Author: Italoeuropeo

London- The British Museum has some areas dedicated to civilization that influenced the progress of humankind. For example, there is an area dedicated to the Ancient Greece which actually is one of the most visited areas of the Museum. 

Located in the Ancient Greece section there is the frieze of the Parthenon, which is now object of discussion between Greece and England. The Greek government wants to have back the sculptures since they historically belong to Greece. Otherwise, the British Museum doesn’t want to give them away.

If you are wondering why the Parthenon frieze is in the British Museum, here there is what happened. Lord Elgin went to Greece and brought it with him back in England. But during the travel, the ship wrecked and the frieze went lost. Someone found the piece near Marseille (France) and delivered to the British authorities.

According to the opinion of British Museum visitors being interviewed, British people would prefer the Parthenon frieze to remain in London, since they are an integral part of the Museum. Also British feel like a part of their the myth already discussed about the transportation of the frieze from Greece to London.

However, there are someone who would give back the frieze to Greece: those people think friezes are a symbol of Greece and a reason of pride. Taking also into consideration the current difficult situation in Greece, returning back the frieze could be seeing as a positive initiative in a period of dark.
A little percentage of visitors interviewed did not answer to the survey, because they considered the situation difficult to judge: the frieze contribute to attract tourist at the British Museum, but, at the it is an important part of the Greek history, able to restore the ancient beauty of the Parthenon.

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Whoever would learn the secret of altering things must know that everyone can influence everything magically if he falls into a great excess of love or hate or the like.  Albertus Magnus (1193 – 1280) – De mirabilibus mundi.

Since the dawn of every civilization there has been a grey area between proven fact and that which falls within the field of the inexplicable, labeled Magic.
The Roman Code of the Twelve Tables (ca. 450 B.C.) stated, “ When grain or crops are prevented from growing by means of magic, the perpetrator shall be sacrificed to Ceres ” and “ Poisoning another person or rendering him ill or inactive through the exercise of magic or diabolical arts is a capital crime punishable by death.”
The Latin writer Apuleius (c. 125 – 180 C.E.) was accused by his wealthy wife’s relatives of having seduced her by magical means. To counter her family’s charges in court, Apuleius wrote his
‘Apologia’, or ‘Defense’, in which he draws a careful distinction between black magic, or necromancy, where the intentions are evil, and white magic, or theurgy, practised by him so as to purify his soul and attain divine wisdom.
The duplicity of magic has itself been tackled in a duplicitous way by the Christian Church. Pope Sylvester II (999 – 1003) was alleged to have practised alchemy, a branch of magic, and had to swear before a special council that he himself was no sorcerer. Albertus Magnus, Bishop of Regensburg, on the other hand, despite being a declared alchemist, was officially recognised as a Doctor of the Church and eventually even canonised as a saint (though not until 1931). The reason for the Church’s ambivalent approach is that alchemy can be seen, not only as an early forerunner of chemistry, but also as the spiritual path leading to inner discipline where matter and soul achieve equilibrium. Ultimately, however, Pope John XXII did in fact outlaw the practice of alchemy in his papal bull of 1317: “ Poor themselves, wise in their own conceit, they fall into the ditch they themselves have digged.” Nowhere has alchemy, as the overarching form of magic, had an easy passage. As early as 144 BC and again in 60 BC the Chinese Emperors banned it, as did the Roman Emperor Diocletian in 296 AD, while King Henry IV declared it illegal in England in 1406.
Physics and chemistry have long marched ahead, leaving the traces of their arcane origins to fade into oblivion and abandoning all reference to the psyche, originally inextricably bound up in the practice of any magical art. Everything that cannot be explained through the canons of proven experiment has been confuted and excommunicated from the field of scientific research and denied as untrue. Thus phenomena such as psycho-kinesis, geomancy, telepathy, foresight and so on have been kept alive only in myths, sagas and legends and are seen only as old-fashioned superstitions.
Carl Gustav Jung attributed the origin of paranormal phenomena, known also as extra-sensorial perception (ESP), to an erratic and peculiar activity on the part of the human psyche not explicable through the laws of science, whose laws are suitable only for macrophysical quantities.
‘There are things,’ he said, ‘that people do not talk about for fear of exposing themselves to thoughtless ridicule… I was amazed to see how carefully their secret was guarded.”

One well-reported case of psycho-kinesis is that one of the Capuchin friar, Joseph of Cupertino (1603–1663), who in the grip of extreme ecstasy was said to levitate and fly. The friar was interviewed by the Inquisition on a charge of witchcraft and sent into isolation in one monastery after another, where he kept on levitating until his death. Centuries later Joseph was canonized as the patron saint of travellers, aviators and astronauts.
The movie ‘The Water Diviner’ has drawn public attention to a facet of geomancy, once widely practised in the countryside all over Europe. When looking for underground water for irrigation purposes, farmers would call on the assistance of experts, known as water diviners.
Telepathy is implicitly a concept of everyday life, witness the old expression ‘you have just read my mind’. The experiments conducted by J.B. Rhine, the Father of Modern Parapsychology .

(1895–1980), at Duke University, North Carolina, have shown that ‘telepaths’ can read a series of cards before they are turned face up but boredom or lack of interest in the course of such experiments are negative factors. As Albertus Magnus said, the genuine alchemist should choose his days and hours for labour with discretion. Furthermore, in keeping with Jung’s theory of the psychic relativity of time-space, distances in time or space do not appear in any way as inhibiting factors in the outcome of experiments.
And now we come to the most inexplicable facet of the whole paranormal conundrum. How is it that our minds are capable on occasion of slipping backwards and forwards in time so as to read past and future events?

The English engineer J.W. Dunne (1866–1949), when serving in the Boer War, foresaw the catastrophic volcanic eruption that was so soon to destroy Martinique thousands of miles away in the Caribbean. He explained this paranormal experience in his book, “ An Experiment with Time. ”
Dunne and others tried to give precognition some sort of scientific basis but the most intelligible hypothesis would seem to remain the one provided by Carl Gustav Jung, namely that ESP phenomena are connected to the absolute knowledge of our collective unconscious, where space and time are contracted to almost zero. These paranormal phenomena display an erratic and unforeseeable pattern, being singularities similar to those occurring in physics.
In the unrelenting search for the laws that govern matter, the old magic has been bypassed, dismantled, explained away. Alongside mankind’s growing dominion over matter, a sort of modern black magic has been building up: nuclear radioactivity, biochemical arms, pollution, deforestation and so on, and we have neglected to focus on the human psyche, which, through its where’s and when’s, makes relative any intended scientific objectivity. It is high time we looked for a fresh white magic and that we investigated our common ancestral pattern of unconscious fears, wishes, dreams and nightmares. In doing so let us go back to the ancient magic riddles and start again from the dictum of the Delphic oracle: “ Know thyself. ”