text:
HAMO and LAMO Images of Canuleia Crater
Photojournal: PIA15903
Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA
These images from NASA's Dawn spacecraft are located in Urbinia quadrangle, in Vesta's southern hemisphere.
Comet ISON shines in this five-minute exposure taken at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center on 8 Nov. at 5:40 a.m. EST.
Comet ISON Passes Through Virgo
Not all of Saturn's rings are created equal: here the C and D rings appear side-by-side, but the C ring, which occupies the bottom half of this image, clearly outshines its neighbor.
Faint D Ring
This composite image shows the comparative sizes of nine asteroids. Up until now, Lutetia, with a diameter of 81 miles (130 kilometers), was the largest asteroid visited by a spacecraft, which occu...
Vesta Sizes Up
High Above Saturn's Cloud Tops July 2, 2004 Full-Res: PIA06346 These graphs illustrate wind strength (bottom) and temperature abo...
Saturn's Sonic Boom
This animation shows "beacons" of hot air seen in the infrared that appeared during a great springtime storm on Saturn from January 2011 to March 2012. These infrared hotspots in Saturn's northern ...
Infrared Hotspots in a Monster Saturn Storm
The "opposition effect" can be seen in this image of Saturn's B ring. The bright spot occurs where the angle between the spacecraft, the Sun and the rings is near zero. Studies of the opposition e...
Opposition View
The Encke Gap, the broad, vertical dark band running down the center of this image, is maintained by the small moon Pan (not pictured). Pan also shepherds three ringlets, all of which appear here a...
Not-Quite-Empty Gap
This image of Earth from lunar orbit was acquired by the NASA 's Moon Mineralogy Mapper - a guest instrument onboard the Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayaan-1 mission to the moon. Aust...
Moon Mapper Looks Homeward
These images of Saturn's polar aurora were taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope on Jan. 24, 26, and 28. Each of the three images of Saturn combines ultraviolet images of the south polar region (...
Saturn's Auroras
Atlas, Pandora and Janus November 17, 2004 Full-Res: PIA06522 Saturn hosts its own miniature solar s...
Atlas, Pandora and Janus
This set of images shows the areas mapped so far on Saturn's moon Titan by the Cassini radar mapper using its synthetic aperture radar imaging mode. Labels represent the approximate central longitu...
Titan Viewed by Cassini's Radar
Second Titan Targeted Flyby #3 December 13, 2004 Full-Res: PIA06153 This image was taken during Cassini's very close approach to Titan ...
Second Titan Targeted Flyby #3
The Cassini spacecraft examines the rough dark-light dichotomy of the terrain on Saturn's moon Iapetus. Scientists continue to investigate the nature of this moon's surface. See The Other Side of ...
Iapetus' Puzzling Surface
This comparison view shows a common, large vortex on Saturn as it plows through the atmosphere. The right image was taken about two Saturn rotations -- about 20 hours -- after the left image. Such...
Round and Round They Go
Saturn's moon Enceladus, imaged at high phase, shows off its spectacular water ice plumes emanating from its south polar region. This image was captured at a phase, or sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, an...
High-Phase Plumes
Data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft show that the sizes and patterns of dunes on Saturn's moon Titan vary as a function of altitude and latitude. The dunes in areas that are more elevated or are hi...
Dune Patterns
Saturn's frigid moon Titan has some characteristics that are oddly similar to Earth, but still slightly alien.
Dunelands of Titan
Small water ice particles fly from fissures in the south polar region of Saturn's moon Enceladus in this image taken during the Aug. 13, 2010, flyby of the moon by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.
Looming Enceladus
Recent images of features in Saturn's C ring called "plateaus" reveal a streaky texture that is very different from the textures of the regions around them.
More Textures in the C Ring
In this infrared view, Saturn's cratered moon Tethys shows a faint, dark band across its equatorial region. Tethys is 1,071 kilometers (665 miles) across. North is up in this view, which shows t...
Banded Moon
This image of Occator Crater on Ceres limb -- short exposure -- was obtained by NASAs Dawn spacecraft on August 14, 2018 from an altitude of about 1149 miles (1849 kilometers).
Occator Crater on Ceres' Limb -- Short Exposure
As Cassini continues its reconnoitering flybys of Titan, the imaging science team continues to improve its ability to tease out surface details hidden in the unprocessed images. This mosaic provide...
Improving the View of Titan
This image of the Earth is one of 60 frames taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft on Feb. 14, 1990 from a distance of approximately 4 billion miles and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane.
Solar System Portrait - Earth
Cassini Enters Saturn's Orbit July 1, 2004 After becoming the first spacecraft to enter Saturn'...
Cassini Enters Saturn's Orbit
Dione's icy surface is scarred by craters and sliced up by multiple generations of geologically-young bright fractures. Numerous fine, roughly-parallel linear grooves run across the terrain in the ...
At Carthage Linea
The spiral arms of the galaxy NGC 3318 are lazily draped across this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
Hubble Sights a Sail of Stars
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope team will answer questions about the mission's latest milestones on Jan. 24.
NASA to Discuss Webb's Arrival at Final Destination, Next Steps
NEA Scout will visit an asteroid estimated to be smaller than a school bus – the smallest asteroid ever to be studied by a spacecraft.
In preparing for Flight 19, the Mars helicopter team found that unexpected Mars weather can result in a scenario familiar here on Earth: a delayed flight.
Grounded: First Flight Delay Due to Inclement Weather on Another World
A black hole at the heart of the dwarf galaxy Henize 2-10 is creating stars rather than gobbling them up.
Hubble Finds a Black Hole Igniting Star Formation in a Dwarf Galaxy
An international research team will survey the stars, star clusters, and dust that lie within 19 nearby galaxies.
Capturing All That Glitters in Galaxies With NASA's Webb

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Laredo health authority issues order to transfer patients out of hospital to create capacity buffer
Julia Wallace, LMTonline.com / Laredo Morning Times
Dec. 14, 2020 Updated: Dec. 14, 2020 7:55 p.m.
Laredo Fire Department purchased three new ambulances that were placed in service on March 27.
Courtesy photo /Laredo Fire Department
Laredo Health Authority Victor Treviño on Monday signed a new public health order meant to create a buffer in local hospitals' intensive care units, which have been consistently overwhelmed and at capacity with COVID-19 patients.
When COVID-19 patients make up 25% or more of Laredo's total hospital capacity, a has been the case for nearly three weeks, the hospitals are required to transfer some patients out in order to create a 5%-15% buffer in the ICU and medical surgical units.
Patients can be transferred to step down facilities, alternate care sites, in-home treatment or to hospitals or other facilities out of town.
Patients will not be denied services or treatment, Treviño wrote in his order. He and the city are working with the hospitals to implement additional mitigation members, he said.
When speaking to the media on Monday, the health authority noted that there is little to no capacity in the city's ICUs.
"And there is limited space in the medsurge units, however, not enough to handle any surge that's expected throughout the holidays. And this is also concerning because the seven-day positivity is at 15%," Treviño said.
Treviño has long said that a buffer is necessary to absorb surges of new patients at the hospital. But a buffer is difficult to create with such limited personnel, he said.
The city's emergency order already included a subsection instructing hospitals to transfer patients who qualify for long-term acute care, such as a tracheostomy or gastrostomy, in order to make room for other patients at the hospitals.
Monday's order was also signed by Laredo Mayor Pete Saenz.
Julia Wallace may be reached at 956-728-2543 or jwallace@lmtonline.com
Julia Wallace
Julia Wallace reports on city and county government for the Laredo Morning Times. She joined LMT in 2014 as a copy editor and moved into reporting two years later.
She graduated from Sewanee: The University of the South as an English major and hails from San Antonio.


May 12th 2017. It was going to rain all weekend in Salt Lake City UT. I don't know about you but I am not crazy about rain especially when your birthday lands on one of these days! Yes it was my birthday. So my boyfriend and I decided at the last minute, to go out of town and road-trip to "Little Grand Canyon". Below are my 5 tips to organize this last minute perfect weekend.
I am not teaching you anything there and you already know that you need a way of transportation for a road-trip. If you don't have a car rent one or simply convince a friend who has one to join you. Carpooling is fun and better for the planet!
It's possible to pack your bag for a last minute weekend organization. Only make sure to check out the environment and forecast the place you are going to. The desert for example is tricky, it can be hot during the day and freezing cold during the night. Plan your food and water. Especially in the desert, bring enough food and water as there is no access to stores or many water resources. Depending on how you want to sleep, bring the essentials for camping. We took with us a mattress to sleep in the car.
It was only 3 hours drive to arrive to Little Grand Canyon. Before getting started check the route on a map. Don't put the general name of the place you are going to (« Little Grand Canyon » for instance), look for a specific destination « Wedge Rd, UT ») and it will reduce the chances of loosing yourself. Knowing where to go without depending on a GPS is so important. Notice that we didn't have any network connection for at least a ¼ of the trip. My advice is to download your route or have an offline GPS application on your phone.
We planned car camping for the weekend so the only thing we had to do when arriving at the camping was to find THE perfect spot to wake up the next morning with a view.
Arrived at destination? Then it's time to relax, enjoy and explore.
As you can see it is not so hard to plan a last minute weekend road trip. There are few things you need to know and look before heading the road such as checking the route, forecast, environment, etc. Beside of that my advice would be to relax and take as many as things you want. You are road-tripping and not backpacking remember? You don't have to be « ultra light » for these days, you only have to be « ultra relaxed ».


text:
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            emit_non_interpolated
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        # Test for interpolation
        #
        # @return [Boolean]
        #
        # @api private
        #
        def interpolation?
          children.any? { |child| !child.type.equal?(:str) }
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        # Return dynamic body
        #
        # @return [Parser::AST::Node]
        #
        # @api private
        #
        def dynamic_body
          Parser::AST::Node.new(:dyn_str_body, children)
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        # Dynamic string literal emitter
        class String < self

          OPEN = CLOSE = '"'.freeze
          handle :dstr

        private

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          handle :dsym

        private

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          def emit_non_interpolated
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end # Unparser

