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Michaël Borremans is an artist fluent in centuries-old technical skill, yet his works speak their own contemporary language. His oeuvre spans drawing, sculpture, film, and photography, but he is best-known for his oil-on-canvas paintings, which bristle with tension between historical medium and conceptual immediacy. A trademark of Borremans’s work is his deadpan penchant for the absurd and theatrical. His subjects often appear in homemade costumes, dressed as if for the stage or ritual. Yet their expressions betray no irony or intent. In his paintings, the artist represses obvious displays of emotion—whether surprise or distress—in strange compositions deserving of them. Borremans’s reoccurring subject is the dark (and darkly funny) mess of human experience and possibility. This mess unites with the clinical precision and elegance of the artist’s craft, fine-tuned to the exhilarating mood of each painting. Now on show in Voorlinden, I wood go and see it if I were you!

#MichaëlBorremans

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 a poetic beautiful and moving work curious what you think of it

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#MarcelBroodthaers

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#Marcel Duchamp #Boîte-en-valise

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He is making works about his dreams over 30 years!

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Paul Klemann

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surrealist automatism is a method of art-making in which the artist suppresses conscious control over the making process, allowing the unconscious mind to have 

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Active imagination is a method of assimilating unconscious contents (dreams, fantasies, etc.) through some form of self-expression. not heard, thereby establishing a line of communication between consciousness and the unconscious. Even when the end products-drawing, painting, writing, sculpture, dance, music, etc.- are not interpreted, something goes on between creator and creation that contributes to a transformation of consciousness.

The object of active imagination is to give a voice to sides of the personality (particularly
the anima , animus and the shadow ) that are normally
The first stage of active imagination is like dreaming with open eyes. It can take place spontaneously or be artificially induced.

In the latter case you choose a dream, or some other fantasy-image, and concentrate on it by simply catching hold of it and looking at it. You can also use a bad mood as a starting-point, and then try to find out what sort of fantasy-image it will produce, or what image expresses this mood. You then fix this image in the mind by concentrating your attention. Usually it will alter, as the mere fact of contemplating it animates it. The alterations must be carefully noted down all the time, for they reflect the psychic processes in the unconscious background, which appear in the form of images consisting of conscious memory material. In this way conscious and unconscious are united, just as a waterfall connects above and below. [Carl Jung: The Conjunction, CW 14, par. 706.]

The second stage, beyond simply observing the images, involves a conscious participation in them, the honest evaluation of what they mean about oneself, and a morally and intellectually binding commitment to act on the insights. This is a transition from a merely perceptive or aesthetic attitude to one of judgment.

Although, to a certain extent, he looks on from outside, impartially, he is also an acting and suffering figure in the drama of the psyche. This recognition is absolutely necessary and marks an important advance. So long as he simply looks at the pictures he is like the foolish Parsifal, who forgot to ask the vital question because he was not aware of his own participation in the action. [An allusion to the medieval Grail legend. The question Parsifal failed to ask was, "Whom does the Grail serve?" ]. But if you recognize your own involvement you yourself must enter into the process with your personal reactions, just as if you were one of the fantasy figures, or rather, as if the drama being enacted before your eyes were real. ( The Conjunction, CW 14, par. 753.)

The judging attitude implies a voluntary involvement in those fantasy-processes which compensate the individual and-in particular-the collective situation of consciousness. The avowed purpose of this involvement is to integrate the statements of the unconscious, to assimilate their compensatory content, and thereby produce a whole meaning which alone makes life worth living and, for not a few people, possible at all. ( The Conjunction, par. 756.)

--
*From Jung Lexicon by Daryl Sharp, M.A. Jungian Analyst.
Read also:
-> Active imagination and the method of free associations

<<< Back to Psychotherapy | Home

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Active imagination is a method of assimilating unconscious contents (dreams, fantasies, etc.) through some form of self-expression. not heard, thereby establishing a line of communication between consciousness and the unconscious. Even when the end products-drawing, painting, writing, sculpture, dance, music, etc.- are not interpreted, something goes on between creator and creation that contributes to a transformation of consciousness.

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indian artist

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Vito Acconci

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"Our species, unlike almost all others, gives birth to puppies that are unsuitable for independent survival.  We come into the world with an incomplete brain that still has many years to develop, and, for a very long period of time, we are truly inadequate, incapable and unfit for social life".

"We are not aware of this dialogue, but if it were decided.  Now that we pay attention to it, we can analyze it and discover, as if through a dream, the personal form of one's sense of guilt with its precise and individual contents.  In order to understand the internal dialogue, the best method king is to equip yourself with a small recorder, preferably
with a wire microphone to be placed on the dress not far away not from the mouth.  The patient must register for one day everything that comes to mind, with extreme precision and without any censorship.
Any omission, even due to good taste and good manners, invalidates the procedure."

"the loss of another causes relative and short-lived suffering.  But the loss suffered is linked to a defeat of our capacity, to the worthlessness demonstrated by abandonment, and this is the cause of the desperate pain.  It is essential to learn to recognize and distinguish, within oneself, the pain of missing others from the pain of losing one's self-love.
A lady in tears expressed to me her great suffering because her husband had gone to live with another woman.
I stopped her with determination, forced her to give her full attention to my words: << Just think about what I'm telling you now: her husband had a mystical crisis and entered a convent forever.  How does he feel?" and she replied: <<<Very good».

"According to Jesus, we are not the masters of even one of our hairs.

I hope to convince some of those who seek the scientific and mathematical truth of reality and manage to exercise control over the irrationality of emotional beliefs, overcoming the horror novi and the phobia of change.

Throughout our lives our actions tend towards goals that we could not choose;  no one can decide what physiological needs, what emotions, what desires and what ideals to have.  These vital drives are the result of universal necessity and are not in our power.  I can only love those I love and hate only those I hate, I am not free to choose even between apples and pears if I like pears more since I cannot even decide my tastes".

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dutch artist that work with his dreams

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Fantastic Planet  by René Laloux and written by Laloux

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Fantastic Planet  by René Laloux and written by Laloux

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italian theater actors

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Il Viaggio in Subaru Baracca | Aldo Giovanni e Giacomo - Tel chi el telun

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(Show) Benigni racconta la Divina Commedia

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I Came Everywhere | Tom Segura | Full Tour Documentary

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Ricky Gervais' Airport Mental Breakdown!| Science | Universal Comedy

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is a 1982 dark fantasy film directed by Jim Henson and Frank Oz

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A satire of action film archetypes, American militarism, and the global implications of the politics of the United States, the film follows the titular paramilitary police force, who recruit a Broadway actor to assist in saving the world from Kim Jong Il and his conspiracy of Islamic terrorists and liberal Hollywood. Team America was produced using a crew of about 200 people, which sometimes required four people at a time to manipulate a marionette.

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#VienneseActionism

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Suggestive, affective, nauseating. How to respond but with a wince, looking quickly away, perhaps a shudder right through to your groin, and then looking back to check whether what you thought you saw, really was what you saw?

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#Autarky

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#Autarky

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#JonahHill#Therapy#Stutz

Jonah Hill is sharing his therapist's mental health tools in a new Netflix documentary, Stutz. The film is made up of conversations between the 21 Jump Street actor and his therapist, Phil Stutz, M.D. Not only does it offer a window into Hill's experiences with mental health, but it also provides actionable advice and techniques for viewers.
The tools include visualization exercises that help people turn an unpleasant experience into an opportunity, he explains.

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In candid conversations with actor Jonah Hill, leading psychiatrist Phil Stutz explores his early life experiences and unique, visual model of therapy.

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#Hieronymus Bosch#TheGardenOfEarthlyDelights

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Garden_of_Earthly_Delights

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Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, oil on oak panels, 205.5 cm × 384.9 cm (81 in × 152 in), Museo del Prado, Madrid

The Garden of Earthly Delights is the modern title given to a triptych oil painting on oak panel painted by the Early Netherlandish master Hieronymus Bosch, between 1490 and 1510, when Bosch was between 40 and 60 years old. It has been housed in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, Spain since 1939.

As little is known of Bosch's life or intentions, interpretations of his artistic intent behind the work range from an admonition of worldly fleshy indulgence, to a dire warning on the perils of life's temptations, to an evocation of ultimate sexual joy. The intricacy of its symbolism, particularly that of the central panel, has led to a wide range of scholarly interpretations over the centuries. Twentieth-century art historians are divided as to whether the triptych's central panel is a moral warning or a panorama of paradise lost.

Bosch painted three large triptychs (the others are The Last Judgment of c. 1482 and The Haywain Triptych of c. 1516) that can be read from left to right and in which each panel was essential to the meaning of the whole. Each of these three works presents distinct, yet linked themes addressing history and faith. Triptychs from this period were generally intended to be read sequentially, the left and right panels often portraying Eden and the Last Judgment respectively, while the main subject was contained in the center piece. It is not known whether The Garden was intended as an altarpiece, but the general view is that the extreme subject matter of the inner center and right panels make it unlikely that it was intended to function in a church or monastery, but was instead commissioned by a lay patron.

The exterior panels show the world during creation, probably on the Third Day, after the addition of plant life but before the appearance of animals and humans.[4]

When the triptych's wings are closed, the design of the outer panels becomes visible. Rendered in a green-gray grisaille, these panels lack colour, probably because most Netherlandish triptychs were thus painted, but possibly indicating that the painting reflects a time before the creation of the sun and moon, which were formed, according to Christian theology, to "give light to the earth". The typical grisaille blandness of Netherlandish altarpieces served to highlight the splendid color inside.

The outer panels are generally thought to depict the creation of the world, showing greenery beginning to clothe the still-pristine Earth. God, wearing a crown similar to a papal tiara (a common convention in Netherlandish painting), is visible as a tiny figure at the upper left. Bosch shows God as the father sitting with a Bible on his lap, creating the Earth in a passive manner by divine fiat. Above him is inscribed a quote from reading "Ipse dīxit, et facta sunt: ipse mandāvit, et creāta sunt"- For he spoke and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast. There is a firmament around the Earth, in reference to It hangs suspended in the cosmos, which is shown as an impermeable darkness, whose only other inhabitant is God himself.

Despite the presence of vegetation, the earth does not yet contain human or animal life, indicating that the scene represents the events of the biblical Third Day. Bosch renders the plant life in an unusual fashion, using uniformly gray tints which make it difficult to determine whether the subjects are purely vegetal or perhaps include some mineral formations. Surrounding the interior of the globe is the sea, partially illuminated by beams of light shining through clouds. The exterior wings have a clear position within the sequential narrative of the work as a whole. They show an unpopulated earth composed solely of rock and plants, contrasting sharply with the inner central panel which contains an Earth teeming with lustful humanity.

Scholars have proposed that Bosch used the outer panels to establish a Biblical setting for the inner elements of the work, and the exterior image is generally interpreted as set in an earlier time than those in the interior. As with Bosch's Haywain Triptych, the inner centerpiece is flanked by heavenly and hellish imagery. The scenes depicted in the triptych are thought to follow a chronological order: flowing from left-to-right they represent Eden, the garden of earthly delights, and Hell. God appears as the creator of humanity in the left hand wing, while the consequences of humanity's failure to follow his will are shown in the right.

However, in contrast to Bosch's two other complete triptychs, The Last Judgment (around 1482) and The Haywain (after 1510), God is absent from the central panel. Instead, this panel shows humanity acting with apparent free will as naked men and women engage in various pleasure-seeking activities. According to some interpretations, the right hand panel is believed to show God's penalties in a hellscape.

Art historian Charles de Tolnay believed that, through the seductive gaze of Adam, the left panel already shows God's waning influence upon the newly created earth. This view is reinforced by the rendering of God in the outer panels as a tiny figure in comparison to the immensity of the earth. According to Hans Belting, the three inner panels seek to broadly convey the Old Testament notion that, before the Fall, there was no defined boundary between good and evil; humanity in its innocence was unaware of consequence.

Detail from the left hand panel, showing the pre-incarnate Christ blessing Eve before she is presented to Adam[16]

The left panel (sometimes known as the Joining of Adam and Eve) depicts a scene from the paradise of the Garden of Eden commonly interpreted as the moment when God presents Eve to Adam. The painting shows Adam waking from a deep sleep to find God holding Eve by her wrist and giving the sign of his blessing to their union. God is younger-looking than on the outer panels, blue-eyed and with golden curls. His youthful appearance may be a device by the artist to illustrate the concept of Christ as the incarnation of the Word of God. God's right hand is raised in blessing, while he holds Eve's wrist with his left. According to the work's most controversial interpreter, the 20th-century folklorist and art historian Wilhelm Fraenger:

As though enjoying the pulsation of the living blood and as though too he were setting a seal on the eternal and immutable communion between this human blood and his own. This physical contact between the Creator and Eve is repeated even more noticeably in the way Adam's toes touch the Lord's foot. Here is the stressing of a rapport: Adam seems indeed to be stretching to his full length in order to make contact with the Creator. And the billowing out of the cloak around the Creator's heart, from where the garment falls in marked folds and contours to Adam's feet, also seems to indicate that here a current of divine power flows down, so that this group of three actually forms a closed circuit, a complex of magical energy ...

Eve avoids Adam's gaze, although, according to Walter S. Gibson, she is shown "seductively presenting her body to Adam". Adam's expression is one of amazement, and Fraenger has identified three elements to his seeming astonishment. Firstly, there is surprise at the presence of the God. Secondly, he is reacting to an awareness that Eve is of the same nature as himself, and has been created from his own body. Finally, from the intensity of Adam's gaze, it can be concluded that he is experiencing sexual arousal and the primal urge to reproduce for the first time.

The surrounding landscape is populated by hut-shaped forms, some of which are made from stone, while others are at least partially organic. Behind Eve rabbits, symbolising fecundity, play in the grass, and a dragon tree opposite is thought to represent eternal life. The background reveals several animals that would have been exotic to contemporaneous Europeans, including a giraffe, a monkey riding an elephant, and a lion that has killed and is about to devour his prey. In the foreground, from a large hole in the ground, emerge birds and winged animals, some of which are realistic, some fantastic. Behind a fish, a person clothed in a short-sleeved hooded jacket and with a duck's beak holds an open book as if reading.

To the left of the area a cat holds a small lizard-like creature in its jaws. Belting observes that, despite the fact that the creatures in the foreground are fantastical imaginings, many of the animals in the mid and background are drawn from contemporary travel literature, and here Bosch is appealing to "the knowledge of a humanistic and aristocratic readership". Erhard Reuwich's pictures for Bernhard von Breydenbach's 1486 Pilgrimages to the Holy Land were long thought to be the source for both the elephant and the giraffe, though more recent research indicates the mid-15th-century humanist scholar Cyriac of Ancona's travelogues served as Bosch's exposure to these exotic animals.

According to art historian Virginia Tuttle, the scene is "highly unconventional [and] cannot be identified as any of the events from the Book of Genesis traditionally depicted in Western art". Some of the images contradict the innocence expected in the Garden of Eden. Tuttle and other critics have interpreted the gaze of Adam upon his wife as lustful, and indicative of the Christian belief that humanity was doomed from the beginning. Gibson believes that Adam's facial expression betrays not just surprise but also expectation. According to a belief common in the Middle Ages, before the Fall Adam and Eve would have copulated without lust, solely to reproduce. Many believed that the first sin committed after Eve tasted the forbidden fruit was carnal lust. On a tree to the right a snake curls around a tree trunk, while to its right a mouse creeps; according to Fraenger, both animals are universal phallic symbols.

Center panel

The skyline of the center panel (220 × 195 cm, 87 × 77 in) matches exactly with that of the left wing, while the positioning of its central pool and the lake behind it echoes the lake in the earlier scene. The center image depicts the expansive "garden" landscape which gives the triptych its name. The panel shares a common horizon with the left wing, suggesting a spatial connection between the two scenes. The garden is teeming with male and female nudes, together with a variety of animals, plants and fruit.

The setting is not the paradise shown in the left panel, but neither is it based in the terrestrial realm. Fantastic creatures mingle with the real; otherwise ordinary fruits appear engorged to a gigantic size. The figures are engaged in diverse amorous sports and activities, both in couples and in groups. Gibson describes them as behaving "overtly and without shame", while art historian Laurinda Dixon writes that the human figures exhibit "a certain adolescent sexual curiosity".

Many of the numerous human figures revel in an innocent, self-absorbed joy as they engage in a wide range of activities; some appear to enjoy sensory pleasures, others play unselfconsciously in the water, and yet others cavort in meadows with a variety of animals, seemingly at one with nature. In the middle of the background, a large blue globe resembling a fruit pod rises in the middle of a lake. Visible through its circular window is a man holding his right hand close to his partner's genitals, and the bare buttocks of yet another figure hover in the vicinity. According to Fraenger, the eroticism of the center frame could be considered either as an allegory of spiritual transition or a playground of corruption.

A group of nude females from the center panel. The head of one female is adorned with two cherries-a symbol of pride. To her right, a male drinks lustfully from an organic vessel. Behind the group, a male carries a couple encased in a mussel shell.[31]

On the right-hand side of the foreground stand a group of four figures, three white- and one black-skinned. The white-skinned figures, two males and one female, are covered from head to foot in light-brown body hair. Scholars generally agree that these hirsute figures represent wild or primeval humanity, but disagree on the symbolism of their inclusion. Art historian Patrik Reuterswärd, for example, posits that they may be seen as "the noble savage" who represents "an imagined alternative to our civilized life", imbuing the panel with "a more clear-cut primitivistic note". Writer Peter Glum, in contrast, sees the figures as intrinsically connected with whoredom and lust.

In a cave to their lower right, a male figure points towards a reclining female who is also covered in hair. The pointing man is the only clothed figure in the panel, and as Fraenger observes, "he is clothed with emphatic austerity right up to his throat". In addition, he is one of the few human figures with dark hair. According to Fraenger:

The way this man's dark hair grows, with the sharp dip in the middle of his high forehead, as though concentrating there all the energy of the masculine M, makes his face different from all the others. His coal-black eyes are rigidly focused in a gaze that expresses compelling force. The nose is unusually long and boldly curved. The mouth is wide and sensual, but the lips are firmly shut in a straight line, the corners strongly marked and tightened into final points, and this strengthens the impression-already suggested by the eyes-of a strong controlling will. It is an extraordinarily fascinating face, reminding us of faces of famous men, especially of Machiavelli's; and indeed the whole aspect of the head suggests something Mediterranean, as though this man had acquired his frank, searching, superior air at Italian academies.

The pointing man has variously been described as either the patron of the work (Fraenger in 1947), as an advocate of Adam denouncing Eve (Dirk Bax in 1956), as Saint John the Baptist in his camel's skin (Isabel Mateo Goméz in 1963), or as a self-portrait. The woman below him lies within a semicylindrical transparent shield, while her mouth is sealed, devices implying that she bears a secret. To their left, a man crowned by leaves lies on top of what appears to be an actual but gigantic strawberry, and is joined by a male and female who contemplate another equally huge strawberry.

There is no perspectival order in the foreground; instead it comprises a series of small motifs wherein proportion and terrestrial logic are abandoned. Bosch presents the viewer with gigantic ducks playing with tiny humans under the cover of oversized fruit; fish walking on land while birds dwell in the water; a passionate couple encased in an amniotic fluid bubble; and a man inside of a red fruit staring at a mouse in a transparent cylinder.

The pools in the fore and background contain bathers of both sexes. In the central circular pool, the sexes are mostly segregated, with several females adorned by peacocks and fruit. Four women carry cherry-like fruits on their heads, perhaps a symbol of pride at the time, as has been deduced from the contemporaneous saying: "Don't eat cherries with great lords-they'll throw the pits in your face."

The women are surrounded by a parade of naked men riding horses, donkeys, unicorns, camels and other exotic or fantastic creatures. Several men show acrobatics while riding, apparently acts designed to gain the females' attention, which highlights the attraction felt between the two sexes as groups. The two outer springs also contain both men and women cavorting with abandon. Around them, birds infest the water while winged fish crawl on land. Humans inhabit giant shells. All are surrounded by oversized fruit pods and eggshells, and both humans and animals feast on strawberries and cherries.

The impression of a life lived without consequence, or what art historian Hans Belting describes as "unspoilt and pre-moral existence", is underscored by the absence of children and old people. According to the second and third chapters of Genesis, Adam and Eve's children were born after they were expelled from Eden. This has led some commentators, in particular Belting, to theorise that the panel represents the world if the two had not been driven out "among the thorns and thistles of the world". In Fraenger's view, the scene illustrates "a utopia, a garden of divine delight before the Fall, or-since Bosch could not deny the existence of the dogma of original sin -a millennial condition that would arise if, after expiation of Original Sin, humanity were permitted to return to Paradise and to a state of tranquil harmony embracing all Creation."

In the high distance of the background, above the hybrid stone formations, four groups of people and creatures are seen in flight. On the immediate left a human male rides on a chthonic solar eagle-lion. The human carries a triple-branched tree of life on which perches a bird; according to Fraenger "a symbolic bird of death". Fraenger believes the man is intended to represent a genius, "he is the symbol of the extinction of the duality of the sexes, which are resolved in the ether into their original state of unity".

To their right a knight with a dolphin tail sails on a winged fish. The knight's tail curls back to touch the back of his head, which references the common symbol of eternity: the snake biting its own tail. On the immediate right of the panel, a winged youth soars upwards carrying a fish in his hands and a falcon on his back. According to Belting, in these passages Bosch's "imagination triumphs ... the ambivalence of [his] visual syntax exceeds even the enigma of content, opening up that new dimension of freedom by which painting becomes art." Fraenger titled his chapter on the high background "The Ascent to Heaven", and wrote that the airborne figures were likely intended as a link between "what is above" and "what is below", just as the left and right hand panels represent "what was" and "what will be".

Right panel

A scene from the hellscape panel showing the long beams of light emitted from the burning city in the panel's background[18]

The right panel (220 × 97.5 cm, 87 × 38.4 in) illustrates Hell, the setting of a number of Bosch paintings. Bosch depicts a world in which humans have succumbed to temptations that lead to evil and reap eternal damnation. The tone of this final panel strikes a harsh contrast to those preceding it. The scene is set at night, and the natural beauty that adorned the earlier panels is noticeably absent. Compared to the warmth of the center panel, the right wing possesses a chilling quality-rendered through cold colourisation and frozen waterways-and presents a tableau that has shifted from the paradise of the center image to a spectacle of cruel torture and retribution.

In a single, densely detailed scene, the viewer is made witness to cities on fire in the background; war, torture chambers, infernal taverns, and demons in the midground; and mutated animals feeding on human flesh in the foreground. The nakedness of the human figures has lost all its eroticism, and many now attempt to cover their genitalia and breasts with their hands, ashamed by their nakedness.

Large explosions in the background throw light through the city gates and spill into the water in the midground; according to writer Walter S. Gibson, "their fiery reflection turning the water below into blood". The light illuminates a road filled with fleeing figures, while hordes of tormentors prepare to burn a neighbouring village. A short distance away, a rabbit carries an impaled and bleeding corpse, while a group of victims above are thrown into a burning lantern. The foreground is populated by a variety of distressed or tortured figures. Some are shown vomiting or excreting, others are crucified by harp and lute, in an allegory of music, thus sharpening the contrast between pleasure and torture. A choir sings from a score inscribed on a pair of buttocks, part of a group that has been described as the "Musicians' Hell".

The focal point of the scene is the "Tree-Man", whose cavernous torso is supported by what could be contorted arms or rotting tree trunks. His head supports a disk populated by demons and victims parading around a huge set of bagpipes-often used as a dual sexual symbol-reminiscent of human scrotum and penis. The tree-man's torso is formed from a broken eggshell, and the supporting trunk has thorn-like branches which pierce the fragile body. A grey figure in a hood bearing an arrow jammed between his buttocks climbs a ladder into the tree-man's central cavity, where nude men sit in a tavern-like setting. The tree-man gazes outwards beyond the viewer, his conspiratorial expression a mix of wistfulness and resignation. Belting wondered if the tree-man's face is a self-portrait, citing the figure's "expression of irony and the slightly sideways gaze [which would] then constitute the signature of an artist who claimed a bizarre pictorial world for his own personal imagination".

Many elements in the panel incorporate earlier iconographical conventions depicting hell. However, Bosch is innovative in that he describes hell not as a fantastical place, but as a realistic world containing many elements from day-to-day human life.

Gibson compares this "Prince of Hell" to a figure in the 12th-century Irish religious text Vision of Tundale, who feeds on the souls of corrupt and lecherous clergy.[47]

Animals are shown punishing humans, subjecting them to nightmarish torments that may symbolise the seven deadly sins, matching the torment to the sin. Sitting on an object that may be a toilet or a throne, the panel's centerpiece is a gigantic bird-headed monster feasting on human corpses, which he excretes through a cavity below him, into the transparent chamber pot on which he sits. The monster is sometimes referred to as the "Prince of Hell", a name derived from the cauldron he wears on his head, perhaps representing a debased crown. At his feet, a female has her face reflected on the buttocks of a demon. Further to the left, next to a hare-headed demon, a group of naked persons around a toppled gambling table are being massacred with swords and knives. Other brutal violence is shown by a knight torn down and eaten up by a pack of wolves to the right of the tree-man.

