Magical Incantations Research Articles

Using Knowledge Management to Give Context to Analytics and Big Data and Reduce Strategic Risk

At the moment, the phrases “big data” and “analytics” are often being used as if they were magic incantations that will solve all an organization's problems at a stroke. The reality is that data on its own, even with the application of analytics, will not solve any problems. The resources that analytics and big data can consume represent a significant strategic risk if applied ineffectively. Any analysis of data needs to be guided, and to lead to action. So while analytics may lead to knowledge and intelligence (in the military sense of that term), it also needs the input of knowledge and intelligence (in the human sense of that term). And somebody then has to do something new or different as a result of the new insights, or it won’t have been done to any purpose.Using an analytics example concerning accounts payable in the public sector in Canada, this paper reviews thinking from the domains of analytics, risk management and knowledge management, to show some of the pitfalls, and to present a holistic picture of how knowledge management might help tackle the challenges of big data and analytics.

Introduction

Introduction Jahan Ramazani and Herbert F. Tucker What is song? we often say or write or even sing the word, but seldom pause to consider the divergent but overlapping uses we make of it. At least three different meanings compete in everyday discourse, as in dictionaries that attempt to codify them: 1) the act or art of articulating words or sounds to musical inflections of the voice; 2) a poem or other formal composition, usually in rhyme and a recognizable verse-structure; 3) a sequence of musical tones, with or without words; a tune. In the first definition voice and music fuse with words (or wordlike sounds, at least, as in magical incantation or scat-singing), but the other two split these components apart, one of them privileging the verbal, textual, or poetic, and the other placing emphasis instead on the musical. This semantic fissure suggests the importance of exploring the probably inexhaustible topic of song from both literary-critical and musicological perspectives, bringing together, as in this special issue, the divergent outlooks and protocols of these and other disciplinary approaches, including anthropology, film studies, and gender studies. This issue of New Literary History investigates song in some of its splendid temporal and geographic variety, from twelfth- and thirteenth-century Occitan and Chinese songs and early modern Italian castrati, to nineteenth-century German art songs and English poems, to twentieth- and twenty-first-century American folk, blues, rock, ballads, and pop, to Senegalese rap and transgender Americana and Bollywood song sequences. Inevitably, our sampling has left out much more than it lets in: the songs of prehistoric cave dwellers and choruses from Attic Greece can’t be heard here, nor can Tuvan throat singing, the voice-cracking arpeggios of Persian tahrir, or Jamaican mento, ska, and reggae. A full list of our unsung omissions would go on for pages. But we hope that our contributors’ approaches to, and insights about, song will shed light on the immense variety of song styles across the globe and since the dawn of speech—that prehistoric event which song may have antedated, if the students of voice are right who suppose that our ancestors sang together before they spoke. While the contributions here amply validate [End Page vii] the methodological practice, across several disciplines, of rooting inquiry in the conditioning particulars from which given instances of song arise, it nevertheless remains surprising that so rich and multifarious a topic has seldom been explored across cultures and epochs. Studies that pursue this neglected direction include, among others noted here and there in the following essays, A History of Song, ed. Denis Stevens (1961); John Potter’s Cambridge Companion to Singing; and, with Neil Sorrell, his History of Singing (both 2012). Bolder precedents greet us in the rich tradition of poetry committed to the topic of—and the rivalry posed by—song as such. Robert Pinsky’s poem “The Uncreation” hymns the variousness of song, ranging from ceremonially masked Native American dancers to machines that “may chant or jingle.” As a printed text, his lyric can only partly convey the synthesis of words, music, and voice that it celebrates, but it’s worth quoting from to suggest the vastness of the subject and thus the impossibility of analytically encompassing what Pinsky calls “the great excess of song that coats the world”: The crowd at the ballpark sing, the cantor singsKol Nidre, and the equipment in our carsFills them with singing voices while we drive. When the warlord hears his enemy is dead,He sings his praises. The old men sang a songAnd we protesters sang a song against them, Like teams of children in a singing game;And at the great convention all they didThey punctuated with a song: our breath Which is an element and so a quarterOf all creation, heated and thrown outWith all the body’s force to shake our ears. By beginning with baseball and the Jewish high holidays, Pinsky’s poem suggests that song doesn’t dissolve differences between the sometimes contending social practices it accompanies: ballplayers like Sandy Koufax and Hank Greenberg famously found themselves trapped between their duties to secular sports ritual...

