Zodiacal Light: From Holy Light to False Dawn

2014

Recent research suggests that ancient Greek festivals with nighttime elements had astronomical links to specific celestial sights (Boutsikas, Hannah, Ruggles, Salt). Such an astronomical connection can be posited between the night sky at particular seasons and the Mysteries of Eleusis, the pre-eminent religious pilgrimage of the Hellenic and Hellen-istic world. The Mysteries of Demeter guaranteed those initiated at the sanctuary outside Athens a happier lot in the hereafter. By the end of the Republic, cultured Romans headed to Ath-ens to participate in the rites of the Mother and her daughter. Cicero had been initiated at Eleusis and, as an objective observer, he reveals that the Mysteries can be explained through natural philosophy-through science. What natural phenomena occurred in spring and in autumn-when the Lesser and the Greater Mysteries were celebrated? Plato describes gates to the afterlife in the Myth of Er at the end of Republic-infernal gates like the cave of Hades at Eleusis, as well as celestial portals that would be located at the intersections in the sky that he describes in Timaeus. The initiated Cicero's translation into Latin of a section of Timaeus-the part with Plato's celestial X-suggests an astronomical aspect to the Mysteries. Another astronomical connection to the Mysteries of Eleusis could be found two centuries later when the theurgist authors of the Chaldean Oracles connected Hekate-the goddess of crossroads who had helped Demeter in the Homeric hymn-to the World Soul that according to Plato has the form of a celestial X. At that intersection of the Milky Way and the path of the Planets stand the gates to the afterlife according to Macrobius' Commentary on Cicero's Dream of Scipio, while Cicero had based the Dream of Scipio on Plato's soteriological Myth of Er and the cosmological Ti-maeus. At the portals to the afterlife-at the celestial crossroads-stood Hekate, the goddess who opened and closed the gates of Hades and helped Demeter find her daughter.

A response to an article written by John McHugh published in Cosmos and Logos: Journal of Myth, Religion, and Folklore, Vol. II, Aug. 2016. An overview of the sea-walking miracle of Jesus found in the New Testament and its possible cultural antecedents in pagan astrolatry. Lundwall argues that there were private and secret rituals in the early Christian cults that held deep cosmogonic themes of rebirth. He responds to McHugh's assertion that the sea-walk miracle of Jesus had pagan origins with an overview of possible connections and the sheer difficulties of proving them.

The Macedonic cult of Dionis (Paionian Dyalos; lat. Dionysus), Sabazius, Bachus, Nimrod, Tammuz/Dumuzi, Zagreus, Osiris-Serapis, etc. is one of the oldest mythological appearances known to humanity. His name is founded in immemorial timeworn forgotten past. According to his astrological and animalistic attributes, the time frame of his conception coincides with the Zodiacal Era of Bull, which spans from 4th to 2nd millennium BCE. The Macedonic Paionians gave the origin of the name Dyaus, from a root-word which means ‘to shine’: Dya/Da - ‘to’, and Us - ‘rising, up’ (like the sun) and/or Usvity - ‘incandescent’. Same meaning is to be found in the Sanskrit ‘Vas-anta’ - spring, from the word root ‘vas’ - shine, heat. Russian prominent linguist Vadim Tsymbursky proposed interpretation of the name Dionis on the basis of Macedonic onomastics: "Our God” – ‘Douh-naš’ in plain Macedonian. When these first Pre-Indo-Europeans fashioned the other gods out of the forces and forms in nature, this root-name was implied for Dionis as well. His primordial cult is strongly associated with the archaic mythological creatures as kentaurs, maenads, satyrs, sileni, etc. Dionis was originally a god of the fertility and nature, associated with wild and ecstatic religious rites; in later traditions he was also the god of wine, of ritual madness and ecstatic behavior, who loosens inhibition and inspires creativity in music and poetry. Initiates worshipped him in the Dionisiac Mysteries, which were comparable to and intricately linked with the Eleusian and Orpheic Mysteries, which are again one and the same with the manifestations of most primordial mysteries of Cabiri , mentioned already by Herodotus as thought by Pelasgians to the men from the isle of Samothrace.

This is a compilation of the seven-part series on Orphism by F.S. Darrow, A.M., Ph. D. (Harv.), that originally was published in the Theosophical Path from April, 1912 to March, 1913 (see tuponline.org). The work of G.R.S. Mead may also interest you: https://www.academia.edu/112722856/ORPHEUS_GRS_Mead_electronic_text_edition_jan_1_2024 (See link in dropdown menu)

2010

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Contributions from Science Education Research, 2007

Video-technology has played a substantial role in research on teaching and learning in actual practice and in teacher professional development since the 1970s. However, the more recent advances of digital video-technology and video-analysis facilitate much deeper insight into the interplay of teaching and learning processes than the analogue video technology available so far. It turned out that the new technology does not only allow much more fine-graded coding than has been possible until now, but also enables to investigate patterns of instructional scripts in rather large samples of classes and numbers of lessons. Three projects on investigating key patterns of lower secondary physics instruction in two countries (Germany and the German speaking part of Switzerland) closely cooperate. Major emphases are video-based analyses of dominating instructional patterns by employing common coding schemes and drawing consequences for improving actual instructional practices e.g. by teacher professional development. After providing a brief overview of research methods and theoretical orientation in the three collaborating research groups three studies are discussed that illustrate the power of video-analyses methods in research on teaching and learning science. The following issues are the focus of theses studies: (1) Standard basic coding of surface structures of instruction; (2) a coding scheme for investigating the practice of using experiments in science classes; (3) methods to investigate linkages of teaching and learning processes in instruction.

2012

Owing to their fractional electric charges, quarks are blind to transformations that combine a color center phase with an appropriate electromagnetic one. Such transformations are part of a global $Z_6$-like center symmetry of the Standard Model that is lost when quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is treated as an isolated theory. This symmetry and the corresponding topological defects may be relevant to non-perturbative phenomena such as quark confinement, much like center symmetry and ordinary center vortices are in pure SU($N$) gauge theories. Here we report on our investigations of an analogous symmetry in a 2-color model with dynamical Wilson quarks carrying half-integer electric charge.