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Fri, 06 Jan, 2023 - 08:45
John Horgan column: GAA season coming back to life is a great boost to us all
Ben McCarthy watches his shot travel along the road during the Carrigaline GAA Poc Fada on New Years Day. Picture: Howard Crowdy
VERY slowly, the GAA season is beginning to stir again, over six months since its closure at the latter end of last July when Kerry got the better of Galway in the All-Ireland SFC final.
The shutdown is all but over now with the commencement of the pre-season competitions across the four provinces in both codes.
It's very early, of course, but those competitions are a nice lead in to the national league and despite the fact that there is not across the board interest in them, they are serving a purpose in so far as it gives management teams an opportunity to throw their eyes over quite a few players that are wearing an inter-county jersey for the first time.
All those pre-season games will be concluded very quickly and then things get a bit more serious with the start of the national league.
Subsequently, thereafter it's really game on when the championship flag is raised.
There is a school of thought about that this season's NHL will be a bit of a damp squib with very few of the participants putting too much store into it.
That has been the case in the past too, championship preparation being prioritised a lot more on the training ground.
The Calnan and McSweeney teams seen at the Carrigaline GAA Poc Fada on New Years Day. Picture: Howard Crowdy
Just last season, Limerick put very few if any of their eggs into the national league basket, all the concentration was on having the squad in tip-top shape for the Munster championship, the now cut throat group format which decrees that two top hurling counties will have their year over and done with before there will be any heat in the Summer sun.
As we have outlined before, the reason because there might be quite a bit of apathy about this season's league is because of the fact that three of the teams that got themselves immersed in it, Waterford, Cork and Wexford in 2022 had a championship best forgotten.
So, it's going to be very interesting to find out what the approach of the big counties will be towards the secondary competition?.
Quite a number of counties in both Munster and Leinster have now new men wearing the manager's bib and seeing how they go about their business in the league adds to the debate.
After last season's capitulation in Munster, new Tipperary boss Liam Cahill will surely be looking for some positivity from his players early on and to get a very frustrated fan base behind the team from the off.
As always, Davy Fitz will want to win every game Waterford play in but he's a realist too and may not put as much emphasis this time as Liam Cahill did in 2022 when they ended up with the trophy but subsequently failed dismally in Munster.
Dublin, with the very astute and experienced Miceal O'Donoghue taking the reins might be one of the teams that will give the league a bit more priority.
Clare have a lot to build on from last year despite the manner with which they lost to Kilkenny in the All-Ireland semi-final when they got a right thumping.
But it must be recalled that Clare were the only county to really put the frighteners on Limerick last season, drawing with them three times in regulation time in the league and twice in the Munster championship.
Their Munster final draw in regulation time before they came up short in the added 20 minutes was one of the games of the year and Tony Kelly's equalising point from a very acute angle to bring that game to extra-time was, undoubtedly, the score of the season from one of the game's great players, a player that you would pay the admission fee alone just to see him in action.
The Greene Team' of Niall, Daniel and PJ Greene seen at the recent Carrigaline GAA Poc Fada. Picture: Howard Crowdy
Henry Shefflin learned a lot from his first season in charge on the Western seaboard and they did put it up to Limerick in the All-Ireland semi-final.
They should have beaten Kilkenny in the Leinster final but then again how Cork contrived to lose to them in the quarters remains a mystery.
With three home games, Cork will have a large support behind them in Pairc Ui Chaoimh and whilst in the long run it might not matter, a win over Limerick in the opener would be seen at putting down a bit of a marker.
The likes of Antrim, Westmeath, Offaly and Laois will look at the league as a means to be competitive in the championship and Joe McDonagh Cup.
The Lake county, after all, held Wexford to a draw in the Leinster Round-robin, one of the stories from that stage of the championship.
As they say, the league will always be the league, intersting but come the championship throw-in it will be consigned to the footnotes of the year.
Kilkenny used to do the double, league and championship regularly and Limerick have accomplished it in recent times.
Then again, their strength in depth was a major contributory factor in those outcomes.
As was stated recently, it's currently Limerick's world, all the rest live outside it That, of course, may change this season and there were a few morsels of evidence last season that a few of the chasing pack are making up ground on them, Clare, Gaway and Kilkenny in paticular because of how they performed, Clare in the Munster final and the Leinster duo in both the semi-final and final of the All-Ireland.
The national league will reveal certain things but until such time as we delve deep into the championship we'll not be really that much the wiser.
In the past, going all the way in the league has worked on splendidly for some teams, a springboard but that was before the timing of the championship was still three or four weeks away.
It's not now and that's why team bosses be trying to ensure that their players peak at exactly the right time, not before, as what happened with Waterford, in particular, last time out.
Cork v Meath: Teams picked for league opener at Páirc Uí Chaoimh
Tributes pour in for popular Cork basketballer Garreth Blount
The Longshot: A clash of the titans in the FA Cup tonight
#cork gaa
Read all about the monthly winner's and more.
New boss Sean Dyche wants to 'remodel' Everton as he searches for reinforcements
Campbell Johnstone becomes first All Black to announce he is gay
Moises Caicedo heads deadline-day speculation as Chelsea pursue Enzo Fernandez


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Janne Pesonen was born on May 11, 1982 in Suomussalmi, Finland. Pesonen was drafted 269th overall by the Anaheim Ducks in the 2004 NHL Entry Draft, though he would remain in Finland, putting up impressive offensive numbers until 2008.
On July 7, 2008, the Pittsburgh Penguins announced that they signed Pesonen to a one year contract. However, Pesonen would spend the majority of the season in the American Hockey League, setting a new record for points in a single season for the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Baby Penguins, finishing the season with 82 points, the highest point total by a Finn in AHL history.
After one season in North America, Pesonen opted to return to Europe and signed with Russian club Ak Bars Kazan of the Kontinental Hockey League on August 4, 2009.
AHL Second All-Star Team (2009) Signed as a free agent by Pittsburgh, July 7, 2008. Signed as a free agent by Kazan (KHL), August 4, 2009.


text:
Simon Dach (Memel, 29 juli 1605 – Koningsbergen, 15 april 1659) was een Duitse dichter. Hij bekleedde de post van hoogleraar in de dichtkunst aan de Albertina-universiteit te Koningsbergen.

Leven
Simon Dach werd in 1605 in Memel (nu Klaipėda in Litouwen) geboren als zoon van een gerechtstolk voor de Litouwse taal. Hij bezocht de 'Große Stadtschule', een Latijnse school, in zijn geboortestad, daarna de Domschule (kathedraalschool) in Koningsbergen (het huidige Kaliningrad), vervolgens een Latijnse school in Wittenberg en ten slotte een gymnasium in Maagdenburg. Van Maagdenburg, dat zwaar te lijden had onder de Dertigjarige Oorlog en een pestepidemie, ging hij in 1626 weer terug naar Koningsbergen. Daar liet hij zich in hetzelfde jaar inschrijven bij de Albertina-universiteit, waar hij filosofie en theologie ging studeren. Hij verliet de universiteit zonder academische graad en werd in 1633 leraar aan de Domschule; drie jaar later werd hij daar conrector.

Zijn vriend Adrian Brauer stimuleerde hem om poëzie te gaan schrijven. In 1636 stichtte de dichter Robert Roberthin in Koningsbergen het Gesellschaft der Sterblichkeit Beflissener, een gezelschap dichters en musici die zich bezighielden met het geestelijke lied. De tien à twaalf leden kwamen bijeen in de tuin van Heinrich Albert, de organist van de Dom. Albert kweekte pompoenen, vandaar dat de vriendenkring zich ook wel Kürbishütte (of Kürbshütte) noemde. De leden lazen er hun gedichten voor en musiceerden samen. Simon Dach werd een prominent lid van het gezelschap. In 1641 kwam daaraan een eind, toen de gemeentelijke overheid de tuin onteigende omdat ze daar woningen wilde neerzetten. Simon Dach schreef een weemoedig gedicht over de verloren gegane tuin en de vergankelijkheid van het aardse. De leden van de groep bleven daarna wel contact houden.

Dach bouwde met zijn gedichten al gauw een naam op en in 1639 benoemde keurvorst George Willem van Brandenburg hem op voorspraak van Roberthin tot hoogleraar in de dichtkunst aan de Albertina-universiteit. In 1640 promoveerde Dach daar tot magister; in 1656 werd hij rector magnificus van de universiteit. Keurvorst Frederik Willem I van Brandenburg schonk hem twee jaar later op voorstel van Johann von Klingsporn, die heel tevreden was over het gedicht dat Dach ter gelegenheid van zijn huwelijk had geschreven, het landgoed Kuikeim (nu het dorp Bajewka in de oblast Kaliningrad). Kuikeim behoorde tot de bezittingen van de familie von Klingsporn. Johann bleef overigens wel het beheer over het landgoed voeren.

Simon Dachs activiteiten als gelegenheidsdichter leverden hem een aardig neveninkomen op. Hij schreef vaak op bestelling, soms wel drie of vier gedichten per week, ter gelegenheid van een huwelijk of een begrafenis. Die gedichten werden doorgaans op één vel papier in een kleine oplaag gedrukt. Voor tijdgenoten waren ze een gewild verzamelobject. Ook Dachs bekendste gedicht Ännchen von Tharau valt in de categorie gelegenheidsgedichten. Dach heeft tijdens zijn leven nooit een dichtbundel gepubliceerd, maar in de jaren 1638-1658 zijn toch meer dan 1200 gedichten van zijn hand in druk verschenen, vele daarvan in de acht delen Arien und Melodeien, de liedbundels die Heinrich Albert in de jaren 1638-1650 publiceerde. In die bundels worden zijn liederen vaak toegeschreven aan Chasmindo, Sichamond of Ischmando, allemaal anagrammen van Simon Dach.

In 1654 liep Dach tuberculose op. Na een jarenlang slepende ziekte overleed hij in 1659 in Koningsbergen.

Simon Dach trouwde op 29 juli 1641 met Regina Pohl (1617-1685). Het paar had vijf zoons, van wie er twee als kind overleden, en twee dochters.

Werk

Er zijn ongeveer 1250 gedichten van Simon Dach bewaard gebleven. Een vijfde daarvan is geschreven in het Latijn.

