Raw Angelite
Oh, angelite, you are so sweet!
One of the first gems I ever worked with when I was just a teenager beginning my spiritual journey.
I adore it, and I think once you learn about its powers, you will too.
Angelite acts as an anchor to our angelic guides; it channels clear communication lines to them.
It also helps you speak freely and from a place of tranquility.
How fitting to have this stone carved into these perfect pocket angel statuettes.
Are you having difficulty speaking from a place of understanding and peace?
Use angelite to raise tranquil energy, promote unconditional love, and bring peace during difficult times.
If you need a calming energy that soothes, rather than over-stimulates your senses, this is the gemstone for you.
Angelite acts as the deep exhale, and activates the Third Eye and Throat Chakras, enabling the user to receive and give calm communication, compassion, and intuitive thought.
Used as a meditation guide and for dream work, it can help with awareness and tapping into higher dimensions.
Angelite is useful in connecting with angelic guides, as the name implies.
https://www.sagegoddess.com/product/angelite-angels/
One diver in South Africa got a taste of his own Jonah and the Whale story. Rainer Schimpf is a 51-year-old dive operator.
Rainer was snorkeling off the coast of Port Elizabeth in South Africa when he was swallowed whole by a whale.
It was a Bryde’s whale.
How did this happen?
Even crazier, how did Rainer survive being swallowed by a giant whale?
Rainer said that the whale came out of nowhere.
He was busy looking for sharks and avoiding being attacked when he was attacked by a whale instead.
Rainer has been a dive operator for over 15 years and has never experienced anything like this.
He was only in the water for a few minutes when the whale swallowed him up.
He said he felt pressure all around his body, and quickly realized what was happening.
Luckily, he also realized that he was too large for the whale to swallow him.
He said it was an instant relief.
Soon after, the whale actually spit him out!
Rainer said he held his breath because he assumed that the whale would spit him out into the deep ocean, but he was lucky and the whale spit him out closer to the surface.
What a crazy experience!
The whale that caught Rainer is a Bryde’s whale.
They are part of the baleen whale family which also includes more commonly known blue whales and humpback whales.
Bryde’s whales were named after Johan Bryde, who created the first whaling stations in South Africa.
Rainer said he is grateful that he survived and didn’t get severely hurt. He said it just reminded him of how small humans are in this amazing world.
https://doyouremember.com/93597/diver-gets-eaten-by-whale
From the founding of the Roman empire to its fall in A.D. 476, Rome dominated Europe and much of North Africa, the Near East, and Asia Minor*.
Although this sprawling empire encompassed many cultures with their own myths and legends, the mythology of the Romans themselves revolved around the founding, history, and heroes of the city of Rome.
The Romans had developed their own pantheon of gods and goddesses.
After they conquered Greece, however, their deities became increasingly associated with the figures of Greek mythology.
Although Rome's early history is difficult to separate from the legends that formed around it, the city appears to have begun as a community of central Italian peoples known as Latins.
The Latins merged with the Etruscans, who had come to Italy from Asia Minor before 800 B.C.
Until 510 B.C. , Rome was ruled by kings.
Then it became a republic governed by elected officials.
The Roman republic eventually dominated most of Italy and conquered the North African coast and Greece.
By 31 B.C. , Rome governed all the lands around the Mediterranean Sea as well as northwest Europe.
The principal sources of information about Roman mythology appeared during the early years of the empire, between about 20 B.C. and A.D. 20.
The poet Virgil produced Rome's national epic, the Aeneid, which drew on myths that linked the city's founding with Greek deities and legends.
Another poet, Ovid, wrote the Metamorphoses, a collection of Near Eastern and Greek myths that the Romans had adopted.
Ovid's Fasti describes Roman myths about the gods according to the festivals in their calendar.
In his history of Rome, Livy portrayed legends about the city's founding as though they were historical events.
These and other writers worked to create an "official" Roman mythology, one that gave Rome an ancient, distinguished, and glorious heritage.
In their early years, Roman people had many gods and goddesses called numina, or powers.