The Asclepian rod and the return of Psychiatry to its home in medicine and neuroscience.

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) recently adopted the symbol of the rod (or Staff) of Asclepius, the Greek god of healing, embedded within the brain as its logo. The attached sketch by this author was made at the Wayne State School of Medicine in front of which is a statue of Asclepius (Fig. 1). Also shown in the inset is a sketch of the new APA logo. Asclepius, son of Apollo, is said to have lived between 12th and 5th century BC, and was considered as the ideal physician. Temple complexes in ancient Greece, called Asklepions, were centers for healing practices. The staff of Asclepius has a single serpent winding around a rod or tree trunk, and figures as the symbol for many medical organizations around the world, including the World Health Organization. However, some medical organizations use the caduceus with two serpents winding around a winged rod, which is the symbol of Hermes (or mercury, a greeco-roman god. Hermes was associated more with magical incantations rather than medicine; thus, the use of the caduceus as a symbol of medicine has been thought to be erroneous (Wilcox et al., 2003). The APA’s previous logo, since 1921, was the picture of Benjamin Rush, who is considered to be the father of American

Impacting the University: An Archeology of the Future

Impacting the University:An Archeology of the Future Éric Méchoulan (bio) Translated by Roxanne Lapidus In memoriam Bill Readings It is generally agreed that the modern university originated in early 19th-century Prussia, under the inspiration of Wilhelm von Humboldt. Thus it was stamped with the seal of idealism and of German Romanticism. Today the entrepreneurial model that seems to be imposing itself on universities around the globe confounds this former ideal, particularly by requiring academia to report on its economically quantifiable "impact." But an impact on what, exactly? On knowledge in general? On society at large? On industry? Is it a question of developing the critical acumen of each person in a democratic universe in which the citizen must be formed as well as informed? Or is it a question of favoring industrial innovation and producing workers for the job market? One often has the impression that the term "impact" belongs to some magical incantation: one has only to use it to align the university on the side of an economically viable 21st century. Thus it appears useful, in our highly utilitarian times, to examine the notion more closely and to grasp the very impact it can have on discourses and individuals. The Figure of Impact The notion of "impact" comes from the physics of solids: it designates the pressure exercised by one body on another at the moment of collision. Impact always implies the exercise of a certain violence. Its economic or social usage is clearly figural, in the often vague sense of "effect" or "influence." However, it is worth noting that its first figural use is exactly contemporary with Humboldt. We find it in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the English idealist and romantic poet who, in fact, had studied in German universities and was influenced (impacted?) by Kant, Fichte and Schelling. In one of his most remarkable texts, Biographia Literaria, Coleridge introduces his poems by an long and convoluted autobiographical preface, as well as by a group of philosophical considerations that underly the poems, as though it were a question of communicating to the reader the complexity of relations among life, thought, and writing. Within this preface that both feeds and constrains the reader's understanding, Coleridge [End Page 7] pens a chapter on dualism, where he confronts the fundamental question of the link between perception and idea: Let any reflecting mind make the experiment of explaining to itself the evidence of our sensuous intuitions, from the hypothesis that in any given perception there is a something which has been communicated to it [the mind] by an impact, or an impression ab extra. [...] Thus, as materialism has been generally taught, it is utterly unintelligible [...]. But as soon as it becomes intelligible, it ceases to be materialism. (90-91) To better undermine the materialist posture, Coleridge stresses the mysterious metamorphosis, which must be thought through, between perception and idea, between the sensible and the intelligible. The sudden figurative use of the notion of impact intervenes at precisely this moment, to stress the unintelligibility of that "something" that has been communicated to the mind by the senses. In other words, the figurative use of the notion, which up to that point had been a matter of the senses, serves, not to calculate an effect, but to show the impossibility of a "real" impact. Paul de Man, who made subtle readings of the symbol in Coleridge, would have appreciated this figuration of the disfiguration of the subtle process that itself disfigures the way to consider the body-mind connection. For Coleridge, the opposition between the sensible and the intelligible does not retreat into a supposed impact of the one upon the other, but must be the very condition of their reciprocal manifestation: all opposition is a tendency to reunion [...] their opposition [is] the condition of all existence or being manifested: and every thing or phenomenon is the exponent of a synthesis as long as the opposite energies are retained in that synthesis" (The Friend, vol. 4, 94). Without needing to return to a rigorous dualism, we can nevertheless keep in mind the complex relationship that impact maintains with it own figuration or with its sensible matter, as well...