During the Middle Ages, sexuality and lust were seen, by some, as evidence of humanity's fall from grace. In the eyes of some viewers, this sin is depicted in the left-hand panel through Adam's, allegedly lustful, gaze towards Eve, and it has been proposed that the center panel was created as a warning to the viewer to avoid a life of sinful pleasure. According to this view, the penalty for such sins is shown in the right panel of the triptych. In the lower right-hand corner, a man is approached by a pig wearing the veil of a nun. The pig is shown trying to seduce the man to sign legal documents.

Lust is further said to be symbolised by the gigantic musical instruments and by the choral singers in the left foreground of the panel. Musical instruments often carried erotic connotations in works of art of the period, and lust was referred to in moralising sources as the "music of the flesh". There has also been the view that Bosch's use of music here might be a rebuke against traveling minstrels, often thought of as purveyors of bawdy song and verse.

Henry III of Nassau-Breda (1483-1538) by Bernard van Orley, who may have been the patron of Bosch's triptych. Henry III was well known as an avid collector of art.[49]

The dating of The Garden of Earthly Delights is uncertain. Ludwig von Baldass (1917) considered the painting to be an early work by Bosch. However, since De Tolnay (1937) consensus among 20th-century art historians placed the work in 1503-1504 or even later. Both early and late datings were based on the "archaic" treatment of space. Dendrochronology dates the oak of the panels between the years 1460 and 1466, providing an earliest date (terminus post quem) for the work.

Wood used for panel paintings during this period customarily underwent a lengthy period of storage for seasoning purposes, so the age of the oak might be expected to predate the actual date of the painting by several years. Internal evidence, specifically the depiction of a pineapple (a " New World" fruit), suggests that the painting itself postdates Columbus' voyages to the Americas, between 1492 and 1504. The dendrochronological research brought Vermet to reconsider an early dating and, consequently, to dispute the presence of any "New World" objects, stressing the presence of African ones instead.

Portrait of Engelbrecht II of Nassau (1451-1504) in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam

The Garden was first documented in 1517, one year after the artist's death, when Antonio de Beatis, a canon from Molfetta, Italy, described the work as part of the decoration in the town palace of the Counts of the House of Nassau in Brussels. The palace was a high-profile location, a house often visited by heads of state and leading court figures. The prominence of the painting has led some to conclude that the work was commissioned, and not "solely ... a flight of the imagination". A description of the triptych in 1605 called it the "strawberry painting", because the fruit of the strawberry tree ( madroño in Spanish) features prominently in the center panel. Early Spanish writers referred to the work as La Lujuria ("Lust").

The aristocracy of the Burgundian Netherlands, influenced by the humanist movement, were the most likely collectors of Bosch's paintings, but there are few records of the location of his works in the years immediately following his death. It is probable that the patron of the work was Engelbrecht II of Nassau, who died in 1504, or his successor Henry III of Nassau-Breda, the governor of several of the Habsburg provinces in the Low Countries. De Beatis wrote in his travel journal that "there are some panels on which bizarre things have been painted. They represent seas, skies, woods, meadows, and many other things, such as people crawling out of a shell, others that bring forth birds, men and women, white and blacks doing all sorts of different activities and poses."

Because the triptych was publicly displayed in the palace of the House of Nassau, it was visible to many, and Bosch's reputation and fame quickly spread across Europe. The work's popularity can be measured by the numerous surviving copies-in oil, engraving and tapestry-commissioned by wealthy patrons, as well as by the number of forgeries in circulation after his death. Most are of the central panel only and do not deviate from the original. These copies were usually painted on a much smaller scale, and they vary considerably in quality. Many were created a generation after Bosch, and some took the form of wall tapestries.

The De Beatis description, only rediscovered by Steppe in the 1960s, cast new light on the commissioning of a work that was previously thought-since it has no central religious image-to be an atypical altarpiece. Many Netherlandish diptychs intended for private use are known, and even a few triptychs, but the Bosch panels are unusually large compared with these and contain no donor portraits. Possibly they were commissioned to celebrate a wedding, as large Italian paintings for private houses frequently were. Nevertheless, The Garden's bold depictions do not rule out a church commission, such was the contemporaneous fervor to warn against immorality. In 1566, the triptych served as the model for a tapestry that hangs at El Escorial monastery near Madrid.

Upon the death of Henry III, the painting passed into the hands of his nephew William the Silent, the founder of the House of Orange-Nassau and leader of the Dutch Revolt against Spain. In 1568, however, the Duke of Alba confiscated the picture and brought it to Spain, where it became the property of one Don Fernando, the Duke's illegitimate son and heir and the Spanish commander in the Netherlands. Philip II acquired the painting at auction in 1591; two years later he presented it to El Escorial. A contemporaneous description of the transfer records the gift on 8 July 1593 of a "painting in oils, with two wings depicting the variety of the world, illustrated with grotesqueries by Hieronymus Bosch, known as 'Del Madroño'".

After an unbroken 342 years at El Escorial, the work moved to the Museo del Prado in 1939, along with other works by Bosch. The triptych was not particularly well-preserved; the paint of the middle panel especially had flaked off around joints in the wood. However, recent restoration works have managed to recover and maintain it in a very good state of quality and preservation. The painting is normally on display in a room with other works by Bosch.

Hieronymus Bosch, Man Tree, c. 1470s. The "Tree-Man" of the right-hand panel, depicted in an earlier drawing by Bosch. This pen and bistre version contains no suggestion of Hell, yet its outline was adapted into one of The Garden's most memorable grotesques.[42]

Little is known for certain of the life of Hieronymus Bosch or of the commissions or influences that may have formed the basis for the iconography of his work. His birthdate, education and patrons remain unknown. There is no surviving record of Bosch's thoughts or evidence as to what attracted and inspired him to such an individual mode of expression. Through the centuries art historians have struggled to resolve this question yet conclusions remain fragmentary at best. Scholars have debated Bosch's iconography more extensively than that of any other Netherlandish artist. His works are generally regarded as enigmatic, leading some to speculate that their content refers to contemporaneous esoteric knowledge since lost to history.

Although Bosch's career flourished during the High Renaissance, he lived in an area where the beliefs of the medieval Church still held moral authority. He would have been familiar with some of the new forms of expression, especially those in Southern Europe, although it is difficult to attribute with certainty which artists, writers and conventions had a bearing on his work.

José de Sigüenza is credited with the first extensive critique of The Garden of Earthly Delights, in his 1605 History of the Order of St. Jerome. He argued against dismissing the painting as either heretical or merely absurd, commenting that the panels "are a satirical comment on the shame and sinfulness of mankind". The art historian Carl Justi observed that the left and center panels are drenched in tropical and oceanic atmosphere, and concluded that Bosch was inspired by "the news of recently discovered Atlantis and by drawings of its tropical scenery, just as Columbus himself, when approaching terra firma, thought that the place he had found at the mouth of the Orinoco was the site of the Earthly Paradise".

The period in which the triptych was created was a time of adventure and discovery, when tales and trophies from the New World sparked the imagination of poets, painters and writers. Although the triptych contains many unearthly and fantastic creatures, Bosch still appealed in his images and cultural references to an elite humanist and aristocratic audience. Bosch reproduces a scene from Martin Schongauer's engraving Flight into Egypt.

Conquest in Africa and the East provided both wonder and terror to European intellectuals, as it led to the conclusion that Eden could never have been an actual geographical location. The Garden references exotic travel literature of the 15th century through the animals, including lions and a giraffe, in the left panel. The giraffe has been traced to Cyriac of Ancona, a travel writer known for his visits to Egypt during the 1440s. The exoticism of Cyriac's sumptuous manuscripts may have inspired Bosch's imagination.

The giraffe on the right side of the left panel may be drawn from copies of those in Cyriac of Ancona's Egyptian Voyage (left), which was published c. 1440.[22]

The charting and conquest of this new world made real regions previously only idealised in the imagination of artists and poets. At the same time, the certainty of the old biblical paradise began to slip from the grasp of thinkers into the realms of mythology. In response, treatment of the Paradise in literature, poetry and art shifted towards a self-consciously fictional Utopian representation, as exemplified by the writings of Thomas More (1478-1535).

Albrecht Dürer was an avid student of exotic animals, and drew many sketches based on his visits to European zoos. Dürer visited 's-Hertogenbosch during Bosch's lifetime, and it is likely the two artists met, and that Bosch drew inspiration from the German's work.

Attempts to find sources for the work in literature from the period have not been successful. Art historian Erwin Panofsky wrote in 1953 that, "In spite of all the ingenious, erudite and in part extremely useful research devoted to the task of "decoding Jerome Bosch", I cannot help feeling that the real secret of his magnificent nightmares and daydreams has still to be disclosed. We have bored a few holes through the door of the locked room; but somehow we do not seem to have discovered the key." The humanist Desiderius Erasmus has been suggested as a possible influence; the writer lived in 's-Hertogenbosch in the 1480s, and it is likely he knew Bosch. Glum remarked on the triptych's similarity of tone with Erasmus's view that theologians "explain (to suit themselves) the most difficult mysteries ... is it a possible proposition: God the Father hates the Son? Could God have assumed the form of a woman, a devil, an ass, a gourd, a stone?"

Because only bare details are known of Bosch's life, interpretation of his work can be an extremely difficult area for academics as it is largely reliant on conjecture. Individual motifs and elements of symbolism may be explained, but so far relating these to each other and to his work as a whole has remained elusive. The enigmatic scenes depicted on the panels of the inner triptych of The Garden of Earthly Delights have been studied by many scholars, who have often arrived at contradictory interpretations. Analyses based on symbolic systems ranging from the alchemical, astrological, and heretical to the folkloric and subconscious have all attempted to explain the complex objects and ideas presented in the work. Until the early 20th century, Bosch's paintings were generally thought to incorporate attitudes of Medieval didactic literature and sermons. Charles De Tolnay wrote that

The oldest writers, Dominicus Lampsonius and Karel van Mander, attached themselves to his most evident side, to the subject; their conception of Bosch, inventor of fantastic pieces of devilry and of infernal scenes, which prevails today (1937) in the public at large, and prevailed with historians until the last quarter of the 19th century.

Generally, his work is described as a warning against lust, and the central panel as a representation of the transience of worldly pleasure. In 1960, the art historian Ludwig von Baldass wrote that Bosch shows "how sin came into the world through the Creation of Eve, how fleshly lusts spread over the entire earth, promoting all the Deadly Sins, and how this necessarily leads straight to Hell". De Tolnay wrote that the center panel represents "the nightmare of humanity", where "the artist's purpose above all is to show the evil consequences of sensual pleasure and to stress its ephemeral character". Supporters of this view hold that the painting is a sequential narrative, depicting mankind's initial state of innocence in Eden, followed by the subsequent corruption of that innocence, and finally its punishment in Hell. At various times in its history, the triptych has been known as La Lujuria, The Sins of the World and The Wages of Sin.

Proponents of this idea point out that moralists during Bosch's era believed that it was woman's-ultimately Eve's-temptation that drew men into a life of lechery and sin. This would explain why the women in the center panel are very much among the active participants in bringing about the Fall. At the time, the power of femininity was often rendered by showing a female surrounded by a circle of males. A late 15th-century engraving by Israhel van Meckenem shows a group of men prancing ecstatically around a female figure. The Master of the Banderoles's 1460 work the Pool of Youth similarly shows a group of females standing in a space surrounded by admiring figures.

This line of reasoning is consistent with interpretations of Bosch's other major moralising works which hold up the folly of man; the Death and the Miser and the Haywain. Although according to the art historian Walter Bosing, each of these works is rendered in a manner that it is difficult to believe "Bosch intended to condemn what he painted with such visually enchanting forms and colors". Bosing concludes that a medieval mindset was naturally suspicious of material beauty, in any form, and that the sumptuousness of Bosch's description may have been intended to convey a false paradise, teeming with transient beauty.

In 1947, Wilhelm Fränger argued that the triptych's center panel portrays a joyous world when mankind will experience a rebirth of the innocence enjoyed by Adam and Eve before their fall. In his book The Millennium of Hieronymus Bosch, Fränger wrote that Bosch was a member of the heretical sect known as the Adamites-who were also known as the Homines intelligentia and Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit. This radical group, active in the area of the Rhine and the Netherlands, strove for a form of spirituality immune from sin even in the flesh, and imbued the concept of lust with a paradisical innocence.

Hieronymus Bosch, in a c. 1550 drawing once thought to be a copy of a self-portrait. His age in this representation (believed to be around 60 years) has been used to estimate his date of birth, although its attribution remains uncertain.[90]

Fränger believed The Garden of Earthly Delights was commissioned by the order's Grand Master. Later critics have agreed that, because of their obscure complexity, Bosch's "altarpieces" may well have been commissioned for non-devotional purposes. The Homines intelligentia cult sought to regain the innocent sexuality enjoyed by Adam and Eve before the Fall. Fränger writes that the figures in Bosch's work "are peacefully frolicking about the tranquil garden in vegetative innocence, at one with animals and plants and the sexuality that inspires them seems to be pure joy, pure bliss." Fränger argued against the notion that the hellscape shows the retribution handed down for sins committed in the center panel. Fränger saw the figures in the garden as peaceful, naive, and innocent in expressing their sexuality, and at one with nature. In contrast, those being punished in Hell comprise "musicians, gamblers, desecrators of judgment and punishment".

Examining the symbolism in Bosch's art-"the freakish riddles ... the irresponsible phantasmagoria of an ecstatic"-Fränger concluded that his interpretation applied to Bosch's three altarpieces only: The Garden of Earthly Delights, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, and the Haywain Triptych. Fränger distinguished these pieces from the artist's other works and argued that despite their anti-cleric polemic, they were nevertheless all altarpieces, probably commissioned for the devotional purposes of a mystery cult. While commentators accept Fränger's analysis as astute and broad in scope, they have often questioned his final conclusions. These are regarded by many scholars as hypothesis only, and built on an unstable foundation and what can only be conjecture. Critics argue that artists during this period painted not for their own pleasure but for commission, while the language and secularization of a post-Renaissance mind-set projected onto Bosch would have been alien to the late- Medieval painter.

Fränger's thesis stimulated others to examine The Garden more closely. Writer Carl Linfert also senses the joyfulness of the people in the center panel, but rejects Fränger's assertion that the painting is a "doctrinaire" work espousing the "guiltless sexuality" of the Adamite sect. While the figures engage in amorous acts without any suggestion of the forbidden, Linfert points to the elements in the center panel suggesting death and temporality: some figures turn away from the activity, seeming to lose hope in deriving pleasure from the passionate frolicking of their cohorts. Writing in 1969, E. H. Gombrich drew on a close reading of Genesis and the Gospel According to Saint Matthew to suggest that the central panel is, according to Linfert, "the state of mankind on the eve of the Flood, when men still pursued pleasure with no thought of the morrow, their only sin the unawareness of sin."

Because Bosch was such a unique and visionary artist, his influence has not spread as widely as that of other major painters of his era. However, there have been instances of later artists incorporating elements of The Garden of Earthly Delights into their own work. Pieter Bruegel the Elder ( c. 1525-1569) in particular directly acknowledged Bosch as an important influence and inspiration, and incorporated many elements of the inner right panel into several of his most popular works. Bruegel's depicts a peasant woman leading an army of women to pillage Hell, while his The Triumph of Death ( c. 1562) echoes the monstrous Hellscape of The Garden, and utilizes, according to the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, the same "unbridled imagination and the fascinating colours".

While the Italian court painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo ( c.  1527-1593) did not create Hellscapes, he painted a body of strange and "fantastic" vegetable portraits-generally heads of people composed of plants, roots, webs and various other organic matter. These strange portraits rely on and echo a motif that was in part inspired by Bosch's willingness to break from strict and faithful representations of nature.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Winter, 1573. The concept of the "Tree-man", the hybrid organism, as well the engorged fruit, all bear hallmarks of Bosch's Garden.

David Teniers the Younger ( c. 1610-1690) was a Flemish painter who quoted both Bosch and Bruegel throughout his career in such works as his versions of the Temptation of St Anthony, the Rich Man in Hell and his version of Mad Meg.

During the early 20th century, Bosch's work enjoyed a popular resurrection. The early surrealists' fascination with dreamscapes, the autonomy of the imagination, and a free-flowing connection to the unconscious brought about a renewed interest in his work. Bosch's imagery struck a chord with Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí in particular. Both knew his paintings firsthand, having seen The Garden of Earthly Delights in the Museo del Prado, and both regarded him as an art-historical mentor. Miró's The Tilled Field contains several parallels to Bosch's Garden: similar flocks of birds; pools from which living creatures emerge; and oversize disembodied ears all echo the Dutch master's work. Dalí's 1929 The Great Masturbator is similar to an image on the right side of the left panel of Bosch's Garden, composed of rocks, bushes and little animals resembling a face with a prominent nose and long eyelashes.

When André Breton wrote his first Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, his historical precedents as inclusions named only Gustave Moreau, Georges Seurat, and Uccello. However, the Surrealist movement soon rediscovered Bosch and Bruegel, who quickly became popular among the Surrealist painters. René Magritte and Max Ernst both were inspired by Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights.

1. The drenched state of the Earth has led some to interpret the panels as depicting ^ The Flood. In Mann, 2005

2. ^ Genesis 1:7 And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so. | English Standard Version 2016 (ESV) | Download The Bible App Now.

3. Calas, Elena. "D for Deus and Diabolus. The Iconography of Hieronymus Bosch". The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 27, No. 4, Summer, 1969. 445-454

4. Tuttle, Virginia. "Lilith in Bosch's 'Garden of Earthly Delights'". Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, Volume 15, No. 2, 1985. 119

5. Vermet, Bernard M.. "Hieronymus Bosch: painter, workshop or style?" in Koldeweij et al. 2001a, 84-99:90-91. Extended argumentation in: Vermet, Bernard M.."Baldass was right" in ^ Jheronimus Bosch. His Sources. 2nd International Jheronimus Bosch Conference May 22-25, 2007 Jheronimus Bosch Art Center. 's-Hertogenbosch 2010. ISBN 978-90-816227-4-5 "Online".

6. This fact was only discovered by J. K. Steppe in 1962 (Jaarboek van de Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Wegenschaften 24 [1962], 166-167), 20 years after Fraenger speculated the triptych was commissioned by the grand master of a heretical sect, but five years before E. H. Gombrich claimed to have discovered the Nassau provenance. In Belting, 71

7. Silver, Larry. "Hieronymus Bosch, Tempter and Moralist". Per Contra: The International Journal of the Arts, Literature and Ideas, Winter 2006-2007. Retrieved April 27, 2008

8. "^ Bosch and Bruegel: Inventions, Enigmas and Variations Archived 2007-06-09 at the Wayback Machine ". The National Gallery, London. Press release archive, November 2003. Retrieved May 26, 2008

9. ^ "La restauración del Jardín de las delicias - Voz - Museo Nacional del Prado".

10. Bosch was christened Jeroen van Aken but took surname Bosch from the town he lived in for most of his life. Hieronymus is the Latin form of Jerome. In Rooth, 12. ^ ISBN 951-41-0673-3

11. Spector, Nancy. "^ The Tilled Field, 1923-1924 Archived 2008-09-25 at the Wayback Machine". Guggenheim display caption. Retrieved May 30, 2008

12. Jones, Jonathan. "^ The end of innocents". The Guardian, January 17, 2004. Retrieved May 27, 2008

13. "^ Mad Meg by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1561-62 Archived 2012-02-08 at the Wayback Machine". Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp. Retrieved May 27, 2008

14. Kimmelman, Michael. "^ Arcimboldo's Feast for the Eyes". The New York Times, October 10, 2007. Retrieved May 27, 2008

15. Moray, Gerta. "Miró, Bosch and Fantasy Painting". The Burlington Magazine, Volume 113, No. 820, July 1971. 387-391

16. Fanés, Fèlix. ^ Salvador Dalí: The Construction of the Image, 1925-1930. Yale University Press, March, 2007. 121. ISBN 0-300-09179-6

17. Félix Fanès: ^ Salvador Dalí. The Construction of the Image 1925-1930. Yale University Press 2007, ISBN 978-0-300-09179-3, p. 74

18. Moray, Gerta. "Miró, Bosch and Fantasy Painting". ^ The Burlington Magazine, Volume 113, No. 820, July 1971. Max Ernst's favourite painters and poets of the past, p. 387

Baldass, Ludwig von. Hieronymus Bosch. London: Thames and Hudson, 1960. ASIN B0007DNZR0

Boulboullé, Guido, "Groteske Angst. Die Höllenphantasien des Hieronymus Bosch". In: Auffarth, Christoph and Kerth, Sonja (Eds): "Glaubensstreit und Gelächter: Reformation und Lachkultur im Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit", LIT Verlag Berlin, 2008, pp. 55-78.

Cinotti, Mia. The Complete Paintings of Bosch. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969.

De Tolnay, Charles. Hieronymus Bosch. Tokyo: Eyre Methuen, 1975. ISBN 0-413-33280-2. Original publication: Hieronymus Bosch, Basel: Holbein, 1937, 129 pages text, 128 pages images.

Delevoy, Robert L. Bosch: Biographical and Critical Study. Lausanne: Skira, 1960.

Fraenger, Wilhelm and Kaiser, Ernst. The Millennium of Hieronymus Bosch. New York: Hacker Art Books, 1951. Original publication: Wilhelm Fraenger, Hieronymus Bosch - das Tausendjährige Reich. Grundzüge einer Auslegung, Winkler-Verlag Coburg 1947, 142 pages[ISBN missing ]

Glum, Peter. "Divine Judgment in Bosch's 'Garden of Earthly Delights". The Art Bulletin, Volume 58, No. 1, March 1976, 45-54.

Linfert, Carl (tr. Robert Erich Wolf). Bosch. London: Thames and Hudson, 1972. ISBN 0-500-09077-7. Original publication: Hieronymus Bosch - Gesamtausgabe der Gemälde, Köln: Phaidon Verlag 1959, 26 pages text, 93 pages images.

Moxey, Keith. "Hieronymus Bosch and the 'World Upside Down': The Case of The Garden of Earthly Delights". Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations. Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1994, 104-140. ISBN 0-8195-6267-X.

Pokorny, Erwin, "Hieronymus Bosch und das Paradies der Wollust". In: "Frühneuzeit-Info", Jg. 21, Heft 1+2 (Sonderband "Die Sieben Todsünden in der Frühen Neuzeit"), 2010, pp. 22-34.

Rooth, Anna Birgitta. Exploring the garden of delights: Essays in Bosch's paintings and the medieval mental culture. California: Suomalainen tiedeakatemia, 1992. ISBN 951-41-0673-3.

Snyder, James. Hieronymus Bosch. New York: Excalibur Books, 1977. ISBN 0-89673-060-3.

Snyder, James. The Northern Renaissance: Painting, Sculpture, the Graphic Arts from 1350 to 1575. Second edition. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2004. ISBN 0-13-150547-5.

Vermet, Bernard M. "Baldass was right" in Jheronimus Bosch. His Sources. 2nd International Jheronimus Bosch Conference May 22-25, 2007 Jheronimus Bosch Art Center. 's-Hertogenbosch 2010. ISBN 978-90-816227-4-5 "Online".

Matthijs Ilsink, Jos Koldeweij, Hieronymus Bosch: Painter and Draughtsman - Catalogue raisonné, Mercatorfonds nv; 2016.

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The Garden of Earthly Delights - Wikipedia

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The Garden of Earthly Delights is the modern title given to a triptych oil painting on oak panel painted by the Early Netherlandish master Hieronymus Bosch, between 1490 and 1510, when Bosch was between 40 and 60 years old. It has been housed in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, Spain since 1939.

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Journalist Graham Hancock travels the globe hunting for evidence of mysterious, lost civilizations dating back to the last Ice Age. Watch trailers & learn more.

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Aàdesokan: Environmental Identities #7 – Waste Identity

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https://climatetracker.org/artists-from-kenya-are-using-recycled-plastic-to-clean-up-nairobis-slums/

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Kevin Muller, a 28-year-old self-taught artist from Nairobi, Kenya, is combating climate change by creating toys, serviette holders and art pieces. In this way, he says, he expresses himself while at the same time taking action against pollution.

Muller is using plastic waste collected locally to create over 1.000 different types of reusable and durable products. He is part of a larger wave of young people creating new products out of recycled materials, particularly in urban slums.

Kenya has implemented strong actions against plastics. In 2017, the country placed a countrywide ban on plastic bags, with some of the toughest sanctions for polluters in the world. Manufacturers, sellers, and end-users of plastic bags face four years imprisonment or fines of up to $40.000.

Despite this law, Kenya is still battling waste from single-use plastic. Informal settlement areas such as Kibera, one of the largest slums in the world, bear the largest risks and environmental consequences of plastic pollution.

Born and raised in Kibera, Muller recalls that a lot has changed since his childhood and now. Rapid population growth and urbanization in the area have changed the landscape and increased pollution, he said.

Through art, he decided to find a way to tackle this problem. As he says, every type of plastic waste can be used to make a useful product, such as wall art pieces, toys, serviette holders, and a wide range of items from discarded plastic.