Unlike the Greek deities, the numina did not have distinctive, well-defined personalities and characteristics.
Few stories about them existed.
They were simply the forces that oversaw the activities of daily life.
Examples include Janus, god of doorways and archways, and Terminus, god of boundaries.
Many early Roman deities were patrons of farming, crops, or the land. Sylvanus, for example, was the protector of woodcutters and plowmen.
Other early deities represented virtues or qualities, such as Concordia (goddess of agreement), Fides (goddess of honesty), and Fortuna (goddess of fate or luck).
Captivated by the elaborate and entertaining myths the Greeks had woven around their gods and goddesses, the Romans gradually changed some of their numina into Roman versions of the major Greek deities.
The ancient Roman god Saturn, guardian of seeds and planting, became identified with the Titan* Cronus, who appeared in Greek mythology as the ancestor of the gods.
Aphrodite became Venus, the Roman goddess of love.
Zeus and Hera, the king and queen of the Greek gods, became the Roman Jupiter (sometimes called Jove) and Juno.
The Romans gave their deities some of the characteristics and even some of the stories associated with the Greek gods and goddesses.
They also imported other foreign deities, such as Cybele from near Troy in Asia Minor and the Persian god Mithras.
At the same time, in their own homes they continued to worship their traditional household gods, known as the Lares and Penates.
Roman mythology also includes human heroes. Sometimes these mortals became deities.
Romulus, the legendary founder of the city of Rome, was thought to have become the god Quirinus.
Many emperors were declared gods by the Roman senate after their deaths, and people worshiped them in temples.
The most honored heroes, however, were Aeneas, Romulus and Remus, and others from myths about Rome's beginnings and early history.
Romans cherished myths about their city's founding.
A myth that probably dates from around 400 B.C. told of the twins Romulus and Remus, offspring of a Latin princess and the god Mars.
Although their uncle tried to drown them, they survived under the care of a she-wolf and a woodpecker.
Eventually, the twins overthrew their uncle and decided to found a new city on the spot where they had been rescued by the she-wolf.
After receiving an omen from the gods about the new city, Romulus killed Remus and became leader—as the gods had intended. Rome took its name from him.
The ditch that Romulus dug to mark the boundary of Rome was called the pomerium.
Everything within the pomerium was considered to be part of the original, authentic, sacred Rome.
Throughout Rome's long history, the Romans preserved landmarks within the pomerium that they associated with the legend of Romulus and Remus.
These included a cave on the Palatine Hill where the wolf was said to have nursed the twins and a nearby hut where Romulus was said to have lived.
According to legend, Romulus made the new city a refuge for criminals, poor people, and runaway slaves to attract citizens.
Because this population lacked women, Romulus invited a neighboring people called the Sabines to a religious festival and then kidnapped the Sabine women.
Titus Tatius, king of the Sabines, brought an army to wage war on Rome.
By that time, however, the Sabine women had married Romans.
At their urging, the men made peace, and until his death, Titus ruled at the side of Romulus.
One of Rome's most worshiped goddesses received little literary attention.
According to legend, Angerona knew a magical spell to raise the sun in midwinter.
Her festival occurred on December 21, the shortest day of the year, when she was believed to say the words that would cause the days to lengthen and spring to return.
Even more important, Angerona guarded the secret name of the city of Rome.
The gods knew this name, but Rome would be doomed if people ever learned it.
Statues of Angerona showed her mouth covered with her hands or a gag so that the secret name could not slip out.
One myth connected with the war between the Romans and the Sabines says that a high-ranking Roman woman named Tarpeia caught sight of Tatius and fell in love with him.
Tarpeia betrayed Rome to the Sabine army, but Tatius slew her for her treachery.
By the late years of the republic, Romans had adopted a powerful new myth about their state's origins.
This account is most fully told in the Aeneid.
It revolves around Aeneas, a Trojan* prince who fled from his ruined homeland because the gods told him that he was fated to establish a "new Troy".