The developing understanding of Human Health and Fitness: 2. Early city life.

This article examines the effects upon health and fitness of a transition from a hunter-gatherer life to an agricultural and/or pastoral society. Data are considered from Simeria/Assyria/Babylonia, Egypt, Israel, India and China. In many of these regions, fertile alluvial flood plains and the development of skills in irrigation facilitated the emergence of large cities. Agricultural surpluses fostered the appearance of class structures, often with an elite ruling class, government officials, soldiers to protect and augment the new-found wealth, common labourers and slaves from subjugated territories, each with specific health and fitness needs. Occasionally the ruler was expected to demonstrate physical prowess, and the elite pursued hunting and other sports for pleasure. However, spectator sports, feasting and sedentary games brought obesity to many of the elite, with the appearance of lifestyle diseases such as atherosclerosis. Soldiers typically wore heavy clothing and carried heavy weapons, with fitness maintained by a combination of military duties and sports. Heavy occupational work was required of labourers and slaves, making it likely that they also were fit. However, this phase of history saw a gradual increase in passive transportation, and the introduction of waterpower as an early harbinger of industrial mechanization. Illness was generally attributed to offences against the gods and/or an imbalance of poorly understood body humours. Physicians emerged from the priesthood with a healing repertoire that included herbs and some forms of surgery, plus a heavy reliance on magical incantations. Only a few lone voices from this era advocated exercise for its health benefits. The Indian physician Sushruta stands out from his colleagues for recommending physical activity in the aerobic training zone.

Folktales in Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo's The Last of The Strong Ones, House of Symbols And Children of The Eagle

Folktales are among the elements and materials that made up the folklore of any homogeneous society. Others include proverbs, riddles, songs, beliefs, myths, legends, charms, magic incantations, omens, and superstitions among few others. All these made up the folklore of a given society from which we obtain a picture, a way of life and attitude, belief, custom worldview, perception and outlook to life common among the people of the society. These folklore materials are handed over from generation to generation orally, that is through a mouth to mouth transmission. They live with the society and die only when such society is dead and live no more. Folktale is one of the elements of folklore handed over from generation to generation. It appears in the forms of stories told by our fore-fathers, stories believed to have taken place in the remote past, a time best known to the originators of the tales. These tales in the end are used for entertainment, for instruction and for teaching important moral values of society. In the recent time, these tales have found better expression in the written works of African literary artists and have become one of the veritable elements writers borrow to adorn their written literary works and give them a touch of local flavour and beauty. This paper studied the use of folktales as one of the major ingredients of storytelling in Akachi Adimora Ezeigbo's trilogy, The Last of the Strong Ones, House of Symbols and Children of the Eagle. How the author weaved these tales in between narrations, their functions and the obvious reasons they were used is the purpose of this paper.

Magia terapéutica en el Segundo tomo del ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha de Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda: el romance del conde Peranzules y una réplica a Cervantes

Miguel de Cervantes included several ballads in his Don Quixote of 1605. Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda imitated this practice in his sequel to Cervantes's novel. One of the ballads of Avellaneda's Segundo tomo del ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha is the “ballad of Count Peranzules,” which was mentioned by Sancho Panza during the episode of the melons. Avellaneda, a defender of both religious orthodoxy and immobility within social structures, used this ballad to criticize the presence of magical incantation in some passages of Cervantes's first Don Quixote . The ballad of Count Peranzules has not yet been identified but it might be related to the ballad of Count Pero Vélez.

