Lada and her daughter Lela in Baltic mythology are deities that connect soil and the sky and nurture the earth. Their names up to this day are carried through Lithuanian folk song Sutartinės. Today the meaning of the word leliumai deriving from Lela’s name is still being carried through song as an unconscious chant to the deity.
Thesmophoria began as a fertility rite. It dated back to pre-Homeric times, a ritual women conducted in the late autumn when seed was to be sown. Demeter, goddess of the earth, presided as divine patron. The festival's story came from Demeter's burial and mourning for her dead daughter, Persephone; the name came from its main action, that of laying things in the earth (thesmoi in Greek means "laying down" in the broad sense of laying down the law). Women prepared for the Thesmophoria with a ritual act making use of pigs - treated in Greek mythology as animals of sacred value. At the end of each spring, they took slaughtered pigs down into pits, or megara, dug into the ground; here the dead animals were left to putrefy.
On the first of the three days of the Thesmophoria, women went into the pits containing the moist remains of the pigs, and mixed grain seed into the carcasses. This day was a matter of "going" (kathodos) and "rising up" (anodos), for the women rose from the cave to enter into special huts where they sat and slept on the ground. On the second day, the women fasted, to commemorate Persephone's death; they mourned by swearing and cursing. On the third day, they retrieved the grain-rich piglets, and this stinking mush was sown into the earth later as a kind of sacred compost.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula, despite operating in Victorian London, sleeps in crates of soil brought from his native Romania. This soil dust follows the vampire and settles in the spaces he inhabits. It is advised to sterilise the Romanian soil in order to disinfect the place of vampyric refuge and the source of their primal power.
The Malleus Maleficarum 1489 treatise on witchcraft known as the Hammer of the Witches describes the emergence of a demon or vampire who’s body, although arising from air, possesses an earthy quality and a density of soil.
Demonology was rooted in medieval Europe; and the creation of the social stereotype of the witch, a stereotype that was the keystone of an ideological edifice for political persecution, was developed by the Catholic Church in an epoch marked by great political and social upheaval. Although this stereotype had been elaborated in a narrow, local context, once developed it acquired a life of its own. While the formal theological construct shaped the official rules by which orthodoxy and heresy were to be judged, the stereotype penetrated and became a part of European folk belief, of the popular culture. It became a standard for judgment and a cultural evaluation which was applied outside the boundaries of the specific context in which it had been conceived. The Spanish conquest of Peru thus transported the devil, and his ally the witch, to the Andes.
Confronted with the startlingly different cultures of the New World, the Spanish Crown and Catholic religious authorities began the process of creating institutions that would bind these newly discovered lands to the mother country. An integral part of the colonization process entailed the campaign waged by the Church to destroy indigenous religion. Although the clerics who accompanied the first conquistadors and administrators might have engaged in disputes over the nature of the indigenous soul, and over the theological justification of conquest, almost all agreed that the devil was flourishing in the Andes. How else to explain the devotion displayed by these people toward the hills, trees, stones, the sun, the moon, rivers and springs.
Soil as the upper layer of the Earth could be compared to skin insofar as it is porous and vulnerable in both directions. A permeable membrane that consists of a mixture of clay, rock particles and organic remains of plants and animals.
The smell of wet soil is also known to stimulate a visceral response in people.The odour derived from oils exuded by certain plants during dry periods is absorbed by clay-based soils and rocks. During rain, the oil is released into the air along with another compound, geosmin, a metabolic by-product of certain actinobacteria, which is emitted by wet soil, producing a distinctive scent.
Petrichor - from Greek: ‘stone liquid which flows in the veins of gods’; is the molecular moment of the landscape entering the breathing body. Its release into the air ensures rainfall following a drought. The emotional response people are said to have to petrichor opens a vast field of speculation on the inducement of the pleasurable sensation by this particular odor. Thus, petrichor becomes metaphoric of the weirdness that inhabits human and nonhuman bodies as it does the environment, imbricating them in complex relations that reveal their desire of co-constitution.