After wandering around the Mediterranean, Aeneas landed in Italy with some Trojan followers.
There he married the daughter of the local Latin king; Aeneas's son Ascanius founded a settlement called Alba Longa.
This version of Roman history emphasized the idea that the gods had always meant for Rome to rule the world.
Romulus and Remus became sons of a princess of Alba Longa, descendants of Aeneas—a perfect example of Roman willingness and ability to piece together different myths.
Myths arose linking many deities with key events in Roman history.
The twin wind gods Castor and Pollux, together called the Dioscuri, appear in both Greek and Roman mythology as inseparable brothers who form the constellation Gemini.
In the Roman version, the Dioscuri fought on the side of the Roman army in a battle in the 490s B.C. , and they brought word of the Roman victory back to the city.
The myths and legends about Roman history celebrate the virtues that Romans especially prized: duty, self-sacrifice, honor, bravery, and piety.
Roman deities, too, tended to represent virtues, without the all-too-human weaknesses and vices of the Greek gods.
A Greek historian named Dionysius of Halicarnassus recognized this difference when he wrote that the Roman deities were more moral than the Greek deities because the Romans had taken only what was good from the old stories and left out all the disgraceful parts.
Legacy. The influence of Roman mythology extended farther and lasted longer than the Roman empire.
Statues, temples, and other structures associated with Roman gods and myths can be found far from the ancient capital.
An old mosaic in Britain, for example, shows the she-wolf feeding Romulus and Remus.
It is a reminder of the days when Rome ruled Britain and a mark of how far Roman mythology spread.
Read more: http://www.mythencyclopedia.com/Pr-Sa/Roman-Mythology.html#ixzz5i6e7xEIJ
Athena was the daughter of Zeus and Metis. But there was a problem, Zeus checked up on Metis and found out that if he had a son by her this son would be mightier than him (you know, the same way he was greater than his daddy and his daddy was greater than his grandpa).
So he tricked Metis and ended up swallowing her when she turned into a fly and figured she was no longer a threat.
However, Metis was pregnant with Athena and when Athena was born, this turned into quite a problem.
Soon Zeus was plagued with killer headaches and he ran to Hephaestus (Smith God) and begged him to open his head.
Hephaestus did as he was told, and out popped Athena, full grown and ready for battle!
Other versions peg her father as Pallas (who later attempted to ravage her and she killed him without hesitation and took his name and skin).
Some say her daddy was Itonus, a King of Iton.
Some say her biological father was Poseidon, but that she begged to be adopted by Zeus.
No matter what the story is, she never has a real mother.
Athena's birth "is a desperate theological expedient to rid her of matriarchal conditions" says J. E. Harrison.
She was the Goddess of Wisdom, and the daughter of the Titaness who basically personified it.
By having her born only from Zeus, it gave males authority and power over something that had previously only been a female realm.
Zeus swallowed Metis, and so was able to assimilate her crafty wisdom.
Athena did not have any loyalty to a mother figure, which probably played a major role in her self-description as misogynist.
Athena was, as I said earlier, the Goddess of more things than I can shake a stick at.
But they can be pretty easily summarized into three things. She was the Goddess of Wisdom, Goddess of Military Victory (war with good tactics and winning strategies, not just fighting, like Ares), and Goddess of Crafts.
I need to elaborate a little more on that last one, just so you can understand her coolness.
Athena invented the flute, the trumpet, the earthenware pot, the plough, the rake, the ox-yoke, the horse-bridle, the chariot, and the ship.
Now that's just the "guy" stuff.
She was also the first teacher of the science of numbers, and all women's arts: weaving, cooking, and spinning.
If you are looking through paintings and you think you might have found something that is Athena, here is some of her iconography: the aegis (shield/fringed cloak, sometimes with the head of Medusa on it), a shield (again, sometimes with the head of Medusa), bronze armor, a helmet (this is very common), and a spear (also very common).
Athena was also one of the three Virgin Goddesses on Olympus, something you might want to read more about.
