scholarly journals Ghost Theme is Ancient Kannada and Tamil texts

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 68-74
Author(s):  
Jayalalitha
Keyword(s):  
Tenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Evil Spirit ◽  
Late Period ◽  
Technical Term ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Evil Spirits ◽  
The Dead

As members of Dravidian family of Languages, Kannada and Tamil are close to each other. Apart from linguistic and grammatical similarities there are comparable elements in literary texts also. There are similar motifs and themes in Ancient Kannada and Tamil literary works. Though a few studies have concentrated in the similarities of Kannada and Tamil grammars, very little is done on the similar features of literary works. This paper makes an attempt to bring out a surprising motif of ghosts that occur in Ancient Kannada and Tamil texts. Tolkappiyam is an early grammatical work in Tamil and date of which is believed to be from 1 to 3 AD. This book speaks of a concept of ‘Thodakkaanji’. This concept is explained by commentators as not allowing the evil spirit to eat the body of the hero who died during a war. The same concept, though the technical term to denote the concept is absent, is present in the Kannada text ‘Sahasa Bheema Vijaya or Gadhayuddha’ by the Ranna, who belongs to the tenth century. While the theme of the narration centers around the battle of maces between Bhima and Duryodhana on the last day of the eighteen-day war, the poet uses a technique similar to flashbacks. This technic we can see in Tamil as a “Singanokku” which is used in grammar text to explain the ‘noorpaa’. Ranna the Kannada poet gives the details of an incident of the war field where the dead leader’s body is guarded from evil spirits/ ghosts by the fellow warriors whose wounds are less fatal. Tolkappiyam is an earlier work and Ranna’s work is late period. But that the particular theme of Thodakkanchi occurs in the Kannada and Tamil contexts merits mention and study a rare example which has not been brought out by anybody so far. Such similar points of comparison are brought out elaborately in this article.

scholarly journals Reading Discourses of Power and Violence in Emerging Kashmiri Literature in English: The Collaborator and Curfewed Night

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-49
Author(s):  
Amrita Ghosh
Keyword(s):  
Literary Texts ◽  
Bare Life ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Conflict Zone ◽  
Living Dead ◽  
Dead Bodies ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Forms Of Violence

This essay studies two literary texts on Kashmir, The Collaborator (2011) by Mirza Waheed and Curfewed Night (2010) by Basharat Peer and analyzes the discourses of power, overt forms of violence that the works present. It first contextualizes events from the last three years that have occurred in Kashmir to present forms of violence Kashmiri subjects undergo in the quotidian of life. The essay, thus, argues that the selected literary works represent Kashmir as a unique postcolonial conflict zone that defies an easy terminology to understand the onslaught of violence, and the varied forms of power. As analyzed in the article, one finds a curious merging of biopolitics and necropolitics that constructs the characters as “living dead” within this emergency zone. For this, the theoretical trajectory of the essay is mapped out to show the transition from Foucault and Agamben’s idea of biopolitics to Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics. Thereafter, essay concludes how the two texts illustrate Agamben’s notion of the bare life is not enough to understand subjects living in this unique postcoloniality. The presence of death and the dead bodies go beyond bare life and shows how that bodies become significant signifiers that construct a varied notion of agency.

scholarly journals The Evolution of the Mythological Image of the Bear in the Culture of the Eastern Slavs

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikhail Kozlov ◽  
Snezhana Shendrikova
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Human Race ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Evil Spirits ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Archaeological Excavations

The subject of this study is the evolution of the image of the bear among the Eastern Slavs between the tenth and seventeenth centuries. The authors maintain that totemic ideas about bears as creatures that escort the souls of the deceased to the kingdom of the dead began to spread in the East Slavic lands only from the mid-tenth century. Such ideas were influenced by the beliefs and cults of the neighbouring Finno-Ugric and Baltic tribes and were not characteristic of traditional East Slavic paganism. Based on ancient Russian writings and archaeological excavations into ancient pagan sanctuaries, the authors outline the origin and formation of the myth of the supernatural ancestor bear, the protector of the human race, in all East Slavic lands. With the help of archaeological and zoological materials from the excavations of Russian settlements from the pre-Mongol era, as well as several ancient Russian written documents, the authors determine the period of transformation in the folk mythological consciousness of the Eastern Slavs of the mythological image of the bear from the ruler of destinies and guide in the kingdom of the dead into a forest demon. This paper emphasises that the myth of the supernatural ancestor bear gave rise to the custom of taking trained bears around Russian cities to rid them of evil spirits, as well as folk divination. The authors conclude that in the minds of these ancestors, the image of the bear went through several stages – from the idea of the bear as a tribal totem to the image of a benevolent spirit, a protector of people from evil spirits. The ancient pagan ideas about the bear as a deity remained part of the worldview of the East Slavic peoples until the early twentieth century, finding their reflection in folk fairytales, legends, and traditions.