Painted plastic bottles that can be used for storage and decoration. Photo: Kevin Muller.

Plastic pollution around the world not only creates health impacts for people and biodiversity, but it's also a climate problem. Currently, between 4 to 8% of annual oil consumption is linked to plastic production, according to the World Economic Forum. That figure could increase up to 20% of oil consumption if reliance on plastics persists as demand grows.

Muller is part of a movement of young people trying to mitigate this problem through art. "I enjoy artwork because it allows me to freely express myself. Art complements my world. I can wake up in the middle of the night and think of something interesting to articulate," says Muller.

Cleaning up the slums

Since 2017, Muller has been part of the youth-led organization Slums Going Green and Clean (SGGC), which is based at the heart of Kibera. The organization, which initially formed to reform youth from crime, has over 150 members.

The SGGC members utilize various forms of art, such as drawing, singing, poetry, drama, sculpture, and modelling to pass important information on conservation of the environment and plastic waste reduction.

They also collect an average of 1.5 tonnes of waste from 640 households monthly, which is later taken to their sorting site for segregation. Muller gets most of his raw materials for craft art from this site.

"Plastic is causing almost irreversible damage to our society, as a climate and health risk. Rivers in the slum area are mostly choked by plastic materials. Some people burn them, which releases harmful greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Some of these plastics also release harmful chemicals when exposed to the sun," says Muller.

He often sells his art pieces at exhibitions, and they're frequently featured in conservation events to sensitize the community on the need to beat plastic pollution. According to Muller, young people are increasingly finding interest in this type of craft.

However, the COVID-19 pandemic has had an adverse impact on Muller's work as restrictions on gatherings to events have cut off platforms to exhibit his work. The most recent lockdown imposed on Nairobi and nearby counties have also made it impossible for Muller to sell his products to other regions within the country.

Artists at the Slums Go Green and Clean plastic center. Photo: Kevin Muller.

Fighting plastics

Janet Kavutha, a Program Officer at African Sustainability Network (ASNet), believes that talented young people such as Muller should receive government support, the private sector, and conservation organisations to amplify their impact.

"Manufacturers of single-use plastics and local governments should provide incentives to young artists like Kevin to increase efficiency and help them find markets for their products," says Kavutha.

At a national level, Kenya still faces big challenges to eradicate plastic pollution and its side effects. For example, a 2018 study from the National Environmental Management Agency (NEMA) found that half of the country's cattle had plastic in their stomachs.

Before the country's plastic ban, Kenya produced around 4.000 tons of plastic monthly, with supermarkets alone offering 100 million bags, according to a 2018 study. Only half of that plastic ended up in the solid waste streams.

Now, Muller and the SGGC have ambitious plans for their future. "We have a vision of building a 5-storied art center with locally collected plastic waste," states Muller. The building, according to him, will be a safe haven where youth from the slum will express themselves and experiment with various materials.

"Many people do not currently appreciate the immense role that art can play in solving much of the society's pressing challenges, such as climate change. That is why we are building a generation of eco-conscious artists," Muller concludes.

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Artists from Kenya are using recycled plastic to clean up Nairobi's slums - climatetracker

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Kevin Muller, a 28-year-old self-taught artist from Nairobi, Kenya, is combating climate change by creating toys, serviette holders and art pieces. In this way, he says, he expresses himself while at the same time taking action against pollution. Muller is using plastic waste collected locally to create over 1.000 different types of reusable and durable products.

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#Recycling#Kenya#

https://youtu.be/GK-BHZs7GxE

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How Flip-Flop Art Helps Clean Kenya's Beaches | World Wide Waste | Business Insider

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Discover
Contemporary African Art.

Banana Hill Art Gallery is a contemporary African art gallery located in Banana Hill, just west of the Nairobi city centre.

7 January - 24 January 2023

Banana Hill Art Gallery is delighted to present "Let's Not Think About Tomorrow" a group exhibition by artists Andrew Nyaga and Leezie Kiambi. All are welcome to visit.

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Nairobi Art Gallery | Banana Hill Art Gallery | Banana Hill

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Discover Contemporary African Art. Banana Hill Art Gallery is a contemporary African art gallery located in Banana Hill, just west of the Nairobi city centre. 7 January - 24 January 2023 Banana Hill Art Gallery is delighted to present "Let's Not Think About Tomorrow" a group exhibition by artists Andrew Nyaga and Leezie Kiambi.

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Neem tree is the medicine for african people 

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Neem tree is the medicine for african people 

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#Tree#TheNeemTree#Malaria

https://www.fawco.org/global-issues/environment/environment-articles/289-the-neem-tree-a-wonder-tool-against-malaria

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Early Civilizations Had It All Figured Out

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Early Civilizations Had It All Figured Out

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#EarlyCivilizations

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A contrarian account of our prehistory argues that cities once flourished without rulers and rules-and still could.

Moments of sociopolitical tumult have a way of generating all-encompassing explanatory histories. These chronicles either indulge a sense of decline or applaud our advances. The appetite for such stories seems indiscriminate-tales of deterioration and tales of improvement are frequently consumed by the same people. Two of Bill Gates's favorite soup-to-nuts books of the past decade, for example, are Steven Pinker's " The Better Angels of Our Nature" and Yuval Noah Harari's " Sapiens." The first asserts that everything has been on the upswing since the Enlightenment, when we learned that rational argument was preferable to religious superstition and wanton cudgelling. The second concludes that everything was more or less O.K. until about twelve thousand years ago, when we first beat our swords into plowshares; this innocent decision, which must have seemed a good idea at the time, heralded an era of administrative hierarchy, state-sanctioned violence, and the unchecked proliferation of carbohydrates. Perhaps what readers like Gates find valuable in these books has less to do with the purported shape and direction of history than with the broad assurance that history has a shape and a direction.

Both stories, after all, adhere to a model of history that's at once teleological (driven by specific forces to arrive at the foreordained present) and discontinuous (such magical things as farming and rationality emerged from the woodwork, unlocking successive stages of developmental maturity). They generally agree that the crucial rupture divided some original state of nature from the grand accession of civilization. Their arcs of irrevocable decline or compulsory progress are variations on themes that were given their most recognizable modern elaborations by Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Pinker takes up the Hobbesian notion that early human existence was a brutish war of all against all. Harari takes rather literally Rousseau's thought experiment that we were born free and rushed headlong into our chains. ("There is no way out of the imagined order," Harari writes. "When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.") In both accounts, guilelessness and egalitarianism are exchanged for knowledge and subordination; the only real difference lies in the cost-benefit assessments of that trade.

About a decade ago, the anthropologist and activist David Graeber, who died suddenly last year, at the age of fifty-nine, and the archeologist David Wengrow began to consider, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, how they might contribute to the burgeoning literature on inequality. Not inequality of income or wealth but inequality of power: why so many people obey the orders of so few. The two scholars came to see, however, that to inquire after the "origins" of inequality was to defer to one of two myths-roughly, Hobbes's or Rousseau's-based on a deeply ingrained and deeply misleading fantasy of the human career. The product of their extended collaboration, " The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity " (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is a profuse and antic account of how we came to take that old narrative for granted and why we might be better off if we let it go.

The consensus version of the story begins with the appearance of the first anatomically modern humans, about two hundred thousand years ago. For approximately a hundred and ninety thousand years, or about ninety-five per cent of our existence as a species, we lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers, following migratory herds and foraging for wild nuts and berries. These cohorts were small enough, and the demands of resource procurement and allocation were sufficiently minor, that decisions were face-to-face affairs among intimates. Despite the lurking menace of large cats, these early hunter-gatherers didn't have to work particularly hard to fulfill their caloric needs, and they passed their ample leisure hours cavorting like primates. The order of the day was an easy egalitarianism, mostly for want of other options.

Twelve thousand years ago, give or take, the static pleasures of this long, undifferentiated epoch gave way to history proper. The hunter-gatherer bands lucky enough to find themselves on the flanks of the Zagros Mountains, or the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, began herding and farming. The rise of agriculture allowed for permanent settlements, which, growing dense, became cities. Urban commerce demanded division of labor, professional specialization, and bureaucratic oversight. Because wheat, unlike wild berries or the hindquarters of an aurochs, was a storable, countable good that appeared on a routine schedule, the selfish administrators of inchoate kingdoms could easily collect taxes, or tributes. Writing, which first emerged in the service of accounting, abetted the sort of control and surveillance upon which primitive racketeers came to depend. Where hunter-gatherers had hunted and gathered only enough to meet the demands of the day, agricultural communities created history's first surpluses, and the extraction of tributes propped up rent-seeking élites and the managerial pyramids-not to mention standing armies-necessary to maintain their privilege. The rise of the arts, technology, and monumental architecture was the upside of the creation and immiseration of a peasant class.

From roughly the Enlightenment through the middle of the twentieth century, these developments-which came to be known as the Neolithic Revolution-were seen as generally good things. Societies were categorized by evolutionary stage on the basis of their mode of food production and economic organization, with full-fledged states taken to be the pinnacle of progress.

But it was also possible to think that the Neolithic Revolution was, all in all, a bad thing. In the late nineteen-sixties, ethnographers studying present-day hunter-gatherers in southern Africa argued that their "primitive" ways were not only freer and more egalitarian than the "later" stages of human development but also healthier and more fun. Agriculture required much longer and duller working hours; dense settlements and the proximity of livestock, as well as monotonous diets of cereal staples, encouraged malnutrition and disease. The poisoned fruit of grain cultivation had, in this telling, led to a cycle of population growth and more grain cultivation. Agriculture was a trap. Rousseau's thought experiment, long written off by conservative critics as romantic nostalgia for the "noble savage," was resuscitated, in modern, scientific form. It might have taken three or four decades for these insights to make their way to TED stages, but the paleo diet became a fundamental requirement of any self-respecting Silicon Valley founder.

For Graeber and Wengrow, this basic story, whether relayed in a triumphal or a defeatist register, is itself a trap. If we accept that the rise of agriculture meant the rise of the state-of political élites and intricate structures of power-then all we can do is tinker around the edges. Even if we regard the Paleolithic era as a garden paradise, we know that our reëntry is forever barred. For one thing, the requirements of hunting and gathering could support only some trivial fraction of the earth's current population. A life under government control now seems inescapable.

"The Dawn of Everything" is a lively, and often very funny, anarchist project that aspires to enlarge our political imagination by revitalizing the possibilities of the distant past. Superficially, it resembles other exhaustive, synoptic histories-it's encyclopedic in scope, with sections introduced by comically baroque intertitles-but it disavows the intellectual trappings of a knowable arc, a linear structure, and internal necessity. As a stab at grandeur stripped of grandiosity, the book rejects the logic of technological or ecological determinism, structuring its narrative around our ancestors' improvisatory responses to the challenges of happenstance. The result is an almost hallucinatory vision of the human epic as a series of idiosyncratic digressions. It is the story of how we made it up as we went along-of how things could have been different and, perhaps, still might be.

Drawing on new archeological findings, and revisiting old ones, Graeber and Wengrow argue that the granaries-to-overlords tale simply isn't true. Rather, it's a function of an extremely low-resolution approach to time. Viewed closely, the course of human history resists our favored schemata. Hunter-gatherer communities seem to have experimented with various forms of farming as side projects thousands of years before we have any evidence of cities. Even after urban centers developed, there was nothing like an ineluctable relationship between cities, technology, and domination.

The large town of Çatalhöyük, for example, on the Konya Plain in present-day Turkey, was settled around 7400 B.C. and seems to have been occupied for approximately fifteen hundred years-which, the authors note, is "roughly the same period of time that separates us from Amalafrida, Queen of the Vandals, who reached the height of her influence around AD 523." The settlement was home to about five thousand people, but it had neither an obvious center nor any communal facilities. There weren't even streets: households were densely packed together and accessed via roof ladders. The residents' living areas were marked by a "distinctly macabre sense of interior design," with narrow rooms outfitted with aurochs skulls and horns, along with raised platforms that encased the remains of up to sixty of the households' dead ancestors. It was, as far as we know, one of the first large settlements to have practiced agriculture: the citizens derived most of their nutrition from cereals and beans they grew, as well as from domesticated sheep and goats. For a long time, all of this was taken together as a key example of the "agricultural revolution" in action, and the material remnants were interpreted to support the old story. Corpulent female figurines, assumed to be part of fertility rituals, were found in what were understood to be proto-religious shrines of some sort-the first indications of organized cultural systems.

In the past three decades, however, new archeological methods have disturbed many of these long-standing assumptions. The "shrines" were, Graeber and Wengrow tell us, just regular houses; the female figurines could be the discarded Barbie dolls of the Anatolian Neolithic, but they could also be a way of honoring female elders. The community seems to have supported itself for a thousand years with various forms of agriculture-floodplain farming and animal husbandry-without ever having committed itself to new forms of social or cultural organization. From what we can derive from wall murals and other expressive residues, Graeber and Wengrow say, "the cultural life of the community remained stubbornly oriented around the worlds of hunting and foraging."

So what was actually going on in Çatalhöyük? Graeber and Wengrow interpret the evidence to propose that the town's inhabitants managed their affairs perfectly well without the sort of administrative structures, royal or priestly, that were supposedly part of the agricultural package. "Despite the considerable size and density of the built-up area, there is no evidence for central authority," the authors maintain. "Each household appears more or less a world unto itself-a discrete locus of storage, production and consumption. Each also seems to have held a significant degree of control over its own rituals." Some houses appear to have been more lavishly furnished with aurochs horns or prized obsidian (which was brought in from Cappadocia, more than a hundred miles away), but there is no sign of élite neighborhoods or marks of caste consolidation. Different forms of social organization likely prevailed at different times of year, with greater division of labor necessary for cultivation and hunting in the summer and fall, followed by something more equitable-and, perhaps, matriarchal-during the winter.

Çatalhöyük isn't the only site that calls into question the presumption that the Neolithic era was patterned on a single civilizational kit. Graeber and Wengrow report that some cities thrived long before they showed signs of hierarchical systems-such as temples and palaces-and some never developed them at all. "In others, centralized power seems to appear and then disappear," they write. "It would seem that the mere fact of urban life does not, necessarily, imply any form of political organization."

If cities didn't lead to states, what did? Not any singular arrow of history, according to Graeber and Wengrow, but, rather, the gradual and dismal coalescence of otherwise unrelated, parallel processes. In particular, they think it involved the extension of patriarchal domination from the home to society at large. Their account of how household structures were transformed into despotic regimes requires some unconvincing hand-waving, but throughout they emphasize that any given process can be historically contingent without being simply inexplicable. The guiding principle of "The Dawn of Everything" is that our remote ancestors-not to mention certain present-day Indigenous groups long dismissed as living relics of superannuated barbarians-must be viewed as self-conscious political actors. Historical ruptures cannot be reduced to technological novelties or geographical constraints, even if those factors played crucial roles. They arose from our own choices and actions.

Graeber and Wengrow point to moments in the distant past in which they see instances of deliberate refusal: communities that weighed the advantages and disadvantages of one ostensibly evolutionary step or another (pastoralism, royal domination) and decided that they liked their current odds just fine. The communities that built Stonehenge had once adopted ways of cultivating cereal from Continental Europe, but recent research suggests that they returned to hazelnut collection around 3300 B.C. Various ecological theories have been floated to explain the sudden collapse, around 1350 A.D., of the brutal dynasty of Cahokia (in present-day Illinois), then the largest city in the Americas north of Mexico, but Graeber and Wengrow propose that the proto-empire's subjects-who lived under constant surveillance and the threat of mass executions-simply defected en masse. Land wasn't scarce, and they just walked away.

Where some groups adopted and abandoned different arrangements over time, others maintained a repertoire of assorted practices to suit fluctuating purposes. Modern ethnographic treatments of Indigenous communities describe an astonishing level of social plasticity (available to us, perhaps, in the highly etiolated form of Burning Man and other "temporary autonomous zones"). In a 1903 essay, the anthropologists Marcel Mauss and Henri Beuchat described the routine organizational reversals in Inuit communities. These groups spent their summers fishing and hunting in small cohorts under the possessive-and coercive-authority of a single male elder. Graeber and Wengrow describe how then, as the winter brought an influx of walruses and seals to the shore, "the Inuit gathered together to build great meeting houses of wood, whale rib and stone," where "virtues of equality, altruism and collective life prevailed. Wealth was shared, and husbands and wives exchanged partners." It's impossible to say whether such practices were designed or preserved to diminish the threat of permanent domination, but that was one of their effects.

Such groups weren't ignorant of whatever else was on offer; they were frequently in contact with other societies, took stock of their habits, and sought to define themselves in contrarian ways, in a rather underexplored process that, following the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, Graeber and Wengrow call "schismogenesis." In the Pacific Northwest, men of rank among the Kwakiutl held lavish, greasy potlatches and took war captives as slaves; their neighbors to the south of the Klamath River, the Yurok, prized restraint and self-denial, and committed themselves to modes of subsistence that rendered slavery, which they found morally repugnant, unnecessary.

When divergences in cultural values occurred within societies rather than between them, the result could take the form of revolutionary sentiment. Consider the city of Teotihuacan, which was founded around 100 B.C.-more than a thousand years before the rise of the Aztecs-and was almost certainly the largest city in the pre-colonial Americas. The metropolis was first constructed on a monumental scale, with the kind of pyramids and palaces that indicate social hierarchy. At a certain point, however, the people of Teotihuacan decided against investing in more fancy villas. Instead, Graeber and Wengrow write, "the citizens embarked on a remarkable project of urban renewal, supplying high-quality apartments for nearly all the city's population, regardless of wealth or status." They accomplished all of this without wheeled vehicles, sailing ships, animal-powered traction, or advanced metallurgy. Perhaps most important was that, although they were in contact with the monarchical Mayan societies nearby, the people of Teotihuacan flourished for some three centuries without submitting to the rule of anything like a king.

Except, we learn in passing, some archeologists believe that they did. (The scholarly debate on the matter turns in part on the interpretation of a few inscriptions in the Mayan city of Tikal.) Though Graeber and Wengrow have marshalled a vast amount of archeological evidence, they acknowledge that much of what anyone has to say about ancient societies is speculative. Their hope is that, even if some of their examples remain dubious, the accumulated weight of recent findings-and the more inventive assortment of political organization they imply-establishes the glib tendentiousness of Big History. As they put it, "We are at least trying to see what happens when we drop the teleological habit of thought."

Big History, to be sure, has long been out of favor in academic circles. Although Graeber and Wengrow can be a little self-congratulatory, they do point out that one of the first things you learn in an introductory course in anthropology or archeology is that pat appeals to cultural evolution are retrograde and silly. Critiques of grand narratives have been important to the modern self-image of these fields-in part as penance for having once been happy to serve the priorities of empire, peddling "civilization" as a gift to the "primitives." One consequence, however, is that wholesale synthetic accounts of human history tend to be written in the extravagantly roughshod mode of Harari's "Sapiens" or Jared Diamond's " Guns, Germs, and Steel." (Graeber and Wengrow neglect to mention their strongest rivals: the science fictions of writers such as Kim Stanley Robinson.)

At the same time, Graeber and Wengrow know better than to limit "The Dawn of Everything" to a litany of counterexamples. In the late nineteen-sixties, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz worried that his discipline had gained a reputation for simple negation-a message encapsulated in the phrase "Not on Easter Island." In other words, there were holes in every story: you could always puncture some "high-wrought" theory with a shard of anomalous data from the remote place where you did your fieldwork. Yet when anthropology was reduced to "spiteful ethnography," Geertz argued, it put itself in the business of "disapproving of intellectual constructions but not of creating, or perhaps even of understanding, any." Graeber and Wengrow seem to agree. It's all well and good, they might think, to murmur "Not on Easter Island" when a popularizer gets too expansive or confident, but they worry that if people aren't offered an alternative framework they will still default to some version of the pernicious cultural-evolution myth-and accept that the familiar hierarchies of governance are simply the price of sophistication.

Consider the widespread assumption, which Graeber long contested, that larger human societies can't resolve collective-action problems without top-down authority. In 2014, he and the tech investor Peter Thiel debated the issue onstage. Thiel argued that modern life is much too convoluted for truly democratic participation, which is why his model for innovation was the miniature suzerainty of the startup. As a quasi-libertarian, he admitted some sympathy for Graeber's political anarchism, but he didn't see how it could ever work: "Could you build the Manhattan Project, could you build Apollo, could you get someone to the moon in a radically decentralized chaotic system? Or do you need coördination and planning?"

Curiously, there are moments in "The Dawn of Everything" in which Graeber and Wengrow seem to yield to this way of thinking; they suggest, at one point, that we pay less attention to Egypt's heroic pyramid-building Old and Middle Kingdoms and more to its apparently helter-skelter "intermediate" periods, during which masterpieces might have gone unbuilt but people did not have to fear being summarily enslaved or buried alive as part of a funeral entourage. Still, it's by contending at length with the prejudices of scale-the expectation that there is some natural upper bound on the number of people who can live and work together without significant coördination from above-that the book signals its broader ambitions. "In the standard, textbook version of human history, scale is crucial," the authors write. "The tiny bands of foragers in which humans were thought to have spent most of their evolutionary history could be relatively democratic and egalitarian precisely because they were small." We therefore persuade ourselves that, given the problem of strangers, we need "such things as urban planners, social workers, tax auditors and police."

Yet pre-agricultural people erected great testaments to their ways of life in the absence of those structural supports-at Göbekli Tepe, also in Turkey, as well as on the Ukrainian steppe and in the Mississippi Delta. And post-agricultural societies could maintain systematic achievements without administrators to run them. "It turns out that farmers are perfectly capable of co-ordinating very complicated irrigation systems all by themselves," Graeber and Wengrow say. "Urban populations seem to have a remarkable capacity for self-governance in ways which, while usually not quite 'egalitarian,' were likely a good deal more participatory than almost any urban government today." Ancient emperors mostly "saw little reason to interfere, as they simply didn't care very much about how their subjects cleaned the streets or maintained their drainage ditches." About eight thousand years ago, the villagers of Tell Sabi Abyad, in present-day Syria, saw to a variety of complex tasks-pasturing the flocks; sowing, harvesting, and threshing grain; weaving flax; making beads; and carving stones-that presumably required extensive inter-household coöperation, yet everyone lived in uniform dwellings. Though writing wasn't invented for another three thousand years, a scheme of geometric tokens, stored and archived in a central if nondescript depot, had been put in place to monitor resource administration. The archeological remains of the village, remarkably preserved by a catastrophic fire that baked its structures of mud and clay, show no signs of caste division or a presiding authority.

Graeber and Wengrow hope that, once we grasp how ancient mega-sites (in Ukraine or in Jomon-era Japan) could grow large and manifold without a literate bureaucracy, or the way early literate societies (Uruk, in Mesopotamia) might have managed the trick of participatory self-governance, we might renew and expand our own cramped notions of what's politically tenable. We could come to detach progress from obedience. As they put it, "Humans may not have begun their history in a state of primordial innocence, but they do appear to have begun it with a self-conscious aversion to being told what to do. If this is so, we can at least refine our initial question: the real puzzle is not when chiefs, or even kings and queens, first appeared, but rather when it was no longer possible to simply laugh them out of court."

Graeber and Wengrow's dearest aspiration is to quicken that laughter once again. "Nowadays, most of us find it increasingly difficult even to picture what an alternative economic or social order would be like," they write. "Our distant ancestors seem, by contrast, to have moved regularly back and forth between them. If something did go terribly wrong in human history-and given the current state of the world, it's hard to deny something did-then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence."

This wasn't a matter of sheer forgetfulness, they say. It was by design. At least some of the Indigenous inhabitants of the Americas, they tell us, were bewildered and appalled by the strange European custom of giving and taking orders. Their judgments were widely circulated in the Europe of the early Enlightenment, where Indigenous people were often featured in dialogues meant to criticize the status quo. At the time, they were typically dismissed as the rhetorical sock-puppetry of canny European heretics. For how could "Natives" credibly engage with political constitutions or deliberate over consequential decisions?

"The Dawn of Everything" makes a persuasive case that what was passed off as Indigenous criticism of European political thinking was, in fact, Indigenous criticism of European political thinking. These Indigenous objections could be safely deflected only if they were seen as European ventriloquism, not ideas from another adult community with alternative values. "Portraying history as a story of material progress, that framework recast indigenous critics as innocent children of nature, whose views on freedom were a mere side effect of their uncultivated way of life and could not possibly offer a serious challenge to contemporary social thought," Graeber and Wengrow write.

The whole symbolic apparatus of cultural evolution aimed to make freedom-which they define as the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey orders, and the freedom to imagine less hierarchical ways of organizing ourselves-seem archaic and perilous. When we speak of the onset of social inequality, we're accepting the idea that real freedom is the plaything of children. The species grew up, and grew out of it. Peter Thiel wonders why we don't yet live in the future of our dreams. Graeber and Wengrow think the first step forward is a reminder of the past we deserve. ♦

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Early Civilizations Had It All Figured Out

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A contrarian account of our prehistory argues that cities once flourished without rulers and rules-and still could. Gideon Lewis-Kraus on David Graeber and David Wengrow's "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity."