I am telling this story here (briefly) because it is important to Athena (I think), but there is a much better version of this, for your reading pleasure, in the Myth Pages.
So! Wayyyyyy back in the day the city of Athens belonged to Poseidon.
He had claimed it by coming in, striking a rock with his trident and establishing a spring.
But the spring only gushed salt water, and so it wasn't very useful, even if it was kind of pretty.
Many years later, during the reign of Cecrops (a half-snake dude who was the king there), Athena came in and planted an olive tree, thus claiming the land for herself.
Poseidon was totally pissed off, and challenged Athena to mortal combat (he would have got his ass kicked) and Athena was about to accept except that Zeus stepped in and stopped them (he probably didn't want Poseidon killed). Instead they went before the Gods with Cecrops presenting the evidence.
The Gods voted.
All the males voted for Poseidon and all the Goddesses voted for Athena, except for Zeus - who refused to give his opinion.
Therefore, Athena won the decision by one vote.
Poseidon was pissed, and - like the stupid boy he was - threw a temper tantrum and flooded another one of Athena's cities (called Athenae on the Thriasian Plain).
So Athena moved to Athens, took residence there and named that city after herself too.
But, to help Poseidon's ego, the women of Athens were deprived of their vote, and men were no longer to carry their mothers' names.
Athena was loved by most everyone, and was a very loving person herself.
But she loved everyone in the filial sense (like a sister), and was completely uninterested in sex.
There were tons of Gods who would have given their eyes to marry her, but she was completely disgusted by the idea.
Once, during the Trojan War, Athena had to ask Hephaestus to make her a set of armor and weapons.
She offered to pay him, but Hephaestus insisted that his only payment would be love.
She completely missed the sexual innuendo and agreed.
When she came to Hephaestus' smithy to pick up her stuff, he came at her and tried to ravage her.
Obviously that didn't happen.
Don't think to badly of Hephaestus though, it really wasn't all his fault.
Poseidon had played a joke on him and told him that Athena was on her way to the smithy hoping to make violent love to him.
Athena totally ran away from the unfortunate Hephaestus, but she didn't move quite fast enough and he ejaculated on her leg.
Athena was completely grossed out, and wiped it off with a piece of wool that she then dropped on the Earth.
That would be Gaia, and she was fertilized by the semen on the wool.
Gaia was revolted at the very idea of it, and so she refused to bring the child up.
Athena was fine with this and decided to bring the kid, who she named Erichthonius ("Earth-born"), up herself.
There is more to this story (involving love, suicide, and people getting turned into stone), but if you want to know it, you better check it out in the Myth Pages.
Unfortunately it is not there yet, so you're just gonna have to wait.
In general, Athena was a really nice goddess.
She was very modest, like Artemis, but much more generous.
Athena, like Artemis, was surprised by an enraptured onlooker while bathing, but she didn't kill him or transform him or rip him to shreds or anything.
She laid her hands over his eyes and blinded him, but gave him inward sight and the ability to understand the birds' signs to tell the future.
As a result, Teiresias (that was his name) was highly respected and revered from then on.
So that wasn't bad at all.
Athena was, as I said, generally cool.
But every once in a while she got all pissy (as gods tend to get) and lashed out.
Once, was a rather minor incident when she invented this double stemmed flute.
She was really excited about it, and went around playing it everywhere.
That is, until someone happened to mention that she looked absolutely ridiculous with her cheeks puffed out like that to play.
She was furious and threw the flute onto the ground where it was picked up by Marsyas, but that's another story.
The one time Athena really lost it for something petty was in the story of Arachne, and that story isn't even really Greek.
Arachne was this Lydian princess who was a fabulous weaver.
She was so good that people said she was better than Athena.
Athena heard and was all like, "Excuuuuuuse me?
Please girl, I was weaving before humans existed," and challenged Arachne to a weave-off.
They both made beautiful tapestries, and both were completely flawless, except Arachne's made fun of the Gods.
Athena was bitter and very pissed and ripped Arachne's work to shreds in a cold, vengeful rage.
