tagged w/ Elements
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"From The Times
July 8, 2008
My friendly neighbourhood witches
Ken Russell
In a heavily wooded hollow in the heart of the New Forest lies the village of Burley. Its tea rooms provide cream teas for tourists, while half a dozen shops cater to the needs of witches living in the woods near by. Books of spells for good and ill, stacks of magic wands, shelves of tarot cards vie for space. Pentagrams, lucky charms, crystal balls, mystic bibles, “books of shadows”, astrological mugs and twig brooms are piled high. Witches and fairies of all kinds hang from the ceiling in mid-flight or decorate bracelets, china, paintings and pretty clocks. Everything is for sale, and for every sale to a serious witch or warlock, there must be a thousand to the visiting tourist.
Yes, Burley is well and truly steeped in witchcraft. And, except for that 16th and 17th-century lapse in tolerance in which tens of thousands were burnt across Europe (mostly women), witches have been thriving, ever since Burley's own Sybil Leek came out of the broom closet in the 20th century and invented witch pride.
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Like most people brought up on Shakespeare, Rackham's drawings, the Brothers Grimm and The Wizard of Oz, I've always assumed that witches were good when they were bad. Double bubble, poison apples, magic mirrors, warts and wands. Pointed hats, black cats, prodding fingers, cackling laughs. But in Burley I was privileged to drag my Hammer-Horror fantasies into the secret lair of a real witch and warlock for correctional instruction.
Our modern magicians, Vandervalk and Freya, hold multiple university degrees in medicine, animal husbandry, ecology and psychology. They're grounded professionals whose dedication to public service (teaching prisoners to care for creatures such as wild owls as a route to learning respect) makes it a risk to reveal their night jobs as high priest and priestess of the craft. And they've had it up to here with toad jokes. This is 2008, after all, and the wise arts have been tested and refined for centuries. The results are in for this pair, who have been practising a combined total of 30 years, 12 of them in partnership.
Witchcraft is based on the four elements: earth, air, fire and water. It involves fine-tuning oneself to receive a vivid experience of the connectedness of things. As Vandervalk puts it: “Witchcraft is like electricity. I'm the plug that goes into the mains. I don't keep the force for myself, or claim mastery over it. I'm a conduit, to bring ease and positive outcomes to other people's lives.”
He continues: “In Western civilisation, all of us are five days away from anarchy. All it would take would be for our usual power systems to fail and we'd be plunged into darkness. At that moment it would be extremely useful to know a shaman like myself who is an adept in woodcraft and plant medicine.”
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“Power animals are my speciality,” he adds. “I'm grafting myself to their purity. Survival is their whole purpose. It's the life-linkage I'm cultivating. A witch connected to woodland ways is able to remove the plastic wrapper from life. That's why it's easier to conduct our work in nature. The forest, the time of year and the Moon are our church.”
“It's a path for attaining self-knowledge in conjunction with the cycle of life, birth, death: the mysteries."
“If someone wants to get revenge or a husband to return, we don't help them to cast spells; we redirect them,” Freya says. “Any black magic rebounds on the sender seven-fold. Nor do we perform ‘skyclad' - in the nude,” she adds, a little too pointedly in my direction and with a hint of psychic powers.
“We're not obsessive about it. The point is to integrate the mundane with the evolutionary thrust, not to favour one at the expense of the other,” Vandervalk says. “And,” he jokes, “to turn annoying people into mushrooms.”
""From The Times
July 8, 2008
My friendly neighbourhood witches
Ken Russell... more
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oahspe
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3 years ago
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"You are what you eat. But do you recall munching some molybdenum or snacking on selenium? Some 60 chemical elements are found in the body, but what all of them are doing there is still unknown.
Roughly 96 percent of the mass of the human body is made up of just four elements: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen, with a lot of that in the form of water. The remaining 4 percent is a sparse sampling of the periodic table of elements.
Some of the more prominent representatives are called macro nutrients, whereas those appearing only at the level of parts per million or less are referred to as micronutrients.
These nutrients perform various functions, including the building of bones and cell structures, regulating the body's pH, carrying charge, and driving chemical reactions.
The FDA has set a reference daily intake for 12 minerals (calcium, iron, phosphorous, iodine, magnesium, zinc, selenium, copper, manganese, chromium, molybdenum and chloride). Sodium and potassium also have recommended levels, but they are treated separately.
However, this does not exhaust the list of elements that you need. Sulfur is not usually mentioned as a dietary supplement because the body gets plenty of it in proteins.
And there are several other elements — such as silicon, boron, nickel, vanadium and lead — that may play a biological role but are not classified as essential.
"This may be due to the fact that a biochemical function has not been defined by experimental evidence," said Victoria Drake from the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University.
Check out the link for a full run down of just what the hell is in your BODY!!"You are what you eat. But do you recall munching some molybdenum or snacking on... more
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Theodore Gray has created a rather uncommon table. He has transformed the Periodic Table of Elements into an actual table, a coffee table to be exact. But this table doesn’t just depict element names and numbers, it also stores samples of each.Theodore Gray has created a rather uncommon table. He has transformed the Periodic... more
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Nanosciences and nanotechnologies represent a formidable challenge for the research community and industry. World-class infrastructure, new fundamental knowledge, novel equipment for characterization and manufacturing, multi-disciplinary education and training for innovative and creative engineering, and a responsible attitude to societal demands are required. This documentary film, made available by the European Commission, provides a glimpse of some of the many activities that are being carried out in Europe in these fast-growing fields of research and technological development.Nanosciences and nanotechnologies represent a formidable challenge for the research... more
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"But now comes word that it isn’t just wildlife that can go extinct. The element gallium is in very short supply and the world may well run out of it in just a few years. Indium is threatened too, says Armin Reller, a materials chemist at Germany’s University of Augsburg. He estimates that our planet’s stock of indium will last no more than another decade. All the hafnium will be gone by 2017 also, and another twenty years will see the extinction of zinc. Even copper is an endangered item, since worldwide demand for it is likely to exceed available supplies by the end of the present century."
Gallium is used to make LCD's which are becoming pretty much unavoidable in electronic displays. As the author points out, "Oil is just an organic substance that was created by natural biological processes; we know that we have a lot of it, but we’re using it up very rapidly, no more is being created, and someday it’ll be gone. The disappearance of elements, though—that’s a different matter. I was taught long ago that the ninety-two elements found in nature are the essential building blocks of the universe. Take one away—or three, or six—and won’t the essential structure of things suffer a potent blow? Somehow I feel that there’s a powerful difference between running out of oil, or killing off all the dodos, and having elements go extinct."
Not only is gallium at risk but indium will be gone in a decade and hafnium gone by 2017. Oh ya, copper and zinc will be gone too."But now comes word that it isn’t just wildlife that can go extinct. The... more
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RonenA
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3 years ago
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Scientists claim to have discovered a naturally occurring element with an atomic number (number of protons) of 122 — 30 notches on the periodic table ahead of uranium, long considered the heaviest naturally occurring element.
Students all across the world are reeling in agony over having to learn another element on the periodic table!Scientists claim to have discovered a naturally occurring element with an atomic... more
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Rostam
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4 years ago
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