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#LeonardWitte

http://www.leonardwitte.com/

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#MasaiJewelry#MasaiTribe#Kenya

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#Dance#JumpingDance#Ceremony#Maasai

The adumu, also known as the “jumping dance,” is a highly identifiable Maasai ceremony that has been captured in countless photographs and movies. However, many tourists may be unaware of the true significance of this dance. When on safari tribesmen will often perform an out-of-context version of it for visitors. For the Maasai, the adumu is simply one of several rites that make up the Eunoto, the event in which the morani, or younger warriors, advance to manhood.

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The adumu, also known as the "jumping dance," is a highly identifiable Maasai ceremony that has been captured in countless photographs and movies. However, many tourists may be unaware of the true significance of this dance. When on safari tribesmen will often perform an out-of-context version of it for visitors. For the Maasai, the adumu is simply one of several rites that make up the Eunoto, the event in which the morani, or younger warriors, advance to manhood.

Children stay at home with their parents until they reach adolescence, when they are inducted into the earliest stages of masculinity via the Emuratta, a ritualised circumcision ceremony (women don't have their own "age group" like boys, but do through some of their own rites on their journey to adulthood). Boys who successfully complete the Emuratta (one of the prerequisites is that you do not even flinch) are promoted to junior moran status. Following the ritual, the new morani are relocated to a "manyatta," a communal campground where they would remain for up to ten years. Part of the reasoning behind the manyatta camp is to teach male Maasai independence since mothers typically take care of household tasks as they grow up.

It is understandable that the morani, isolated from the rest of their tribe and forbidden from eating or drinking in the presence of a woman would jump at the chance to graduate to full adulthood.

Eunoto celebrations can take up to ten days and include singing, a march in front of elder warriors, a ritual cow slaughter, and the first taste of alcohol, which is usually produced from fermented aloe roots and honey. The adumu, on the other hand, is one of the most photogenic aspects of the ceremony.

The juvenile morani form a circle into which one or two at a time will enter. The young warriors began to jump, their bodies kept in a narrow posture with their heels never touching the earth. The higher and more graceful the warrior's leap, the more appealing he is to the young women watching (providing tremendous motivation to the young men who will only be able to marry after the Eunoto rite is completed!). When one warrior wears out (typically after only a few jumps; the height gained is typically astonishing and necessitates serious agility), another fighter takes his place. The morani in the outer circle continue to sing, raising the pitch of their voices to "match" the height of the jumps.

The morani shave their long hair after the ceremony as a sign of their new position as full-fledged warriors. They are now free to return to the society, marry, and raise their own families.

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Maasai jumping dance. How high can you jump?

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For the Maasai, important rites of passage in life are marked by ceremonies filled with song and dance. Boys are divided into age groups ...

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#AfricanMasks

https://www.contemporary-african-art.com/african-masks.html

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They are both idea and form. The artistry of African masks is self evident but, for the people who create them, they have a much deeper meaning than surface beauty.
In general, the mask form is a physical mechanism to initiate transformation whereby the wearer takes on a new entity, allowing him to have influence on the spirits to whom he is appealing to or offering thanks.

The Western viewer is often caught off guard by the emotions that a mask can evoke. Our intrigue can quickly be transformed to a powerful connection not often experienced in our frequently disassociated worlds.

They therefore yield some notion of power which the viewer can be attracted to or repelled by. This too is despite the fact that often the viewer is studying the mask out of context and without its accompanying costume or props. Something mystical is transferred by the nature of its function.

The traditional African mask is worn during celebrations, dances and festivities and ritual ceremonies commemorating social and religious events. They play a very significant spiritual and functional role in the community and often there is no distinction between social recreation and ritual celebration.
African masks are more often than not part of a unified experience, so while we may see them as sculptural forms they can also be considered as a form of performance art and understanding their function within this event is essential to appreciating their cultural, symbolic and aesthetic significance. They are often used in dance ceremonies to make the connection between the human world and the spirit world. Masquerades carry great religious and cultural significance for participants including the enthralled and connected audience. The African mask is a dramatic device enabling performers to stand apart from their everyday role in society and wearers are often chosen for special characteristics or qualities they have attained or been initiated into.
African masks are in high demand from art collectors and museums the world over are reworking their archival collections to present masks in a new and vibrant format which, more often than not, focus on the beauty and variety of form of the sculptured piece.

Seeing a row of African masks from different tribal areas can show up all the contrasts of form, shape, colour, design, patterning and adornment which exist and suggest the dazzling range of formal possibilities achieved by African sculptors. But lose the connection of a carving with its original function and it is very difficult to establish the purpose for which it is created.

Master carvers of masks do still exist; it is a skill that earns respect within a community and a tradition that is passed down within a family through many generations.

Carvers undergo many years of specialized apprenticeship until achieving mastery of the art. It is creative work that not only employs complex craft techniques but also requires spiritual, symbolic and social knowledge. The aura and presence of masks can put them among the most charismatic of any sculptures ever produced and the sense of play in some of the masquerade masks make them some of humanity's richest and most vibrant visual creations.

Vertically covering the face

As helmets, encasing the entire head

As a crest, resting upon the head which is commonly covered by material or fibre to continue the disguise

A mask used for spiritual purposes can often only be worn once and then thrown away or burned, once its function has been performed. An initiation mask seldom survives the ceremony .
Imagine how many art pieces have been lost to the world!

I know from art college how torn I was to sculpt an effigy and then be made to burn it on the beach in some defiant ceremony to prove that the energy and thought process required in production of the piece was the compelling and significant component.

For the African artist, the purpose of creating the mask was achieved once the ritual performance was over. There was no attachment to the piece but the skill and the experience is carried forward and handed down the line of descendants. The viewing of a mask or ceremonial events can also often be restricted to certain peoples or places; there is a lot of tradition and taboo surrounding this art form. In many instances masquerades are forbidden to be seen by certain members of the community.

Materials used:

African masks are primarily carved from wood but can also be made of terracotta, glazed pottery, bronze, brass, copper, ivory or leather.

They are adorned and decorated with cloth, raffia and other plant fibres, shells, beads, found objects like porcupine quills and other natural objects, feathers, horns, paint, kaolin, nails, coloured glass.

Ceremonies

African masks are generally representative of some sort of spirit and the spirit is believe to inhabit and possess the dancer as they take part in the performance. Music (primarily drums), dance, song and prayer are all tools used to induce a state of trance by which this transformation can occur. Some of the spirits these masks evoke are represented in mask depicting women, royalty and animals.

A translator who is often a wise being who holds status within the community helps with the communication to the ancestors and the translation of the messages received, deciphering the groans and utterances of the dancer.

In rituals, African masks represent deities, mythological beasts and gods; metaphors for good and evil, the dead, animals, nature and any other force that is considered more powerful than man himself. A mask can function as a receptacle for prayer and appeal to the Gods for benevolence and appeasement or on the other end of the scale, power and bravery in battle. Some of the rituals performed are for...

Initiation into manhood/ womanhood/adulthood

Circumcision

Fertility

Hunting preparation

War preparation

To stop destruction/invasion by human or natural forms/protection

Witchcraft or magical rites

Expulsion of bad spirits, village purification, execution of criminals

Celebratory

These are performed with great vigour and spectacle and the African mask is often part of an elaborate theatrical event, a masquerade with costumes and props created to enthrall and entertain. Some of the celebrations occur around...

Storytelling, expressing social expectations and conventions

Crop harvesting

Abundance and prosperity

Market day festivals

Post hunt gratitude

Post war victory

Consulting the oracles

Resolving of disputes

Burials

Commemorative occasions

Rejoicing

Tribal masks

African tribal masks have a known history as far back as the stone age. For thousands of years, rituals and ceremonies were an integral part of community life. Unfortunately, these days it is less so and since many tribes have lost their cultural identity through tribal dispersement and fragmentation for various reasons, authentic masking ceremonies no longer occur in many parts of Africa. There are very specific masks for very specific ceremonies which have their own function and meaning.

To study all these would take a lifetime!

However, there are some prominent tribes and communities to whom masks and mask ceremonies have been a significant form of societal life and historically have defined their culture.

They can be examined in more detail on separate pages, see African Tribal Masks...

Bwa, Mossi and Nuna of Burkina Faso

Dan of Liberia and Ivory Coast

Dogon and Bamana of Mali

Fang (Punu) and Kota of Gabon

Yorubo, Nubo, Igbo and Edo of Nigeria

Senufo and Grebo, Baule (Guro) and Ligbi (Koulango) of Ivory Coast

Temne, Gola and Sande (Sowei) of Sierra Leone

Bambara of Mali

Luba (Lulua) Songye, Teke, Goma, Lulua, Hemba and Kuba of Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)

Chokwe of Zambia and Angola Makonde of N Mozambique

Contemporary Art Mask

Romauld Hazoume b 1962, Porto Novo, Republic of Benin

He is essentially a brilliantly inventive assemblagist who is committed to carrying African art traditions forward while finding a new way to portray the dilemmas currently assuaging the African continent. He reworks what is sent by the West in terms of throwaway consumerables and delivers them back in a confrontational art form.

In the mid-1980's he began sculptural experiments with black jerry cans which are carried in great clusters on the back of bicycles and motorbikes in his home country. They are often the cause of fatal explosions since they are expanded and thereby weakened over heat to obtain more capacity. Romauld has used these cans as a powerful metaphor of slave repression, pushed to extreme before breaking point.

His Masks Collection transforms salvaged materials and industrial waste into spiritual objects. They are incredibly effective in conveying the same sense of power we see in traditional African masks with a sense of foreboding and a slightly confrontational aspect.

Unlike traditional African masks which take on identities, these masks each have their own personalities and characters; they can be war-like, comical, animalistic, self portrait but the central theme is that their core is made from plastic fuel canisters, a symbol of negotiation, corruption and mis-use of power in Africa. (Dealing in fuel often involves illegal cross border smuggling). The handle becomes a nose and the gaping snout and sculpted panels suggest facial features. Adornment can be found anywhere from industrial waste to found natural items like porcupine quills.

His work is reflective of an enduring African cultural art form that can be seen in the works of Joseph-Francis Sumegne and Dilomprizulike of Nigeria among many other artists who work with found objects.

Joseph-Francis Sumegne b 1951, Cameroon

Sumegne's sculptures are a true reformation of waste and rejects that are made mainly from wire/scrap iron and material that he has collected and stored in his workplace.

For me they exhibit the same qualities as African masks do, slightly sinister and enigmatic but with strong bearing and form.

Nick Cave b 1959, Missouri, USA

Nick Cave is not African but his work is so infectious and inspirational that he has to be included in this contemporary African art section just for the joy and pleasure of being exposed to his amazing installations.

He has undoubtedly been influenced by tribal masquerades and his 'sound suit' installations and accompanying videos are very reminiscent of all that those ceremonies conjure up for all participants be they viewer, listener or performer.
Watch his extraordinary sculptures come to life on You Tube. Click the links below each image to watch in a new window...
He uses all manner of found objects to create his suits; sequins and fur, bottle caps, sticks; metal and wooden, fabric, hair, ordinary materials that he transmutes into multi-layered, mixed media sculptures.

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They are both idea and form. The artistry of African masks is self evident but, for the people who create them, they have a much deeper meaning than surface beauty. In general, the mask form is a physical mechanism to initiate transformation whereby the wearer takes on a new entity, allowing him to have influence on the spirits to whom he is appealing to or offering thanks.

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#AfricanMask

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#SoapStone#KenyanArt#Sculpture

Soapstone is a soft stone that is really popular in kenyan for carving sculptures

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#Africa

African way to work with animal bones

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#Relic

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In religion, a relic is an object or article of religious significance from the past.[1] It usually consists of the physical remains or personal effects of a saint or other person preserved for the purpose of veneration as a tangible memorial. Relics are an important aspect of some forms of Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, shamanism, and many other religions. Relic derives from the Latin reliquiae, meaning “remains”, and a form of the Latin verb relinquere, to “leave behind, or abandon”. A reliquary is a shrine that houses one or more religious relics.

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Can it be called anything other than vulgar when Diogenes lets a fart fly against the Platonic theory of ideas – or is fartiness itself one of the ideas God discharged from his meditation on the genesis of the cosmos?

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An Introduction to Peter Sloterdijk's "Critique of Cynical Reason"

In this essay I wish to give an introduction to the first main work of a major German contemporary philosopher - Peter Sloterdijk. He was born in Karlsruhe in 1947. 36 years later, in 1983, he became the shooting star of German philosophy with the publication of his early main work 'The Critique of Cynical Reason' with which I will be concerned in this paper.

In later publications he has dealt with topics as diverse as the flight from the world (Weltflucht) of monks, to the cultural history of drugs, the location when we listen to music [Sloterdijk (1993a)], and even a Taoism for Europe [Sloterdijk (1996)]. In addition, it should be mentioned that the philosoüphy of his latest main works which are called "Spheres" {"Sphären 1" [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998b] & "Sphären 2" [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1999]} differs significantly from the 'Critique of Cynical Reason'. Yet, he is not only a philosopher and cultural critic, but he has also published a novel called 'the magic tree' (Der Zauberbaum) [Sloterdijk (1985)] which deals with the birth of psychoanalysis. His fame in German philosophical circles is only being matched by Habermas, Marquard, and Gadamer.

There are, however, also quite a few people, who would object to me calling Sloterdijk a philosopher, because, according to them, Sloterdijk lacks academic rigour, and deals with topics not normally discussed in Academic philosophy. Still, Habermas takes him seriously [J. Habermas, in: Pflasterstrand: Nr.: 159 / 1983], internationally renowned Professors of philosophy have written articles about him [ed. Suhrkamp (1987)], and there are already lecture series being organised on some of his writings in Germany, so it seem as if one should not dismiss him that easily, even if the initial impression one might get about him is that he is just a cultural critic.

Let us consider the philosopher's educational background. Peter Slotterdijk went through the German educational system. He studied German literature, history, and philosophy in Munich and Hamburg, where he received his Dr. phil. in German Literature. After he had finished his studies, he was working as a free lance writer in Munich for some time. Then he was producing his "Critique of Cynical Reason". Nowadays, he is a Professor at the Karlsruher Hochschule für Gestaltung, and the Wiener Akademie der Bildenden Künste.

Although, he now is a professional academic, his inventive style of writing has not changed, and the titles, as well as the content of his works are still as innovative and idiosyncratic as they used to be in his early publications. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has even compared him to such high class writers as Schopenhauer, and Spengler [J. Busche, in FAZ: 7.4.1983]. Besides Sloterdijk's rather dull discussion of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy in his "Thinker on Stage" [Sloterdijk (1989)], wherein one gets to know Sloterdijk, but not Nietzsche; I regard this to be a fair estimation.

After briefly having introduced Sloterdijk as a person, and a writer, I wish to turn to his main work - 'The Critique of Cynical Reason'. This 1000 page long giant was published in Germany in 1983, and translated into English in 1987. It contains some of the most refreshing German prose written after 1945. As the title already suggests it is a Critique, which criticises cynical reason. This sounds interesting, but where can we place him as a philosopher, one might wonder.

PHILOSOPHY

Peter Sloterdijk is not someone, who would translate philosophy as 'love of the truth', because he is not concerned with the great metaphysical, ontological, and epistemological problems:

The great themes, they were evasions and half truths. Those futile, beautiful, soaring flights - God, Universe, Theory, Praxis, Subject, Object, Body, Spirit, Meaning , Nothingness - all that is nothing. They are nouns for young people, for outsiders, clerics, sociologists. [Sloterdijk (1987b): P. xxvi]

His philosophy is about all the seemingly insignificant, apparently lower aspects of life.

The Zeitgeist has left its mark on us, and whoever wants to decipher it is faced with the task of working on the psychosomatics of Cynicism. This is what an integrating philosophy demands of itself. It is called integrating because it does not let itself be seduced by the attraction of the 'great problems', but instead initially finds its themes in the trivial, in everyday life, in the so-called unimportant, in those things that otherwise are not worth speaking about, in petty details. Whoever wants to can, in such a perspective, already recognise the kynical impulse for which the 'low-brow themes' are not too low. [Sloterdijk (1987b): P. 140 - 141]

He is still concerned with the questions of life, and of values, if we take values not only to refer to general principles, but include attitudes towards life as well. So, one could say that Sloterdijk understands philosophy as the 'love of wisdom'. Thereby, he is one of Nietzsche's philosopher's of the future, who are the inventors of new values, and do not believe in the truth anymore. In other words, he is a post-modernist. I take the term 'post-modernist' to refer to someone who regards the possibility of human beings to get to know the truth, in respect to metaphysics as well as in respect to ethics, as impossible. This implies that for him there is also no set of values, or principles, which is absolutely valid. A couple of problems in respect to ones own life arise out of this attitude because each of us has to find answers to the following questions: How am I supposed to live? What are the values, and principles, I intend to stick to? What could be a possible basis for my actions? Sloterdijk does not provide direct answers to these questions.

If we took the notion 'value' to refer to general principles concerning the good life only, then Sloterdijk would not be a philosopher in the above mentioned sense because, in contrast to Marx, and Nietzsche, he is not building up a new immanent system of virtues and values to give answers to the aforementioned questions {"New values? No thanks!" [Sloterdijk (1987b): P. 6]}, but he accepts that currently our Western societies are mainly based on nihilism, and puts forward an altered attitude towards it. The present attitude human beings take in respect to life, if they believe in nihilism, is Cynicism, according to him. This he contrasts with Kynicism, and while doing so he describes Kynicism in such a way that this state of consciousness is much more appealing than the cynical one. Therefore, one can say that he is putting forward Kynicism as a better reaction to nihilism than Cynicism. Cynicism as well as Kynicism are states of consciousness, according to Sloterdijk, and they also agree insofar as they both are far beyond the belief in idealism, and stable, absolute values. Whenever Sloterdijk employs the term "idealism", he does not mean typical idealism a la Hegel, but he refers to all types of belief in absolutes. The loss of the belief in stable values, idealism et cetera, e.g. nihilism, was brought about by the Enlightenment movement. This movement was accompanied by the cynical attitude, which he criticises in this work. His work is not primarily a critique of the Enlightenment, as Andreas Huyssen pointed out [Sloterdijk (1987b): Foreword], but rather a critique of the attitude of Cynicism, which accompanied the Enlightenment movement. It is not a critique of the Enlightenment at all, but only a critique of the state of consciousness, which is usually brought about by any form of enlightenment, e.g. Cynicism, or as he calls it: Cynical reason.

After having pointed out, where Peter Sloterdijk is to be found on the philosophical map, I now give a brief overview over the structure of the 'Critique of Cynical Reason'. In the first part of his Critique, he provides us with the concepts of "Cynicism" and "Kynicism", and states examples of the loss of absolutes from the Enlightenment period, which have brought about cynical reason in human beings. In the second main part, which is nearly three times longer than the first, he goes through masses of examples of Cynicism in the world process. These examples are divided up into four main categories. The first one deals with physionomy, the second with phenomenology, the third with logic, and the last with a historical example, e.g. the Weimar Republic. He does so to provide us with an understanding of the various variations and complexities of Cynicism. One should also bear in mind that the four headings, just mentioned, have rather idiosyncratic meanings within his work, which are however easily grasped, if one reads the parts itself. Space here is too limited to deal with all the problematic notions in question, but a brief introduction to the key notions of the 'Critique of Cynical Reason' can be given.

I begin with an interpretation of what took place during the Enlightenment period, according to Sloterdijk, this leads me to an analysis of the notion of 'Cynicism', which as an attitude towards life is supposed to be prevalent in the present, and finally I put forward my analysis of Sloterdijk's notion 'Kynicism', which he defends as an alternative to 'Cynicism'.

ENLIGHTENMENT

The Enlightenment brought about the end of the Christian domination of the Western world, a destruction of any ideals, absolutes, or truths, whether in respect to ontology, or morality. The various destruction's, of course, did not happen from one moment to the other, but took place over a long period of time. In the history of philosophy the enlightenment began with Descartes "Meditations". Kants critiques are further central works concerning the enlightenment movement. The more the Enlightenment progressed, the more the importance of nihilism increased, as more and more ideals were destroyed. However, within the enlithenment one still has had the reasonable unified subject on which one could rely and on which all critiques but also all positive, non nihilistic conceptions, like Kantian ethics, were based. So within the enlightenment there was still a small stronghold against nihilism - the reasonable unified subject.

Before the enlightenment, one used to believe that the Christian metaphysics is true, that the bible was revealed to us and represents the actual word of God, that human beings can get to know the metaphysic of the whole world by using their faculty of reason, that if we live a moral life we will gain an eternal blissful afterlife, that any form of absolutes exists ontologically in some separate realm, that the earth is at the centre of the universe, that God is the creator of everything and many other things from the support we get from Angels to the existence of the devil. However, in the Enlightenment period all these beliefs and various others more were attacked by critiques. A critique is a theory or a set of beliefs which attacks or sheds doubt upon an absolute truth, an indubitable belief. Human beings use their faculty of reason to undertake these critiques. Sloterdijk explains the dynamic of these critiques as follows, and counterposes his own critique to the other ones:

It is the a-priori pain - it makes even the simplest things in life difficult for a person - that opens his eyes critically. There is no significant critique without significant defects. It is the critically wounded in a culture who, with great effort, find something healing, who continue to turn the wheel of critique... Among the great critical achievements in modern times, sores open up everywhere... Out of the self healing of deep sores come critiques that serve epochs as rallying points for self knowledge. Every critique is pioneering work on the pain of the times ( Zeitschmerz) and a piece of exemplary healing.

It is not my ambition to enlarge this honourable infirmary of critical theories. It is time for a new critique of temperaments. Where enlightenment appears as a 'melancholy science' (Adorno, Transl.), it unintentionally furthers melancholic stagnation. Thus, the critique of cynical reason hopes to achieve more from a work that cheers us up, whereby it is understood from the beginning that it is not so much a matter of work but rather of relaxation. [Sloterdijk (1987b): P. xxxvi - xxxvii]

So Sloterdijk's critique is supposed to be a gay science, as opposed to the critiques of the enlightenment which were sad sciences because they merely destroyed all the ideals in which people used to believe in, which people employed for structuring their lives, and which provided a meaning to the lives of people. Of course, his critique aims to destroy or attack something as well. Yet, what it goes against is an attitude towards life which makes people miserable and depressed, whereas the ideals the Enlightenment critiques attacked brought at least an apparent fulfilment and joy into the lives of the people, like a blissful afterlife. This can be seen at the critiques which came up during the Enlightenment period:

There is the Critique of Revelation, Religious Illusion, Metaphysical Illusion, the Idealistic Superstructure, Moral Illusion, Transparency, Natural Illusion, and Illusion of Privacy. I do not wish to go into too much detail here, although Sloterdijk does. He sets out the different critiques in a fairly detailed manner. I will cite only three examples from two categories. I have taken the first one from Sltoterdijk's critique of religious illusion. It is the theory of priests' deception, as it came up in the 18th century:

It is known as the theory of priests' deception. Here enlightenment approaches religion through an instrumentalist perspective by asking, Whom does religion serve, and what function does it serve in the life of society? The enlighteners were not at a loss for the - apparently simple - answer. [Sloterdijk (1987b): P. 28]

All religions are erected on the ground of fear. Gales, thunder, storms... are the cause of this fear. Human beings who felt impotent in the face of such natural events, sought refuge in beings who were stronger than themselves. Only later did ambitious men, artful politicians and philosophers begin to take advantage of the people's gullibility. For this purpose they invented a multitude of equally fantastic and cruel gods, who serve no other purpose than to consolidate and maintain their power over people.. [Sloterdijk (1987b): P. 28]

Here the Christian metaphysics was being attacked by a philosopher. However, this sort of critique was not only practised by politicians, or philosophers, but also of artists, as one can see at the next example taken from Heinrich Heine's work. It goes against the morals of the servants of God on earth:

I know the style, I know the text

And also their lordships, the authors:

I know they secretly drank wine

And publicly preached water. [Sloterdijk (1987b): P. 33]

The last example I wish to give is contained in Sloterdijk's critique of illusion of privacy. It deals with the place of the self in relation to nature and society. It tells us that:

In that which is 'given in nature' there is always something 'given in addition' by human beings. [Sloterdijk (1987b): P. 59]

The aristocratic programming of a heightened self-consciousness, however, comprises more than just what is too hastily called vanity or arrogance. It provides at the same time a high level of character formation and education that works to form opinions, etiquette, emotionality, and cultural taste... With the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie, the place of the 'best' is awarded anew... The bourgeoisie found its own way of being better than the others, better than the corrupt nobility and the uncultivated mob. At first its class ego raised itself on the feeling of having the better, purer, more rational, and more useful morality in all areas of life, from sexuality to management... From a historical perspective, the bourgeoisie is the first class that has learned to say I and at the same time has the experience of labour... When the bourgeois says 'I' the idea of the pride of labour, of productive accomplishment can also be heard for the first time... In the workers' movement ... a new political ego took the floor once more. It was no longer a bourgeois ego, but initially and for a long time, it spoke a bourgeois language... Its ideology was: freedom, equality, solidarity... The labourer ego... possesses no primary narcissistic will to power. [Sloterdijk (1987b): P. 62 - 66]

i.e. it does not claim to be the best form of life as the others do.