Arachne totally didn't mean to upset her heroine and hung herself, but Athena remembered herself, and saved the girl by turning her into a spider and giving her the ability to weave forever.
In a variation on the same theme, Servius reports that Athena loved this Attic chick, but the girl (Myrmex) went out and betrayed Athena's trust by claiming to have invented the plow herself, when it was really Athena.
See, if they were both mortal, there would have been all this drama, someone would have gone home crying ... but Athena just turned the girl into an ant for being so presumptuous and that was the end of that.
Athena is often referred to in mythology, but if you don't know her names, sometimes these references can be hard to catch.
She is often called Pallas, or Pallas Athene.
This name comes from a childhood friend she had, a nymph, who she accidentally killed when they were having a mock battle.
Athena was distraught and carried her friend's name with her forever more.
The name, Pallas, means Maiden.
And as Athena is often referred to in this form - which can refer to her Virginity, her Youthful Strength, or her Independence - you should definitely know what it means.
Often you will find references to her as "gray-eyed", a reference which seems linked only to Athena and may have something to do with her wisdom.
There is one weird reference by Pausanias about Athena having blue eyes.
That comes from a Libyan story that Athena was the daughter of Poseidon and Lake Tritonis, and because of that has blue eyes like her father.
But this story is not generally accepted, and you aren't going to find a blue-eyed Athena anywhere except on one statue next to a specific Temple of Hephaestus, so don't worry about it.
Sometimes she is called "bright-eyed" but that is common to all Gods.
In Cylarabes there is an Athena called Pania.
This name, I am guessing, comes from her discovery of the flute.
In Athens they called her Athena Ergane (Worker) and were very devoted to her because of her crafts.
The story of her patronship of Athens is really cool, and I told it above.
She was called Athena Aethyia (Gannet, a type of bird), and I don't know why yet, but there was a Rock dedicated to this where the hero Pandion died. Tritogeneia was another name of Athena's.
It could have come from three different sources.
Geneia means "born" in Greek, and so it could be a reference to the idea that Athena was born from the Lake Tritonis.
It also could have been from tritô, the Aeolian word for "head", therefore "head-born" - which would make a lot of sense.
The other idea is that the trito was from the root meaning "three" and that she was the third child (she was the third Olympian daughter of Zeus after Artemis and Apollo).
https://www.paleothea.com/SortaSingles/Athena.html
The painted replica of a c. 490 B.C. archer (at the Parthenon in Athens)
White marble has been the norm ever since the Renaissance, when classical antiquities first began to emerge from the earth.
The sculpture of Trojan priest Laocoön and his two sons struggling with serpents sent, it is said, by the sea god Poseidon (discovered in 1506 in Rome and now at the Vatican Museums) is one of the greatest early finds.
Knowing no better, artists in the 16th century took the bare stone at face value.
Michelangelo and others emulated what they believed to be the ancient aesthetic, leaving the stone of most of their statues its natural color.
Thus they helped pave the way for neo-Classicism, the lily-white style that to this day remains our paradigm for Greek art.
By the early 19th century, the systematic excavation of ancient Greek and Roman sites was bringing forth great numbers of statues, and there were scholars on hand to document the scattered traces of their multicolored surfaces.
Some of these traces are still visible to the naked eye even today, though much of the remaining color faded, or disappeared entirely, once the statues were again exposed to light and air.
Some of the pigment was scrubbed off by restorers whose acts, while well intentioned, were tantamount to vandalism.
In the 18th century, the pioneering archaeologist and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann chose to view the bare stone figures as pure—if you will, Platonic—forms, all the loftier for their austerity.
"The whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is as well," he wrote. "Color contributes to beauty, but it is not beauty.
Color should have a minor part in the consideration of beauty, because it is not [color] but structure that constitutes its essence."
Against growing evidence to the contrary, Winckelmann's view prevailed.
For centuries to come, antiquarians who envisioned the statues in color were dismissed as eccentrics, and such challenges as they mounted went ignored.
No longer; German archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann is on a mission.