Brian Ferneyhough and the "Avant-Garde Experience": Benjaminian Tropes in "Funérailles"

Brian Ferneyhough and the "Avant-Garde Experience": Beniaminian Tropes in Funérailles Peter Rosser We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what ener vated perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations. What things were interred and sacrificed amid magic incantations, what horrible cabinet of curiosities lies there below, where the deepest shafts are reserved for what is most commonplace. —Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street1 THE impression of Walter Benjamin's thought on the continuing artistic career of Brian Ferneyhough is both easily defined and ambiguous. The composer has signalled his indebtedness in overt ways, Benjaminian Tropes in Funérailles I 15 in work titles and in the explication of pre-compositional and opera tional concepts, and his immersion in Benjamin's writings has been productive, most notably in the full-length "thought-opera"2 Shadow time produced with librettist Charles Bernstein and premiered in 2004. This is a work that creates a musico-literary commentary on the thoughts of Benjamin and a quasi-narrative compaction of biographical detail relating to the writer's final days and suicide on the Franco Spanish border in 1940. The ambiguity, however, resides in the depth of this impression on the deeper-level structural decisions the com poser has made over the course of more than four decades of writing music, and on how far this impression can explain long-standing philo sophical, intellectual and compositional practices. It is, of course, common for composers to invoke comparison with non-musical expression as a means of providing intellectual context for their pieces. In the treatment or setting of primary source or adapted text, as in Shadowtime, the method is at its most transparent and parallels between words and music are easily understood; symbolism and affec tive word-setting are ways in which the composer can emerge from the confines of the discipline in hand. But the retrospective projection of literary and philosophical influences onto earlier, more protean periods of a composer's artistic activity, and onto pieces that are less clearly associative, often yields greater results. Over the period 1969-80 Brian Ferneyhough wrote Funérailles, a twofold structure that remains unique in the composer's output. The piece consists of the representation of a ritual, in the first instance, and then a further presentation, a rewritten version of this ritual, to be performed in the same concert as the first, but under no circumstances immediately following it. Neither version is to be played indepen dently. The writing of Funérailles, therefore, was undertaken twice in Ferneyhough's career. This stutter, this double take, is in itself incentive enough to take a closer look at the piece. It also occurs at a defining moment for the composer when the beginnings of a rapprochement with tradition can be detected. What is often forgotten is that many of the defining characteristics of the Ferneyhough style as commonly understood today—the microscopic attention to detail, the idiosyncratic notation, the multiple layers of material, and the proliferation of nested irrationals—all emerge at a time when Ferneyhough was both experimenting with the conventions of the score and re-engaging with ideas of musical structure and gesture that come from the nineteenth century and earlier. Funérailles comes in the wake of the psychological torture chambers of the Time and Motion Studies (1971-77), and the expansive Webern-inspired textural essay I I 6 Perspectives of New Music Sonatas for String Quartet (1967). At this time the large-scale symbolist works such as Transit (1972-75) and La terre est un homme (1976-79) give way to a more refined, formally rhetorical model, first seen in the Second String Quartet (1980).3 The soi-disant Benjamin pieces, Lemma-Icon-Epigram (1981) and Kurze Shatten II (1985-88), appear soon afterwards. Funérailles, with its double exposure, its sudden change of tack, represents the only time in Ferneyhough's career when a retreading was deemed necessary and unavoidable. It is also in Funérailles that we see the introduction of several distinctly Benjaminian tropes that would come...