At these excerps it becomes clear that Sloterdijk does not put forward arguments but merely states claims. As he thinks that there is no truth, and that anything can possibly be argued given the respective premisses, he turns to the premisses themselves, and tells a tempting story with which he tries to convince the readers of the plausibility of his premisses, and his story. Here he tries to convey that if one understands that the aristocratic morality or the middle class morality were only regarded as the one and only natural morality because it suited the character of the inventors and usually the subscribers of the respective morality, then it is tempting to start to believe in the relativity of morality. Every social group develops a morality suitable for its own good. Members of the different groups, once they are aware of the fact that they have the morality they have because they are who they are, and not because it is the one and only true morality, and who still have to stick to the morality accepted in their social group, tend to become cynics, which means that the enlightenment about the non universal validity of a strong morality makes them miserable. Enlightenment thinkers realised that any strong account of the Good cannot claim universal validity, and so they tried to establish a universal morality based on reason. This, however, did not provide them with a strong conceptions of the Good life, but only with an account of what should not be done. From then on it was allowed to do what one whises to do, as long as one did not limit the freedom of other individuals, because all individuals have the right to be free, as they all are reasonable creatures.

No matter whether it is morality or religion, as it is the case in our two examples, or whether we take other cases of Enlightenment critiques into consideration, what is important is that traditional absolutes were destroyed by putting forward different explanations which suggest that the absolutes in questions are no absolutes, but are rather regarded as truth or absolutely valid due to who one is, yet they are metaphysically non existent. The whole tradition of critiques can be subsumed under the heading of critiques of ideologies.

The 'philosophical' ideology critique is truly the heir if a great satirical tradition, in which the motif of unmasking, exposing, baring has served for aeons now as a weapon. But modern ideology critique - according to our thesis has ominously cut itself away from the powerful traditions of laughter in satirical knowledge, which have their roots in ancient Kynicism. [Sloterdijk (1987b): P. 16]

So although the history of critiques of ideologies was linked to laughter and the satiric tradition, it has dissolved from this and has altered into one which leads to misery, depression, and pessimism. Sloterdijk calls this attitude towards life Cynicism. It came into existence parallel to the progression of the enlightenment period, and has now reached a very influential position in our society.

CYNICISM

What is Cynicism?

Cynicism is enlightened false consciousness [Sloterdijk (1987b): P. 5]

Sloterdijks understands Cynicism as enlightened false consciousness. I have already alluded to what this means. A cynic is someone, who is part of an institution, or group, whose existence and values he himself can no longer see as absolute, necessary and unconditional, and who is miserable, due to this enlightenment, because he sticks to principles he does not believe in. The only knowledge left for a cynic is his trust in reason, which, however, cannot provide him with a firm basis for action, and this again is another reason for being miserable.

According to Sloterdijk Cynicism, nowadays, is a common problem. He even says that Cynicism is universal. I do not think that he says this to refer to the whole world because the form of Cynicism he describes is clearly linked to the Enlightenment, and this also implies that he is mainly justified in referring to the history of the Western industrial countries, or at most all the educated people all over the world, although even this seems to go a bit far because I think that the educated people especially in Asian countries still are very involved in the traditional religions of their countries. This means that the Cynicism we are concerned with is mainly a phenomenon of the Western Industrial countries.

The discontent in our culture has assumed a new quality: it appears as a universal, diffuse Cynicism. [Sloterdijk (1987b): P. 3]

According to Sloterdijk, the corner stone for this development can already be found in the education we get at schools and universities.

The universities and schools practice a schizoid role playing in which an unmotivated, prospectless but intelligent youth learns to keep up with the general standards of enlightened meaninglessness. [Sloterdijk (1987b): P. 83 - 84]

We get already educated in such a way that we are bound to end up as cynics. Why is this the case? It is due to the schizoid role playing we are supposedly taught at school and universities. This means that in our education we come in contact with a huge amount of lifestyles, and we are also being told that most of them are justified by reference to a metaphysics or a religion, but we also learn that religions or metaphysics can no longer be upheld. Such an education puts us into the schizoid situation that we have got the chance to lead many lifestyles, but without any one of them being justified. So one is forced to act without being convinced of what one does. The higher one gets within our educational system, the more contingencies we get to learn, and the more uncertain our lives become.

This short explanation of what schizoid role playing means should have already made it clear that the cynical type of human being can be seen as a mass phenomena among the people of the upper and the upper middle class nowadays.

Today the cynic appears as a mass figure: an average social character in the upper echelons of the elevated superstructure. [Sloterdijk (1987b): P. 4]

It can only be people from the higher classes, who are cynical, because Cynicism implies that one has to be in the positions of authority, and not believe in it or rather reject their purposefulness. In the position of authority are priests, atheists, metaphysical philosophers, Marxists, fascists, scientists, or anyone else who sticks to some abstract ideology and is part of / a representative of an absolute system. The problem all these representatives face nowadays is that all these ideologies have been severely and convincingly attacked and destroyed via all the critiques published in the Enlightenment period, according to Sloterdijk. So many of the representatives of the respective ideologies themselves do not believe in what they are doing anymore, or do not regard their position to be the one and only truth - like members of the church who do not believe in God, or economists who would like to be farmers. Still, they have to act and talk as if they were completely convinced of what they are doing, which is what makes them miserable. It is the contingency of the value of all life styles which was brought about by the critiques, and which has lead to a schizoid state of mind, and to misery, as publicly everybody still has to represent the path chosen. As the result of this the representatives of the ideologies are often engaged in empty discourse, which progresses in the following manner.

Each side has developed certain, almost rigged, moves of critique; the religious criticise the areligious and vice versa, whereby each side has in its repertoire a metacritique of the ideology critique used by the opposing side: the moves in the dialogue between the Marxists and liberals are to a large extent fixed, likewise those of between Marxists and anarchists as well as those between anarchists and liberals... One knows pretty well what natural scientists and representatives of the humanities will accuse each other of. Even the ideology critique used by militarists and pacifists on each other threatens to stagnate, at least as far as creative moves are concerned. For ideology critique, the Sartrean film title, The Game Is Over, itself almost half a century old, thus seems apposite. [Sloterdijk (1987b): P. 90]

This sort of engagement in one's daily tasks results in pessimism, depression, and indifference. The cynics are living without any passion for life are miserable, and regard the world to be futile and as something which has to be rejected.

We live from day to day, from vacation to vacation, from news show to news show, from problem to problem, from orgasm to orgasm, in private turbulances and medium-term affairs, tense, relaxed. With some things we feel dismay but with most things we can't really give a damn... We would still like to see a lot of the world and in general ' to live a whole lot more.' We ask ourselves what to do next and what will happen next. In the Feuilleton of the Zeit, the culture critics argue about the right way to be pessimistic." [Sloterdijk (1987b): P. 98 - 99]

Of course, they do not have any long term goals anymore, or any great aims. Yet, they do not take pleasure in what they have either. None of the ideals are worth striving for any more, and what they have reached, millions of other people have achieved as well. Nothing is special, everything is permanently the same, the cynics think that they just strive and inflict pain upon themselves to achieve a position of respect and authority, although the position for which they are respected is not regarded to be worthwhile anymore because many critiques have already attacked it convincingly. There are catholic priests who praise God, tell their community all the nice little comforting stories about Jesus Christ, and explain how one is able to reach the blissful afterlife, but themselves do not believe that there is such an after-life and get involved in rather dubious activities in their private lives. This is a prime example for what Sloterdijk regards as a cynic. The bitterness, life denying attitude, the pessimism and the double standarts which are essential to being a cynic is partly understandable, even according to Sloterdijk:

However, since the technological atrocities of the twentieth century, from Verdun to the Gulag, from Auschwitz to Hiroshima, experience scorns all optimism. Historical consciousness and pessimism seem to amount to the same thing. [Sloterdijk (1987b): P. 11 - 12]

One the other hand, one might also wish to point out the benefits we have gained during the enlightenment, like social welfare, human rights, and an incredible medical progress. Although these aspects indeed provide us with many goods, we are lacking something which gives meaning to our lives, and we do not have a world view through which we can justify our lives, and both of the last mentioned elements provides human beings with more life fulfilment than does a huge selection of technological products. Therefore there are good reasons for being a cynic, and for being miserable.

However, Sloterdijk does not regard it as necessary to react in such a way to the nihilism of our times or as he calls it to having an enlightened consciousness, but he regards it only as a contingent response. He does not think that the awareness of the enlightenment critiques or the enlightened consciousness is the problem, but the response towards this knowledge should not be Cynicism, but rather Kynicism, which I will introduce in the next section. He says:

In order to survive, one must be schooled in reality. Of course. Those who mean well call it growing up, and there is a grain of truth to that. But that is not it all. [Sloterdijk (1987b): P. 6 - 7]

KYNICISM

We can get an initial grasp of the difference between Cynicism and Kynicism, in an example Sloterdijk gives us. It involves a kynical critique of the great cynic Adorno. He

was just about to begin his lecture when a group of demonstraters prevented him from mounting the podium... Among the dirupters were some female students who, in protest, attracted attention to themselves by exposing their breast to the thinker. Here, on the one side, stood naked flesh, exercising 'critique'; there, on the other side, stood the bitterly disappointed man without whom scarcely any of those present would have known what critique meant... It was not naked force that reduced the philosopher to muteness, but the force of the naked. [Sloterdijk (1987b): P. xxxvii]

Sloterdijk introduces the notion 'Kynicism' by dealing with its Greek origin. Once we have grasped what Greek-Kynicism is all about, it should be easy for us to apply the concept to our times. So firstly I will cite what Sloterdijk tells us about Kynicism:

Greek Philosophy of Cheekiness: Kynicism

Ancient Kynicism, at least in its Greek origins, is in principle cheeky... In kynismos a kind of argumentation was discovered that, to the present day, respectable thinking does not know how to deal with. Is not crude and grotesque to pick one's nose while Socrates exorcises his demon and speaks of the divine soul? Can it be called anything other than vulgar when Diogenes lets a fart fly against the Platonic theory of ideas - or is fartiness itself one of the ideas God discharged from his meditation on the genesis of the cosmos? And what is it supposed to mean when this philosophising town bum answers Plato's subtle theory of Eros by masturbating in public?

To understand these apparently irrelevantly provocative gestures, it is worth reflecting on a principle that called into being the doctrines of wisdom and that was regarded by the ancient world as a truism, before modern developments eradicated it. For the philosopher, the human being who exemplifies the love of truth and conscious living, life and doctrine must be in harmony... The appearance of Diogenes marks the most dramatic moment in the process of truth of early European philosophy... With Diogenes, the resistance against the rigged game of 'discourse' begins in European philosophy. Desperately funny, he resists the 'linguistification' of the cosmic universalism that called the philosopher to this occupation. Whether monologic or dialogic 'theory', in both, Diogenes smells the swindle of ldealistic abstractions and the schizoid staleness of a thinking limited to the satirical resistance, an uncivil enlightenment. He starts the non-platonic dialogue. [Sloterdijk (1987b): P. 101 - 102]

It is this cheerful cheekiness which one can find in all of the kynics action, and which distinguishes the kynics attitude from the cynics. The kynics argue with the whole of their bodies, especially with its lower part, which has been neglected through out the history of philosophy. The kynic is similar to the cynic only in so far as they both have an enlightened consciousness. Yet, the enlightened consciousness of the cynics is called false by Sloterdijk, because their consciousness makes them miserable. Whereas the enlightened consciousness of the cynics can be called correct, because they are cheerful, life-affirming, full of vitality and therefore also cheeky.

Cheekiness has, in principle, two positions, namely, above and below, hegemonic power and oppositional power, expressed on the language of the Middle Ages: master and serf. Ancient Kynicism begins the process of 'naked arguments' from the opposition, carried by the power that comes from below. The kynic farts, shits, pisses, masturbates on the street, before the eyes of the Athenian market. He shows contempt for fame, ridicules the architecture, refuses respect, parodies the stories of gods and heroes, eats raw meat an vegetables, lies in the sun, fools around with the whores and says to Alexander the Great that he should get out of the sun. What is this supposed to mean?

Kynicism is a first reply to Athenian hegemonic idealism that goes beyond theoretical repudiation. It does not speak against idealism, it lives against it. [Sloterdijk (1987b): P. 103 - 104]

Farting is something one does not do. Like masturbating, pissing and picking ones noses, it is an activity one only does behind closed doors, but one does not do it in public and one never talks about it as well. It is regarded as cheeky if one breaks these conventions, and cheekiness nowadays rather has some negative connotations. However this has not always been the case, as Sloterdijk tells us:

By the way, only in the last few centuries has the word 'cheeky' ( frech) gained a negative connotation. Initially, as for example in Old High German, it meant a productive aggressivity, letting fly at the enemy: 'brave, bold, lively, plucky, untamed, ardent.' The devitalization of a culture mirrored in the history of this word. [Sloterdijk (1987b): P. 102 - 103]

Vitality, life affirmation, living, laughing, celebrating is all linked to Kynicism. As I have already said Kynicism as well as Cynicism reject any form of belief in absolutes. It is the life affirming attitude of Kynicism which distinguishes it from Cynicism.

In idealism... the ideas stand at the top and gleam in the light of attentiveness; matter is below, a mere reflection of the idea, a shadow, an impurity... [How does Kynicism react?] The excluded lower element goes to the marketplace and demonstratively challenges the higher element. Feces, urine, sperm! 'Vegetate' like a dog, but live, laugh and take care to give the impression that behind all this lies not confusion but clear reflection." [Sloterdijk (1987b): P. 104]

The reflection which must be apparently implicit in ones actions, expresses itself not verbally but within the bodily arguments typical for the kynic. That it is difficult to respond to these sort of arguments became obvious in the way Plato related to Diogenes:

However, neither Socrates nor Plato can deal with Digenes - for he talks with them 'differently too', in a dialogue of flesh and blood. Thus, for Plato there remained no alternative but to slander his weird and unwieldy opponent. He called him a "Socrates gone mad" (Socrates mainoumenos). The phrase is intended as an annihilation, but it is the highest recognition. [Sloterdijk (1987b): P. 104]

Yet, it is not only the divine Plato who implicitly showed the greatest respect for Diogenes, but authorities or great people in general have this or a similar related sort of attitude towards him.

Those who rule lose their real self-confidence to the fools, clowns, and kynics: for this reason, an anecdote has Alexander the Great say that he would like to be Diogenes if he were not Alexander. [Sloterdijk (1987b): P. 102]

It is only the kynical attitude which is able to put forward effective reasons against idealism, because of the following reasons.

In the dog philosophy of the kynic ( kyon, dog in Greek:- Trans.), a materialist position appears that is clearly a match for the idealist dialectic. It possesses the wisdom of original philosophy, the realism of a fundamental materialist stance, and the serenity of an ironic religiosity. [Sloterdijk (1987b): P. 104]

When Diogenes urinates and masturbates in the marketplace, he does both because he does them publicly - in a model situation... The philosopher thus gives the small man in the market the same rights to an unashamed experience of the corporeal that does well to defy all discrimination. Ethical living may be good, but naturalness is good too. That is all kynical scandal says. Because the teaching explicates life, the kynic had to take oppressed sensuality out into the market. Look how this wise man, before whom Alexander the Great stood in admiration, enjoys himself with his own organ. And he shits in front of everybody. So that can't be all that bad. [Sloterdijk (1987b): P. 106]

Like Cynicism Kynicism is a realist position, which rejects idealism, absolutes, and unconditional truths, however, in contrast to Cynicism, which makes people miserable because cynics are still part of higher orders in which they themselves do not believe any longer, the kynics are happy, cheerful, and cheeky and kynics do not belong to hierarchically ordered systems or normal social institutions.

One might be tempted to reply to Sloterdijk that his defence of neo-Kynicism is a very immature conception because his kynics just fail to take any practical human tasks into consideration, e.g. one simply needs to earn money to have something to eat, to drink and a place to live in. However, to earn money one has to belong to a social system, but social systems are always ordered hierarchically, therefore it is impossible to live like a kynik and to secure ones own existence. A kynical lifestyle can be seen as just a dream young immature people usually have. Yet, Sloterdijk is not so simple minded not to have a response to that objection. In that respect he mentions three institutions in which this kynical cheekiness can be found and where it can be practised.

Apart from the city, three social dies of serene refractoriness have played an essential role in the history of cheekiness: the carnival, the universities, and the Bohemians. All three function as safety valves through which needs that otherwise are not given their due in social life can achieve a limited release. Here, cheekiness has had a space in which it has been tolerated, even if the tolerance has lasted only a short time and can be rescinded." [Sloterdijk (1987b): P. 117]

So it is the carnival, the universities, and the boheme, which allow one to be a true kynic. Although one should also keep something from this light kynical spirit for the rest of the time, these are the social institutions in which a kynical lifestyle is possible and one is justified to express it in an extreme manner.

The old carnival was a substitute revolution for the poor. A kingly fool was elected who reigned over a thoroughly inverted world for a day and a night. In this inverted world, the poor and the decent brought their dreams to life, as costumed oafs and bacchanals, forgetting themselves to the point of truth, cheeky, lewd, turbulent, and disgraceful. One was allowed to lie and to tell the truth, to be obscene and honest, drunken and irrational... Class societies can scarcely survive without the institution of the inverted world and the crazy day - as the Indian and Brazilian carnivals demonstrate.

Likewise since the Middle Ages, universities have become important in the social economy of cheekiness and kynical intelligence. They were by no means simply places of teaching and research. In them, there romped also a vagrant, extravagant, youthful intelligence that was clever enough to know something better than just cramming.

The Bohemians, a relatively recent phenomenon, played a prominent role in the regulation of the tensions between art and bourgeois society. Bohemianism was the space in which the transition from art into the art of living was tried out... Research has established that there were only a few long-term Bohemians, the milieu remained a transit station, a space for testing out life and departing from the norms. There they used their freedom to work out their rejection of bourgeois society until a (perhaps) more grown-up 'yes, but' took its place. [Sloterdijk (1987b): P. 117 - 118]

However, Sloterdijk does not think that these three neo-kynical institutions fulfil their roles properly anymore.

For a long time now carnival has meant not "inverted world" but flight into safe world, of anaesthesia from a permanently inverted world full of daily absurdities. We know that, at least since Hitler, Bohemianism is dead, and in its offshoots in the subcultures cheeky moods are to be found less than the cheerless attitude of withdrawal. And as far as the universities are concerned - oh, let's not talk about that!

These mutilations of cheeky impulses indicate that society has entered a stage of organised seriousness in which the playgrounds of lived enlightenment are becoming increasingly clogged. This is what dampens the climate of this country so much. We live on in a morose realism, not wanting to be noticed, and play the respectable games. Cynicism prickles beneath the monotony. A clear-sighted academia and elsewhere. The provocations seem to be exhausted, all bizarre twists of modern existence seem to be already tried out. A state of public, respectable torpor has been entered. A tired, schizoidly demoralised intelligentsia plays at realism by contemplatively walling itself up in harsh circumstances. [Sloterdijk (1987b): P. 118]

The fact that these traditional kynical institutions do not fulfil their role anymore in a proper way is exactly what Sloterdijk is criticising. By doing so, he is trying to reintroduce cheekiness and kynikal life-style elements into our society to make our lives more colourful, cheerful and cheeky. It is not that he portrays Kynicism as a new God, but he solely wishes to increase its importance.

It has to be pointed out that although Sloterdijk regards kynicism as a better reaction to the state the enlightenment has left us with, and therefore to a position within the enlightenment, I doubt that this is actually the case. As with the introduction of "kynicism" the notions of "truth" and "the reasonable unified subject" also get attacked. These, however, represent the basis of the enlightenment project. Therefore, it would be more appropriate to say that by introducing "kynicism" Sloterdijk goes beyond the enlightenment. As enlightenment and modernity are closely related concepts, and by going beyond the enlightenment, he also goes beyong modernity, one should call the kynical position defended in the 'Critique of Cynical Reason' a postmodern.

Within Sloterdijks recent work, he becomes doubtful of his earlier position, as he seems to have realised that the kynical position is not one which solves the problem of cynicism properly. It might bring about a temporary relief, but that is all. Therefore, he has been working towards a stronger conception of the Good within his latest main works. Although, Sloterdijk himself has gone beyong his early works, the kynical position defended in the "Critique of Cynical Reason" nevertheless has to be regarded as a suitable developmental step between cynicism and a stronger position of the good, and so is a position worth to be taken lightly.

Bibliography:

Sloterdijk, Peter "Kritik der zynischen Vernunft" [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983]

Sloterdijk, Peter "Der Zauberbaum" [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985]

Sloterdijk, Peter "Kopernikanische Mobilmachung und ptolomäische Abrüstung" [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1987a]

Sloterdijk, Peter "Critique of Cynical Reason" [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987b]

Edition Suhrkamp "Peter Sloterdijks 'Kritik der zynischen Vernunft'" [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1987c]

Sloterdijk, Peter "Zur Welt kommen - Zur Sprache kommen: Frankfurter Vorlesungen" [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988]

Sloterdijk, Peter "Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche's Materialism" [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989]

Sloterdijk, Peter "Versprechen auf Deutsch: Rede über das eigene Land" [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1990]

Sloterdijk, Peter "Weltfremdheit" [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1993a]

Sloterdijk, Peter "Im selben Boot: Versuch über die Hyperpolitik" [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1993b]

Sloterdijk, Peter "Eurotaoismus: Zur Kritik der politischen Kinetik" [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1996]

Sloterdijk, Peter "Der starke Grund zusammen zu sein" [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998a]

Sloterdijk, Peter "Sphären 1" [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998b]

Sloterdijk, Peter "Sphären 2" [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1999]

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#UniversalLanguage#Esperanto

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Esperanto ( or ) is the world's most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Created by the Warsaw-based ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, it was intended to be a universal second language for international communication, or "the international language" ( la Lingvo Internacia). Zamenhof first described the language in Dr. Esperanto's International Language (Esperanto: Unua Libro), which he published under the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto. Early adopters of the language liked the name Esperanto and soon used it to describe his language. The word esperanto translates into English as "one who hopes".

Within the range of constructed languages, Esperanto occupies a middle ground between "naturalistic" (imitating existing natural languages) and (where features are not based on existing languages). Esperanto's vocabulary, syntax and semantics derive predominantly from languages of the Indo-European group. The vocabulary derives primarily from Romance languages, with some of it influenced from Germanic languages. One of the language's most notable features is its extensive system of derivation, where prefixes and suffixes may be freely combined with roots to generate words, making it possible to communicate effectively with a smaller set of words.

Esperanto is the most successful constructed international auxiliary language, and the only such language with a sizeable population of native speakers, of which there are perhaps several thousand. Usage estimates are difficult, but two estimates put the number of people who know how to speak Esperanto at around 100,000. Concentration of speakers is highest in Europe, East Asia, and South America. Although no country has adopted Esperanto officially, Esperantujo ("Esperanto-land") is used as a name for the collection of places where it is spoken. The language has also gained a noticeable presence on the internet in recent years, as it became increasingly accessible on platforms such as Duolingo, Wikipedia, Amikumu and Google Translate. Esperanto speakers are often called "Esperantists" ( Esperantistoj).

Esperanto has not been a secondary official language of any recognized country, but it entered the education systems of several countries, such as Hungary and China.

There were plans at the beginning of the 20th century to establish Neutral Moresnet, in central-western Europe, as the world's first Esperanto state; any such plans came to an end when the Treaty of Versailles awarded the disputed territory to Belgium, effective January 10, 1920. In addition, the self-proclaimed artificial island micronation of Rose Island, near Italy in the Adriatic Sea, used Esperanto as its official language in 1968, and another micronation, the extant Republic of Molossia, near Dayton, Nevada, uses Esperanto as an official language alongside English.

The Chinese government has used Esperanto since 2001 for daily news on china.org.cn. China also uses Esperanto in China Radio International, and for the internet magazine El Popola Ĉinio.

The United States Army has published military phrase books in Esperanto, to be used from the 1950s until the 1970s in war games by mock enemy forces. A field reference manual, FM 30-101-1 Feb. 1962, contained the grammar, English-Esperanto-English dictionary, and common phrases. In the 1970s Esperanto was used as the basis for Defense Language Aptitude Tests.

Esperanto is the working language of several non-profit international organizations such as the Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda, a left-wing cultural association which had 724 members in over 85 countries in 2006. There is also Education@Internet, which has developed from an Esperanto organization; most others are specifically Esperanto organizations. The largest of these, the Universal Esperanto Association, has an official consultative relationship with the United Nations and UNESCO, which recognized Esperanto as a medium for international understanding in 1954. The Universal Esperanto Association collaborated in 2017 with UNESCO to deliver an Esperanto translation of its magazine UNESCO Courier ( Unesko Kuriero en Esperanto). The World Health Organization offers an Esperanto version of the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19, Esperanto: KOVIM-19) occupational safety and health education course.

In the summer of 1924, the American Radio Relay League adopted Esperanto as its official international auxiliary language, and hoped that the language would be used by radio amateurs in international communications, but its actual use for radio communications was negligible.