Dach schreef twee gedichten in het dialect dat gesproken werd in het Samland: Anke van Tharaw en Grethke, warumb heffstu mi. Anke van Tharaw is meteen zijn beroemdste gedicht. Het werd in 1636 geschreven ter gelegenheid van het huwelijk van Anna Neander, die uit Tharau (het huidige Vladimirovo in de oblast Kaliningrad) kwam, met de predikant Johannes Portatius. Johann Gottfried von Herder publiceerde in 1778 een Hoogduitse vertaling: Ännchen von Tharau. In die versie is het gedicht in Duitsland nog altijd mateloos populair; als lied staat het op het repertoire van vele koren.

Bijna even populair is het Lied der Freundschaft met de beginregels:

Der Mensch hat nichts so eigen,
So wohl steht ihm nichts an,
Als daß er Treu' erzeigen
Und Freundschaft halten kann.

(De mens heeft niets dat zo karakteristiek is,
Niets past zo goed bij hem,
Als dat hij zich trouw kan tonen
En een vriendschap onderhouden kan)

Andere bekende liederen van Simon Dach zijn Sei getrost, o meine Seele en Herr Gott, meine Seele bringet. Hij schreef ook twee zangspelen, Cleomedes en Sorbuisa, beide met muziek van Heinrich Albert. Van Cleomedes (dat geschreven en opgevoerd werd ter gelegenheid van het bezoek van de Poolse koning Wladislaus Wasa aan Koningsbergen in 1635) is echter het grootste deel van de muziek, van Sorbuisa (geschreven en opgevoerd ter gelegenheid van het honderdjarig bestaan van de Albertina-universiteit in 1644) alle muziek en het grootste deel van de tekst verloren gegaan.

Veel gedichten van Dach werden op muziek gezet door Heinrich Albert en Johann Stobäus, de cantor van de Dom. Enkele kerkliederen worden in protestantse kerken nog steeds gezongen. Ook Anke van Tharaw en het Lied der Freundschaft zijn door Albert op muziek gezet. Alberts versie van Anke van Tharaw is inmiddels verdrongen door een melodie van de hand van Friedrich Silcher uit 1827. Richard Strauss schreef in 1899 een nieuwe versie van het Lied der Freundschaft voor mannenkoor.

Twee kerkliederen van Dach, Ich bin ja, Herr, in deiner Macht en O, wie selig seid ihr doch, ihr Frommen, zijn later door Johann Sebastian Bach op muziek gezet. Max Reger maakte van dat laatste lied een cantate.

Monumenten voor Simon Dach

In 1912 werd in Dachs geboorteplaats Memel een fontein onthuld. Het water kwam uit een zuil in het midden. Op de zuil stond een beeldje van Ännchen von Tharau van de hand van Arnold Künne; een meisje uit Sandkrug, het huidige Smiltynė, stond daarvoor model. Tegen de zuil was een plaquette aangebracht met het portret van Simon Dach. De fontein bevond zich op de markt voor het theater van de stad.

Tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog verdween het beeldje spoorloos, maar in 1988 werd een inzameling gehouden onder Litouwers en Duitsers die historische banden met Memel hadden. Aan de hand van oude foto's en een gipsmodel reconstrueerde de beeldhouwer Harald Haacke het beeldje. In november 1989 werd de fontein met het nieuwe beeldje onthuld Het staat waar het vroeger ook stond.

In Wittenberg is een plaquette met de naam van Dach aangebracht op de school die hij daar bezocht. Berlijn heeft een Simon-Dach-Straße.

Literatuur

Verzameld werk
 Walter Ziesemer (uitgever), Gedichte, 4 delen, Halle, 1936-38.

Over Simon Dach
 Alexander J. Birt, Simon Dach, Gräfe & Unzer, Königsberg, 1905.
 Gerhard Dünnhaupt, 'Simon Dach', in: Personalbibliographien zu den Drucken des Barock, Band 2, Hiersemann, Stuttgart, 1990, blz. 996-1230. ISBN 3-7772-9027-0 (bibliografie).
 August Gebauer (uitgever), Simon Dach und seine Freunde als Kirchenlieddichter, Osiander, Tübingen, 1828.
 Alfred Kelletat (uitgever), Simon Dach und der Königsberger Dichterkreis, Reclam, Stuttgart, 1986. ISBN 3-15-008281-1 (bloemlezing uit het werk van Dach en zijn vriendenkring met een nawoord, dat nader ingaat op het werk van Dach).
 Ivar Ljungerud, 'Ehren-Rettung M. Simonis Dachii', in: Euphorion 61 (1967), blz. 36-83 (over het auteurschap van Anke van Tharaw).
 Bruno Nick, Das Naturgefühl bei Simon Dach, proefschrift Greifswald, 1911.
 Hermann Österley, Simon Dach, Fues, Tübingen, 1876.
 Heinrich Stiehler, Simon Dach, Hartung, Königsberg, 1896.
 Albrecht Schöne, Kürbishütte und Königsberg: Modellversuch einer sozialgeschichtlichen Entzifferung poetischer Texte am Beispiel Simon Dach, C.H. Beck, München, 1982, 2e druk. ISBN 3-406-05878-7.
 Barbara Sturzenegger, Simon Dach und Paul Fleming: Topoi der Freundschaft im 17. Jahrhundert, proefschrift Bern, 1996.

Over de Simon Dachfontein
 Antanas Stanevičius, Rätselraten um Ännchen von Tharau, Rytas, Klaipėda, 1992.

Externe links
 Beknopte biografie, met een link naar een groot aantal gedichten
 Korte biografie met links naar teksten (gearchiveerd)
 Over Simon Dach en de Simon-Dach-Straße (gearchiveerd)
 Links naar teksten over Simon Dach (gearchiveerd)

Duits dichter
 Auteur in het publiek domein

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
Q: Find the first column which starts with a string I have a bash script which is going to receive a string that looks something like this:
foo,user:johndoe,bar

The order and number of values is not known, so it could also be something like:
bar,foo,baz,user:johndoe

I need to be able to get the name of the user -- in this case, johndoe.
With grep the closest I have gotten is this:
$ echo "foo,user:johndoe,bar" | grep -o 'user:.*,'
user:johndoe,

But this also gets me user: and ,, which I don't want. I am new to this and am not sure if grep is the tool I should be using, or if awk or something is more appropriate.

A: For simple substitutions sed will do:
% echo "foo,user:johndoe,bar" | sed 's/.*user:\([^,]*\).*/\1/'
johndoe

The above will replace the whole string with your user:
s/
  .*                     # Match anything zero or more times
    user:                # Match literal user:
         \([^,]*\)       # Capture everything but , zero or more times in \1
                  .*     # Match to the end of the string
                    /\1/ # Replace with what we matched and saved in \1

GNU Grep also have a -P option which enables PCRE that support lookbehinds:
% echo "foo,user:johndoe,bar" | grep -Po '(?<=user:)[^,]*'
johndoe

-P is still highly experimental and should be avoided when possible.

A: With awk:
$ echo "foo,user:johndoe,bar" | awk -F: '$1=="user"{print $2}' RS=,
johndoe

How it works

*

*-F:
This sets the field separator to :

*$1=="user"{print $2}
If the first field is user, then print the second field.

*RS=,
This sets the record separator to ,.

A: echo "foo,user:johndoe,bar" | awk -F ":" '{print $2}' | awk -F "," '{print $1}'