Amor nello specchio (1622): Mirroring, Masturbation, and Same-Sex Love

Amor nello specchio (1622):Mirroring, Masturbation, and Same-Sex Love Emily Wilbourne (bio) The literal translation of Amor nello specchio is "love in the mirror," although "love reflected" provides a better sense of the phrase's meaning. The play by that name was first published in Paris by Giovan Battista Andreini in 1622 and has recently come to occupy a remarkable position in the work of scholars and theater practitioners.1 The magnetic pull of this particular text is attributable to the twists and turns of the commedia plot. The main character, Florinda, is initially in love with her own reflection. After some time she transfers her affections to the beautiful Lidia, and by the end of the play she has settled on Lidia's identical twin brother, Eugenio, a self-described hermaphrodite played by a woman in drag. This romp through variously configured sexual relations is fascinating for its frank depictions of female sexuality—Florinda consummates each of her three love affairs—and also for an ending that remains sexually and delightfully ambiguous despite the specter of resolution into compulsory heterosexuality. At the same time, the "real-world" backdrop to the play's performance and publication complicates further the shifting erotic allegiances staged as Amor nello specchio. The playwright, Giovan Battista, was both author and actor, although his character, Lelio, filled a fairly minor role. In this play Lelio is sharply rejected by a self-obsessed Florinda and after a failed attempt at seduction by magical incantation abandons the feminine temptations of romantic love in favor of a career in the military. Not only Lelio but all [End Page 54] the male characters of this play are shunted sideways, with the dramatic interest of Amor nello specchio securely centered on the female characters. The lead, Florinda, was played by Virginia Ramponi Andreini, wife of Giovan Battista and a renowned singer and actress in her own right, while her onstage lovers, Lidia and the (male) hermaphrodite, Eugenio, were both played by her husband's real-life lover, Virginia Rotari.2 In performance, then, the shifting sexual configurations of Amor nello specchio embodied and reconstituted the scandalous ménage à trois of the actors' offstage love lives. Add to this an onstage masturbation scene, some cross-dressing, and the temporal interval of nearly four hundred years that separates the early modern play from our postmodern moment, and it is clear why this text proved and proves so fascinating. Previous scholarship has valued Amor nello specchio for the compelling exegetical unfolding of male fantasies of female sexuality, with Siro Ferrone's Attori mercanti corsari (1993) and Piermario Vescovo's "Narciso, Psiche e Marte 'mestruato.' Una lettura di Amor nello specchio di Giovan Battista Andreini" (2004) the most notable examples.3 Understood thus, Giovan Battista's stylistic maturity is achieved at the expense of his female companions, with the characters of Florinda and Lidia repeatedly understood to ventriloquize the artistic product of a male author. Amor nello specchio is seen as both symptom of and transcendent signifier for Giovan Battista's extramarital affair: literary mastery routed through the penis. This model of reception is present also in the program notes of the two modern stagings the work has received, both directed by Luca Ronconi (1987 and 2002), and in a 1999 Italian film entitled Amor nello specchio, a period drama very loosely based around the play and on the historico-biographical circumstances that preceded its publication. 4 The film was directed by Salvatore Maira, who, with Anna Michela Borracci, published a modern edition of the original play in 1997; the edition includes an introduction by Maira that lightly revises an article first published in 1994.5 The film exists, therefore, in a weird historiographic relationship with the 1622 text and with modern scholarship on the work, functioning as an attempt to imagine and explain the conditions of the play's conception. In contrast with these authors and directors, my interest lies elsewhere. In relation to the improvised practice and formulaic conventions of commedia dell'arte performance, questions of authorship are inherently problematic.6 Stock characters were the norm, and each actor brought a repertoire of gestures, sounds, and phrases to his or her performance...

A Late-Medieval Crisis of Superstition?

Previous articleNext article No AccessA Late-Medieval Crisis of Superstition?Michael D. BaileyMichael D. Bailey Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 84, Number 3JULY 2009 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1017/S0038713400209330 Views: 173Total views on this site Citations: 3Citations are reported from Crossref © 2009 The Medieval Academy of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:James D. Katz, D. Ted George Reclaiming magical incantation in graduate medical education, Clinical Rheumatology 39, no.33 (Nov 2019): 703–707.https://doi.org/10.1007/s10067-019-04812-xHeather Burke, Susan Arthure, Cherrie de Leiuen A Context for Concealment: The Historical Archaeology of Folk Ritual and Superstition in Australia, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 20, no.11 (Oct 2015): 45–72.https://doi.org/10.1007/s10761-015-0318-1David J. Collins Magic in the Middle Ages: History and Historiography, History Compass 9, no.55 (May 2011): 410–422.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1478-0542.2011.00776.x

The Birth of Opera and the New Science

Since its birth in 1600 opera has been interpreted as an attempt to revive Greek tragedies in its marvelous music. Its provocative presentation of action and narration entirely in music has been seen as a manifestation of the enchanted universe of sixteenth-century hermeticism. Viewed as a final homage to the magical incantations of the premodern era, late Renaissance operas have been interpreted as the culmination rather than the dissolution of Renaissance culture. This paper proposes that the relationship between the natural and the supernatural in early opera represents a rational mediation between the real and the unreal rather than an enchanted bond between these realms. The paper situates the birth of opera in the context of the epistemological shift of the new science and suggests that opera played a key role in the transition from the old to the modern notions of meaning and truth.