All the personal documents sold by the World Service Authority, including the World Passport, are written in Esperanto, together with English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, and Chinese (the official languages of the United Nations).

Esperanto was created in the late 1870s and early 1880s by L. L. Zamenhof, a Polish-Jewish ophthalmologist from Białystok, then part of the Russian Empire, but now part of Poland. In the 1870s, just a few years before Zamenhof created Esperanto, Polish was banned in public places in Białystok.

According to Zamenhof, he created the language to reduce the "time and labor we spend in learning foreign tongues", and to foster harmony between people from different countries: "Were there but an international language, all translations would be made into it alone ... and all nations would be united in a common brotherhood." His feelings and the situation in Białystok may be gleaned from an extract from his letter to Nikolai Borovko:

The place where I was born and spent my childhood gave direction to all my future struggles. In Białystok the inhabitants were divided into four distinct elements: Russians, Poles, Germans, and Jews; each of these spoke their own language and looked on all the others as enemies. In such a town a sensitive nature feels more acutely than elsewhere the misery caused by language division and sees at every step that the diversity of languages is the first, or at least the most influential, basis for the separation of the human family into groups of enemies. I was brought up as an idealist; I was taught that all people were brothers, while outside in the street at every step I felt that there were no people, only Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews, and so on. This was always a great torment to my infant mind, although many people may smile at such an 'anguish for the world' in a child. Since at that time I thought that 'grown-ups' were omnipotent, I often said to myself that when I grew up I would certainly destroy this evil.

-  L. L. Zamenhof, in a letter to Nikolai Borovko, c. 1895

It was invented in 1887 and designed so that anyone could learn it in a few short months. Dr. Zamenhof lived on Dzika Street, No. 9, which was just around the corner from the street on which we lived. Brother Afrum was so impressed with that idea that he learned Esperanto in a very short time at home from a little book. He then bought many dozens of them and gave them out to relatives, friends, just anyone he could, to support that magnificent idea for he felt that this would be a common bond to promote relationships with fellow men in the world. A group of people had organized and sent letters to the government asking to change the name of the street where Dr. Zamenhof lived for many years when he invented Esperanto, from Dzika to Zamenhofa. They were told that a petition with a large number of signatures would be needed. That took time so they organized demonstrations carrying large posters encouraging people to learn the universal language and to sign the petitions... About the same time, in the middle of the block marched a huge demonstration of people holding posters reading "Learn Esperanto", "Support the Universal language", "Esperanto the language of hope and expectation", "Esperanto the bond for international communication" and so on, and many "Sign the petitions". I will never forget that rich-poor, sad-glad parade and among all these people stood two fiery red tramway cars waiting on their opposite lanes and also a few dorożkas with their horses squeezed in between. Such a sight it was. Later a few blocks were changed from Dzika Street to Dr. Zamenhofa Street and a nice monument was erected there with his name and his invention inscribed on it, to honor his memory.

-  Autobiography of Tema Kipnis, Jewish refugee from Poland

Zamenhof's goal was to create an easy and flexible language that would serve as a universal second language, to foster world peace and international understanding, and to build a "community of speakers".

His original title for the language was simply "the international language" ( la lingvo internacia), but early speakers grew fond of the name Esperanto, and began to use it as the name for the language just two years after its creation. The name quickly gained prominence, and has been used as an official name ever since.

In 1905, Zamenhof published the Fundamento de Esperanto as a definitive guide to the language. Later that year, French Esperantists organized with his participation the first World Esperanto Congress, an ongoing annual conference, in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France. Zamenhof also proposed to the first congress that an independent body of linguistic scholars should steward the future evolution of Esperanto, foreshadowing the founding of the Akademio de Esperanto (in part modeled after the Académie Française), which was established soon thereafter. Since then, world congresses have been held in different countries every year, except during the two World Wars, and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic (when it was moved to an online-only event). Since the Second World War, they have been attended by an average of more than 2,000 people, and up to 6,000 people at the most.

Zamenhof wrote that he wanted mankind to "learn and use ... en masse ... the proposed language as a living one". The goal for Esperanto to become a global auxiliary language was not Zamenhof's only goal; he also wanted to "enable the learner to make direct use of his knowledge with persons of any nationality, whether the language be universally accepted or not; in other words, the language is to be directly a means of international communication."

After some ten years of development, which Zamenhof spent translating literature into Esperanto, as well as writing original prose and verse, the first book of Esperanto grammar was published in Warsaw on July 26, 1887. The number of speakers grew rapidly over the next few decades; at first, primarily in the Russian Empire and Central Europe, then in other parts of Europe, the Americas, China, and Japan. In the early years before the world congresses, speakers of Esperanto kept in contact primarily through correspondence and periodicals.

Zamenhof's name for the language was simply Internacia Lingvo ("International Language"). December 15, Zamenhof's birthday, is now regarded as Zamenhof Day or Esperanto Book Day.

The autonomous territory of Neutral Moresnet, between what is today Belgium and Germany, had a sizable proportion of Esperanto-speaking citizens among its small, diverse population. There was a proposal to make Esperanto its official language.

However, neither Belgium nor Germany had surrendered their claims to the region, with the latter having adopted a more aggressive stance towards pursuing its claim around the turn of the century, even being accused of sabotage and administrative obstruction to force the issue. The outbreak of World War I would bring about the end of neutrality, with Moresnet initially left as "an oasis in a desert of destruction" following the German invasion of Belgium. The territory was formally annexed by Prussia in 1915, though without international recognition.

After the war, a great opportunity for Esperanto seemingly presented itself, when the Iranian delegation to the League of Nations proposed that the language be adopted for use in international relations following a report by a Japanese delegate to the League named Nitobe Inazō, in the context of the 13th World Congress of Esperanto, held in Prague. Ten delegates accepted the proposal with only one voice against, the French delegate, Gabriel Hanotaux. Hanotaux opposed all recognition of Esperanto at the League, from the first resolution on December 18, 1920, and subsequently through all efforts during the next three years. Hanotaux did not approve of how the French language was losing its position as the international language and saw Esperanto as a threat, effectively wielding his veto power to block the decision. However, two years later, the League recommended that its member states include Esperanto in their educational curricula. The French government retaliated by banning all instruction in Esperanto in France's schools and universities. The French Ministry of Public Instruction said that "French and English would perish and the literary standard of the world would be debased". Nonetheless, many people see the 1920s as the heyday of the Esperanto movement. During this time, Anarchism as a political movement was very supportive of both anationalism and the Esperanto language.

Fran Novljan was one of the chief promoters of Esperanto in the former Kingdom of Yugoslavia. He was among the founders of the Croatian Prosvjetni savez (Educational Alliance), of which he was the first secretary, and organized Esperanto institutions in Zagreb. Novljan collaborated with Esperanto newspapers and magazines, and was the author of the Esperanto textbook Internacia lingvo esperanto i Esperanto en tridek lecionoj.

In 1920s Korea, socialist thinkers pushed for the use of Esperanto through a series of columns in The Dong-a Ilbo as resistance to both Japanese occupation as well as a counter to the growing nationalist movement for Korean language standardization. This lasted until the Mukden Incident in 1931, when changing colonial policy led to an outright ban on Esperanto education in Korea.

Esperanto attracted the suspicion of many states. Repression was especially pronounced in Nazi Germany, Francoist Spain up until the 1950s, and the Soviet Union under Stalin, from 1937 to 1956.

In Nazi Germany, there was a motivation to ban Esperanto because Zamenhof was Jewish, and due to the internationalist nature of Esperanto, which was perceived as "Bolshevist". In his work, , Adolf Hitler specifically mentioned Esperanto as an example of a language that could be used by an international Jewish conspiracy once they achieved world domination. Esperantists were killed during the Holocaust, with Zamenhof's family in particular singled out to be killed. The efforts of a minority of German Esperantists to expel their Jewish colleagues and overtly align themselves with the Reich were futile, and Esperanto was legally forbidden in 1935. Esperantists in German concentration camps did, however, teach Esperanto to fellow prisoners, telling guards they were teaching Italian, the language of one of Germany's Axis allies.

After the October Revolution of 1917, Esperanto was given a measure of government support by the new workers' states in the former Russian Empire and later by the Soviet Union government, with the Soviet Esperantist Union being established as an organization that, temporarily, was officially recognized. In his biography on Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky mentions that Stalin had studied Esperanto. However, in 1937, at the height of the Great Purge, Stalin completely reversed the Soviet government's policies on Esperanto; many Esperanto speakers were executed, exiled or held in captivity in the Gulag labour camps. Quite often the accusation was: "You are an active member of an international spy organization which hides itself under the name of 'Association of Soviet Esperantists' on the territory of the Soviet Union." Until the end of the Stalin era, it was dangerous to use Esperanto in the Soviet Union, even though it was never officially forbidden to speak Esperanto.

Fascist Italy allowed the use of Esperanto, finding its phonology similar to that of Italian and publishing some tourist material in the language.

During and after the Spanish Civil War, Francoist Spain suppressed anarchists, socialists and Catalan nationalists for many years, among whom the use of Esperanto was extensive, but in the 1950s the Esperanto movement was again tolerated.

In 1954, the United Nations - through UNESCO - granted official support to Esperanto as an international auxiliary language in the Montevideo Resolution. However, Esperanto is still not one of the official languages of the UN.

The development of Esperanto has continued unabated into the 21st century. The advent of the Internet has had a significant impact on the language, as learning it has become increasingly accessible on platforms such as Duolingo, and as speakers have increasingly networked on platforms such as Amikumu. With up to two million speakers, it is the most widely spoken constructed language in the world. Although no country has adopted Esperanto officially, Esperantujo ("Esperanto-land") is the name given to the collection of places where it is spoken.

While many of its advocates continue to hope for the day that Esperanto becomes officially recognized as the international auxiliary language, some (including raŭmistoj) have stopped focusing on this goal and instead view the Esperanto community as a stateless diasporic linguistic group based on freedom of association.

On May 28, 2015, the language learning platform Duolingo launched a free Esperanto course for English speakers. On March 25, 2016, when the first Duolingo Esperanto course completed its beta-testing phase, that course had 350,000 people registered to learn Esperanto through the medium of English. By July 2018, the number of learners had risen to 1.36 million. On July 20, 2018, Duolingo changed from recording users cumulatively to reporting only the number of "active learners" (i.e., those who are studying at the time and have not yet completed the course), which as of October 2022 stands at 299,000 learners.

On October 26, 2016, a second Duolingo Esperanto course, for which the language of instruction is Spanish, appeared on the same platform and which as of April 2021 has a further 176,000 students. A third Esperanto course, taught in Brazilian Portuguese, began its beta-testing phase on May 14, 2018, and as of April 2021, 220,000 people are using this course and 155,000 people in May 2022. A fourth Esperanto course, taught in French, began its beta-testing phase in July 2020, and as of March 2021 has 72,500 students and 101,000 students in May 2022.

As of October 2018, Lernu!, another online learning platform for Esperanto, has 320,000 registered users, and nearly 75,000 monthly visits. 50,000 users possess at least a basic understanding of Esperanto.

On February 22, 2012, Google Translate added Esperanto as its 64th language. On July 25, 2016, Yandex Translate added Esperanto as a language.

With about 338,000 articles, Esperanto Wikipedia (Vikipedio) is the 36th-largest Wikipedia, as measured by the number of articles, and is the largest Wikipedia in a constructed language. About 150,000 users consult the Vikipedio regularly, as attested by Wikipedia's automatically aggregated log-in data, which showed that in October 2019 the website has 117,366 unique individual visitors per month, plus 33,572 who view the site on a mobile device instead.

Esperanto's phonology, grammar, vocabulary, and semantics are based on the Indo-European languages spoken in Europe. Some evidence has shown that Zamenhof studied German, English, Spanish, Lithuanian, Italian and French and knew 13 different languages, which had an influence on Esperanto's linguistic properties.

Esperanto has been described as "a language lexically predominantly Romanic, morphologically intensively agglutinative, and to a certain degree isolating in character". Typologically, Esperanto has prepositions and a pragmatic word order that by default is subject-verb-object (SVO). Adjectives can be freely placed before or after the nouns they modify, though placing them before the noun is more common. New words are formed through extensive use of affixes and compounds.

Esperanto typically has 22 to 24 consonants (depending on the phonemic analysis and individual speaker), five vowels, and two semivowels that combine with the vowels to form six diphthongs. (The consonant /j/ and semivowel /i̯/ are both written ⟨j⟩, and the uncommon consonant /dz/ is written with the digraph ⟨dz⟩, which is the only consonant that does not have its own letter.) Tone is not used to distinguish meanings of words. Stress is always on the second-to-last vowel in proper Esperanto words, unless a final vowel elided, a phenomenon mostly occurring in poetry. For example, "family" is [fa.mi.ˈli.o], with the stress on the second o is i, but when the word is used without the final the stress remains on the second [fa.mi.ˈli]. i  :

The 23 consonants are:

There is some degree of allophony:

A large number of consonant clusters can occur, up to three in initial position (as in , "strange") and five in medial position (as in ekssklavo, "former slave"). Final clusters are uncommon except in unassimilated names, poetic elision of final and a very few basic words such as "hundred" and "after".

Esperanto has the five vowels found in such languages as Spanish, Modern Hebrew, and Modern Greek.

Since there are only five vowels, a good deal of variation in pronunciation is tolerated. For instance, e commonly ranges from [e] (French é) to [ɛ] (French glottal stop may occur between adjacent vowels in some people's speech, especially when the two vowels are the same, as in "hero" ( è). These details often depend on the speaker's native language. A [he.ˈro.o] or [he.ˈro.ʔo]) and "great-grandfather" ([pra.ˈa.vo] or [pra.ˈʔa.vo]).

The Esperanto alphabet is based on the Latin script, using a one-sound-one-letter principle, with the exception of [d͡z]. It includes six letters with diacritics: five with circumflexes (⟨ĉ⟩, ⟨ĝ⟩, ⟨ĥ⟩, ⟨ĵ⟩, and ⟨ŝ⟩), and one with a breve (⟨ŭ⟩). The alphabet does not include the letters ⟨q⟩, ⟨w⟩, ⟨x⟩, or ⟨y⟩, which are only used in the writing of proper names and borrowings.

The 28-letter alphabet is:

All letters lacking diacritics are pronounced approximately as their respective IPA symbols, with the exception of ⟨c⟩.

Esperanto's ⟨j⟩ and ⟨c⟩ consonants are used in a way that is familiar to speakers of many Central and Eastern European languages ( Germanic languages and Slavic languages), but may be unfamiliar to English speakers. ⟨j⟩ has a ⟨y⟩ sound [j~i̯], as in yellow and boy (Esperanto jes has the same pronunciation as its English cognate yes), and ⟨c⟩ has a " ts" sound [t͡s], as in hits or the ⟨zz⟩ in pizza. In addition, the ⟨g⟩ in Esperanto is always 'hard', as in gift. Esperanto makes use of the five-vowel system, identically to those in languages like Spanish.

The accented letters are:

⟨ĉ⟩ is pronounced like English ⟨ch⟩ as in chatting

⟨ĝ⟩ is pronounced like English ⟨g⟩ as in gem

⟨ĥ⟩ is pronounced like the ⟨ch⟩ in German Bach, or the Scottish English loch.

⟨ĵ⟩ is pronounced like the ⟨s⟩ in English fusion or the ⟨j⟩ in French je

⟨ŝ⟩ is pronounced like English ⟨sh⟩.

⟨ŭ⟩ is pronounced like English ⟨w⟩, primarily seen after vowels (such as in antaŭ)

According to one of Zamenhof's entries in the Lingvaj respondoj, the letter ⟨n⟩ ought to be pronounced as [n] in all cases, but a rendering as [ŋ] is admissible before ⟨g⟩, ⟨k⟩, and ⟨ĥ⟩.

Even with the widespread adoption of Unicode, the letters with diacritics (found in the "Latin-Extended A" section of the Unicode Standard) can cause problems with printing and computing, because they are not found on most physical keyboards and are left out of certain fonts.

There are two principal workarounds to this problem, which substitute digraphs for the accented letters. Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto, created an "h-convention", which replaces ⟨ĉ⟩, ⟨ĝ⟩, ⟨ĥ⟩, ⟨ĵ⟩, ⟨ŝ⟩, and ⟨ŭ⟩ with ⟨ch⟩, ⟨gh⟩, ⟨hh⟩, ⟨jh⟩, ⟨sh⟩, and ⟨u⟩, respectively. If used in a database, a program in principle could not determine whether to render, for example, ⟨ch⟩ as /c/ followed by /h/ or as /ĉ/, and would fail to render, for example, the word senchava unambiguously unless its component parts were intentionally separated, as in senc·hava. A more recent x-convention has also gained prominence with the advent of computing, utilizing an otherwise absent ⟨x⟩ to produce the digraphs ⟨cx⟩, ⟨gx⟩, ⟨hx⟩, ⟨jx⟩, ⟨sx⟩, and ⟨ux⟩; this has the incidental advantage of alphabetizing correctly in most cases, since the only letter after ⟨x⟩ is ⟨z⟩.

There are computer keyboard layouts that support the Esperanto alphabet, and some systems use software that automatically replaces x- or h-convention digraphs with the corresponding diacritic letters (for example, Amiketo for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, Esperanta Klavaro for Windows Phone, and Gboard and AnySoftKeyboard for Android).

On Linux, the GNOME, Cinnamon, and KDE desktop environments support the entry of characters with Esperanto diacritics.

Criticisms are levied against the letters with circumflex diacritics, which some find odd or cumbersome, along with their being invented specifically for Esperanto rather than borrowed from existing languages. Additionally, some of them are arguably unnecessary - for example, the use of ĥ instead of x and ŭ instead of w. However, Zamenhof did not choose these letters arbitrarily: In fact, they were inspired by Czech letters with the caron diacritic but replaced the caron with a circumflex for the ease of those who had access to a French typewriter (with a circumflex dead-key). The Czech letter ž was replaced with ĵ to match the French letter j with the same sound. The letter ŭ on the other hand comes from the u-breve used in Latin prosody, and is also speculated to be inspired by the Belarusian Cyrillic letter ; French typewriters can render it approximately as the French letter ù.

Esperanto words are mostly derived by stringing together roots, grammatical endings, and at times prefixes and suffixes. This process is regular so that people can create new words as they speak and be understood. Compound words are formed with a modifier-first, head-final order, as in English (compare "birdsong" and "songbird," and likewise, birdokanto and kantobirdo). Speakers may optionally insert an o between the words in a compound noun if placing them together directly without the o would make the resulting word hard to say or understand.

The different parts of speech are marked by their own suffixes: all common nouns end in -o, all adjectives in -a, all derived adverbs in -e, and all verbs except the jussive (or imperative) and infinitive end in -s, specifically in one of six tense and mood suffixes, such as the present tense -as; the jussive mood, which is tenseless, ends in -u. Nouns and adjectives have two cases: nominative for grammatical subjects and in general, and accusative for direct objects and (after a preposition) to indicate direction of movement.

Singular nouns used as grammatical subjects end in -o, plural subject nouns in -oj (pronounced [oi̯] like English "oy"). Singular direct object forms end in -on, and plural direct objects with the combination -ojn ([oi̯n]; rhymes with "coin"): -o indicates that the word is a noun, -j indicates the plural, and -n indicates the accusative (direct object) case. Adjectives agree with their nouns; their endings are singular subject -a ([a]; rhymes with "ha!"), plural subject -aj ([ai̯], pronounced "eye"), singular object -an, and plural object -ajn ([ai̯n]; rhymes with "fine").

The suffix -n, besides indicating the direct object, is used to indicate movement and a few other things as well.

The six verb inflections consist of three tenses and three moods. They are present tense -as, future tense -os, past tense -is, infinitive mood -i, conditional mood -us and jussive mood -u (used for wishes and commands). Verbs are not marked for person or number. Thus, kanti means "to sing", mi kantas means "I sing", vi kantas means "you sing", and ili kantas means "they sing".

Word order is comparatively free. Adjectives may precede or follow nouns; subjects, verbs and objects may occur in any order. However, the article la "the", demonstratives such as tiu "that" and prepositions (such as ĉe "at") must come before their related nouns. Similarly, the negative ne "not" and conjunctions such as kaj "and" and ke "that" must precede the phrase or clause that they introduce. In copular (A = B) clauses, word order is just as important as in English: "people are animals" is distinguished from "animals are people".

The core vocabulary of Esperanto was defined by Lingvo internacia, published by Zamenhof in 1887. This book listed 917 roots; these could be expanded into tens of thousands of words using prefixes, suffixes, and compounding. In 1894, Zamenhof published the first Esperanto dictionary, Universala Vortaro, which had a larger set of roots. The rules of the language allowed speakers to borrow new roots as needed; it was recommended, however, that speakers use most international forms and then derive related meanings from these.

Since then, many words have been borrowed, primarily (but not solely) from the European languages. Not all proposed borrowings become widespread, but many do, especially technical and scientific terms. Terms for everyday use, on the other hand, are more likely to be derived from existing roots; komputilo "computer", for instance, is formed from the verb komputi "compute" and the suffix -ilo "tool". Words are also calqued; that is, words acquire new meanings based on usage in other languages. For example, the word muso "mouse" has acquired the meaning of a computer mouse from its usage in many languages (English mouse, French souris, Dutch muis, Spanish ratón, etc.). Esperanto speakers often debate about whether a particular borrowing is justified or whether meaning can be expressed by deriving from or extending the meaning of existing words.

Some compounds and formed words in Esperanto are not entirely straightforward; for example, eldoni, literally "give out", means "publish", paralleling the usage of certain European languages (such as German herausgeben, Dutch uitgeven, Russian издать izdat'‌). In addition, the suffix -um- has no defined meaning; words using the suffix must be learned separately (such as dekstren "to the right" and dekstrumen "clockwise").

There are not many idiomatic or slang words in Esperanto,[citation needed ] as these forms of speech tend to make international communication difficult-working against Esperanto's main goal.

Instead of derivations of Esperanto roots, new roots are taken from European languages in the endeavor to create an international language.

The following short extract gives an idea of the character of Esperanto.

"En multaj lokoj de Ĉinio estis temploj de la drako-reĝo. Dum trosekeco oni preĝis en la temploj, ke la drako-reĝo donu pluvon al la homa mondo. Tiam drako estis simbolo de la supernatura estaĵo. Kaj pli poste, ĝi fariĝis prapatro de la plej altaj regantoj kaj simbolis la absolutan aŭtoritaton de la feŭda imperiestro. La imperiestro pretendis, ke li estas la filo de la drako. Ĉiuj liaj vivbezonaĵoj portis la nomon drako kaj estis ornamitaj per diversaj drakofiguroj. Nun ĉie en Ĉinio videblas drako-ornamentaĵoj, kaj cirkulas legendoj pri drakoj."

In many places in China, there were temples of the dragon-king. During times of drought, people would pray in the temples that the dragon-king would give rain to the human world. At that time the dragon was a symbol of the supernatural creature. Later on, it became the ancestor of the highest rulers and symbolized the absolute authority of a feudal emperor. The emperor claimed to be the son of the dragon. All of his personal possessions carried the name "dragon" and were decorated with various dragon figures. Now dragon decorations can be seen everywhere in China and legends about dragons circulate.

Listed below are some useful Esperanto words and phrases along with IPA transcriptions:

Esperanto speakers learn the language through self-directed study, online tutorials, and correspondence courses taught by volunteers. More recently, free teaching websites like lernu! and Duolingo have become available.

Esperanto instruction is rarely available at schools, including four primary schools in a pilot project under the supervision of the University of Manchester, and by one count at a few universities. However, outside China and Hungary, these mostly involve informal arrangements, rather than dedicated departments or state sponsorship. Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest had a department of Interlinguistics and Esperanto from 1966 to 2004, after which time instruction moved to vocational colleges; there are state examinations for Esperanto instructors. Additionally, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland offers a diploma in Interlinguistics. The Senate of Brazil passed a bill in 2009 that would make Esperanto an optional part of the curriculum in public schools, although mandatory if there is demand for it. As of 2015, the bill is still under consideration by the Chamber of Deputies.

In the United States, Esperanto is notably offered as a weekly evening course at Stanford University's Bechtel International Center. Conversational Esperanto, The International Language, is a free drop-in class that is open to Stanford students and the general public on campus during the academic year. With administrative permission, Stanford Students can take the class for two credits a quarter through the Linguistics Department. "Even four lessons are enough to get more than just the basics," the Esperanto at Stanford website reads.

The Zagreb method is an Esperanto teaching method that was developed in Zagreb, Croatia, in the late 1970s to early 1980s as a response to the unsatisfactory learning outcomes of traditional natural-language teaching techniques when used for Esperanto. Its goal was to streamline the material in order to equip learners with practical knowledge that could be put to use in a short of a time frame as possible. It is now implemented and available on some of the well-known learning websites in the community.

From 2006 to 2011, four primary schools in Britain, with 230 pupils, followed a course in " propaedeutic Esperanto"-that is, instruction in Esperanto to raise language awareness, and to accelerate subsequent learning of foreign languages-under the supervision of the University of Manchester. As they put it,

Many schools used to teach children the recorder, not to produce a nation of recorder players, but as a preparation for learning other instruments. [We teach] Esperanto, not to produce a nation of Esperanto-speakers, but as a preparation for learning other languages.