Hell, hello anyway, old friend from the mirror, you said, and you understood what she meant and walked rapidly off into the woods. A sea of phantoms once more surrounded you. They no longer disturbed you. You knew that — 1 is no less real than 1; that wherever you find 1,2,3,4,you also find—1, —2, —3.
Achieving immortality and resurrection of all people who ever lived are two inseparable goals, according to Nikolai Fyodorov. Immortality is impossible, both ethically and physically, without resurrection. We cannot allow our ancestors, who gave us life and culture, to remain buried, or our relatives and friends to die. The complete victory will be achieved only when everyone is resurrected and transformed to enjoy immortal life.
In rural tradition, on Thursdays or most notably on October 31, the ancestral ghosts or dziady would pay the living a visit. In preparation the bathhouse was heated, the number of chairs, shirts and towels set in the bathhouse equaled the number of invited souls. After bathing, feasting took place. An equivalent number of table settings was to be laid out. The foods would be dark in colour and aromatic, they were to resemble the soil. Even babies were kept awake. The presence of Death was immediately announced to all domestic animals, bees were informed by a rhythmic knock on the hive. Attentiveness was endorsed, silence ruled the house, doors and windows remained open. Additional food was left at the crossroads and was handed out to the poorer members of society as dziad simultaneously meant a 'poor person', leaving only little linguistic disjunction between being ancestor or family, and being poor.
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Oh, rise, from the earth,
From the dark soil;
What legs, poor me, can I use to lift myself, ah,
Oh, what arms to lean upon;
Ah, my soul, my little heart.
Oh, make your fingernails into spades,
Your palms into shovels;
Oh, throw the soil onto one side,
And the slab to the other.
Turn your hands into shovels.
Dig yourself out. Return to me.
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Thus goes the Greek Mariola lament song of longing or xenitia: a sense of catastrophic loss characterized by a frenzied yearning for home. Every year the people of Epirus (Northern Greece) hold panegyria, multiday, music-intensive events in which they mourn their losses and celebrate what remains. Panegyria are religious festivals, in that they are tied to the patron saint of a village church and are held on a day dedicated to honoring the life of that saint, as determined by the Greek Orthodox calendar. There is speculation that the panegyria have pagan roots, that the priests simply assimilated them. Regardless, panegyria have always aimed to treat xenitia with a hefty dose of parea, a company of friends. Panegyria are a way for the village to pay homage not just to its saints but also to its missing (those who left, those who are otherwise exiled) and then to exult in the remaining togetherness, however fleeting it might be.
A sense of the eerie seldom clings to enclosed and inhabited domestic spaces; we find the eerie more readily in landscapes partially emptied of the human. “What happened to produce these ruins, this disappearance? What kind of entity was involved? What kind of thing was it that emitted such an eerie cry?
Amilcar Cabral: The conflict between lithos (rock) and atmos (climate) is due to the antagonisms between rock and climate – if we admitted the existence of intention in natural phenomena, we could argue that this ‘opposition’ demands that the rock transforms itself in order to subsist. Neither the rock disappears completely, nor the climatic phenomena cease to operate – rather the rock gets integrated into a new form of negation-existence.
This observation – intention in natural phenomena – can be read as an urge to allow for a kind of rock agency: the rock/soil as carrier of a prose, a narrative, the substrate where everything is inscribed. This echoes what is described as a ‘geophysical force’; this, he writes, ‘is what in part we are in our collective existence – [it] is neither a subject nor an object.
Judith Butler makes a case for queer ecology, because she shows how heterosexist gender performance produces a metaphysical manifold that separates “inside” from “outside.” The inside-outside manifold is fundamental for thinking the environment as a metaphysical, closed system—Nature. This is impossible to construe without violence.
She looks at the paintings, she looks into them. Every one of them is a picture of Lucy. You can’t see her exactly, but she’s there, in behind the pink stone island or the one behind that. In the picture of the cliff she is hidden by the clutch of fallen rocks toward the bottom; in the one of the river shore she is crouching beneath the overturned canoe. In the yellow autumn woods she’s behind the tree that cannot be seen because of the other trees, over beside the blue sliver of pond; but if you walked into the picture and found the tree, it would be the wrong one, because the right one would be farther on.
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