A Brief History of Wound Care

Since the caveman, man has been tending to his wounds. Wound care evolved from magical incantations, potions, and ointments, to a systematic text of wound care and surgery from Hippocrates and Celsus. These advances were lost after the fall of the Roman Empire. In Europe, the Middle Ages were a regression of wound care back to potions and charms. It was'nt until the time of large armies using muskets and cannons that surgical wound care emerged again. This article will briefly highlight major milestones in wound care.

The Reception of Homer as Oral Poetry

For me, one of the most interesting directions in oral tradition studies focuses on the reception of Homeric poetry as oral poetry in classical and later antiquity. The topics and materials for study here are wide-ranging. They include the internalization of Homeric poetics by lyric and elegiac poets; rhapsodic variation and conflation of lines in authors who quote Homer; the adaptation of Homeric tags in Cynic street sermons; the pastiche form known as the cento; even the re-use of Homeric poetry in magical incantations, to name just a few avenues of investigation.

AUTHORIZING INTERPRETATION IN POETIC COMPOSITIONS IN THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS AND LATER JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN TRADITIONS

During the second temple period, there is a noticeable growth in hymnography and prayer literature, which is well represented among the literature discovered at Qumran. A significant number of the approximately 930 manuscripts discovered in the Qumran caves contain poetic compositions, including psalms, hymns, or other liturgical texts.' These poetic and liturgical texts fall into seven major categories: (1) liturgies for fixed prayer times, (2) ceremonial liturgies, (3) eschatological prayers, (4) magical incantations, (5) psalmic collections, (6) Hodayot hymns, and (7) prayers embedded in narratives.2 The increase in the production of prayer literature during the second temple period is part of an overall growth of interpretive literature,3

Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women: Sweetening the Spirits, Healing the Sick

Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women preserves the precious remnants of a rich culture on the verge of extinction while affirming women's pivotal role in the health of their communities. Centered around extensive interviews with elders of the Sephardic communities of the former Ottoman Empire, this volume illuminates a fascinating complex of preventive and curative rituals conducted by women at home - rituals that ensured the physical and spiritual well-being of the community and functioned as a vital counterpart to the public rites conducted by men in the synagogues. Isaac Jack Lvy and Rosemary Lvy Zumwalt take us into the homes and families of Sephardim in Turkey, Israel, Greece, the former Yugoslavia, and the United States to unravel the ancient practices of domestic healing: the network of blessings and curses tailored to every occasion of daily life; the beliefs and customs surrounding mal ojo (evil eye), espanto (fright), and echizo (witchcraft); and, cures involving everything from herbs, oil, and sugar to the powerful mumia (mummy) made from dried bones of corpses. For the Sephardim, curing an illness required discovering its spiritual cause, which might be unintentional thought or speech, accident, or magical incantation. The healing rituals of domesticated medicine provided a way of making sense of illness and a way of shaping behavior to fit the narrow constraints of a tightly structured community. Tapping a rich and irreplaceable vein of oral testimony, Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women offers fascinating insight into a culture where profound spirituality permeated every aspect of daily life. Isaac Jack Lvy, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Spanish Language and Literature at the University of South Carolina and founder of the American Society of Sephardic Studies, is the author of And the World Stood Silent: Sephardic Poetry of the Holocaust and Prolegomena to the Study of the Refranero Sefardi.