The results showed that the pupils achieved enhanced metalinguistic awareness, though the study did not indicate whether a course in a language other than Esperanto would have led to similar results. Similar studies have been conducted in New Zealand, the United States, and Germany. The results of these studies were favorable, and demonstrated that studying Esperanto before another foreign language expedites the acquisition of the other, natural language. In one study in England, a group of European secondary school students studied Esperanto for one year, then French for three years, and ended up with a better command of French than a control group, who had studied French for a four-year period.

Esperanto is by far the most widely spoken constructed language in the world. Speakers are most numerous in Europe and East Asia, especially in urban areas, where they often form Esperanto clubs. Esperanto is particularly prevalent in the northern and central countries of Europe; in China, Korea, Japan, and Iran within Asia; in Brazil, and the United States in the Americas; and in Togo in Africa.

An estimate of the number of Esperanto speakers was made by Sidney S. Culbert, a retired psychology professor at the University of Washington and a longtime Esperantist, who tracked down and tested Esperanto speakers in sample areas in dozens of countries over a period of twenty years. Culbert concluded that between one and two million people speak Esperanto at Foreign Service Level 3, "professionally proficient" (able to communicate moderately complex ideas without hesitation, and to follow speeches, radio broadcasts, etc.). Culbert's estimate was not made for Esperanto alone, but formed part of his listing of estimates for all languages of more than one million speakers, published annually in the World Almanac and Book of Facts. Culbert's most detailed account of his methodology is found in a 1989 letter to David Wolff. Since Culbert never published detailed intermediate results for particular countries and regions, it is difficult to independently gauge the accuracy of his results.

In the Almanac, his estimates for numbers of language speakers were rounded to the nearest million, thus the number of Esperanto speakers is shown as two million. This latter figure appears in Ethnologue. Assuming that this figure is accurate, that means that about 0.03% of the world's population speaks the language. Although it does not meet Zamenhof's goal of a universal language, it still represents a level of popularity unmatched by any other constructed language.

Marcus Sikosek (now Ziko van Dijk) has challenged this figure of 1.6 million as exaggerated. He estimated that even if Esperanto speakers were evenly distributed, assuming one million Esperanto speakers worldwide would lead one to expect about 180 in the city of Cologne. Van Dijk finds only 30 fluent speakers in that city, and similarly smaller-than-expected figures in several other places thought to have a larger-than-average concentration of Esperanto speakers. He also notes that there are a total of about 20,000 members of the various Esperanto organizations (other estimates are higher). Though there are undoubtedly many Esperanto speakers who are not members of any Esperanto organization, he thinks it unlikely that there are fifty times more speakers than organization members.

Finnish linguist Jouko Lindstedt, an expert on native-born Esperanto speakers, presented the following scheme to show the overall proportions of language capabilities within the Esperanto community:

1,000 have Esperanto as their native family language.

10,000 speak it fluently.

100,000 can use it actively.

One million understand a large amount passively.

Ten million have studied it to some extent at some time.

In 2017, doctoral student Svend Nielsen estimated around 63,000 Esperanto speakers worldwide, taking into account association memberships, user-generated data from Esperanto websites and census statistics. This number, however, was disputed by statistician Sten Johansson, who questioned the reliability of the source data and highlighted a wide margin of error, the latter point with which Nielsen agrees. Both have stated, however, that this new number is likely more realistic than some earlier projections.

In the absence of Culbert's detailed sampling data, or any other census data, it is impossible to state the number of speakers with certainty. According to the website of the Universal Esperanto Association:

Numbers of textbooks sold and membership of local societies put "the number of people with some knowledge of the language in the hundreds of thousands and possibly millions".

Native Esperanto speakers, eo: denaskuloj, 'person from/since birth', have learned the language from birth from Esperanto-speaking parents. This usually happens when Esperanto is the chief or only common language in an international family, but sometimes occurs in a family of Esperanto speakers who often use the language. As of 1996, according to Corsetti, there were approximately 350 attested cases of families with native Esperanto speakers (which means there were around 700 Esperanto speaking natives in these families, not accounting for older native speakers). The 2022 edition of Ethnologue gives 1,000 L1 users citing Corsetti et al 2004.

However, native speakers do not occupy an authoritative position in the Esperanto community, as they would in other language communities. This presents a challenge to linguists, whose usual source of grammaticality and meanings are native speakers.

Esperantists can access an international culture, including a large body of original as well as translated literature. There are more than 25,000 Esperanto books, both originals and translations, as well as several regularly distributed Esperanto magazines. In 2013 a museum about Esperanto opened in China. Esperantists use the language for free accommodations with Esperantists in 92 countries using the Pasporta Servo or to develop pen pals through .

Every year, Esperantists meet for the World Congress of Esperanto (Universala Kongreso de Esperanto).

Historically, much music has been written in the language such as Kaj Tiel Plu, has been in various folk traditions. There is also a variety of classical and semi-classical choral music, both original and translated, as well as large ensemble music that includes voices singing Esperanto texts. Lou Harrison, who incorporated styles and instruments from many world cultures in his music, used Esperanto titles and/or texts in several of his works, most notably La Koro-Sutro (1973). David Gaines used Esperanto poems as well as an excerpt from a speech by Zamenhof for his Symphony No. One (Esperanto) for mezzo-soprano and orchestra (1994-98). He wrote original Esperanto text for his Povas plori mi ne plu ( I Can Cry No Longer) for unaccompanied SATB choir (1994).

There are also shared traditions, such as Zamenhof Day. Esperantists speak primarily in Esperanto at special conventions, such as the World Esperanto Congress.

Proponents of Esperanto, such a Humphrey Tonkin, a professor at the University of Hartford, argue that Esperanto is "culturally neutral by design, as it was intended to be a facilitator between cultures, not to be the carrier of any one national culture". The late Scottish Esperanto author William Auld wrote extensively on the subject, arguing that Esperanto is "the expression of a common human culture, unencumbered by national frontiers. Thus it is considered a culture on its own." Critics have argued that the language is eurocentric, as it draws much of its vocabulary from European languages.

Several Esperanto associations also advance Esperanto education, and aim to preserve its culture and heritage. Poland added Esperanto to its list of intangible cultural heritage in 2014.

In the futuristic novel Lord of the World by Robert Hugh Benson, Esperanto is presented as the predominant language of the world, much as Latin is the language of the Church. A reference to Esperanto appears in the science-fiction story War with the Newts by Karel Čapek, published in 1936. As part of a passage on what language the salamander-looking creatures with human cognitive ability should learn, it is noted that "...in the Reform schools, Esperanto was taught as the medium of communication." (P. 206).

Esperanto has been used in many films and novels. Typically, this is done either to add the exotic flavour of a foreign language without representing any particular ethnicity, or to avoid going to the trouble of inventing a new language. The Charlie Chaplin film The Great Dictator (1940) showed Jewish ghetto shop signs in Esperanto. Two full-length feature films have been produced with dialogue entirely in Esperanto: in 1964, and a 1965 B-movie horror film which is also notable for starring William Shatner shortly before he began working on . In Captain Fantastic (2016) there is a dialogue in Esperanto. The 1994 film Street Fighter contains Esperanto dialogue spoken by the character Sagat. Finally, Mexican film director Alfonso Cuarón has publicly shown his fascination for Esperanto, going as far as naming his film production company Esperanto Filmoj ("Esperanto Films").

In 1921 the French Academy of Sciences recommended using Esperanto for international scientific communication. A few scientists and mathematicians, such as Maurice Fréchet (mathematics), John C. Wells (linguistics), Helmar Frank (pedagogy and cybernetics), and Nobel laureate Reinhard Selten (economics) have published part of their work in Esperanto. Frank and Selten were among the founders of the International Academy of Sciences in San Marino, sometimes called the "Esperanto University", where Esperanto is the primary language of teaching and administration.

A message in Esperanto was recorded and included in 's Golden Record.

Esperanto business groups have been active for many years. Research conducted in the 1920s by the French Chamber of Commerce and reported in The New York Times suggested that Esperanto seemed to be the best business language.

The privacy-oriented cryptocurrency, Monero, takes its name from the Esperanto word for coin.

Zamenhof had three goals, as he wrote already in 1887: to create an easy language, to create a language ready to use "whether the language be universally accepted or not" and to find some means to get many people to learn the language. So Zamenhof's intention was not only to create an easy-to-learn language to foster peace and international understanding as a general language, but also to create a language for immediate use by a (small) language community. Esperanto was to serve as an international auxiliary language, that is, as a universal second language, not to replace ethnic languages. This goal was shared by Zamenhof among Esperanto speakers at the beginning of the movement. Later, Esperanto speakers began to see the language and the culture that had grown up around it as ends in themselves, even if Esperanto is never adopted by the United Nations or other international organizations.

Esperanto speakers who want to see Esperanto adopted officially or on a large scale worldwide are commonly called finvenkistoj, from fina venko, meaning "final victory". There are two kinds of finvenkismo: desubismo aims to spread Esperanto between ordinary people ( desube, from below) to form a steadily growing community of Esperanto speakers, while desuprismo aims to act from above ( desupre), beginning with politicians. Zamenhof considered the first way more plausible, as "for such affairs as ours, governments come with their approval and help usually only when everything is completely ready."

Those who focus on the intrinsic value of the language are commonly called raŭmistoj, from Rauma, Finland, where a declaration on the short-term improbability of the fina venko and the value of Esperanto culture was made at the International Youth Congress in 1980. However the "Manifesto de Raŭmo" clearly mentions the intention to further spread the language: "We want to spread Esperanto to put into effect its positive values more and more, step by step".

In 1996 the Prague Manifesto was adopted at the annual congress of the Universal Esperanto Association (UEA); it was subscribed by individual participants and later by other Esperanto speakers. More recently, language-learning apps like Duolingo and Amikumu have helped to increase the amount of fluent speakers of Esperanto, and find others in their area to speak the language with.

The earliest flag, and the one most commonly used today, features a green five-pointed star against a white canton, upon a field of green. It was proposed to Zamenhof by Richard Geoghegan, author of the first Esperanto textbook for English speakers, in 1887. The flag was approved in 1905 by delegates to the first conference of Esperantists at Boulogne-sur-Mer.

The green star on white (la verda stelo ) is also used by itself as a round (buttonhole, etc.) emblem by many esperantists, among other reasons to enhance their visibility outside the Esperanto world.

A version with an E superimposed over the green star is sometimes seen. Other variants include that for Christian Esperantists, with a white Christian cross superimposed upon the green star, and that for Leftists, with the color of the field changed from green to red.

In 1987, a second flag design was chosen in a contest organized by the UEA celebrating the first centennial of the language. It featured a white background with two stylised curved "E"s facing each other. Dubbed the jubilea simbolo ( jubilee symbol), it attracted criticism from some Esperantists, who dubbed it the melono (melon) for its elliptical shape. It is still in use, though to a lesser degree than the traditional symbol, known as the verda stelo (green star).

Esperanto has been placed in many proposed political situations. The most popular of these is the Europe-Democracy-Esperanto, which aims to establish Esperanto as the official language of the European Union. Grin's Report, published in 2005 by François Grin, found that the use of English as the lingua franca within the European Union costs billions annually and significantly benefits English-speaking countries financially. The report considered a scenario where Esperanto would be the lingua franca, and found that it would have many advantages, particularly economically speaking, as well as ideologically.

Left-wing currents exist in the wider Esperanto world, mostly organized through the Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda founded by French theorist Eugène Lanti. Other notable Esperanto socialists include Nikolai Nekrasov and Vladimir Varankin, both of whom were put to death in October 1938 during the Stalinist repressions. Nekrasov was accused of being "an organizer and leader of a fascist, espionage, terrorist organization of Esperantists."

Baháʼí Faith

The Baháʼí Faith encourages the use of an auxiliary international language. `Abdu'l-Bahá praised the ideal of Esperanto, and there was an affinity between Esperantists and Baháʼís during the late 19th century and early 20th century.

On February 12, 1913, `Abdu'l-Bahá gave a talk to the Paris Esperanto Society, stating:

Now, praise be to God that Dr. Zamenhof has invented the Esperanto language. It has all the potential qualities of becoming the international means of communication. All of us must be grateful and thankful to him for this noble effort; for in this way he has served his fellowmen well. With untiring effort and self-sacrifice on the part of its devotees Esperanto will become universal. Therefore every one of us must study this language and spread it as far as possible so that day by day it may receive a broader recognition, be accepted by all nations and governments of the world, and become a part of the curriculum in all the public schools. I hope that Esperanto will be adopted as the language of all the future international conferences and congresses, so that all people need acquire only two languages-one their own tongue and the other the international language. Then perfect union will be established between all the people of the world. Consider how difficult it is today to communicate with various nations. If one studies fifty languages one may yet travel through a country and not know the language. Therefore I hope that you will make the utmost effort, so that this language of Esperanto may be widely spread.

Lidia Zamenhof, daughter of L. L. Zamenhof, became a Baháʼí around 1925. James Ferdinand Morton Jr., an early member of the Baháʼí Faith in Greater Boston, was vice-president of the Esperanto League for North America. Ehsan Yarshater, the founding editor of Encyclopædia Iranica, notes how as a child in Iran he learned Esperanto and that when his mother was visiting Haifa on a Baháʼí pilgrimage he wrote her a letter in Persian as well as Esperanto. At the request of 'Abdu'l-Baha, Agnes Baldwin Alexander became an early advocate of Esperanto and used it to spread the Baháʼí teachings at meetings and conferences in Japan.

Today there exists an active sub-community of Baháʼí Esperantists and various volumes of Baháʼí literature have been translated into Esperanto. In 1973, the Baháʼí Esperanto-League for active Baháʼí supporters of Esperanto was founded.

In 1908, spiritist Camilo Chaigneau wrote an article named "Spiritism and Esperanto" in the periodic La Vie d'Outre-Tombe recommending the use of Esperanto in a "central magazine" for all spiritists and esperantists. Esperanto then became actively promoted by spiritists, at least in Brazil, initially by Ismael Gomes Braga and František Lorenz; the latter is known in Brazil as Francisco Valdomiro Lorenz, and was a pioneer of both spiritist and Esperantist movements in this country. The Brazilian Spiritist Federation publishes Esperanto coursebooks, translations of Spiritism's basic books, and encourages Spiritists to become Esperantists.

William T. Stead, a famous spiritualist and occultist in the United Kingdom, co-founded the first Esperanto club in the U.K.

The Teozofia Esperanta Ligo (Theosophical Esperantist League) was formed in 1911, and the organization's journal, Espero Teozofia, was published from 1913 to 1928.

The first translation of the Bible into Esperanto was a translation of the Tanakh (or Old Testament) done by L. L. Zamenhof. The translation was reviewed and compared with other languages' translations by a group of British clergy and scholars before its publication at the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1910. In 1926 this was published along with a New Testament translation, in an edition commonly called the " Londona Biblio". In the 1960s, the Internacia Asocio de Bibliistoj kaj Orientalistoj tried to organize a new, ecumenical Esperanto Bible version. Since then, the Dutch Remonstrant pastor Gerrit Berveling has translated the Deuterocanonical or apocryphal books, in addition to new translations of the Gospels, some of the New Testament epistles, and some books of the Tanakh. These have been published in various separate booklets, or serialized in Dia Regno, but the Deuterocanonical books have appeared in recent editions of the Londona Biblio.

Christian Esperanto organizations and publications include:

After a failed attempt to start a Catholic Esperanto organization, Emile Peltier, a parish priest near Tours, France, published the first issue of Espero Katolika (Catholic Hope) in 1902. A year after Peltier's death, the International Union of Catholic Esperantists (Internacia Katolika Unuiĝo Esperantista, IKUE) was formed in 1910. Father Max Metzger founded the World Peace League of the White Cross in 1916 and the German Catholics' Peace Association in 1919, both of which used Esperanto as their working language. Two Roman Catholic popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, have regularly used Esperanto in their multilingual urbi et orbi blessings at Easter and Christmas each year since Easter 1994.

In 1911, The International League of Christian Esperantists (Kristana Esperantista Ligo Internacia, KELI) was founded during the Universal Congress of Esperanto in Antwerp. The founder, Paul Hübner (1881-1970), was an early supporter of the Nazi movement, a fact which disenfranchised liberal and Jewish members, thus severely limiting the growth of the KELI during the first half of the 20th century. KELI's bimonthly interdenominational magazine, Dia Regno, continues to be published and is reportedly made available to readers in 48 countries. They have also published several Esperanto hymnals including the 1971 Adoru Kantante (Worship by Singing) and Tero kaj Ĉielo Kantu (Earth and Heaven Sing).

The Quaker Esperanto Society (Kvakera Esperanto-Societo, KES) was established in 1921 and described in multiple issues of "The Friend" Advices and Queries (Konsiloj kaj Demandoj) and several other Quaker texts have been translated. Well-known Esperantists who were also Quakers include authors and historians, Edmond Privat and Montagu Christie Butler.

Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran called on Muslims to learn Esperanto and praised its use as a medium for better understanding among peoples of different religious backgrounds. After he suggested that Esperanto replace English as an international lingua franca, it began to be used in the seminaries of Qom. An Esperanto translation of the Qur'an was published by the state shortly thereafter.

Though Esperanto itself has changed little since the publication of Fundamento de Esperanto ( Foundation of Esperanto), a number of reform projects have been proposed over the years, starting with Zamenhof's proposals in 1894 and Ido in 1907. Several later constructed languages, such as Universal, Saussure, Romániço, Internasia, Esperanto sen Fleksio, and Mundolingvo, were all based on Esperanto.

In modern times, conscious attempts have been made to eliminate perceived sexism in the language, such as Riism. Many words with ĥ now have alternative spellings with k and occasionally h, so that arĥitekto may also be spelled arkitekto; see Esperanto phonology for further details of ĥ replacement. Reforms aimed at altering country names have also resulted in a number of different options, either due to disputes over suffixes or Eurocentrism in naming various countries.

J. R. R. Tolkien wrote in support of the language in a 1932 British Esperantist article, but criticised those who sought to adapt or "tinker" with the language, which, in his opinion, harmed unanimity and the goal of achieving wide acceptance.

There have been numerous objections to Esperanto over the years. For example, there has been criticism that Esperanto is not neutral enough, but also that it should convey a specific culture, which would make it less neutral; that Esperanto does not draw on a wide enough selection of the world's languages, but also that it should be more narrowly European.

Esperantists often argue for Esperanto as a culturally neutral means of communication. However, it is often accused of being Eurocentric. This is most often noted in regard to the vocabulary, but applies equally to the orthography, phonology, and semantics, all of which are largely derived by the grammars of European languages. The vocabulary, for example, draws about three-quarters from Romance languages, and the remainder primarily from Greek, English and German. The grammar is arguably more European than not. The vocabulary, orthography, phonology, and semantics are all thoroughly European. The phonology is said to be similar to Polish. The language also has many calques of Polish expressions. Supporters have argued that the agglutinative grammar and verb regularity of Esperanto has more in common with Asian languages than with European ones. A 2010 linguistic typological study concluded that "Esperanto is indeed somewhat European in character, but considerably less so than the European languages themselves."

Esperanto is frequently accused of being inherently sexist, because the default form of some nouns is masculine while a derived form is used for the feminine, which is said to retain traces of the male-dominated society of late 19th-century Europe of which Esperanto is a product. These nouns are primarily titles and kin terms, such as sinjoro "Mr, sir" vs. sinjorino "Ms, lady" and patro "father" vs. patrino "mother". In addition, nouns that denote persons and whose definitions are not explicitly male are often assumed to be male unless explicitly made female, such as doktoro, a PhD doctor (male or unspecified) versus doktorino, a female PhD. This is analogous to the situation with the English suffix -ess, as in the words baron/baroness, waiter/waitress, etc.

On the other hand, the pronoun ĝi ("it") may be used generically to mean he/she/they; the pronoun li ("he") is always masculine and ŝi ("she") is always female, despite some authors' arguments. A gender-neutral singular pronoun ri has gradually become more widely used in recent years, although it is not currently universal. The plural pronoun ili ("they") is always neutral, as are nouns with the prefix ge- such as gesinjoroj (equivalent to sinjoro kaj sinjorino "Mr.and Ms."), gepatroj "parents" (equivalent to patro kaj patrino "mother and father").

Speakers of languages without grammatical case or adjectival agreement frequently complain about these aspects of Esperanto. In addition, in the past some people found the Classical Greek forms of the plural (nouns in -oj, adjectives in -aj) to be awkward, proposing instead that Italian -i be used for nouns, and that no plural be used for adjectives. These suggestions were adopted by the Ido reform. A reply to that criticism is that the presence of an accusative case allows much freedom in word order, e.g. for emphasis ("Johano batis Petron", John hit Peter; "Petron batis Johano", it is Peter whom John hit), that its absence in the "predicate of the object" avoids ambiguity ("Mi vidis la blankan domon", I saw the white house; "Mi vidis la domon blanka", the house seemed white to me) and that adjective agreement allows, among others, the use of hyperbaton in poetry (as in Latin, cf. Virgil's Eclogue 1:1 Tityre, tu patulæ recubans sub tegmine fagi... where "patulæ" (spread out) is epithet to "fagi" (beech) and their agreement in the genitive feminine binds them notwithstanding their distance in the verse).

The Esperanto alphabet uses two diacritics: the circumflex and the breve. The alphabet was designed with a French typewriter in mind, and although modern computers support Unicode, entering the letters with diacritic marks can be more or less problematic with certain operating systems or hardware. One of the first reform proposals (for Esperanto 1894) sought to do away with these marks and the language Ido went back to the basic Latin alphabet.

However, from the beginning, French (the "international" language of diplomats, the League of Nations, and until now the post office) typewriters allowed the addition of ^ to any letter. As Wikipedia and Unicode show, that argument is increasingly losing force. As for many other languages, there is an orthography without diacritics: See H-system, X-system, etc. Almost all languages that use the Latin alphabet use diacritics. English in particular does not use them, but its phonetics are difficult to learn. It takes only a few minutes to learn the six accented Esperanto letters.

Achievement of its creator's goals

One common criticism is that Esperanto has failed to live up to the hopes of its creator, who dreamed of it becoming a universal second language. Because people were reluctant to learn a new language which hardly anyone spoke, Zamenhof asked people to sign a promise to start learning Esperanto once ten million people made the same promise. He "was disappointed to receive only a thousand responses."

However, Zamenhof had the goal to "enable the learner to make direct use of his knowledge with persons of any nationality, whether the language be universally accepted or not", as he wrote in 1887. The language is currently spoken by people living in more than 100 countries; there are about 2,000 native Esperanto speakers and probably up to 100,000 people who use the language regularly.

In this regard, Zamenhof was well aware that it might take much time for Esperanto to achieve his desired goals. In his speech at the 1907 World Esperanto Congress in Cambridge he said, "we hope that earlier or later, maybe after many centuries, on a neutral language foundation, understanding one another, the nations will build ... a big family circle."

The poet Wisława Szymborska expressed doubt that Esperanto could "produce works of lasting value," saying it is "an artificial language without variety or dialects" and that "no one thinks in Esperanto." Esperantists have replied that "lasting value" is a statement of opinion, that Esperanto grew "naturally" by the actions of its speakers on Zamenhof's intentionally elementary Fundamento, and that the last sentence ("No one thinks in Esperanto") is false-to-fact.

There are some geographical and astronomical features named after Esperanto, or after its creator L. L. Zamenhof. These include Esperanto Island in Antarctica, and the asteroids 1421 Esperanto and 1462 Zamenhof discovered by Finnish astronomer and Esperantist Yrjö Väisälä.

1. ^ "Plena Ilustrita Vortaro de Esperanto 2020".

2. Harald Haarmann, Eta leksikono pri lingvoj, 2011, archive date March 4, 2016: Esperanto. ... estas lernata ankaŭ de pluraj miloj da homoj en la mondo kiel gepatra lingvo. ("Esperanto has also been learned by several thousand people in the world as a mother tongue.")

3. ^

4. ^ Wandel, Amri (2014). "HOW MANY PEOPLE SPEAK ESPERANTO? OR: ESPERANTO ON THE WEB". Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems. A simple calculation accompanied by reasonable refinements leads to a number of approximately two million Esperanto users within the internet community alone, probably significantly more worldwide

5. ^ Jones, Daniel (2003) [1917], Peter Roach; James Hartmann; Jane Setter (eds.), English Pronouncing Dictionary, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 3-12-539683-2

6. Salisbury, Josh (December 6, 2017). "'Saluton!': the surprise return of Esperanto". The Guardian. Archived from the original on December 28, 2017.

7. Michael Byram and Adelheid Hu: ^ Routledge Encyclopedia of Language Teaching and Learning. 2nd edition. Taylor and Francis, Hoboken 2013, ISBN 978-1-136-23554-2, page 229.

8. ^ "Esperanto and Anarchism (translation of Lexikon der Anarchie, Schwarzer Nachtschatten), Plön 1998, (ISBN 3-89041-014-6) The Anarchist Library". theanarchistlibrary.org. Archived from the original on August 8, 2017.

