a half-life where all feeling is suppressed”; the characters’ longing for the South Sea Isles in Mourning is as much a withdrawal as Lavinia’s into the house/tomb at the end—though Manheim does not see her chosen entombment as an opportunity to expiate for her sins that she has only won because she...

Bodin and the great God of nature. The moral and religious universe of a Judaiser

Bodin and the great God of nature. The moral and religious universe of a Judaiser

— Summary — Two Inscriptions from Ilgaz (Olgassys), and Kimiatene

These inscriptions were found at the village of Kurmalar in the distriction of Ilgaz at the province Çankırı (ancient Gangra). A Dedication To the Great Gods of Stoa Buildings and Oikema etc. Limestone; the bottom part of this cilindiric inscription which has 12 lines is broken. H. 0,50 m. Diamet. 0,35 m. The hight of letters: 0,02 m. These are suggestive of the late third century or the beginning of the second century B.C. The Stoas are the most important buildings of the Agora, that is market places of ancient cities. The stoas, according to J. J. Coulton, show the the wealth and the magnificance of an ancient city. At the same time these enourmous buildings could be taken the pledge to pay the depts of cities to anothers. We think that this inscriptions must indicate a new construction and not a repairing phase of the same building. Because, the repairing inscriptions, to J. J. Coulton again, have been generally written after the first century B.C. in which there were the most troublous years of Asia Minor.

Review. Bodin and the Great God of Nature. The Moral and Religious Universe of a Judaiser. Rose, Paul Lawrence

Review. Bodin and the Great God of Nature. The Moral and Religious Universe of a Judaiser. Rose, Paul Lawrence

Bodin and the Great God of Nature: The Moral and Religious Universe of a Judaiser. Paul Lawrence RoseSelected Writings on Philosophy, Religion and Politics. Jean Bodin , Paul Lawrence Rose

<i>Bodin and the Great God of Nature: The Moral and Religious Universe of a Judaiser</i>. Paul Lawrence Rose<i>Selected Writings on Philosophy, Religion and Politics</i>. Jean Bodin , Paul Lawrence Rose

Bodin and the Great God of Nature: The Moral and Religious Universe of a a Judaiser

Paul Lawrence Rose nous offre ici une biographie intellectuelle de Jean Bodin. Sa vie, sa pensee, ses aspirations religieuses sont examinees dans leurs interrelations. L'auteur met en evidence l'influence du judaisme sur la pensee religieuse de Bodin et tente une explication psychologique des conversions successives qui ponctuerent sa vie.

The Presence of Śiva

One of the three great gods of Hinduism, Siva is a living god. The most sacred and most ancient book of India, The Rg Veda, evokes his presence in its hymns; Vedic myths, rituals, and even astronomy testify to his existence from the dawn of time. In a lively meditation on Siva--based on original Sanskrit texts, many translated here for the first time--Stella Kramrisch ponders the metaphysics, ontology, and myths of Siva from the Vedas and the Puranas. Who is Siva? Who is this god whose being comprises and transcends everything? From the dawn of creation, the Wild God, the Great Yogi, the sum of all opposites, has been guardian of the absolute. By retelling and interweaving the many myths that keep Siva alive in India today, Kramrisch reveals the paradoxes in Siva's nature and thus in the nature of consciousness itself.