Divination

In the Western world, due to the power of the church and the holy trinity, three has always meant something beyond the realm of numbers. Shakespeare uses the familiarity of this number, and all the good usually associated with it, to turn it upside down and inside out. How is it that one number can exist with so many different interpretations and understandings? How is it that three simultaneously associates itself with luck and good fortune but also with loss? Shakespeare's Macbeth (1606)…

The legend of Aleister Crowley, as it can be called nothing less than that, began on October 12, 1875 (Booth 4). Born to a family which belonged to a rather strict form of Christianity known as The Plymouth Brethren, young Crowley had limited access to ideas which varied from the church’s doctrine as well as books outside of the Bible. This limited access forced him to focus on the biblical stories leading to a mind fed on stories of false prophets, the beast and the number 666, “Crowley’s…

Oedipus finds out from Creon who is his brother in law that he sent to Delphi for information, that Apollo was the God who put the plague the Thebes until they “Drives the corruption frame the land, don’t harbor it any longer, past all cure, don’t nurse it in your soil-root it out!”-( Oedipus The King pg:576, line: 107-111)Oedipus says this as an oath before the chorus and the priest that the murder would be found and banished from the land. During this is one of the time you can really…

The Etruscans were a widespread people who resided in ancient Italy, primarily in both the central and northern regions of the Italian Peninsula. These peoples “formed the most powerful nation in pre-Roman Italy” and “created the first great civilization on the peninsula, whose influence on the Romans as well as on present-day culture is increasingly recognized” (Grummond, 2015). The heart of their civilization was in Etruria, an area that covered part of modern Tuscany, Western Umbria, and…

Qian’s father, Sima Tan, was the Grand Astrologer for the court of Emperor Wu. The Grand Astrologer is responsible for “observation of natural occurrences, record keeping, calendar making, and different forms of divination” (Violatti). On his deathbed Sima Tan says to his son, “I am dying. You must become the Grand Astrologer, and as the Grand Astrologer do not forget that which I have desired to set in order and write [...] The feudal lords have joined together,…

the same means” (Rebekah Nydam, 2012, para. 6). In addition, “Three teachings in one” was inherited in many other Chinese traditions, including “folk or popular beliefs in gods, spirits, and ghosts; ancestor worship; the imperial or state ritual; divination and geomancy; Confucianism; Taoism; and Buddhism… Even before the Qing period, elements from these traditions had…

Q1i. Knowing the poet’s thought is knowing where the poet’s thoughts come from, what inspires him/her, what motivated the poet to put his ideas together he/she did, and why the poet chose to present those ideas in the way he/she did. These things can be different for each poet, that’s why Ion makes such a distinction between Homer and every other poet (531a4). Socrates believes that God instills poets with these thoughts and ideas and possesses the poet (534c3). God is the source of the poet’s…

Stephen Crane an instant literary celebrity at the age of twenty-four. Crane did receive negative criticism initially, however, overall many critics gave high appraisal for his work. William Dean Howells, writing in Harper's Weekly, praises Crane's "divinations of motive and experience" but gives doubt as to whether Crane can be considered a realist writer. Howells preferred to call his prose style "impressionistic" which is still debated among critics about which of these labels to use.…

The Qin rulers managed to conquer all neighboring regions and states, but their dynasty was the shortest in Chinese history (221-206 BC.) The empire collapsed after only fifteen years. In only nine years, the Qin succeeded to conquer all regions that comprised the former Zhou Empire through successive wars that lasted between 230 and 231 BC. The Qin dynasty also managed to capture all distant areas toward the southern and northern sides. The society was immensely centralized, and any slight…

Richards reports experiments in which he himself administered high doses of LSD to a poverty-stricken research volunteer that saw images of a Hindu God with many spiraling arms during his psychedelic experience. He found out because the young man, who was in his mid-twenties, pointed it out in a magazine he was looking through some time after the experiment at Richards office and it was exactly that, a Hindu rendition of the God Shiva. “Psychedelic research, however, does suggest that there are…