Writing and the Tomb

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Suriano
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Funerary Inscriptions

Hebrew funerary inscriptions began to appear in Judah during late Iron IIB. These inscriptions are relatively unique in that they are written on, or inside, tombs. But they also include amulets that adorned the body during burial. The funerary inscriptions emerged at a stage when the bench tomb had fully developed, and their writings reveal multiple concerns regarding the dead. The Hebrew inscriptions stress the imperative of safeguarding the dead inside the tomb on multiple levels. The interred are identified by name, and their place inside the tomb is described. All of these concerns relate to the existence of the dead and the preservation of their memory. These concerns are also consistent with blessings and curses that are often inscribed on the tomb, which indicate that Yahweh’s power could extend over the dead as well as the living.

Unqualified Pleasure

2018 ◽  
pp. 791-808
Author(s):  
Branka Arsić
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Dead

Everything that Poe wrote is touched by the question of life. Most notably, dead women come back to life, the living switch personhoods with the dead, and hearts dismembered from the body keep on beating. Such existential shifts were typically interpreted as Poe’s take on the Gothic, his engagement with the supernatural, or, as political allegories. Declining to follow any of those directions, this chapter will take Poe’s ideas about life literally and nontrivially. Closely discussing such texts as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Mesmeric Revelation,” and Eureka, the essay will investigate Poe’s continuous insistence that nothing is inanimate and immaterial, as well as his claim that life can’t be understood according to an anthropomorphic model. Reading his literature against the backdrop of the scientific treatises on life and vitalism that influenced him, this chapter will seek to explain what is at stake in Poe’s statement that even “unorganized matter” is alive and sensuous, endowed with capacity for pain and joy.

Shakespeare’s Dancing Bodies

2019 ◽  
pp. 172-196
Author(s):  
Brandon Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
The Body ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Somatic Psychology ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Early Modern Times

Romeo’s well-known excuse that he cannot dance because he has soles of lead is demonstrative of the autonomous volitional quality Shakespeare ascribes to body parts, his utilization of humoral somatic psychology, and the horizontally divided body according to early modern dance practice and theory. This chapter considers the autonomy of and disagreement between the body parts and the unruliness of the humors within Shakespeare’s dramas, particularly Romeo and Juliet. An understanding of the body as a house of conflicting parts can be applied to the feet of the dancing body in early modern times, as is evinced not only by literary texts, but dance manuals as well. The visuality dominating the dance floor provided opportunity for social advancement as well as ridicule, as contemporary sources document. Dance practice is compared with early modern swordplay in their shared approaches to the training and social significance of bodily proportion and rhythm.

Specific Susceptibility to HCN and the amount of HCN recovered from Fumigated Insects

1951 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 399-418 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Pradhan ◽  
S. C. Bhatia
Keyword(s):  
Body Weight ◽  
Water Content ◽  
Relative Position ◽  
Surface Resistance ◽  
Internal Resistance ◽  
Effective Resistance ◽  
The Body ◽  
Effective Dosage ◽  
Adult Females ◽  
The Dead

The relationship was studied between susceptibility of a number of different species of insects to HCN fumigation and the recovery of HCN from them immediately after fumigation.The test insects used were Tribolium castaneum, seventh stage caterpillars of Corcyra cephalonica, first-and second-instar nymphs of Drosicha sp., third-and fourthinstar nymphs of Drosicha sp. and adult females of Drosicha sp.The apparatus and methods used in the fumigation and in the recovery of HCN from the fumigated insects are fully described.Preliminary expsriments showed that the processes of distillation and redistillation did not affect the recovery of HCN but that the result obtained for recovery from distillation could be affected if some volatile reducing substance were produced and carried over to the distillate. It was found that this did actually take place in the case of one of the test insects—T. castaneum—but that redistillation got rid of the impurity.In the main experiments it was shown that, on the assumption that the concentration of HCN to which insects are exposed is the effective dosage, the susceptibility of the test insects varied in the following descending order : firstand second-stage nymphs of Drosicha sp. > third- and fourth-stage nymphs of Drosicha sp.>C. cephalonica> T. castaneum>the adult females of Drosicha sp.When the same insects were arranged in descending order of the quantities of HCN recovered per 100 gm. of body weight, the order was identical except for the nymphs of Drosicha sp. which occupied a different relative position. The two categories of nymphs of Drosicha sp. were found to occupy a different relative position again with regard to the other three test insects when exposed to a superlethal concentration and assessed for recovery of HCN per 100 gr. body weight.Parallel batches of T. castaneum and C. cephalonica were fumigated and the HCN was recovered from the dead and survivors. More HCN was recovered from the dead insects than from those that survived.Both recovery and sorption of HCN were estimated separately in parallel batches of insects (adult females of Drosicha sp. and C. cephalonica). Recovery was found to be less than sorption showing that a part of the HCN absorbed is converted into a non-recoverable state. Further, that the weight of HCN sorbed per gram body weight of adult females of Drosicha sp. is much less than in the case of C. cephalonica under similar conditions of fumigation and that the amount of HCN converted into non-recoverable products is less in Drosicha adults than in C. cephalonica.A comparison of the water content of T. castaneum, C. cephalonica and Drosicha sp. (adults) showed that there was a positive correlation between water content and higher susceptibility to HCN and greater recovery of HCN was also indicated. It is suggested that this may be a factor in the “ Surface Resistance ” of an insec to a fumigant.The observations of previous workers that larger amounts are sorbed by or recovered (after fumigation) from more susceptible species than for those less susceptible was corroborated by the results obtained with C. cephalonica, T. castaneum and adult females of Drosicha sp. but not with those from nymphs of Drosicha sp.When dosage-mortality graphs were prepared by taking the amount of HCN recovered per gram body weight as an index of internal dose, the order of resistance of different test insects based on this new criterion was found to be entirely different from that based on the usual criterion of the concentration of HCN in the fumatorium being the index of effective dosage.These apparently anomalous observations may be explained by assuming that the resistance shown by an insect in an actual fumigation operation, i.e., to the concentration of HCN to which it is exposed (external dose) is what may be called the total “ Effective Resistance ” and that this “ Effective Resistance ” is the resultant of (a) “ Surface Resistance ” to the entry of fumigant and (b) “ Internal Resistance ” to the amount of HCN which actually gains entry into the body in some way or other. Thus the “Effective Resistance ” of an insect may be due to a combination either of low “ Surface Resistance ” and high “ Internal Resistance ”, giving a very low “ Effective Resistance ” as in the case of C. cephalonica, or vice versa giving the maximum “ Effective Resistance ” as in adult females of Drosicha sp. The lower recovery of HCN from the nymphs of Drosicha sp., although they were more susceptible to fumigation than C. cephalonica, is explained by their higher “ Surface Resistance ” combined with a very much lower “ Internal Resistance ”, leading to a lower “ Effective Resistance ”.