A God of Vengeance? Understanding the Psalms of Divine Wrath (review)

Hebrew Studies 39 (1998) 236 Reviews extensive footnotes. While the detailed exegesis is excellent, Block's applications seem rather distant from the text of Ezekiel on occasion. Indexes of selected subjects (pp. 799-807), authors (pp. 808-817), Scripture references (pp. 818-866), extracanonical literature (pp. 867868 ), and selected Hebrew words and phrases (pp. 869-87) conclude Block's work. The indexes of authors, Scripture references and Hebrew words and phrases are the most comprehensive and helpful. The general subject index is rather spotty, with repetition of the names of authors in the case of rabbinical authorities. A number of format issues detract from Block's commentary. First, the fme excursuses scattered throughout the book are difficult to locate because they are not listed in the table of contents. Second, some key terminological discussions are hard to find without a knowledge of Hebrew. A more comprehensive English index or the addition of English translations beside the terms in the Hebrew index would help. Third, breaking the text into small units makes it demanding to locate and follow the translation. A complete text of Ezekiel, which would be expected with Block's emphasis on the rhetoric of Ezekiel, would help. However, none of these caveats takes away from the indisputable accomplishments of Block within the commentary itself ; they only serve to make a good commentary less user friendly. Kenneth D. Hutchens Victory Baptist Church DeKalb, IL 60115 khutch4852@aol.com A GOD OF VENGEANCE? UNDERSTANDING THE PSALMS OF DIVINE WRATH. By Erich Zenger. Linda M. Maloney, trans. Pp. xi + 104. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1996. Paper. This book addresses the moral and theological problems posed by liturgical use of the imprecatory psalms. Zenger writes from the context of the Catholic debate over reciting these psalms in the daily liturgy, but he also describes and quotes the wider Christian tendency to denounce these psalms as un-Christian and frequently to use such denunciations as the basis for anti-Semitic caricatures. Therefore, the book provides, through extensive quotations, a remarkable catalog of Christian opinions on psalmic use and misuse (including the practice of deploying Psalm 109 as a magical incantation against one's enemies!). So Zenger writes to sharpen awareness of Hebrew Studies 39 (1998) 237 Reviews both the tradition of moral objections against the use and misuse of these psalms and also of the morally questionable status of that tradition itself. Zenger lays the basis for re-evaluating the liturgical worth of the imprecatory psalms through careful literary and historical analysis of Psalms 12, 44, 58, 83, 109, 137, and 139. Literary analysis shows that omitting offending verses often guts the poetic and even prayerful quality of these psalms: for example, excising the last three verses of Psalm 137 (which conclude with "Happy shall they be who take your children and smash them against the stones!") eliminates all traces of a prayer (p. 49). Historical context changes the significance of some of the most shocking lines. Thus because Psalm 137 is a "political psalm," Zenger interprets Babylon's children (v. 7) as the royal dynasty, so that the final image becomes a request for deliverance from political oppression (p. 50). The history of composition modifies the significance of some hymns even more. He argues that in Psalm 44, an original hymn of confidence in God's military support has been changed by the post-exilic addition of verses 10-27 to a lament about suffering for the sake of, not the all-powerful, but rather the all-merciful God (pp. 51-54). Sometimes readers may wonder if Zenger exonerates violent language too quickly, when, for example, on Psalm 139 he argues "Of course, this is not a struggle motivated by religious fanaticism" (p. 32). On the whole, however, he makes a strong case that the imprecatory psalms leave to God the response to violence and are thus "realized theodicy: They affirm God by surrendering the last word to God" (p. 79). He argues that Christian theology has forgotten that "judgment is for the sake of justice" (p. 64) and that Christian liturgy has therefore failed to provide for lament and accusation against God as a legitimate form of prayer. Zenger suggests...

