Category: Other Page 127 of 177

Zeus and Hermes came disguised as ordinary peasants, and began asking the people of the town for a place to sleep that night. They had been rejected by all, “so wicked were the people of that land,” when at last they came to Baucis and Philemon’s simple rustic cottage. Though the couple was poor, their generosity far surpassed that of their rich neighbours, among whom the gods found “doors bolted and no word of kindness.”

After serving the two guests food and wine (which Ovid depicts with pleasure in the details), Baucis noticed that, although she had refilled her guest’s beechwood cups many times, the pitcher was still full (from which derives the phrase “Hermes’s Pitcher”). Realising that her guests were gods, she and her husband “raised their hands in supplication and implored indulgence for their simple home and fare.” Philemon thought of catching and killing the goose that guarded their house and making it into a meal, but when he went to do so, it ran to safety in Zeus’s lap. Zeus said they need not slay the goose and that they should leave the town. This was because he was going to destroy the town and all those who had turned them away and not provided due hospitality. He told Baucis and Philemon to climb the mountain with him and Hermes and not to turn back until they reached the top.

After climbing to the summit (“as far as an arrow could shoot in one pull”), Baucis and Philemon looked back on their town and saw that it had been destroyed by a flood and that Zeus had turned their cottage into an ornate temple. The couple’s wish to be guardians of the temple was granted. They also asked that when time came for one of them to die, that the other would die as well. Upon their death, the couple were changed into an intertwining pair of trees, one oak and one linden, standing in the deserted boggy terrain.

Source: Baucis and Philemon – Wikipedia

On one such branch, of one such future, the Hypogeum lies submerged and all but forgotten. What was once a ring of guarding mountains is now an atoll, whose opening amongst the salt sea into fresh waters within faces two Houses whose names or purposes few now remember. […]

And in the center of whose inner sea might be called forth by one skilled enough in that Music, an island and small mount, atop jutting forth a humble temple, a gleaming wet jewel to be reclaimed. And in this temple, a well which knows no bottom, and whose deep dark memory reaches back before even the ages of Quatria, to which we presently return…

Source: The First Cry of Delrin – Tim Boucher

Before the fall of Abbadon, in Old Quatria, when the land was still young, there were no hierarchic divisions among the priest caste, and in fact not yet a formalized priest caste. Instead, there were traveling minstrels, who went from field and glen to town and village in celebration of the mysteries. They told the tales and the jokes, sung the songs and epic poems of the places they’d gone, or dreamed of on that long, long road.

Though they brought with them joy, the people in the towns could feel their loneliness, and longing for home. They would cook them meals, and give them beds and barns to sleep in, and stock them with provisions and foodstuff when they went on their way.

And thus marked the passing of the rounds of time in Old Quatria. The timing of the Festivals coinciding with the return of the roving bands of minstrels and the changes of the seasons.

Source: A Tale of Ancient Quatria – Tim Boucher

The Antarctic flora is a distinct community of vascular plants which evolved millions of years ago on the supercontinent of Gondwana. It is now found on several separate areas of the Southern Hemisphere, including southern South America, southernmost Africa, New Zealand, Australia and New Caledonia. Joseph Dalton Hooker was the first to notice similarities in the flora and speculated that Antarctica had served as either a source or a transitional point, and that land masses now separated may have formerly been adjacent.[1]

Source: Antarctic flora – Wikipedia

Founding myths feature prominently in Greek mythology. “Ancient Greek rituals were bound to prominent local groups and hence to specific localities”, Walter Burkert has observed.[8] “i.e. the sanctuaries and altars that had been set up for all time”. Thus Greek and Hebrew founding myths established the special relationship between a deity and local people, who traced their origins from a hero and authenticated their ancestral rights through the founding myth. Greek founding myths often embody a justification for the ancient overturning of an older, archaic order, reformulating a historical event anchored in the social and natural world to valorize current community practices, creating symbolic narratives of “collective importance”[9] enriched with metaphor in order to account for traditional chronologies, and constructing an etiology considered to be plausible among those with a cultural investment.[10]

In the Greek view, the mythic past had deep roots in historic time, its legends treated as facts, as Carlo Brillante has noted,[11] its heroic protagonists seen as links between the “age of origins” and the mortal, everyday world that succeeded it.

Source: Origin myth – Wikipedia

A dream vision or visio is a literary device in which a dream or vision is recounted as having revealed knowledge or a truth that is not available to the dreamer or visionary in a normal waking state. While dreams occur frequently throughout the history of literature, visionary literature as a genre began to flourish suddenly, and is especially characteristic in early medieval Europe.[1] In both its ancient and medieval form, the dream vision is often felt to be of divine origin. The genre reemerged in the era of Romanticism, when dreams were regarded as creative gateways to imaginative possibilities beyond rational calculation.[2]

Source: Dream vision – Wikipedia