The image of a modern shaman. A literary example of Ida Brzezińska

2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-134
Author(s):  
Angelika Moskal
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
The Other ◽  
The World ◽  
Evil Spirits ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Way

Abstract: The shaman figure is most often associated with primitive communities, inhabiting, among others Siberia. The shaman plays one of the most important roles in them - he is an intermediary between the world of people and the world of spirits. Responds to, among others for the safe passage of souls to the other side and protects her from evil spirits. However, is there room for representatives of this institution in contemporary Polish popular literature? How would they find themselves in the 21st century? The article aims to show the interpretation of the shaman on the example of Ida Brzezińska, the heroine of the books of Martyna Raduchowska. I intend to introduce the role and functions of the „shaman from the dead”, juxtaposing the way Ida works (including reading sleepy margins from a rather unusual dream catcher, carrying out souls and the consequences that await in the event of failure or making contact with the dead) with the methods described by scholars shamans. The purpose of the work is to show how much Raduchowska tried to adapt shamanism in her work by modernizing it, and how many elements she added from herself to make the story more attractive.

Entomophthora grylli. [Descriptions of Fungi and Bacteria].

1979 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. L. K. Brady
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Geographical Distribution ◽  
The Body ◽  
Nomadacris Septemfasciata ◽  
Healthy Individuals ◽  
East Central ◽  
Resting Spores ◽  
The Dead ◽  
External Growth

Abstract A description is provided for Entomophthora grylli. Information is included on the disease caused by the organism, its transmission, geographical distribution, and hosts. HOSTS: Orthoptera; nymph and adults of grasshoppers and locusts; there have also been records on Lepidoptera, Diptera and Coleoptera (MacLeod & Muller-Kogler, 1973). GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION: Europe, including Britain; Canada; East, Central and South Africa. Fresenius quotes a record at 6000 ft near St. Moritz. DISEASE: The disease, causing epizootics in red locusts, Cyrtacanthacra septemfasciata (Nomadacris septemfasciata), in S. Africa is described by Skaife (1925). Infection is by germinating conidia which penetrate the integument. Dying insects characteristically climb up grass stems and die, apparently embracing the stem. The body becomes soft and easily disintegrates. The abdomen curls upward and backwards. Shortly after death a white, buff or greenish furry growth appears from the intersegmental membrane, leg joints, junction of the head and thorax and at the base of the antennae. The growth is made up of club-shaped conidiogenous cells which forcibly discharge conidia around the dead insect. Conidia, coated with the sticky contents of the conidiophore, are discharged in the evening, when the insects are clustered together and adhere to the surface of healthy individuals. A total of about 1% of locusts throughout the season die showing no external growth but are filled with resting spores; other individuals appear to be immune.

Problems and methods of modern psychiatry

1927 ◽  
Vol 23 (12) ◽  
pp. 1277-1286
Author(s):  
T. I. Yudin
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
The Body ◽  
Evil Spirit ◽  
Modern Psychiatry ◽  
Immortal Soul

The time is not far off when all psychic phenomena were explained only as manifestations of an immortal soul independent of the body. The time was not yet far off when mental illness was looked upon as the result of an evil spirit having taken possession of the patient's soul, and the treatment of mental illness was reduced to the expulsion of this evil spirit by prayers and incantations. The psychiatrists were then clergymen, and the places of treatment of mental illness were monasteries. Where treatment failed, there was only one way to get rid of the evil spirit - to burn, to destroy the body that became his home.

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