On the Tradition and Mathematics of Counting-Out

Children were perhaps the first non-peasant group to be seriously studied by folklorists. In 1846, in a note in The Athenaeum, William J. Thoms proposed the good Saxon compound, Folklore to designate those manners, customs, observances, ballads, proverbs, etc., the olden time. Thoms urged the collection and study these disparate and seemingly trifling and insignificant materials because the light that they, in aggregate, might throw on the ancient past. To illustrate his point, Thoms cited a Yorkshire children's divinatory custom. Children gather around a cherry tree and sing, Cuckoo, Cherry Tree; Come down and tell me; How many years have to live. Each child then shakes the tree, and the number cherries that fall are held to indicate the lifeyears remaining. Thoms points to the relation between this Yorkshire custom and the prophetic qualities the cuckoo's song described in Jacob Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie, and to the belief that the cuckoo will not sing its prophetic song until it has eaten its fill cherries thrice over (Thoms 1965 [1846]:4-6). That children's custom stemmed from ancient practice became something a rule thumb in the nineteenth century', and folklorists set out to establish the specific relations between a host contemporary children's expressions and the observances the past. Certainly, there are any number children's games and pastimes that are ancient. Thus games such as I Spy and Blind Man's Buff collected by W. W. Newell in New York at the close the nineteenth century, are depicted in ancient paintings and are described in second century documents (Newell 1963 [1883]:160,162-63). But many the attempts to establish connections between children's custom and ancient practice were decidedly more tenuous. In 1888, in The Counting-Out Rhymes Children, Henry Carrington Bolton attempted to trace the origins and demonstrate the the custom. Bolton regarded counting-out as having two dimensions. Counting out was a form divination by which the unknown was reckoned through casting lots. Yet counting-out also consisted rhymes and doggerels that established the pattern this procedure (1888:26). Bolton was determined to show connections to ancient belief for both the practice and the verse. Citing the Bible and the Iliad, Bolton had little difficulty in demonstrating the casting lots to identify criminals, sacrificial victims, and military champions (1888:2S34).2 The rhymes themselves Bolton believed to derive from magical incantations that accompanied the casting lots (although he acknowledged that the rhymes were probably of more recent date than the custom itself [1888:35]), and Bolton cites numerous examples incantations-many which seem to contain nonsense words as do children's rhymes. Bolton, however, is unable to cite any ancient example genuine counting-out, nor is he able to directly link a single magical incantation to a contemporary children's rhyme.3 Consequently, Bolton is forced to establish his linkages between children's game and ancient divinatory practice in a more roundabout fashion.4 Bolton approvingly cites T. W. Sandrey's attempt to link counting-out with the selection sacrificial victims by ancient Britons, and his interpretation the Cornish rhyme Ena, mena, bora mi; Kisca, lara, mora di; Eggs, butter, cheese, bread; Stick, stock, stone dead as a phrase great antiquity which first lays a ban on a victim's chief articles food, and foreshadows his death by beating (Bolton 1888:43). The difficulty in establishing connections between counting-out and ancient Celtic practices human sacrifice (also argued by Charles Taylor in The Magpie: or Chatter/is the Pica [Glasgow 1820] ) are most tellingly revealed when folklorists fell back on scenes from nineteenth-century romantic novels to illustrate their arguments. Thus Bolton cites R. D. Blackmore's Lorna Doone (1869) for a magical charm that seems reminiscent a counting-out rhyme (Bolton 1888:50), and the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould quotes extensively from his own novel Perpetua (1897) to illustrate how in Gaul a maiden was counted out to be sacrificed to the spirit the spring. …

The 6th and 7th Books of Moses. The Historical and Sociological Vagaries of a Grimoire.

A manual of magical incantations, which first appeared in Germany nearly 200 years ago, has played an essential role in a tradition of witchcraft belief among Franconian peasants. The use of the grimoire is still wide-spread in Germany today, though its publication was legally disputed in the 1950s. It has even reached the United States, where it is increasingly used in voodoo-like practices.

Ethno-medico-botanical investigations in Kerala I. Some primitive tribals of western ghats and their herbal medicine

Ethno-medico-botanical investigations of seven primitive tribals, Cholanaikken, Pathinaikken, Paniyan, Kuruman, Irular, Adiyan and Kurichan, living in the densely forested high-lands of western ghats in Kerala were carried out. One of the tribes, Cholanaikken, is the most primitive tribe known in the Indian subcontinent. Ethnically they appear close to the Australian aboriginals. All other tribes of Kerala have mixed features of Veddoids, Negroids, Australian aboriginals and Dravidian races suggesting the mixing of these races at various periods of Kerala's historical past. All the tribals investigated practice their own traditional system of medicine. The medical treatment of diseases of most of these tribals involves mysticism, magical incantations, sacrificial practices and divining. They also utilize a wide variety of herbs in treating the physical symptoms. These medicinal herbs were collected, identified and some of the interesting plants for which new medicinal uses were claimed by the tribals are described here.

The Story of the Aramaic Magical Incantation Bowls

Common clay bowls with magical spells written on them provide a clue to one aspect of ancient man's fascination with all aspects of the unseen world.