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Is the Gender Agenda Gaining Momentum?
Every year around the world, International Women's Day (IWD) is celebrated on March 8. Thousands of events are organised at international, national and grassroots levels to celebrate the economic, political and social achievements of women. Each year comes with a unique theme that reflects on women and relevant to global and local gender issues.
Like many women, Agnes looked forward to celebrate 2013 international women day on march 8, little did she know that it would be her last celebrations. Her husband cut her life short as soon as she returned from the celebrations.This years' theme was the gender agenda gaining momentum. Reading Agne's story, one wonders whether the gender agenda gaining momentum? or it is loosing it after over 100years of celebrating this day. Readers, what is your reflection on this?
Hellen is a simple, calm and soft-spoken woman with a big heart for helping women and children. She has done what is in her reach to support them and make their lives better and more meaningful. I met Helen Alyek during a meeting for Women Taskforce Members for a gender responsive Peace Recovery and Development Plan (PRDP) for North and North Eastern Uganda in Kampala in April, 2012 organised by Isis-WICCE. Hellen is from Lira district and she is a retired Superintendent of Uganda Police Force where she served for over 25years and established the Child and Family Protection Unit. Hellen is also the founder and the Director of Lira Rural Women and Children Development Initiative Shelter (LIRWOCDI).
During her career in the Ugandan Police Force Hellen worked in various sections such as Traffic, Police 99 Patrol, Interpol Narcotics Drugs, Criminal Investigations, Juvenile Court (as a court prosecutor), and later as an Administrator at the Police Headquarter in Kampala.
As a court prosecutor in the Juvenile courts, Hellen used to receive many complaints from young offenders between the ages of 12-14 years that they were mistreated and harassed by the adult suspects in the cells.
In order to offer protection to the children suspects, Hellen risked herself and kept the children in her house in the police barracks, feed them and bought clothes for them. Unfortunately, the young criminals did not spare her, they would steal her property and run away and she never gave up.
It was the frustrations from the young offenders that Hellen an hatched the idea of establishing special units for children at police stations where they can be protected. She shared the idea with the then Inspector General of Police and the then Chief Advisor for Police from Scotland Yard who also supported her idea.
The Unit also raised community awareness about the rights of women and children, and taught crime prevention tips to children in nearby schools. With time the CFPU became so popular so the need for expansion.
Hellen approached UNICEF for support to the unit and she got funding for training of the first 120 police women and men. These officers were trained in human rights, counseling, investigation, the protection of women and children, as well as interview techniques for young survivors and suspects.
After the training, they were posted to police stations all over Uganda to handle cases of violence against women/children and were made aware of the importance of separating young offenders from the adult suspects while in custody. UNICEF further supported the unit with a motor vehicle to oversee the work of police officers within the CFPU countrywide, 20 bicycles and 120 motorcycles for officers to use in the field.
With the support of UNICEF and other donors, separate rooms for young offenders within five police stations were constructed in Masaka Police Station in Southern Uganda, Gulu in Northern Uganda, Kumi in Eastern Uganda and the Central Police Station in Central Kampala, which were registering the highest crime rates committed by children.
As a result of this initiative in the Uganda Police, Hellen received the International Scholarship Award in 1997 by the International Association of Women Police (IAWP) in Dallas, Texas as the first Woman Police Officer in Africa to be recognized. In that same year she was also awarded a Certificate of Recognition by the Inspector General of the Uganda Police Force as Police Woman of the Year.
When Hellen was doing her supervisory role in the police force, she visited several IDP camps in Northen Uganda where she met over 50 female survivors of sexual abuse who shared with her their moving, sad stories. The stories touched her heart and inspired her to find a solution. Hellen also saw many orphans in the camps who had lost their parents due to armed conflict or HIV and AIDS and they had nowhere to call home. Due to sexual abuse and exploitation of female orphans, aged 12–15 years, many became young mothers and she felt that the best way to protect these women and children was to build a shelter where survivors of abuse could take refugee and nurse their injuries.
"By the time I retired from the Uganda Police Force in 2003, I had already established a shelter and registered it with the Lira Non Governmental Organization (NGO) Board and the Local Lira Government. I also contacted the International Association of Women Police for support to construct a permanent building for the Shelter with a perimeter wall. In the same year, the shelter received fifty female survivors of abuse. This is the first ever shelter of its kind in Lira District – Northern Uganda. Hellen recalls.
Since 2003 more than four thousand women and child survivors of abuse have passed through this Shelter. With support of UN Women and Children's Fund the shelter also has been able to repair 40 serious cases of Fistula and the youngest survivor was four years who was raped by a neighbor. The shelter also provided medical treatment to over 60 young mothers who were sexually abused.
As part of raising awareness on Sexual and Gender Based Violence in the community and the duty bearers, Hellen spear headed the first ever Town Hall meeting in Lira town where district officials and community members discussed issues of SGBV. The main objective of the meeting was to make the district officials aware of injustice women survivors of abuse face when they are not able to pay the Police Surgeon's fee and to devise means of protecting women and children from violence and abuse.
Despite the achievements, the shelter still faces some challenges as it mainly run on donations from well wishers. According to Hellen, the most pressing needs of the shelter are school fees for orphans to go to school, feeding and clothing, medical care, skills training for young mothers, and a vehicle to ease the movement among others.
When the law fails to deliver justice for Women and Children.
The month of March is internationally known as the women's month, a month that is supposed to be a time for reflection and celebrating what has been achieved in advancing women's rights worldwide. To the surprise of the women in Uganda, March 2012 has been a month of mourning.
Women of Uganda have seen the betrayal of the state that is supposed to protect their rights. Two cases have been in the spotlight.
In 1997, Sharma Kooky, a Uganda of Indian decent tortured and brutally killed his wife by electrocuting her. After the murder Kooky hasted to cremate the body to hide evidence but was stopped by authorities. Women activists also rose up in arms and ensured that justice was done at the time – in 2000. The High Court convicted Kooky of the murder and was sentenced to death. Twelve years down the road, the Uganda Women Movement is shocked at Kooky receiving Presidential pardon on humanitarian grounds and he is now a free man. According to the Constitution of Uganda under article 121 through the advisory committee on the prerogative of mercy, the president is mandated to exercise his rights to release prisoners. Unfortunately the decision of the State cannot be questioned!
Miria Matembe, former minister of Ethic and Integrity and renounced women rights activist said that the women of Uganda were pained by the marginalization of the justice system. She recalled the efforts of the women activists in 1997 that led to the sentencing of Kooky and how all that has been trashed by the president.
But the women movement were vocal on Baro's sentence as they were on Kooky's presidential pardon. They also expressed fear that such acts would escalate violence against women and children in the country.
"If the state can't protect the vulnerable and marginalized groups, who will do that. This is a clear manifestation of failure of the state to protect women and children from sexual and gender based violence," said one of the women activists during the press conference.
The women expressed their disappointment with the magistrate for the linient sentence given to Emmin Baro and are embarrassed that it was done by a female magistrate. The magistrate did not act as a human being, she acted like a machine. Matembe noted.
The Chief Magistrate at Nakawa court has now referred the case to the high Court after protests.
The defilement Act of Uganda clearly states that any sexual activity with children amounts to defilement, which is a capital offence and is punishable by death. These two scenarios are a slap in the face of justice.
The women are also questioning the government commitment to prevent and stop sexual and gender based violence. In December 2011, during the International Conference on Great lakes region, the government signed a declaration to fully domesticate and implement the protocol on prevention and suppression of sexual violence against women and children in the Great lakes region.
The women are now calling for though investigation and prosecution of Emmin Baro for each child abused. They are also calling for psychosocial and trauma counseling for the abused children, operationalisation of the domestic violence acts of 2010, enactment of sexual offences bill. They are also demanding for transparency of the presidential pardon of Kooky and investigation of the entire justice and law system.
The women's movement is also considering the avenues of seeking audience with the respective judicial officers including the chief justice to ensure that justice is delivered.
Meanwhile, a day of mourning for Josh Renu who was murdered by her husband Kooky with impunity will be communicated.
The recent press reports of ethnic clashes in South Sudan over cattle and other resources indicate that South Sudan is still far away from attaining peace and stability after gaining its independence in July 2011. The situation remains worse especially for women and children because they are the most affected. According to IPS Gender Wire, an online news agency thousands of women and children are being abducted and over 1,000 people have died this year.
The conflict is being attributed to the easy availability of arms and cultural norms that portray the ownership of cattle and women as a sign of success.
Last year I was in Juba for the training of health workers and these reports confirms the discussions we had during the training. The health workers from Central Equatorial State informed us that in some cultures, young girls are booked for marriage and the man who pays the highest number of cows takes the girl. In otherwords, marriage process is like a marketplace where girls are auctioned and the highest bidder takes her. As a women's rights activist, I find this very disturbing. How long will this go on? When will the men realize that God created man and woman to support and complement each other.
While some countries seem to have made some strides in towards achieving gender equality and other MDGs, the story is different in post conflict South Sudan. As a result of instability, the women of Southern Sudan missed out on all the developments and benefits of and within the women's movement world wide.
Women are still regarded as men properties and that is why men have to go out of their way to acquire such property and hence cattle rustling and the ethnic clashes. The situation is worsened by the cultural and traditional beliefs and practices in South Sudan which put men in a superior position and regard women as inferiors.
Therefore with the ushering in of new state, the women of South Sudan require a lot of support from both the Government of South Sudan and the entire world women's movement to enable them catch up on what they missed and demand for their rights and dignity as human being.
As part of the campaign to combat violence against women using ICTs, Isis-WICCE conducted a training on VAW and ICT for grassroots women activists in November 2010. The purpose of the training was to equip women leaders with ICT skills to enable them create platforms and opportunities for women to engage with ICT to address violence against women and girls.
The training emphasized the use of new tools of communication for communication, the intersection between ICTs and VAW, use of mobile telephone applications for advocacy, Computer and Microsoft Word skills, Internet and web2.0 applications(blogging) and citizen Journalism.
During the training, a 59 year old participant shared with us an experience of how women in the olden days creatively used local platforms to combat violence against women. She shared that when she was growing up as a young girl, women used to look for a strategic location in the village which was usually an anthill. The woman would stand on top of the anthill and start shouting about the bad behaviors the husband has and she would say "my husband is bad, she beats me when I give meat to the children, he is a glutton, he doesn't want me to do this that and that…." So that everyone in the village hears about her husband's bad behaviors which would prompt the villagers to gossip about him, musicians would compose songs about his bad behaviors and he would be ashamed and eventually change his behaviors.
Today, technology has provided us with much more advanced platforms compared to an anthill such as mobile telephones, internet, computers where we can make noise about VAW so that the whole world can hear us. Unfortunately, most women lack the technical know-how and resources to access such tools and fully utilize, engage and participate.
for me I have always seen a computer. There is an NGO that gave our group a very big computer but we have never touched it because we feared it. The computer is ours but we have never touched it. Now that I have got the knowledge and the skills, when I go back, I will use it" said Lyaka Grace from LASO.
And Kintu Solome said "I used to think that computers are only for those people who are educated and are in big offices in Kampala but today I have realized that I can also use a computer".
men buy mobile phones for the wives to control them. If a man calls the wife and she does not answer the call immediately, she will be asked to explain what she was doing and she will be beaten. Remember, at times the wife might be in the garden or in the kitchen cooking".
For Gladys Maloba, her experiences was that mobile phones have increased the rate of telling lies especially among the couples.Forinstance, you call your husband ask him where he is, he will tell you that I am Bugiri on the contrally,when get to Namayingo, you find him there and he asks you where are you going? who has given you permission and you will be beaten.
And for Barbara, her learning was that "much as these telephones have caused violence against women in some circumstances, I have learnt that we can use the same phones to send messages to the men who violate women's rights to educate them about VAW".
The women for the first time were able to see and use internet by searching the web and opening up their first email addresses, a group email(tumbulawomen@yahoo.com) and a group blog(http://www.tumbulawomen.wordpress.com/).
To most of them, they imagined that internet was a building in Kampala while others thought internet is a human being. This is a reflection of total ignorance or lack of any knowledge of such tools. While some us have access to such communication tools and are using internet, email on a daily basis, many women in rural areas have not even heard about such tools.
Lastly, the women were introduced to Frontline SMS software application used for sending bulk SMS. This software works with any Global System for Mobile (GSM) network. They used it to send out test message to them selves. During the 16 Days of Activism against Gender Based Violence, the women used this platform to send out text messages to raise awareness on issues of violence against women and women's rights in their community.


