• Category Archives Humanities

  • In the Merry, Merry Month of May

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                      Waxing Flower Moon

    Beltane marks the beginning of the growing season so fertility is the essence of the celebration.  In a pre-refrigeration, pre-food preservative (except salt and drying) culture fertility during the growing season carried with it survival, for animals and humans.  Thus, anything to encourage the land and to safeguard the animals that could be done, would be done.

    This holiday, Beltane, used to separate the Celtic year into halves, the other half coming six months later at Samhain, or Summer’s End.  Later the Celts adopted the solstice and equinox celebrations of other peoples and added Imbolc and Lugnasa to make an 8 holiday year.

    Beltane, Lugnasa, Samhain and Imbolc are cross-quarter holidays.  They occur between the quarter year events of Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox–Imbolc,  between Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice–Beltane, between Summer Solstice and Fall Equinox–Lugnasa and between Fall Equinox and Winter Solstice–Samhain.  The cross quarter days were the occasion for markets, festivals/fairs and certain seasonally observed matters like short term weddings, labor contracts and preparation for winter.

    The fire jumping and making love in the fields at night preserved and magnified fertility.  The May pole which you may have gaily stomped around as a child in elementary school symbolizes the male aspect of fertility while the young maidens with May baskets symbolize the feminine.

    The choosing of a May queen carries over the honoring of the goddess in her maiden form, when she can become pregnant and bear children.    This tradition has almost died out in this country and I don’t know whether the selection of a mate for the May queen ever crossed the pond.  At certain points in Celtic history the May Queen’s mate was king for a year and a day.  Over the course of the year and a day the king received all the honors and trappings of royalty.  After the year finished, however, the king died at the hands of his people.  His blood fertilized the soil.

    Today we have much less feel, if any, for this holiday.  It has faint impressions on our culture with May Day celebrations, sometimes with construction paper baskets for paper flowers.

    As we have distanced ourselves from the land and the processes that bring us food, we have also distanced ourselves from the celebrations that mark seasonal change.  We can let Beltane pass by with no bonfires, no cattle purified, no holiday related love making in the fields.

    It may not seem like much, this cultural dementia, at worst a mild symptom.  It might, though,  reveal a more severe underlying affliction.  As we forget the world of fields and cattle, the oceans and their wild fish, cattle ranches and dairy farms, the subtle body may die of starvation or dehydration. Continue reading → Post ID 2547


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  • The Titan

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring           New Moon (Flower)

    Lost sleep night before last, got up early yesterday and had a long day at the museum.  I still feel loggy, not quite focused this morning.   This kind of dulled down makes everything just a bit more difficult like walking and thinking through a bog.

    I’m nearing the end of Dreiser’s The Titan, the second book in his trilogy of desire.  I finished the Financier awhile ago.  The book jacket on my copy, a used $.75 paperback from long ago, describes this trilogy as the forerunner of the modern business novel.  That may be so but it’s like saying the Mona Lisa is the forerunner of female portaitature.  Perhaps true, or if not exactly true, then you can see the point, but the point pales in comparison to the work itself, so much more than just a portrait.

    These three novels:  The Financier, The Titan and the Stoic give a thick description of life in fin de siecle Philadelphia and Chicago, valuable insights into life itself, not only business, which is merely the fictive vehicle for the life of Frank A. Cowperwood, aka Yerkes.  His life has appetites for money, yes, but more for power, and more than power for beauty and for a particular kind of woman.

    Both the Titan and the Financier have eerily familiar scenes developed around financial panics, panics that bear striking resemblance to the one underway right now.  In fact, these books could, at one level, be read as cautionary tales about the dramatic affect personal ambition and animus can have in economic affairs.  In the same vein they give a privileged insight into the mental calculations of a monied set, how it comes to be the case that, “This is only business, nothing personal.”

    They show the Faustian bargain successful men (and women) make as they scramble for this rung, Continue reading → Post ID 2547


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  • With Apologies to Canada and Mexico

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc            Waning Moon of Winds

    I edited and revised American Identity today.  It needed a paragraph indicating what I believe to be similarities between the ante-bellum USA and our current era.  National identity was weak during the ante-bellum period and is weak now.

    In ante-bellum America the Unitarians William Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson made a strong push for American letters.  On the one hand they wanted a break with the European dominance of American literature, painting and scholarship; but more, they wanted American letters, literature rooted in the American experience, painting using American themes and flowing from the genius of American talent and scholarship trained in the new nation and carried out by American academics.

    American identity is weak now for several reasons.  Increasing Mexican immigration has raised a potent challenge to the Anglo-Protestant traditional US culture.  We are now a multiethnic, multiracial society, but our identity has only made tentative steps to say what that means.  We lost a prime enemy in the USSR and now have no one over against whom to identify ourselves.  Since the 1960’s there has been an erosion of trust in the basic institutions of our society:  business, government, the church, education.  Each of these challenges the old ethnic, racial and Anglo-Protestant consensus that underwrote US identity through the 1950’s.

    Like the ante-bellum USA this is a time for a new American letters, a new American literature, a new American painting and sculpture and music, a new American poetry and a new American scholarship, one that reflects the multiethnic, multiracial society we have become.


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