9. ^ "What is Esperanto?". Republic of Molossia. Dayton, Nevada. Archived from the original on July 6, 2017. Esperanto is the second language of the Republic of Molossia.

10. Keller, Stefano. "Zamenhof-Day / Esperanto Book Day, 15 December". Translated by Moon, Brian. Universal Esperanto Association.

11. David Richardson: "Esperanto Learning and Using the International Language". Esperanto-USA 3rd edition 2004, ^ ISBN 0-939785-06-4 page 34

12. ^ Hamann, F.A. (April 1928). "The Progress of Esperanto since the World War". The Modern Language Journal. 12 (7): 545-552. doi:10.2307/315767. JSTOR 315767.

13. ^ "Historia Białegostoku" [History of Białystok]. Miejski Portal Informacyjny Bstok.pl Białystok (in Polish). Archived from the original on February 14, 2021. (transl.) Martial law was kept here [in Białystok] from 1870, and then the use of the Polish language in public places was forbidden. More persecution began.

14. ^

15. ^ Schor, Esther (October 4, 2016). Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language. Henry Holt and Company. p. 70. ISBN 978-1-4299-4341-3.

16. ^ Facsimile of the title page of the First Book in English, 1889.

17. ^ "Esperanto kaj anarkiismo". www.nodo50.org. Archived from the original on April 23, 2020. Anarkiistoj estis inter la pioniroj de la disvastigo de Esperanto. En 1905 fondiĝis en Stokholmo la unua anarkiisma Esperanto-grupo. Sekvis multaj aliaj: en Bulgario, Ĉinio kaj aliaj landoj. Anarkiistoj kaj anarki-sindikatistoj, kiuj antaŭ la Unua Mondmilito apartenis al la nombre plej granda grupo inter la proletaj esperantistoj, fondis en 1906 la internacian ligon Paco-Libereco, kiu eldonis la Internacian Socian Revuon. Paco-libereco unuiĝis en 1910 kun alia progresema asocio, Esperantista Laboristaro. La komuna organizaĵo nomiĝis Liberiga Stelo. Ĝis 1914 tiu organizaĵo eldonis multe da revolucia literaturo en Esperanto, interalie ankaŭ anarkiisma. Tial povis evolui en la jaroj antaŭ la Unua Mondmilito ekzemple vigla korespondado inter eŭropaj kaj japanaj anarkiistoj. En 1907 la Internacia Anarkiisma Kongreso en Amsterdamo faris rezolucion pri la afero de internacia lingvo, kaj venis dum la postaj jaroj similaj kongresaj rezolucioj. Esperantistoj, kiuj partoprenis tiujn kongresojn, okupiĝis precipe pri la internaciaj rilatoj de la anarkiistoj.

18. ^ Istarska enciklopedija Archived February 10, 2021, at the Wayback Machine Josip Šiklić: Novljan, Fran (pristupljeno 23. ožujka 2020.)

19. Pleadin, Josip. Biografia leksikono de kroatiaj esperantistoj. Đurđevac: Grafokom 2002, p. 108-109, ^ ISBN 953-96975-0-6

20. ^ Yang, Jinsuk (February 10, 2016). "A historical analysis of language policy and language ideology in the early twentieth Asia: a case of Joseon, 1910-1945". Language Policy. 16 (1): 59-78. doi:10.1007/s10993-015-9396-5. ISSN 1568-4555. S2CID 146666430. Archived from the original on February 7, 2022.

21. ^ Sutton, Geoffrey (2008). Concise Encyclopedia of the Original Literature of Esperanto, 1887-2007. Mondial. pp. 161-162. ISBN 978-1-59569-090-6. Archived from the original on July 22, 2016. Hitler specifically attacked Esperanto as a threat in a speech in Munich (1922) and in Mein Kampf itself (1925). The Nazi Minister for Education banned the teaching of Esperanto on May 17, 1935. [...] all Esperantists were essentially enemies of the state - serving, through their language, Jewish-internationalist aims.

22. Lins, Ulrich (2008). "Esperanto as language and idea in China and Japan" (PDF). Language Problems and Language Planning. John Benjamins. 32 (1): 47-60. doi:10.1075/lplp.32.1.05lin. ISSN 0272-2690. Archived from the original (PDF) on December 22, 2012.

23. Ulrich Lins: ^ Die gefährliche Sprache. Die Verfolgung der Esperantisten unter Hitler und Stalin. Bleicher: Gerlingen, 1988, p. 220 and elsewhere ISBN 978-3883500232; (English version: Dangerous Language ― Esperanto under Hitler and Stalin. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017 ISBN 978-1137549167.)

24. ^ Lins, Ulrich (February 10, 2017). Dangerous Language - Esperanto under Hitler and Stalin. Springer. ISBN 9781137549174. Archived from the original on April 14, 2021.

25. ^ "Records of the General Conference, Eighth Session, Montevideo 1954; Resolutions" (PDF). UNESDOC Database. UNESCO. Archived (PDF) from the original on February 2, 2011.

26. ^ Zasky, Jason (July 20, 2009), "Discouraging Words", Failure Magazine, archived from the original on November 19, 2011, But in terms of invented languages, it's the most outlandishly successful invented language ever. It has thousands of speakers - even native speakers - and that's a major accomplishment as compared to the 900 or so other languages that have no speakers. - Arika Okrent

27. Esperantujo. (2022, March 17). ^ Wiktionary, The Free Dictionary. Retrieved 19:57, May 14, 2022 from https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Esperantujo&oldid=66166890.

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29. ^ Brants, Thorsten (February 22, 2012). "Tutmonda helplingvo por ĉiuj homoj". Google Translate Blog. Archived from the original on February 25, 2012.

30. ^ Bonvenon al Vikipedia ("Welcome to Wikipedia"), main page of the Esperanto-language version of Wikipedia, October 4, 2019. Accessed October 4, 2019.

31. ^ Blanke, Detlev (1985). "Internationale Plansprachen. Eine Einführung" [International Planned Languages. An Introduction]. Sammlung Akademie-Verlag. Akademie-Verlag. ISSN 0138-550X.

32. ^ Akademio de Esperanto (2007): Oficialaj Informoj, Numero 6 - 2007 01 21 Archived July 31, 2019, at the Wayback Machine.

33. Amiketo and Tajpi are keyboard layouts which support the Esperanto alphabet for ^ Windows Archived November 23, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, Mac OS X Archived April 5, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, and Linux Archived December 7, 2016, at the Wayback Machine

34. ^ La Bona Lingvo, Claude Piron. Vienna: Pro Esperanto, 1989. La lingvo volas eleganti, ne elefanti. "The language wants to be elegant, not elephantine."

35. Report: Edward Thorndike, ^ Language Learning. Bureau of Publications of Teachers College, 1933. Interlingua.org Archived August 20, 2008, at the Wayback Machine

36. Helen S. Eaton, "The Educational Value of an Artificial Language." ^ The Modern Language Journal, No. 12, pp. 87-94 (1927). Blackwellpublishing.com Archived July 3, 2009, at the Wayback Machine

37. Sikosek, Ziko M. Esperanto Sen Mitoj ("Esperanto without Myths"). Second edition. Antwerp: Flandra Esperanto-Ligo, 2003.

38. Esperanto at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022)

39. Lindstedt, Jouko. "Re: ^ Kiom?" (posting). DENASK-L@helsinki.fi Archived May 7, 2011, at the Wayback Machine, April 22, 1996.

40. ^ "An Update on Esperanto". New York: Universala Esperanto‑Asocio. Archived from the original on December 9, 2016. Based on the number of textbooks sold and membership ..., the number of people with some knowledge of Esperanto is in the hundreds of thousands and possibly millions. ... In 1954 ... UNESCO ... recognised that the achievements of Esperanto match UNESCO's aims and ideals, and official relations were established between UNESCO and UEA.

41. ^ Jouko Lindstedt (January 2006). "Native Esperanto as a Test Case for Natural Language, as part of "A man of measure: Festschrift in honour of Fred Karlsson on his 60th birthday"" (PDF). SKY Journal of Linguistics. University of Helsinki-Department of Slavonic and Baltic Languages and Literatures. 19. Archived (PDF) from the original on July 16, 2011.

42. ^ Corsetti, Renato (1996). A mother tongue spoken mainly by fathers. Language Problems and Language Planning 20: 3, 263-73

43. ^ Miner, Ken (February 8, 2011). "The impossibility of an Esperanto linguistics / La neebleco de priesperanta lingvoscienco". InKoj. Interlingvistikaj Kajeroj (in Italian). 2 (1): 26-51. doi:10.13130/2037-4550/838. ISSN 2037-4550. The task of linguistics is to reveal the principles which relate sentences to meanings. One cannot work out these principles if one does not know (1) the grammatical sentences of the language and (2) their meanings. Due to absence of native speakers (the usual source of grammaticality and of meanings), sentence-meanings and grammaticality in Esperanto are radically imprecise in comparison with those of ethnic languages. Due to this imprecision it is not possible to construct linguistic arguments regarding Esperanto: esperantology [sic] is possible, but not a linguistics of Esperanto.

44. Auld, William. ^ La Fenomeno Esperanto ("The Esperanto Phenomenon"). Rotterdam: Universala Esperanto-Asocio, 1988.

45. ^

46. ^ Update 79, oct. 2017, p. 2, Esperanto Association of Britain (EAB)

47. ^ War with the Newts. Karel Čapek. 1936. The Penguin Group. Edition published in 2010 by Penguin Classics. Translated by M. & R. Weatherall.

48. ^ Frank, Helmar; Fössmeier, Reinhard (2000). AIS - La Akademio Internacia de la Sciencoj San Marino / Die Internationale Akademie der Wissenschaften San Marino. Institut für Kybernetik. p. 449. ISBN 978-3-929853-12-4.

49. ^ Feeney, Mark (May 12, 1999). "Esperanto: A surprising 2 million speakers worldwide get their words' worth; from the 'planned language' created in the 19th century". The Boston Globe. p. F01. ISSN 0743-1791. Archived from the original on June 23, 2017. Esperantists speak of the fina venko, or 'final victory'. The concept is that eventually every moderately educated person ... will know Esperanto enough to ... order a cup of coffee ...

50. ^ Silfer, Giorgio (1999). "Kion signifas Raŭmismo". La Ondo de Esperanto (in Esperanto). Kaliningrad, Russia. Archived from the original on May 30, 2002.

51. ^ Smith, Peter (2000). "Zamenhof, Lidia". A concise encyclopedia of the Baháʼí Faith. Oxford: Oneworld Publications. pp. 368. ISBN 1-85168-184-1.

52. ^ Smith, Peter (2000). "Esperanto". A concise encyclopedia of the Baháʼí Faith. Oxford: Oneworld Publications. pp. 134-135. ISBN 1-85168-184-1.

53. ^ Esslemont, J.E. (1980) [1923]. "Universal Language". Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era (5th ed.). Wilmette, Illinois, USA: Baháʼí Publishing Trust. p. 165. ISBN 0-87743-160-4. Archived from the original on May 22, 2021.

54. ^ Katz, Esther (1999). "Morton, Jr., James Ferdinand (1870-1941)". The Margaret Sanger Papers Electronic Edition: Margaret Sanger and The Woman Rebel, 1914-1916. Model Editions Partnership. Archived from the original on October 11, 2017.

55. ^ "Uma só língua, uma só bandeira, um só pastor: Spiritism and Esperanto in Brazil by David Pardue" (PDF). University of Kansas Libraries. Archived from the original (PDF) on September 23, 2006.

56. ^

57. ^ Lins, Ulrich (1971). "Max Joseph Metzger". Kontakto. 2: 16-17.

58. ^ "THE POPE BLESSING IN ESPERANTO.avi". YouTube. Archived from the original on December 11, 2021.

59. KELI kaj Dia Regno^ . http://keli.chez.com/keli_en.htm

60. ^ Eric Walker (May 27, 2005). "Esperanto Lives On". The Friend.

61. ^ Phillips, Brian W. G. (June 15, 1968). "Beyond Babel to a World Language" (PDF). The Friend: 302.

62. ^ "A few texts in Esperanto about Quakerism". Kvakera Esperanto-Societo.

63. ^ Botten J. The Captive Conscience 2002 p.110 re. Esperanto speaking Christadelphians in Tsarist Russia.

64. ^ Spirita nutraĵo

65. ^ Parkvall, Mikael (April 1, 2010). "How European is Esperanto?: A typological study*". Language Problems and Language Planning. 34 (1): 63-79. doi:10.1075/lplp.34.1.04par. ISSN 0272-2690. Archived from the original on November 6, 2021.

66. ^

-  L. L. Zamenhof. Kongresaj paroladoj. Jekaterinburg (Ruslanda Esperantisto). 1995, pp. 23-24

67. Szymborska, Wisława (August 19, 2021) "No One Thinks in Esperanto". ^ The New York Review of Books 68 (13): 14.

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Esperanto ( or ) is the world's most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Created by the Warsaw-based ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, it was intended to be a universal second language for international communication, or "the international language" ( la Lingvo Internacia).

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#NewLanguage

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From the Klingon language in the Star Trek universe to the Na'vi language from James Cameron's Avatar, fictional languages can go a long way towards making a work of fiction feel real. Making a fictional language can be an intense...

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#Dream#DreamingReailty#RealityAsDream #RestrictingDreamingDesires

Facts About Dreaming

We all dream every night. ...

We dream most vividly during Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep. ...

We are specially wired not to act out our dreams. ..

Many dreams are bizarre because part of our brain shuts down. ...

Most dreams relate to recent awake experiences. ...

We can learn to control our dreams.

Do dreams mean anything? Alan Eiser, a psychologist and a clinical lecturer at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor, says dreams can be “highly meaningful,” because they “deal with the sort of personal conflicts and emotional struggles that people are experiencing in their daily lives.”

Most experts believe that lucid dreams are the rarest type of dreams. While dreaming, you are conscious that you are dreaming but you keep on dreaming. According to researchers, 55 percent of people experience these types of dreams at least one time in their life

But for some reason, certain ordinary objects and actions seem to never appear in our dreams, while flying elephants, battles with aliens, or riding motorcycles might be part of our normal dream repertoire. However, things like smartphones, mirrors, and food are rare guests in our dreams.

A person may not remember the events of their dreams because they cannot access that information once they are awake. In a 2016 article in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, researchers posit that people forget their dreams due to changing levels of acetylcholine and norepinephrine during sleep.

Can u feel pain in dreams?

Although some theorists have suggested that pain sensations cannot be part of the dreaming world, research has shown that pain sensations occur in about 1% of the dreams in healthy persons and in about 30% of patients with acute, severe pain.

Can you dream of a face you've never seen?

But have you ever had a dream with a person in it whom you have never seen before in your life? It may seem that way, but it is impossible. It is believed that the human brain is incapable of “creating” a new face.

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DOES  THE SMELL OF THE FART LAST IN THE JAR?

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DOES  THE SMELL OF THE FART LAST IN THE JAR?

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#Fart

https://it.quora.com/Se-scoreggiassi-dentro-ad-un-barattolo-di-vetro-e-lo-tenessi-chiuso-per-una-decina-di-mesi-una-volta-aperto-uscirebbe-ancora-della-puzza

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Se scoreggiassi dentro ad un barattolo di vetro e lo tenessi chiuso per una decina di mesi, una volta aperto uscirebbe ancora della puzza?

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Risposta (1 di 6): Non sono un chimico, ma l'argomento è comunque scientificamente interessante. Cercando un po' in giro, risulta che le sostanze che rendono odorose le flatulenze sono circa l'1% della loro composizione e sono principalmente scatolo, indolo, solfuro di idrogeno, metantiolo, dimet...

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#Fart

https://www.cinemablend.com/television/90-day-fiances-fart-jar-selling-stephanie-matto-may-have-a-new-scheme-and-another-star-from-the-show-is-involved

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90 Day Fiancé's Fart-Jar Selling Stephanie Matto May Have A New Scheme, And Another Star From The Show Is Involved

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90 Day Fiancé franchise star Stephanie Matto is no stranger to get-rich-quick ideas, and she might not be the only 90 Day vet involved with her next idea.

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#DeathByLaughter#Death

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_from_laughter

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Death from laughter is a supposedly extremely rare form of death, usually resulting from either cardiac arrest or asphyxiation, that has itself been caused by a fit of laughter. Instances of death by laughter have been recorded from the times of ancient Greece to modern times.

Usually, the phrase "dying from laughter" is used as hyperbole.

Death may result from several pathologies that deviate from benign laughter. Infarction of the pons and the medulla oblongata in the brain may cause the pseudobulbar affect. Asphyxiation caused by laughter leads the body to shut down from the lack of oxygen.

Laughter can cause atonia and collapse ("agelastic syncope"), which in turn can cause trauma. See also laughter-induced syncope, cataplexy, and Bezold-Jarisch reflex. Gelastic seizures can be due to focal lesions to the hypothalamus. Depending upon the size of the lesion, the emotional lability may be a sign of an acute condition, and not itself the cause of the fatality. Gelastic syncope has also been associated with the cerebellum.

Zeuxis, a 5th-century BC Greek painter, is said to have died laughing at the humorous way in which he painted the goddess Aphrodite - after the old woman who commissioned it insisted on modeling for the portrait.

Chrysippus, also known as "the man who died from laughing at his own joke," is a 3rd-century BC Greek Stoic philosopher who died of laughter after he saw a donkey eating his fermented figs; he told a slave to give the donkey undiluted wine to wash them down, and then, "having laughed too much, he died" (Diogenes Laërtius 7.185).

In 1410, King Martin of Aragon died from a combination of indigestion and uncontrollable laughter triggered by a joke told by his favourite court jester.

In 1556, Pietro Aretino "is said to have died of suffocation from laughing too much".

In 1660, Thomas Urquhart, the Scottish aristocrat, polymath, and first translator of François Rabelais's writings into English, is said to have died laughing upon hearing that Charles II had taken the throne.

On October 14, 1920, 56-year-old Arthur Cobcroft, a dog trainer from Loftus Street, Leichhardt, Australia, was reading a five-year-old newspaper and was amused at the prices for some commodities in 1915 as compared to 1920. He made a remark to his wife regarding this, and burst into laughter, and in the midst of it he collapsed and died. A doctor named Doctor Nixon was called in, and stated that the death was due to heart failure, brought by excessive laughter.

On March 24, 1975, Alex Mitchell, from King's Lynn, England, died laughing while watching the "Kung Fu Kapers" episode of The Goodies, featuring a kilt-clad Scotsman with his bagpipes battling a master of the Lancastrian martial art "Eckythump", who was armed with a black pudding. After 25 minutes of continuous laughter, Mitchell then slumped on the sofa and died from heart failure. His widow later sent The Goodies a letter thanking them for making Mitchell's final moments of life so pleasant. Diagnosis of his granddaughter in 2012 of having the inheritable long QT syndrome (a heart rhythm abnormality) suggests that Mitchell may have died of a cardiac arrest caused by the same condition.

In 1989, during the initial run of the film A Fish Called Wanda, a 56-year-old Danish audiologist named Ole Bentzen reportedly laughed himself to death.

1. Inwood, B. and Gerson, L.P. (2008) ^ The Stoics Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, p. 6

2. ^ Gondim FA, Parks BJ, Cruz-Flores S (December 2001). "'Fou rire prodromique' as the presentation of pontine ischaemia secondary to vertebrobasilar stenosis". J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry. 71 (6): 802-804. doi:10.1136/jnnp.71.6.802. PMC . PMID 11723208.

3. ^ Reiss AL, Hoeft F, Tenforde AS, Chen W, Mobbs D, Mignot EJ (2008). Greene E (ed.). "Anomalous hypothalamic responses to humor in cataplexy". PLOS ONE. 3 (5): e2225. Bibcode:2008PLoSO...3.2225R. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002225. PMC . PMID 18493621.

4. ^ Nishida K, Hirota SK, Tokeshi J (2008). "Laugh syncope as a rare sub-type of the situational syncopes: a case report". J Med Case Rep. 2 (1): 197. doi:10.1186/1752-1947-2-197. PMC . PMID 18538031.

5. ^ Totah AR, Benbadis SR (January 2002). "Gelastic syncope mistaken for cataplexy". Sleep Med. 3 (1): 77-78. doi:10.1016/S1389-9457(01)00113-7. PMID 14592259.

6. ^ Lo R, Cohen TJ (November 2007). "Laughter-induced syncope: no laughing matter". Am. J. Med. 120 (11): e5. doi:10.1016/j.amjmed.2006.07.019. PMID 17976409.

7. ^ Cheung CS, Parrent AG, Burneo JG (December 2007). "Gelastic seizures: not always hypothalamic hamartoma". Epileptic Disord. 9 (4): 453-458. doi:10.1684/epd.2007.0139 (inactive 31 July 2022). PMID 18077234.

8. ^ Famularo G, Corsi FM, Minisola G, De Simone C, Nicotra GC (August 2007). "Cerebellar tumour presenting with pathological laughter and gelastic syncope". Eur. J. Neurol. 14 (8): 940-943. doi:10.1111/j.1468-1331.2007.01784.x. PMID 17662020. S2CID 10940256.

9. ^ Bark, Julianna (2007-2008). "The Spectacular Self: Jean-Etienne Liotard's Self-Portrait Laughing".

10. ^ Morris, Paul N. (October 2000). "Patronage and Piety: Montserrat and the Royal House of Medieval Catalonia-Aragon" (PDF). p. 8. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2006-03-04.

11. Waterfield, Gordon, ed. ^ First Footsteps in East Africa, (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1966) p. 59 footnote.

12. ^ Singh, Anita (21 Jun 2012). "Man who died laughing at Goodies had Long QT syndrome". The Telegraph.

13. ^ King, Darryn (2018-07-12). "'Just a Concoction of Nonsense': The Oral History of A Fish Called Wanda". Vanity Fair Blogs.

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Death from laughter is a supposedly extremely rare form of death, usually resulting from either cardiac arrest or asphyxiation, that has itself been caused by a fit of laughter. Instances of death by laughter have been recorded from the times of ancient Greece to modern times.

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#BodyLanguage#JimCarry

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHibl7uRcYY

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#TearBottle#Tear

Tear bottles are petit decorative glass bottles that express shared tears of love, joy, sympathy and remembrance. The captivating tear bottle tradition dates back nearly 3,000 years, when mourners were said to collect their tears in a tear bottle, also called a lachrymatory, and bury them with loved ones to express honor and devotion.

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Tear bottles are petit decorative glass bottles that express shared tears of love, joy, sympathy and remembrance. The captivating tear bottle tradition dates back nearly 3,000 years, when mourners were said to collect their tears in a tear bottle, also called a , and bury them with loved ones to express honor and devotion.

The tear bottle tradition has endured for more than 3,000 years. Tear bottles, or lachrymatory, were common in ancient middle Eastern societies. Even today they are still produced in that region. Tear bottles were prevalent in ancient Roman times, when mourners filled small glass vial s or cups with tears and placed them in burial tombs as symbols of love and respect. Sometimes women were even paid to cry into "cups", as they walked along the mourning procession. Those crying the loudest and producing the most tears received the most compensation, or so the legend goes. The more anguish and tears produced, the more important and valued the deceased person was perceived to be.

In the Old Testament of the Bible, a reference to collecting tears in a bottle appears in Psalm 56:8 when David prays to God, "Thou tellest my wanderings, put thou my tears in Thy bottle; are they not in Thy Book?" David is referring to the belief that God keeps a record of human pain and suffering and always remembers our sorrows.

Tear bottles reappeared during the In some
period of the 19th century, when those mourning the loss of loved ones would collect their tears in bottles ornately decorated with silver and pewter. Special stoppers allowed the tears to evaporate. When the tears were gone, the mourning period would end.
American Civil War stories, women were said to have cried into tear bottles and saved them until their husbands returned. Their collected tears would show the men how much they were loved and missed. Victorian

Today, lachrymatory tear bottles are given on many oc casions - to show joy and delight upon the wedding of a friend or the birth of a new child. To convey love and admiration between a mother and daughter, representing the tears that have been shed between them. To express sympathy upon the loss of a loved one. Tear bottles communicate feelings that few other gifts can. And what's so wonderful is that unlike flowers, a tear bottle will last for years and be a precious and powerful reminder of your love.

In current music and literature, tear bottles have once again been romanticized. References to the power of the tear bottle tradition occur in contemporary music videos, novels, and poetry. You can learn more about the history of lachrymatory tear bottles at www.lachrymatory.com .

There are no products listed under this category.

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tear bottle tradition lachrymatory ancient middle eastern societies roman times mourners small glass vials cups burial tombs symbols love and respect old testament of the bible collecting tears psalm 56:8 david prays to god thou tellest my wanderings

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put thou my tears in thy bottle; are they not in thy book? human pain suffering remembers our sorrows victorian period 19th century loss of loved ones ornately decorated with silver and pewter american civil war

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Tear bottles are petit decorative glass bottles that express shared tears of love, joy, sympathy and remembrance. The captivating tear bottle tradition dates back nearly 3,000 years, when mourners were said to collect their tears in a tear bottle, also called a , and bury them with loved ones to express honor and devotion.