text:
LAS ARMAS DE CORONEL
THE PETROSAUDI-PDVSA FRAUD: WHO ARE INVOLVED?
An article in the Wall Street Journal, https://www.wsj.com/articles/venezuela-alleges-fraud-in-1-3-billion-oil-rig-lease-1489570201 reports that the Venezuelan authorities are requesting an investigation of five unnamed PDVSA executives for "the embezzlement of public funds, paying inflated fees for the lease of an oil rig". The rig mentioned by the report of the WSJ is the Petrosaudi SATURN. WSJ added that the investigation was restricted to PDVSA and that Petrosaudi or its employees "were not accused of wrongdoing".
This WSJ report caught my attention because I have been following the Petrosaudi-PDVSA relationship since 2010 and find that there is sufficient evidence that both Petrosaudi and PDVSA top personnel are involved in the fraud, together with some third party "facilitators". I have written a recent note about this fraud in my blog, see: http://lasarmasdecoronel.blogspot.com/2017/01/petrosaudi-and-pdvsa-another-great-fraud.html .
In January of this year a significant exposé of the Petrosaudi-PDVSA deal was published in the Sarawak Report, see: http://www.sarawakreport.org/2017/01/petrosaudis-1mdb-financed-venezuelan-adventure-and-the-money-it-didnt-make/, which provided very detailed information on how this deal was done and shows documents that reveal the names of the principal actors involved in the fraud, both on the side of PDVSA and on the side of Petrosaudi.
The new aspect of this fraud, as reported by the WSJ, is that the Venezuelan authorities are starting, after seven years, an investigation of the PDVSA's officers involved in the deal. Up to now, no significant corruption within PDVSA has ever been investigated by the Venezuelan regime. A similar fraud to this one, involving the offshore drilling barge Aban Pearl has been publicly denounced by me since 2010 (Spanish), see: http://lasarmasdecoronel.blogspot.com/2010/07/mi-entrevista-sobre-el-aban-pearl-en.html and (English) : https://www.caracaschronicles.com/2012/07/19/one-guy-vs-the-petrokleptocracy/ without any investigation taking place by the regime. There is a possibility, therefore, that this newly reported anti-corruption drive by the Venezuelan regime could only be directed towards some of the smaller fish, in order to protect the big fishes.
WHO ARE THE PDVSA EXECUTIVES INVOLVED IN THE FRAUD?
The magnitude of the deal, which involved contractual agreements involving more than one billion dollars in payments from PDVSA to Petrosaudi, could not have been approved by lower level executives at PDVSA. Power at PDVSA under the Venezuelan dictatorial regime has been strongly centralized. The only PDVSA executive named in the WSJ report as being under investigation, Romer Valdez, was a second tier regional manager in PDVSA at the time the contract was signed and could not have had decision-making authority in this deal. This man was already sent to prison in 2015 for corrupt behavior (I don't know if he is still there) and was known for his close links to a higher level, former PDVSA manager called Jose Luis Parada, also fallen in disgrace at about the same time. Parada, in turn, was a protégé of Rafael Ramirez, who was president of PDVSA and Minister of Energy and Petroleum from 2004 to 2014. It seems too much of a coincidence that Parada and Valdez were objects of investigation only after Ramirez had left. Parada went briefly to prison but he escaped, apparently after paying a sum said to be of $30 million to the person or persons who let him go. There is a possibility that he was just let go by the regime, provided he kept silent about the corruption within PDVSA.
Who, then, are the big Venezuelan fish in this Petrosaudi-PDVSA mega fraud? The excellent report by Sarawak report gives us a strong hint about their identities. This report says that Petrosaudi entered into the contract with PDVSA when the owner of the rig had problems collecting the fees from the Venezuelan company. Petrosaudi found a "fixer" close to the Chavez regime and took over the deal with their help. With money borrowed from the corrupt Malaysian Fund 1MBD Petrosaudi acquired the rig from its owners, Jaspers, and entered into a joint venture with PDVSA, deal that was proudly announced in 2010 by Rafael Ramirez, see my article: http://tururutururu.com/gustavo-coronel-pdvsa-y-un-gigantesco-fraude-financiero-en-malasia/ . This deal was put together and announced at the very top of the PDVSA executive pyramid. In 2010 I denounced this deal as a fraud, see: http://lasarmasdecoronel.blogspot.com/2010/09/pdvsa-y-el-barco-songa-saturn-un-nuevo.html
The contract signed with PDVSA by Petrosaudi was extremely good to them and to the "facilitators", but very bad for the Venezuelan nation. According to Sarawak Report "PetroSaudi boasted it had succeeded in extracting hugely advantageous terms with a five year fixed contract for its drill ship Neptune Discoverer (it was 7 years for Saturn) with a daily fee that would guarantee a 30% annual return on the initial investment; a sky high rate of interest on the loan – over 20% – and a 'mobilization fee' up-front, which itself amounted to nearly a third of the company's initial outlay on the asset". But, adds the Sarawak Report, "that whole facade was soon to fall apart and by 2011 the clapped out Discoverer had to be de-commissioned – according to one expert observer who spoke to Sarawak Report.
I was that observer mentioned by Sarawak Report and I was further quoted below as saying:
"In March 2011 the workers demanded the evacuation of this barge, now called Petrosaudi Discoverer, due to the deplorable conditions of the equipment. They demanded that Jose Luis Parada, head of PDVSA Services, detain the operations and evacuated the 103 workers in the barge. The barge, they said, lacked the international certification from the American Bureau of Shipping".
Sarawak report adds that, in 2010, when the deal was being put together, this type of communication went from the Pantin brothers, the "facilitators" to Petrosaudi:
Eduardo Pantin asked not show the letter to anyone in PDVSA except Eulogio, Jose Luis and Rafael. Who could they be? I am guessing: Eulogio Del Pino, Jose Luis Parada and Rafael Ramirez.
The Sarawak Report adds: "That Saturn contract allowed for a staggering $485,000 fee payable per day on a fixed contract for seven years – at least double the market rate". The report also quotes me saying: "When I looked Petro Saudi up I found it to be a company created in 2005 without oil operational experience, along the lines of a financial speculator, managed by a gentleman called Tarek Obaid, who seemed to be an international playboy, more involved with Formula One activities than with the oil business. I also found out that the other barge offered to PDVSA, the 34 year old Neptune Discoverer, had been bought from Jaspers Investments for a price of some $120-150 million, $50 million below book value. Their performance has been dismal. It took two years for the Discoverer to drill the first well, while in Trinidad a similar well could be completed in 30-45 days."
What role did the Pantin brothers play in this deal?
According the Sarawak Report: "All correspondence was copied into the Pantin brothers Gerardo and Eduardo, major players in the oil business, and whenever trouble arose Mahony [Petrosaudi] turned to them to sort it out: We need a strategy for how we will get paid …. We expect this from you as our partners on the ground and the ones that understand PDVSA best and have all the key relationships".
When things started to go wrong, in 2011, Petrosaudi wrote the Pantin Brothers:
About the "facilitators" the Sarawak report has this to say:
"The Pantin brothers are in charge of a major family enterprise with a long history in the Venezuela oil business [and] developed good contacts with the Chavez regime. Their company CPVEN was subcontracted to manage all the drilling work for the PetroSaudi adventurers (who had no clue how to run an oil operation). They were also hired as agents. There was also a deal to split the vast mobilization fees that the Pantins extracted as upfront payments from the Venezuelans at the start of each operation. This fee should have been no more than $15 million to cover costs of the setup, however the Pantins organised $56 million to be paid in the case of Saturn, much of which was distributed back to local officials and contacts via banks in Panama, according to inside information from PetroSaudi. The Pantin brothers themselves requested additional payments of $7 and $8 million to be paid through anonymous off-shore companies:
If outsiders are left wondering over what justification there might be for such kickbacks, so apparently was PetroSaudi's own shareholder Tarek Obaid.
Does the Venezuelan regime really want to investigate mega-corruption in PDVSA?
The Venezuelan official investigators would do well consulting the Sarawak Report, since they seem to know exactly how things were done and who were the main culprits of this huge fraud to the Venezuelan nation. But will they dare to go ahead and investigate? I doubt it. The PDVSA executives that appear as putting this deal together have been taboo up to now. Will they be subject to a real investigation by the regime of which they have been an integral part? I don't think so. Such an investigation will probably only be made after the regime is out of power.
Publicado por Gustavo Coronel en 4:23
Otro chinito de Recadi a pagar todos los platos rotos.
Gustavo Coronel, geólogo venezolano
geólogo petrolero, politólogo, actividad comunitaria.
Mis vínculos favoritos
www.porlaconciencia.com
http://thedevilsexcrement.com/
http://venezuelaawareness.com
http://www.stjacquesonline.blogspot.com
Blog for Cuba
http://caracasgringo.wordpress.com
http://alekboyd.blogspot.com
http://www.analitica.com
A Colombo-Americana's perspective
Fausta Blog
http://www.eneasbiglione.com.ar
http://www.hacer.org
Alex Beech
Guia de Noticias
Pedro Burelli
Venezuela News and Views
Habla Enrique Aristeguieta Gramcko
EXTRA: Luisa Ortega Diaz: Cuando el perro muerde a...
La Sociedad Civil venezolana debe rebelarse en con...
El mundo es un torbellino y yo me muevo más lentam...
Que sostiene todavía al chavismo en el poder?
El Plan Estratégico Socialista de PDVSA: esperpent...
MADUROZUELA COLAPSA EN TODOS LOS INDICES MUNDIALES...
NO MÁS MANSEDUMBRE, NO MÁS RESIGNACIÓN
APOYO DE LA REGIÓN A LA DEMOCRACIA VENEZOLANA
REFLEXIONES SOBRE LA IZQUIERDA Y LA DERECHA
CONVERSACIÓN CON UN CANDIDATO A LA INDIGENCIA
THE PETROSAUDI-PDVSA FRAUD: WHOARE INVOLVED?An ar...
LA DEGRADACIÓN DE PETRÓLEOS DE VENEZUELA Y DE EULO...
Mi apoyo pleno a la Gran Alianza Nacional, GANA, a...
EXTRA: Almagro pide inmediata suspensión del régim...
PDVSA muere de corrupción e ineptitud
CARTA A LA OEA Y A PRESIDENTES DE LA REGIÓN
Promotores del diálogo en Venezuela: chavistas, op...
UN RECUERDO PARA BERNARDO DIAZ, GRAN CABALLERO DEL...
Petróleos de Venezuela ha incumplido e incumple co...
The Venezuelan CrisisWhat the United States and t...
Nuncio, FAO, colaboracionismo y otras miserias mo...
Intervention in Venezuela: coming soon to a theate...
Un artículo de Monseñor Ovidio Pérez Morales
Ni en Teherán, pués.
mensajes del paleolítico
Ferrari rojo rojito
Tengo uno amarillo también!
Para Cristina
y lo mío? Hugo, dice Néstor.
La embajada de chávez y maduro en Lima o en Buenos Aires
como será la embajada en Zimbabue?
Chavo McPato en Argentina
Mil millones más, Néstor!
La revolución de Hugo Chávez
Y no se cambia el nombre!
Misión Robinson
La renuncia de Chávez es anunciada
Desfile chavista
La revolución alfabetiza!
Vamos a inscriccbirnos!
New drilling rigs for PDVSA
Modern Chinese Drilling Rig.
Por aqui lo quería pasar


