Sisyphus. In Greek mythology Sisyphus (/ˈsɪsɪfəs/;[1] Greek: Σίσυφος, Sísyphos) was a king of Ephyra (now known as Corinth) punished for chronic deceitfulness by being compelled to roll an immense boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and to repeat this action forever. Mythology[edit] Zeus then ordered Thanatos, the personification of death, to chain King Sisyphus down below in Tartarus. Sisyphus was curious as to why Hermes, whose job was to guide souls to the Underworld, had not come. King Sisyphus slyly asked Thanatos to demonstrate how the chains worked. As Thanatos was granting his wish, Sisyphus then seized the advantage and trapped Thanatos instead. This caused an uproar since no human could die with Thanatos disabled. In another version, Hades was sent to chain Sisyphus, and was chained himself.
Before King Sisyphus died however, he had told his wife to throw his naked body into the middle of the public square (purportedly as a test of his wife's love for him). See also[edit] Major Arcana. Dummett writes that originally the Major Arcana had simple allegorical or exoteric meaning, mostly originating in elite ideology in the Italian courts of the 15th century when it was invented.[3] The occult significance only began to emerge in the 18th century when Antoine Court de Gébelin (a Swiss clergyman and Freemason) published Le Monde Primitif.
List of the Major Arcana[edit] Each Major Arcanum depicts a scene, mostly featuring a person or several people, with many symbolic elements. In many decks, each has a number (usually in Roman numerals) and a name, though not all decks have both, and some have only a picture. The earliest decks bore unnamed and unnumbered pictures on the Majors (probably because a great many of the people using them at the time were illiterate), and the order of cards was not standardized. [citation needed] Nevertheless, one of the most common sets of names and numbers is as follows: Esotericism[edit] Fortune telling[edit] Mysticism[edit] Criticism[edit] Fenrir. Odin and Fenris (1909) by Dorothy Hardy In Norse mythology, Fenrir (Old Norse: "fen-dweller"),[1] Fenrisúlfr (Old Norse: "Fenris wolf"),[2] Hróðvitnir (Old Norse: "fame-wolf"),[3] or Vánagandr (Old Norse: "the monster of the river Ván")[4] is a monstrous wolf.
Fenrir is attested in the Poetic Edda, compiled in the 13th century from earlier traditional sources, and the Prose Edda and Heimskringla, written in the 13th century by Snorri Sturluson. In both the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda, Fenrir is the father of the wolves Sköll and Hati Hróðvitnisson, is a son of Loki, and is foretold to kill the god Odin during the events of Ragnarök, but will in turn be killed by Odin's son Víðarr. In the Prose Edda, additional information is given about Fenrir, including that, due to the gods' knowledge of prophecies foretelling great trouble from Fenrir and his rapid growth, the gods bound him, and as a result Fenrir bit off the right hand of the god Týr.
Attestations[edit] Poetic Edda[edit] Thanatos. In myth and poetry "And there the children of dark Night have their dwellings, Sleep and Death, awful gods. The glowing Sun never looks upon them with his beams, neither as he goes up into heaven, nor as he comes down from heaven. And the former of them roams peacefully over the earth and the sea's broad back and is kindly to men; but the other has a heart of iron, and his spirit within him is pitiless as bronze: whomsoever of men he has once seized he holds fast: and he is hateful even to the deathless gods. " [3] Homer also confirmed Hypnos and Thanatos as twin brothers in his epic poem, the Iliad, where they were charged by Zeus via Apollo with the swift delivery of the slain hero Sarpedon to his homeland of Lycia.
"Then (Apollon) gave him [Sarpedon] into the charge of swift messengers to carry him, of Hypnos and Thanatos, who are twin brothers, and these two presently laid him down within the rich countryside of broad Lycia. " [4] Thanatos was regarded[by whom?] Euripides, in Alcestis: Æsir–Vanir War. Óðinn throws his spear at the Vanir host, illustration by Lorenz Frølich (1895) In Norse mythology, the Æsir–Vanir War was a conflict between the Æsir and the Vanir, two groups of gods, that ultimately resulted in the unification of the two groups into a single group of gods. The war is an important event in Norse mythology, and the implications of the war and the potential historicity surrounding the accounts of the war are a matter of scholarly debate and discourse.
Fragmented information about the war appears in surviving sources, including Völuspá, a poem collected in the Poetic Edda in the 13th century from earlier traditional sources; in the book Skáldskaparmál in the Prose Edda, written in the 13th century by Snorri Sturluson; and in euhemerized form in the Ynglinga saga from Heimskringla, also written by Snorri Sturluson in the 13th century. Attestations[edit] The following attestations provide information about the war: Poetic Edda[edit] Prose Edda[edit] Heimskringla[edit] Other[edit]
Ragnarök. The north portal of the 11th century Urnes stave church has been interpreted as containing depictions of snakes and dragons that represent Ragnarök In Norse mythology, Ragnarök is a series of future events, including a great battle foretold to ultimately result in the death of a number of major figures (including the gods Odin, Thor, Týr, Freyr, Heimdallr, and Loki), the occurrence of various natural disasters, and the subsequent submersion of the world in water. Afterward, the world will resurface anew and fertile, the surviving and returning gods will meet, and the world will be repopulated by two human survivors. Ragnarök is an important event in the Norse canon, and has been the subject of scholarly discourse and theory. The event is attested primarily in the Poetic Edda, compiled in the 13th century from earlier traditional sources, and the Prose Edda, written in the 13th century by Snorri Sturluson.
Mythology[edit] The Old Norse word "ragnarok" is a compound of two words. The Tortoise and the Hare. "The Tortoise and the Hare", from an edition of Aesop's Fables illustrated by Arthur Rackham, 1912 The Tortoise and the Hare is one of Aesop's Fables and is numbered 226 in the Perry Index.[1] The account of a race between unequal partners has attracted conflicting interpretations.
It is itself a variant of a common folktale theme in which ingenuity and trickery (rather than doggedness) are employed to overcome a stronger opponent. An ambiguous story[edit] The story concerns a Hare who ridicules a slow-moving Tortoise and is challenged by the tortoise to a race. As in several other fables by Aesop, there is a moral ambiguity about the lesson it is teaching. Applications[edit] In Classical times the story was annexed to a philosophical problem by Zeno of Elea in one of many demonstrations that movement is impossible to define satisfactorily.
Illustrations of the fable[edit] The fable has also been illustrated on stamps from several countries. Musical versions[edit] Film adaptations[edit]