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In this article, Hansen analyzes and discusses the construction of the fourth-century BC. Temple of Apollo at Delphi, taking into consideration the practical aspects of this difficult construction process. He includes the unique epigraphic building accounts that have been made accessible to non-philologists with Jean Bousque's edition and French translation of the fragments published in 1989. Thereby Hansen offers a masterful revised calendar of the whole building process of the third largest temple on the Greek mainland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While scholars agree that young-earth creationism is problematic, divisions remain over the fundamental question of whether creationism makes testable empirical claims. The key to resolving this impasse lies in Philip Gosse's Omphalos (1857) where he argued that a miraculously created world would exactly resemble one that had formed naturally. Creationists have both adopted and contested the reasoning in Omphalos, but ultimately failed to displace Gosse's more coherent approach. Consequently, as this paper will show, the creationist framework is not only incapable of grounding testable scientific models, but entails the absurd position that much of the universe's apparent history never occurred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the ancient Greek beliefs from a different perspective; I attempt to approach the old themes in an interdisciplinary way. I refer to the studies of French anthropology and on the ethnological studies of the conceptualization of the landscape through oral tradition. Some classical antiquity researchers have already done so. Such authors that relate to ancient Greece as a whole discuss the symbolism of sacrifices and snakes. Thus, the belief system of the community manifests in the landscape in its symbolic sense, and with this working guide, I managed to apply the abovementioned contemporary (modern) perspectives to the example of the ancient Greek Delphi.

Kukai as an Enlightened Transculturalist: Reweaving Cultural Threads from the Universal Womb in This Life It is not unusual for one to experience a transculturally induced existential crisis which could force one to make an arduous philosophical journey in order to liberate oneself from the realm of this lingua-cultural dilemma. In fact, it is this very constraint, which offers its bearer an entry through a gate to reach an evolutionarily critical threshold. No longer measurable by convention, this realm is at once simple and profound as nature itself. That Kukai (a.k.a., Kobo Daishi), the ninth century Japanese Buddhist monk, invented the Japanese syllabic alphabet hiragana remains an academic debate to this day, and may remain so as long as we remain horizontally in our search relying on traditional discursive methods. However, in this essay, the author contends that the answer to this puzzle may be revealed to us when we recognize him as a transculturalist-in-the-making, owing not only to the unique sets of situations he had encountered both at home and abroad in that particular historical period, but more importantly how he responded to them. That is, when we regard “his invention” beyond its simple renderings of Japanese phonemes, they begin to reveal themselves as a natural byproduct of his primary search—the threshold of the original transmission of Esoteric Buddhism. Kukai’s primary intention was two folds—cultural and spiritual. Publicly he had envisioned that his new government should help Japan re-orient itself as an authentic culture rather than to continue emulating the foreign ways meaninglessly following the prestigious Tang model. Personally he was in search of a method which would help one to attain enlightenment as Kukai had thought would be possible in this very life. Accordingly, the author is not hesitant to assume that Kukai, as a transculturalist, may have chosen anonymity. That is, if he had indeed sown the seed of sustainability for Japanese culture among his people linguistically through the kana syllabary and spiritually through dharma operative embodied by its emperors ritually, it was enough for Kukai that his essence should live on namelessly. In this sense, Kukai as a bodhisattva embodies the Zen koan uttered by Linji Yixuan: “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” Thusly posited, this essay will nonetheless elucidate Kukai’s transcultural footing leading up to “his” invention of kana syllabary. It will rely on the language of phenomenology, which emerged in the early 20th century West at the developing phase of the East-West cultural intercourse. Unlike the discursive Cartesian approach to categorize the East as “mysterious,” it allows its bearer to use the Western language yet empowering him/her to elucidate the source of the “structural invisible” inherent in the Eastern thought. For the latter the “structural visible” has always meant to function as its inalienable ontological partner, however ambiguously. The much-suppressed bodily existence, which has nonetheless surfaced as expressions of the dark “otherness” now join the mind as an egalitarian co-catalyst. Together they will help unravel the truth’s operative at its dynamic threshold. A transculturalist is its sustainer, like a seed fire keeper of old. In this sense the essay celebrates a trans-chronologically realized moment of multiple transcultural experiences whose time has come. It honors the inherently primordial operative, which has always already been there and when allowed to presence itself inter-subjectively to our consciousness, reverberates at the nature-human threshold. Kūkai jako oświecony myśliciel transkulturowy: ponowne tkanie w tym życiu kulturowych nici z uniwersalnego źródła Fakt wymyślenia japońskiego sylabariusza hiragana przez japońskiego mnicha buddyjskiego Kūkaia 空海 (lub też Kōbo Daishi) do dziś pozostaje przedmiotem akademickich debat i może nim pozostać tak długo, jak długo będziemy dyskursywnie trzymać się horyzontalnej wizji rzeczywistości. W eseju autorka twierdzi, że aby znaleźć odpowiedź na tę łamigłówkę należy uznać Kūkaia za osobę dochodzącą do transkulturowości (transculturalist-in-the-making). Mnich zawdzięcza to wyjątkowym sytuacjom, które napotkał w domu i za granicą, ale także, co ważniejsze, sposobowi, w jaki na nie zareagował. Kiedy zaczniemy postrzegać „jego wynalazek” jako coś więcej niż uproszczone przedstawienia japońskich fonemów, ujawni się on jako naturalny produkt uboczny pierwotnych poszukiwań Kūkaia – droga do oryginalnego przekazu buddyzmu ezoterycznego. Sugeruje to, że ścieżka jego duchowego poszukiwania, która kwestionuje również kondycję własnej kultury, jest z natury rzeczy połączona z semantyką. Publicznie Kūkai zakładał, że nowy rząd powinien pomóc Japonii skierować się ku autentycznej kulturze zamiast kontynuować naśladownictwo prestiżowego modelu zagranicznego epoki Tang. Osobiście szukał metody, która pomogłaby jednostce osiągnąć oświecenie, które według niego było możliwe jeszcze w tym życiu. W konsekwencji, transkulturowa wyprawa Kūkaia doprowadziła go do świętego królestwa języka. W związku z tym autorka nie waha się twierdzić, że Kūkai, jako myśliciel transkulturowy, mógł wybrać anonimowość. Mnichowi wystarczało zasianie ziarna trwałości japońskiej kultury, językowo poprzez sylabariusz kana i rytualnie poprzez działanie dharmy wcielonej w cesarzy, a jego dziedzictwo mogło pozostać bezimienne. Do tego, jak żył Kūkai pasują słowa wypowiedziane przez Linji Yixuan w koanie Zen: „Jeśli spotkasz Buddę na drodze, zabij go”. Esej jest próbą wyjaśnienia transkulturowych podstaw Kūkaia, które doprowadziły do powstania sylabariusza kana. Całość opiera się na języku fenomenologii, który pojawił się na początku XX wieku na Zachodzie, w fazie rozwoju stosunków kulturalnych Wschód-Zachód. W przeciwieństwie do dyskursywnego podejścia kartezjańskiego, które kategoryzuje Wschód jako „tajemniczy”, fenomenologia pozwala na używanie języka zachodniego, dając możliwość wyjaśnienia „strukturalnie niewidzialnego”, które tkwi we wschodniej retoryce – potężnym, choć niejednoznacznym partnerze ontologicznym. Mocno stłumiona egzystencja fizyczna, która mimo wszystko pojawiła się jako wyraz ciemnej „inności”, teraz łączy się z umysłem jako egalitarny współ-katalizator. Razem pomogą rozwikłać działanie prawdy w jej dynamicznym związku. Myśliciel transkulturowy jest filarem prawdy, jak stary strażnik ognia. W tym duchu esej świętuje trans-chronologicznie zrealizowany moment wielu transkulturowych doświadczeń, których czas właśnie nadszedł. Honoruje on pierwotny czynnik, który, gdy pozwalamy mu ujawnić się intersubiektywnie naszej świadomości, rozbrzmiewa na styku człowieka z naturą. Hołd złożony książce „Pamiętnik z Tosy” Kino Tsurayukiego, japońskiego pisarza z X wieku, jest nie tylko bezpośrednią odpowiedzią na dziedzictwo językowo-kulturowe Kūkaia, ale także pośrednio odpowiedzią na jego pierwotne dociekania – czy można doznać oświecenia w tym życiu?