Armed with high-intensity lamps, ultraviolet light, cameras, plaster casts and jars of costly powdered minerals, he has spent the past quarter century trying to revive the peacock glory that was Greece.
He has dramatized his scholarly findings by creating full-scale plaster or marble copies hand-painted in the same mineral and organic pigments used by the ancients: green from malachite, blue from azurite, yellow and ocher from arsenic compounds, red from cinnabar, black from burned bone and vine.
Call them gaudy, call them garish, his scrupulous color reconstructions made their debut in 2003 at the Glyptothek museum in Munich, which is devoted to Greek and Roman statuary.
Displayed side by side with the placid antiquities of that fabled collection, the replicas shocked and dazzled those who came to see them.
As Time magazine summed up the response, "The exhibition forces you to look at ancient sculpture in a totally new way."
"If people say, ‘What kitsch,' it annoys me," Brinkmann says, "but I'm not surprised."
Actually, the public took to his replicas, and invitations to show them elsewhere quickly poured in.
In recent years, Brinkmann's slowly growing collection has been more or less constantly on the road—from Munich to Amsterdam, Copenhagen to Rome—jolting viewers at every turn.
London's The Guardian reported that the show received an "enthusiastic, if bewildered" reception at the Vatican Museums.
"Il Messagero found the exhibition ‘disorientating, shocking, but often splendid.'
Corriere della Sera's critic felt that ‘suddenly, a world we had been used to regarding as austere and reflective has been turned on its head to become as jolly as a circus.'"
At the Istanbul Archaeology Museum, Brinkmann's painted reconstruction of sections of the so-called Alexander Sarcophagus (named not for the king buried in it but for his illustrious friend Alexander the Great, who is depicted in its sculpted frieze) was unveiled beside the breathtaking original; German television and print media spread the news around the globe.
In Athens, top officials of the Greek government turned out for the opening when the collection went on view—and this was the ultimate honor—at the National Archaeological Museum.
My own introduction to Brinkmann's work came about three years ago, when I was traveling in Europe and the image of a reproduction of a Greek tombstone in a German newspaper caught my eye. The deceased, Aristion, was depicted on the stone as a bearded warrior at the height of his prowess.
He stood in profile, his skin tanned, his feet bare, decked out in a blue helmet, blue shinguards edged in yellow, and yellow armor over a filmy-looking white chiton with soft pleats, scalloped edges and a leafy-green border.
His smiling lips were painted crimson.
Bemused by the image and intrigued by the text that accompanied it, I e-mailed the Glyptothek in Munich.
Brinkmann himself replied promptly with an invitation for a private demonstration of his methodology.
We met at the museum soon after.
Brinkmann led me first to a sculpture of a battle scene from the Temple of Aphaia (c. 490 B.C.) on the island of Aegina, one of the Glyptothek's prime attractions.
Within the ensemble was the original sculpture of the kneeling Trojan archer whose colorfully painted replica Brinkmann had set up for the photo shoot on the Acropolis.
Unlike most of the other warriors in the scene, the archer is fully dressed; his Scythian cap (a soft, close-fitting headdress with a distinctive, forward-curling crown) and his brightly patterned outfit indicate that he is Eastern.
These and other details point to his identification as Paris, the Trojan (hence Eastern) prince whose abduction of Helen launched the Trojan War.
At Brinkmann's suggestion, I had come to the museum late in the day, when the light was low.
His main piece of equipment was far from high tech: a hand-held spotlight.
Under "extreme raking light" (the technical term for light that falls on a surface from the side at a very low angle), I could see faint incisions that are otherwise difficult or impossible to detect with the naked eye.
On the vest of the archer, the spotlight revealed a geometric border that Brinkmann had reproduced in color.
Elsewhere on the vest, he pointed out a diminutive beast of prey, scarcely an inch in length, endowed with the body of a jungle cat and a majestic set of wings.
"Yes!" he said with delight. "A griffin!"
The surface of the sculpture was once covered in brilliant colors, but time has erased them.