text:
Trees of Paradise and Pillars of the World
Cover: Trees of Paradise and Pillars of the World
The Serial Stela Cycle of "18-Rabbit-God K," King of Copan
By Elizabeth A. Newsome
Based on a thorough analysis of the imagery and inscriptions of seven stelae erected in the Great Plaza at Copan, Honduras, by the Classic Period ruler "18-Rabbit-God K," this ambitious study argues that stelae were erected not only to support a ruler's temporal claims to power but more importantly to express the fundamental connection in Maya worldview between rulership and the cosmology inherent in their vision of cyclical time.
Series: The Linda Schele Endowment in Maya and Pre Columbian Studies
294 pages | 8.5 x 11 | 43 halftones, 112 line drawings, 6 maps, 1 graph, 3 tables |
Assemblies of rectangular stone pillars, or stelae, fill the plazas and courts of ancient Maya cities throughout the lowlands of southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and western Honduras. Mute testimony to state rituals that linked the king's power to rule with the rhythms and renewal of time, the stelae document the ritual acts of rulers who sacrificed, danced, and experienced visionary ecstasy in connection with celebrations marking the end of major calendrical cycles. The kings' portraits are carved in relief on the main surfaces of the stones, deifying them as incarnations of the mythical trees of life.
Based on a thorough analysis of the imagery and inscriptions of seven stelae erected in the Great Plaza at Copan, Honduras, by the Classic Period ruler "18-Rabbit-God K," this ambitious study argues that stelae were erected not only to support a ruler's temporal claims to power but more importantly to express the fundamental connection in Maya worldview between rulership and the cosmology inherent in their vision of cyclical time. After an overview of the archaeology and history of Copan and the reign and monuments of "18-Rabbit-God K," Elizabeth Newsome interprets the iconography and inscriptions on the stelae, illustrating the way they fulfilled a coordinated vision of the king's ceremonial role in Copan's period-ending rites. She also links their imagery to key Maya concepts about the origin of the universe, expressed in the cosmologies and mythic lore of ancient and living Maya peoples.
Introduction: Cosmic Origin Myths, Kingship, and the Rites of Renewal: An Introduction to the Stela Cult in the Classic Maya Lowlands
Chapter 1. 18-Rabbit's Kingdom: Archaeology and History at Copan
Chapter 2. The Reign and Monuments of 18-Rabbit-God K
Chapter 3. The Iconography of Vision Quest in 18-Rabbit's Stela Cycle
Chapter 4. A Spell Cast Over the Perimeter of Sacred Ground: The Inscriptions of 18-Rabbit's Stelae
Chapter 5. Trees of Paradise and Pillars of the World: An Iconological Interpretation of 18-Rabbit's Great Plaza Series
Elizabeth A. Newsome is Assistant Professor of Precolumbian and Native American Art History at the University of California, San Diego.
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My research on the stela series dedicated by the Copan ruler known as 18-Rabbit-God K began when I was working toward my doctoral degree in Precolumbian art history at the University of Texas at Austin. Originally, I had defined a different set of goals for research than those I emphasize in this revision of my dissertation. My intention had been to contribute to the ongoing dialogue about state formation that was then the focus of Copan archaeology by writing an art-historical analysis of 18-Rabbit's stelae in relation to the centralization of power and the rise of statehood in the Copan Valley. However, as I became more closely involved in studying the stela cycles of 18-Rabbit and his predecessor, known as Smoke-Imix-God K, I felt myself drawn toward exploring a more fundamental question: What are stelae? What did these sculpted pillars of stone signify for the Maya who created them? As I immersed myself in studying the Classic Period stela cult and reading ethnographic literature that described colonial and modern Maya uses of freestanding directional shrines, I felt increasingly challenged to understand how the ancient Maya used and perceived stelae as sacred objects. I also became aware of how little we really comprehend about the connection the Maya conceived between the erection of stelae and the kinds of rituals they commemorate—blood sacrifice and vision quest, veneration of the ancestral dead, royal accessions, and the completion of calendrical cycles. In the peak years of a movement in the study of Maya art and archaeology driven by political and historical perspectives, when the major breakthroughs in iconography and hieroglyphic decipherment were the identification of historical figures and events, the esoteric nature of these questions seemed incompatible with the prevailing directions of research.
From the perspective of the political interpretations of the early 1990s, stelae were tools the elite used to promote and authenticate their claims to power. They accomplished this by manipulating ritual and religious symbols, such as those depicted in the imagery of stelae and other stone reliefs, to justify their status and right to domination. The monument itself was a vehicle for displaying iconography and inscriptions that asserted these claims in a propagandistic and somewhat legalistic mode, demonstrating that a successor's right to the throne was sanctioned by dynastic genealogy, divine approbation, and his ability to perform the diagnostic rites of office. Stelae were billboards or "political posters" that created a lasting record of these justifications, a public record in stone that validated power throughout the life of the king who dedicated the monument and supported the claims of his heirs to the throne.
The stela cycles at Copan, however, called these assumptions into question for me, and I began to redefine the goals of my study. These programs of stelae, or stela cycles, as I came to call them, chronicle a sequence of ritual actions performed over the course of a k'atun, the twenty-year cycle that the Maya regarded as the fundamental unit of historical time. The monument groupings embody the steps taken to accomplish a complex ritual process and, in terms of the spatial and temporal order they impose upon their environments, model the sacred effects the process was intended to create. The Copan stelae inspired me to define and explain aspects of their function with respect to these ritual actions, leading me to an explanation that belongs to a very different realm of meaning than the simple manipulation of propaganda to gain political advantage. The serial stelae at Copan confronted me with questions about how royal rituals in the Classic Period related to Maya conceptions of time, how stelae served as objects of ritual power, and what significance the Maya associated with setting up pillars of stone on cycle endings. The explanation of these factors also calls for a somewhat different look at Maya kingship and the meaning of much of the iconography that explicates royal power. These issues rose to the forefront of my research, for, in our present state of knowledge, no satisfactory answer accounts for the way the stela cult expressed the fundamental connection in Maya worldview between rulership and the cosmology inherent in their vision of cyclical time.
The value of defining stelae as elements of the Maya ceremonial world lies in their close association with the ideological underpinnings of power that gave cohesion to the society as a whole. They are the primary documents of ancient Maya kingship, for they chronicle the periodic rites of passage that generated our most widespread and consistent record of how the society identified the roles and powers of its leaders. Stelae provide us with much of our most tangible evidence about the lords who erected these monuments throughout their lifetimes, and they are our best resource for understanding the histories both of individual rulers and of their dynastic lines. The reliefs carved on stelae preserve portraits of rulers and the visual record of their rites; the monuments' inscriptions provide us with their names and titles, their actions and dates, and a wealth of other information. The stela cult is so closely associated with the political institutions at the heart of Classic Maya civilization that it is virtually synonymous with their rise, extent, and duration. The appearance of stelae that record royal accessions and cycle endings, displaying a characteristic iconography of kingship, is one of the primary markers of an institutional system that sets Lowland Maya civilization in the Classic Period (A.D. 197-909) apart from its Preclassic antecedents. Stela dedication was nearly universal at sites throughout the Southern Lowlands, from western Honduras throughout Guatemala, Belize, and as far west as the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico. It reflects ceremonial practices definitive to the Classic Maya social, religious, and political systems that also set its civilization apart from Postclassic developments among the Maya in the Northern Lowlands of Yucatan (A.D. 909-1521). The extinction of the stela complex accompanies the collapse of kingdoms throughout the Southern Lowlands in the ninth and tenth centuries, marking the dissolution of a particular combination of religious ideology with political structure. Yet while the stela cult is the source of much of our most vital knowledge about this political and ceremonial world, it is also the source of many of our most perplexing mysteries about how authority was suffused with expressions of spiritual power. Stelae furnish an array of tantalizing glimpses into how kingship was empowered and sustained in Maya worldview, challenging us to understand its efficacy in the context of cosmology and ritual action.
The principal treatments that stelae have received in scholarly literature are either documentary or in the context of broader iconographic, inscriptional, or formal studies. Authors have focused on artistic or historical treatments of the images and texts stelae record, but not on developing theoretical perspectives that assess the role and significance of the monuments themselves. Discussions of stela imagery and design appear scattered through a wide variety of publications that deal with Maya sculpture or take thematic approaches to architecture and art. Interpretation of the monuments has also formed the basis for a growing literature on the reconstruction of dynastic and political histories, notably at Tikal, Dos Pilas, and Copan. Yet stelae have never been the subject of a systematic study to examine them as a distinct class of ceremonial monument. As a result, many of the questions that relate to their meaning and purpose have not been defined or targeted for research. This seems remarkable, since their association with calendrical cycles has long been known, and scholars have frequently remarked upon their highly standardized and specialized iconography. It is difficult to explain this omission except to observe that stelae are such integral features of our consciousness of Maya ceremonial landscapes that, to some degree, scholars have taken them for granted. We have focused on many other topics of Maya studies, overlooking the quite large gaps in our understanding of an expression of Maya elite culture that is central and close at hand.
To an extent, this omission is an artifact of the history of research, to which many factors have contributed. From the inception of study at Maya ruins, documentation by pioneering archaeologists and explorers established that stelae are the most visible features of Maya ceremonial environments. Stelae are less mysterious than the construction sequences of buildings, caches, and tombs and do not require the exacting attention and effort demanded by the excavation of the latter. Studies of writing and calendrics originated not with the inscriptions carved on stelae and other on-site monuments but with the contents of the painted codices from Yucatan that had found their way into European collections the Dresden, Paris, and Madrid (Tro-Cortesianus) manuscripts. Monument texts were primarily available to scholars as line drawings in publications such as Alfred Percival Maudslay's Archaeology from his five-volume Biologia Centrali-Americana series (1889-1902) and Sylvanus Morley's Inscriptions of Peten (1937-1938). Sadly, an early generation of scholars quickly drew conclusions about the form and content of Maya writing that prevented them from making aggressive efforts to decipher monumental inscriptions. If they had operated with a different set of expectations—admitting the possibilities that the Maya script could be read phonetically and that it might encode the history of a civilization—their efforts might have led them to focus more attention and curiosity on the tall stone monuments weathering in the Central American forests. Finally, when the field of Maya studies shifted toward iconographic and epigraphic research on historical content in Maya art and texts, scholars focused so intently on the political messages conveyed in these media that they rarely gave attention to understanding the monument as a meaningful whole.