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The emergence of Ionian physics constitutes to my mind an epistemological break away from the previous world views. The confrontation and dialogue between those forms of thought henceforward remain an irreplaceable heuristic tool, the pertinence of which we mean to propose from two instances which illustrate, each in its own way, the aptitude of mythical narratives to make the most of notions and concepts, even of new intellectual procedures by integrating them into their narrative logic. In the first instance, we see Tiresias the theologian deal playfully with the allegories wherewith the gods and their ordeals used to be reduced to a description of the elements and natural phenomena. For the soothsayer of the Bacchae, it was Zeus who, allegorist in concreto, in order to cheat his vindictive spouse, substitutes a piece of ether for Dionysos. In the second instance, the sovereign of Olympus carries out a real scientific experiment, measuring, as an expert surveyor would do, the world which he governs but the centre of which he is ignorant of : a world which for the purpose in hand becomes as abstract as a mathematical object. Not only therefore -as had long been emphasized- the birth in Greece of a positive and critical thought did not dry up the creative mytho-poetic strain but one can note that the latter was able to take hold of the new theories and representations to feed its fabrication, thereby depriving them ipso facto of their critical potentiality.

This article sets out to examine the pervasive influence of spiritualist and occultist thinking on a number of Fin-de-siecle writers of popular horror fictions set in Wales or Ireland and published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most notably in the work of Arthur Machen, but also in that of William Hope Hodgson and H. P. Lovecraft. The article also examines the influence of occult Celticism on a pair of landmark early Universal horror films, James Whale's The Old Dark House (1933) and George Waggner's The Wolf Man (1941), both set in Wales. The article examines the significance of the omphalos as a geomantic singularity of spiritual force, a portal between two worlds, and uses this to suggest ways in which many writers around the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century saw themselves as straddling a borderland between the worlds of spirit and matter. Furthermore, the theories and rhetoric of Celticism, I suggest, are put to characteristically contradictory ends in these fictions (and elsewhere), simultaneously validating the spiritual identity of the native Welsh and Irish, and subhumanizing or monstering them through their recurring representation as inarticulate beast-men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]