Oxidation and dirt have obscured or darkened any traces of pigment that still remain.
Physical and chemical analyses, however, have helped Brinkmann establish the original colors with a high degree of confidence, even where the naked eye can pick out nothing distinct.
Next, Brinkman shone an ultraviolet light on the archer's divine protectress, Athena, revealing so-called "color shadows" of pigments that had long since worn away.
Some pigments wear off more quickly than others, so that the underlying stone is exposed to wind and weather at different rates and thus also erodes at different rates.
The seemingly blank surface lit up in a pattern of neatly overlapping scales, each decorated with a little dart—astonishing details given that only birds nesting behind the sculpture would have seen them.
A few weeks later, I visited the Brinkmann home, a short train ride from Munich.
There I learned that new methods have greatly improved the making of sculptural reproductions.
In the past, the process required packing a statue in plaster to create a mold, from which a copy could then be cast.
But the direct application of plaster can damage precious color traces.
Now, 3-D laser scanning can produce a copy without contact with the original.
As it happened, Brinkmann's wife, archaeologist Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann, was just then applying color to a laser reproduction of a sculpted head of the Roman emperor Caligula.
I was immediately taken by how lifelike Caligula looked, with healthy skin tone—no easy thing to reproduce.
Koch-Brinkmann's immediate concern that day was the emperor's hair, carved in close-cropped curls, which she was painting a chocolaty brown over black underpainting (for volume) with lighter color accents (to suggest movement and texture).
The brown irises of the emperor's eyes were darkest at the rim, and the inky black of each pupil was made lustrous by a pinprick of white.
Such realistic detail is a far cry from the rendering of Paris the archer.
In circa 490 B.C., when it was sculpted, statues were decorated in flat colors, which were applied in a paint-by-numbers fashion.
But as time passed, artists taught themselves to enhance effects of light and shadow, much as Koch-Brinkmann was doing with Caligula, created some five centuries after the archer.
The Brinkmanns had also discovered evidence of shading and hatching on the "Alexander Sarcophagus" (created c. 320 B.C.)—a cause for considerable excitement.
"It's a revolution in painting comparable to Giotto's in the frescoes of Padua," says Brinkmann.
Brinkmann has never proposed taking a paintbrush to an original antiquity.
"No," he stresses, "I don't advocate that.
We're too far away.
The originals are broken into too many fragments.
What's preserved isn't preserved well enough."
Besides, modern taste is happy with fragments and torsos.
We've come a long way since the end of the 18th century, when factories would take Roman fragments and piece them together, replacing whatever was missing.
Viewers at the time felt the need of a coherent image, even if it meant fusing ancient pieces that belonged to different originals.
"If it were a question of retouching, that would be defensible," Brinkmann says, "but as archaeological objects, ancient statues are sacrosanct."
Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/true-colors-17888/#VOqIvyk2E4BTljiE.99
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When you look in the mirror, the image you see looks a lot like you—not exactly the same, because when you raise your right hand, your mirror-self raises its left.
What’s more, the mirror image is merely an assemblage of reflected light, without a physical body behind it.
Despite these differences, you can see an important connection between you and your reflection.
This type of mirror relation is a familiar and powerful form of symmetry.
We can say that a Valentine heart is symmetrical because the left side is a reflection of the right.
But the symmetry of your mirror image is different and deeper.
A heart is symmetrical because the left and right side happen to have a similar shape.
The symmetry between you and your reflection is due to the laws of physics.
The nature of light requires your reflection to be symmetrical to you.
It is an example of a powerful and subtle type of symmetry known as duality.
Duality is a connection between two things where the properties of one defines the properties of the other.
For example, imagine a book lying on a table, with a nail taped to its front cover, pointing up.
No matter how you hold the book, the nail will point outward from its cover.
If you know what direction the nail is pointing, you also know the orientation of the book.
If you know the orientation of the book, you know where the nail is pointing.
Thus, there is a duality between the nail and book.
So does the the nail determine the orientation of the book, or does the book determine the direction of the nail?