For a pioneering generation of scholars like Morley and the ethnohistorian J. Eric Thompson, stelae exhibited a bewildering array of pictographic signs that recorded only the esoteric preoccupations of a priestly class. The inscriptions, they believed, concerned calculations of astronomy and calendrics, and recorded homages to the gods who ruled the celestial movements and the endless march of time. In describing the stelae in the Great Plaza of Tikal, Thompson wrote, "Those limestone shafts, carved or painted with the static portraits of gods and with their hieroglyphic texts always recording that overwhelming preoccupation of the Maya with the mystery of time, are milestones in the history of the city. Every five or ten years a new one rose to carry forward the story of conquests, not of neighbors, but of the secrets of time and the movements of celestial bodies" (I954: 9). Speculating on the purposes stelae served, he adds, "I could visualize the priest-astronomer, anxious to check his theories on the length of the solar year or the lunar month, threading his way from stela to stela to see what calculations his predecessors had recorded in the distant past" (I954: 9). Thompson and Morley fervently believed that the script could never be deciphered, and that even if it were, its contents would be found to record matters so arcane that no historical value would come from the decipherment. As the quote cited above indicates, they interpreted the images carved on the monurnents' principal surfaces as portraits of gods or their priestly impersonators, not of the political figures whose reigns and activities shaped the history of their civilization. In this climate of research, stelae slipped from scholars' consciousness as primary documents of Maya civilization to become curiosities of their ceremonial landscape, frozen in the illustrated pages of early documentary publications such as John Lloyd Stephens's Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan (1841), Maudslay's Archaeology, and the Peabody Museum memoirs authored by Teobert Maler.
These documentary works are remarkable as enduring testimonials to the importance of stelae as elements of Maya sacred landscapes. The stunning photographs produced by Maudslay and Maler, using large-format wetplate cameras, demonstrate the way a single monolith or groups of stone pillars activate their architectural surroundings, adding visual texture, emphasizing scale, dramatizing key points in the organization of sacred space. The stelae are integral features of the way courts, plazas, and temples were meant to be viewed, approached, and experienced by observers. In some cases, rulers set up their stelae as single markers at the base of a platform or temple stairway; more infrequently, stelae were raised within the sanctuary built at the temple's summit. Monuments were also grouped or aligned in rows before buildings or along the edges of plazas and courts. Many of the stelae that were sculpted in relief were also painted, either in a uniform shade of blood red or with red, blue, and green pigments that picked out the details of the figure and its regalia. Others, however, were never sculpted and form rows of plain stelae paired with uncarved stone altars, such as those aligned before the radial pyramids in the Twin Pyramid Complexes of Tikal. It is unclear whether these monuments were painted or otherwise adorned; in these cases, the stone pillar itself may have been a sufficiently powerful symbol to function independent of iconography and texts. Stelae are usually paired with stone altars of various shapes. Most altars are round or drum-shaped, although others are rectangular and may be adorned with relief carvings of bundlelike knots and ties. At Copan and its nearest neighbor, Quirigua, altars were elaborated into three-dimensional effigies of fantastic, zoomorphic beasts. The pairing of stelae with altars and their locations with respect to the approaches to temples and courts suggests that rites of sacrifice and devotional offerings may have been performed before the monuments, just as the modern Tzotzil Maya of Chiapas pray and make offerings before the wooden-cross shrines they venerate today. Their alignment with respect to buildings suggests that rows of stelae may have articulated points of worship along pilgrimage or processional routes.
The publication in 1841 of John L. Stephens's popular travel and adventure book, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, introduced Europe and North America to some of the most spectacular stelae of the Maya region: the colossal monoliths of Copan and Quirigua. Stephens, who had been sent to Central America on a diplomatic mission by the administration of President Martin Van Buren (1837-1841), found the region in a state of civil war and soon learned that no government existed to receive his diplomatic charge. Luckily for the future of New World archaeology, Stephens decided to devote his time in Central America to exploring the ruins of ancient cities. He visited a number of sites in the Southern Lowlands, the heartland of Classic Maya civilization, and traveled to the arid Northern Lowlands of Yucatan, where the powerful dominions of Chichen Itza and Mayapan rose in the centuries following the collapse of the Maya centers in the south. Another stroke of good luck was Stephens's choice of a traveling companion, the English artist Frederick Catherwood. Catherwood, who had extensive prior experience making illustrations of monumental sculptures in Egypt, created a series of drawings and lithographic prints that illustrated Stephens's narrative, showing views of the ruins and their monuments. He worked carefully to document the Maya works, using the camera lucida to reproduce the details of their design. Catherwood's renderings of the stelae in the Great Plaza at Copan are astonishingly accurate, given the conditions under which he worked and the fact that his drawings were the first visual records of these monuments. The publication of Incidents of Travel brought the Maya ruins and their spectacular sculptures to the attention of both an enthusiastic public and the scientific community. Stephens's account and Catherwood's views of the ruins in Central America so aroused the curiosity of the English archaeologist Alfred Maudslay that he made plans to visit the region and investigate the sites for himself.
The study of Maya archaeology and monumental art benefited enormously from the sudden interest of Maudslay, for he was a tireless and exacting scientific researcher. In addition to carrying out the first series of scientific excavations at Copan, Quirigua, and a number of other Maya sites, Maudslay devoted particular attention to documenting the information preserved on stelae and other sculptural monuments. In a series of expeditions between the 1880s and early 1900s, Maudslay labored exhaustively to create photographs and papier-mache molds of the stone sculptures from the sites he visited. His photographs remain the single most complete and detailed visual resource for studying the sculptures' iconography and texts, showing them in a better state of preservation than they appear today. In addition, Maudslay hired a talented artist, Annie Hunter, to make accurate line drawings of the sculptures based on his photographs and casts. The Austrian scholar Teobert Maler began a program of research for the Peabody Museum at Harvard University that lasted from 1901 to 1911. Following Maudslay s lead, Maler also gathered visual data on the carved stone monuments and compiled an objective record of what he found. He penetrated areas of the Lowlands that Maudslay had been unable to explore, including the regions of the Usumacinta and Pasión Rivers. Although Maler did not publish drawings of iconography or texts, his publications in the Peabody Museum Memoirs include photographs that, like Maudslay's, are exceptionally crisp and detailed. Maler's work includes a thorough accounting of information regarding each stela or other stone sculpture he encountered, including its size, a description of its design and setting, and its condition and location when it was found. Maudslay, Maler, and Stephens and Catherwood were great recorders of Maya monumental art; they sought to provide detailed and thorough documentation and, in the absence of scholarly evidence, chose the objective presentation of data over the temptation to interpret what they found.
As the field of Maya studies moved into its second major phase of scholarship, it was dominated by the interpretations championed by members of the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Maya research program. In this era, the middle years of the twentieth century, the record of Maya history, belief, and ceremonialism attested by monumental art, which is preserved most prominently on stelae, fell into a strange, paradoxical phase of neglect. The neglect was paradoxical in the sense that two major scholars affiliated with the Carnegie, Sylvanus Morley and J. Eric Thompson, produced extensive works on Maya art and inscriptions, yet failed to explore their potential for revealing information about Maya history or its ceremonial world. Thompson, truly one of the great ethnographers of the Maya, adopted a view of Classic civilization—which he defended combatively for most of his career—that denied any historical significance to the content of its art and inscriptions. Armed with an impressive grasp of Maya archaeology, ethnology, language, and religion, Thompson overwhelmed or converted most scholars of his generation to conformity with his views. According to Thompson, the Maya were a society of peaceful peasant farmers, governed by an enlightened caste of benevolent priests. Ruled by their astronomer-priests, the Maya were a deeply religious people concerned with the agricultural calendar, astronomy, and the worship of gods who presided over the phases of time. Early in his career, Thompson seems to have converted his colleague Morley to this view, so that Morley, who originally saw the images carved on stelae as representations of Maya lords, fell into line with Thompson in believing that they portrayed priests and gods.
Adopting Thompson's view of Maya inscriptions, Morley omitted even illustrating the greater portions of monument texts in his two massive studies The Inscriptions of Peten and The Inscriptions of Copan. He describes stelae, including their location and setting, but he analyzes only their calendrical data. He rarely included drawings or discussions of any glyphs other than those of the Initial Series, the opening section of a monumental inscription that provides its date in cycles elapsed since the beginning of the present world. Morley failed to record or interpret the subsequent, often quite extensive sections of the texts from stelae and altars that are now known to record dynastic rituals, the genealogy of rulers, wars, sacrifices, and supernatural events. His works, which might have composed a truly encyclopedic array of information about monument texts and the patterns of meaning they reveal, fall short of that goal and read only as an accounting of the seriation, location, and dates of sculptures at numerous sites.
Thompson's works attest to his tremendous gifts as an ethnologist of Maya culture and religion. Applied to the prehispanic past, his knowledge yielded some marvelous insights into Maya spirituality in his own time and still has the potential to do so today. Had he applied himself to the interpretation of iconography related to the representation of the Classic kings, the results might have been pathbreaking. But Thompson's approach did not permit acknowledging the existence of historical figures in art, and his visual analysis of stelae was resultingly vague, an expression of his view that their images embodied the enigma of the Maya's worship of the gods and time. He regarded the rigorous specialization of stelae iconography and their canons of formal design as evidence that their representations were impersonal, better suited to portraying gods than men. Interestingly, while scholars such as Paul Schellhas (1904) and Gunter Zimmerman (1956) had composed detailed iconographic studies of the gods illustrated in the surviving Maya codices, Thompson's writing seems to avoid applying this kind of scrutiny to the stelae he describes. He mentions few details of their iconography at all, and does not classify or compare features of their composition. Tatiana Proskouriakoff, a colleague of Thompson's on the staff of the Carnegie Institution, would undertake this kind of careful examination of stela iconography in her studies of monuments and texts at Piedras Negras and Yaxchilan. Her efforts mark the beginning of the modern era of Maya studies, making possible the decipherments and breakthroughs in our historical understanding of the ancient Maya that are ongoing today.
Proskouriakoff's landmark 1960 study developed from careful comparisons she made between hieroglyphic statements recorded in the inscriptions of groups of stelae at Piedras Negras and the iconography carved on these monuments. She successfully demonstrated that events recorded in their texts must mirror the ideas communicated in their visual images. Working with the dates and iconography of the monuments, she argued that groups of stelae associated with particular structures record events in the lives of individual rulers. Her work identified patterns of dates associated with particular hieroglyphs: an early date that corresponds to birth; an event that took place in adolescence, such as heir-designation; as well as verbs and dates associated with accession, marriage, and death. Proskouriakoff matched these dates and events to themes that she argued were portrayed in the iconography of particular sculptures. For example, she determined that an event recorded by the "toothache" glyph corresponds to the first stela of each series, which shows a ruler seated in a niche to which he has ascended by a ladder and scaffold. Proskouriakoff correctly identified the "toothache" event as accession, a concept that is also symbolized by the monument's principal image. The iconography of ascending to the niche, where the lord sits enthroned beneath a sky band decorated with symbols of the Sun, the Moon, and planets, functions as a visual metaphor for ascent to the throne. Proskouriakoff's arguments were so persuasive that even Thompson, upon reading her work, admitted, "Of course you are right" (quoted in Coe 1992: 176). Her historical approach and methodology of careful identification and comparison of elements in iconography and texts established the foundation for modern directions of research.
The approach that Proskouriakoff pioneered yielded abundant evidence that Maya art and inscriptions are the creations of a political elite composed of rulers in countless dynasties governing a multiplicity of rival states. Maya scholars since 1960 have explored the way rulers communicated their messages of power through public art. Approaches have ranged from reconstructing dynastic sequences and identifying individual rulers in the iconography and inscriptions of carved monuments to exploring the gestures, poses, iconography, and verbal glyphs that describe specific rites and events. These have been found to include not only accession but various types of blood sacrifices by the ruling elite and military attacks timed to particular hierophanies in the cycle of Venus. Texts and iconography reveal the parentage and the genealogy of kings, rites of heir designation, dynastic marriages, and alliances. Conflicts within and between polities have also emerged in recent hieroglyphic and iconographic studies. These findings have been linked together to create fragmentary mosaics of Maya history, necessarily incomplete and often conjectural but growing more secure through the continual progress of research.
For a time, the success of the historical/political approach and disillusionment with the religious preoccupations of the ahistorical school led to disenchantment among scholars with studies that emphasized certain esoteric aspects of Maya culture. From the 1960s to the middle of the 1980s, the priorities of research focused largely on defining the elements of the Maya political world. Researchers debated whether Maya polities should be classified as chiefdoms or states and whether emblem glyphs referred to dynasties, regions, or political domains. Art historians and epigraphers worked to recover the details of royal biographies and dynastic lines and to define the way Maya lords manipulated claims based on ancestry, ritual, and mythological sanction to legitimate their rule. Scholars went about these studies with the sense that they were bringing the ancient Maya out of a hazy realm dominated by longings for a lost, idealized world into the uncompromising light that history throws upon human motives and events. Themes that were reminiscent of the interpretations championed by Thompson and his contemporaries, many quite important to understanding Maya art and society, nearly vanished from scholarly discourse. Interest in ritual and lore associated with the calendar fell out of fashion and favor, while themes that related to agriculture, fertility, and subsistence-based aspects of religion met a similar fate. From the perspective that dominated the literature produced in these years, religion and ritual existed primarily as the mechanisms that justified the powers of the elite.
In the late 1980S, this trend began to reverse itself, partly through the impact of studies that revealed the strong shamanistic elements of kingship among the Maya and their predecessors of the Olmec and Pacific Slope civilizations. Both established scholars and members of the younger generation have contributed major breakthroughs to our understanding of the ancient Maya's world of belief, ritual practice, and spiritual power. With respect to the goals of this study, the most important developments emerged from the epigraphic investigations by David Stuart, Linda Schele, and Nikolai Grube at Copan. In 1986, Stuart produced a reading for the term for "stela" in the Classic Maya inscriptions that he has since abandoned: te-tun, or "tree-stone." Although Stuart has since rejected this reading in favor of lacam-tun, "large or great stone," as the word for "stela," his idea was important in that it raised the question of the symbolic value the Maya may have attached to these pillars of stone. His work also highlighted issues related to the ceremonial uses of stelae, for he drew upon comparisons with the directional shrines called acantuns that the Postclassic Maya erected in their rites of year renewal, described by Bishop Landa and illustrated in Codex Dresden. Stuart had suggested to me once that the stelae assembled in the Great Plaza might be conceived as a symbolic "forest" in stone (Stuart, pers. com. 1986). I believe that, despite the obsolescence of the te-tun reading, Stuart made a connection that is still fundamentally sound. The value of his idea lies in the relation stelae bear to fertility, directionality, and the renewal of time. His interpretations opened my mind to the possibilities for a whole new way of thinking about the stela complex as an expression of Maya ritual and worldview.
Moreover, the inscriptional studies at Copan produced new insights into the way the Maya viewed their stone monuments and ascribed to them special identities and powers. Findings by Stuart, Schele, and Grube included quite evocative terms for various types of sculptures (such as "sun-eyed throne stone" for an altar) and the proper names of numerous stelae. Many of these monument names include the appellatives of gods and are closely associated with mystical elements in their iconographic design.s The epigraphic studies at Copan revealed that stelae and other carved stone monuments had sacred identities for the Classic Maya and that these ideas were explicitly stated in their inscriptions and given graphic form in their iconographic design. The names of monuments suggested that the Maya attributed divine associations and spiritual presences to their freestanding sculptures that seemed to be realized or made manifest through the sculptor's transformation of the living stone. The evidence produced by the epigraphers at Copan contributed to a growing body of support for the understanding that stelae meant more to the Maya than particularly durable political posters; they were objects of power that the Maya regarded as vital actors in their spiritual world.
A new set of questions about the meaning and significance of the Maya stela complex lies just beyond the horizon, stemming from these advances and charting the theoretical directions of future research. To examine them will require a fuller understanding of the extent and complexity of the phenomenon that the stela cult represents, a problem that has not yet been sufficiently addressed. Systematic studies of stela iconography, inscriptions, and archaeological contexts will be required to provide an understanding of the variables that shaped the design and usage of these monuments across the geographic and temporal extent of Lowland Maya history. Equipped with the data necessary to develop such a perspective, a broader scope of theoretical problems can then be defined. Primary among these is the role these monuments and the ritual behaviors that surrounded them may have played in establishing the intellectual foundations for rulership in Maya society, including the unique historical consciousness that characterized its dynastic institutions. Much may be gained through formulating a new discourse that draws together such arthistorical explorations with trends in the study of political ritual (Tambiah 1977; Kertzer 1988; Bell 1992) and emerging models of Classic Maya political formation (Schele, Grube, and Martin 1998). Although that line of theoretical questioning cannot be explored within the scope of the present volume, it forms the immediate concern of my future research ( The Classic Maya Stela Cult: A Study in the Ideology of Power, University of Texas Press, forthcoming).
In the present work, I have attempted to balance and reconcile two approaches, combining a political interpretation that addresses 18-Rabbit's motives and strategies in dedicating his Great Plaza monuments with an interpretation that is fundamentally concerned with their spiritual meaning. I view these as complementary perspectives that deal with interconnected realities, for political agendas and faith are rarely mutually exclusive factors in the creation of any great religious art. My approach differs from many that examine the use of sacred themes and symbols in dynastic art in that I deal less with how the sculptures promote such agendas as legitimating or exalting the king's reign than with how they embody concepts of spiritual process and effectiveness. It is undeniable that 18Rabbit's beautiful sculptures deify and glorify the status of the king: they do so in such eloquent terms as to merit the description of "visual poetry." But I think the monuments have more to tell us than how religious concepts and beautiful forms exalt an eighth-century Maya ruler. I believe their interpretation can tell us something about what stelae inherently are, what they signified in the ancient world of Maya belief and calendrical celebration. By approaching the interpretation of each monument as a comprehensive whole, and then relating them as a group and to the total structure of the ritual environment they occupy, I maintain that it is possible to draw conclusions that will bring us nearer to understanding some of the fundamental mysteries of Maya royal cults. Considering 18-Rabbit's monuments in this holistic perspective reveals glimpses into the deeper realities of the ancient Maya world of imagination, spiritual lore, and even the corporate experience of community rites of passage. Exploring the monuments in this way also offers an explanation of what stelae signif,v as expressions of Maya spiritual belief and practice. Far from being posters in stone set up merely to broadcast audacious claims to power, the 18-Rabbit sculptures are designed, sculpted, and organized in a way that suggests they were intended to produce a sacred effect upon the world.
Veiled Brightness
Star Gods of the Maya
Com licenca!
Lightning Gods and Feathered Serpents


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