That seems to be a nonsensical question.
The duality between nail and book isn’t about one object determining the orientation of the other, but about the connection that exists between two of the nail-and-book’s fundamental properties, neither of which is caused by the other.
You could say the same thing about quantum theory when someone asks if light is a particle or a wave.
The duality between particles and waves is a central part of quantum theory.
Light is clearly a wave: It has a wavelength that determines its color, and light waves can interact with each other to produce things like lasers.
Light is also clearly a particle: It interacts with atoms as discrete photons; a single photon can be deflected like a billiard ball.
Particle-wave duality means that quantum objects like light have a symmetry between their particle and wave aspects.
They are particles with wave properties and waves with particle properties.
They are both, and they are neither.
The power of quantum theory is that you don’t need to distinguish between particles and waves.
They are simply quantum objects with a duality between their particle and wave natures.
Perhaps the most powerful duality in physics is known as the holographic principle.
This principle is often misrepresented as the idea that the universe is actually a hologram, but it is more accurate to say there is a duality between a volume of space and the surface enclosing that volume.
The holographic principle states that all the information contained within a region of space can be determined by the information on the surface containing it.
Mathematically, this means the volume of space can be represented as a hologram of the surface, hence the idea’s name.
This idea is less crazy than it sounds at first. Imagine a hotel with a guard at the entrance.
Since everyone entering or leaving the hotel must pass the guard, he can count the number of people entering or leaving to know how many people are in the hotel.
Thus information gathered by the guard (at the surface) tells us about the number within (the volume).
This example is obviously much simpler than considering all of the information in a three-dimensional space, but it illustrates how this information could be imprinted on the surface.)
The holographic principle extends that idea to volumes and surfaces in general, and it applies to everything from black holes to cosmology.
With a black hole, for example, we can’t observe the interior because the gravity near a black hole is too strong for light to escape.
But the black hole has a “surface” known as the event horizon, and we could observe everything outside of that.
So, from information near the event horizon, we can understand the interior of a black hole.
Does that mean that the universe is a hologram? Not quite.
It means there is a duality: Ours is a Universe with hologram properties, or a hologram with Universe properties.
Within the mathematical formalism, you don’t need to distinguish between one or the other, which is what gives the holographic principle its power.
Of course we came to this idea by looking in a mirror.
Does the duality between us and our reflection mean that the image in the mirror is as real as us?
In a way it does.
Suppose the mirror-you were real (not just an image of you in a mirror, but a physical, mirrored version of yourself), and you merely the reflection.
The meaning of left and right would be reversed, and the dials on your watch would move widdershins rather than clockwise, but the underlying physics would be the same.
The duality between you and your reflection means we could just as easily describe the mirror Universe as we do our own.
Brian Koberlein is an astrophysicist and physics professor at Rochester Institute of Technology. He writes about astronomy and astrophysics on his blog One Universe at a Time. You can also find him on Twitter @BrianKoberlein.
http://nautil.us/blog/what-it-means-to-live-in-a-holographic-universe
| Age: | 34 |
| Height: | 5 Feet 1 Inches (154 cm) |
| Weight: | 115 lbs (52 kg) |
| Body Type: | Average |
| From City: | Anaheim |
| Country: | United States |
| Religion: | Catholic |
| Education: | Some college |
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| Smoker: | Non-smoker |
| Drinker: | Not drink at all |
| Marital Status: | Separated |
| My goal: | Đã từ lâu tôi chẳng biết mục tiêu của cuộc đời mình... |
| Free Time: | Tập yoga, và chăm sóc nhà cửa |
| I Am: | Tôi là người rất bình thường, ko có gì đặc biệt. Nhưng tôi rất yêu yoga.... |
| Looking For: | Tôi
ko tìm người yêu, cũng chằng tìm người tình. Cái tôi thật sự thiếu đó
là một người bạn, một người bạn đúng nghĩa về mọi mặt..... Cám ơn đã đọc
hết phần giới thiệu của tôi.... |
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