Author: briery

26/f

Johann Faust – Höllenzwang (17th c.). [x]
At the beginning of the 17th century, a book of black magic was
published, attributed to the mythical Faust and known by the title
Höllenzwang. The library in Weimar owned a manuscript of this text,
which Goethe was aware of. The document, which is difficult to date, is
written in cabalistic signs and, according to a German gloss, contains a
series of magic spells for exorcists.

“Editors note: An October 2012 genetic
study published in  Science Magazine found that the Khoisan in southern
Africa are the oldest ethnic group of modern humans, with their
ancestral line originating about 100,000 years ago. The Khoisan,
formerly called by the derogatory term “Bushmen,” are genetically unique
and no other currently known population had separated so early from our
common modern human ancestor, according to the report.

The Khoisan live mainly in southern Africa, in territory spanning
Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. They are
largely divided into two groups — hunters and gathers (Sans people) and
keepers of livestock (Khoikhoi people). The Khoisan languages include
the distinctive click sounds that aren’t found in the languages of their
neighbors.

From the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic periods, hunting and
gathering cultures known as the Sangoan occupied southern Africa in
areas where annual rainfall is less than a metre (1000 mm; 40 in), and
today’s San and Khoi people resemble the ancient Sangoan skeletal
remains. These Late Stone Age people in parts of southern Africa were
the ancestors of the Khoisan people who inhabited the Kalahari Desert.
Probably due to their region’s lack of suitable candidates for
domestication, the Khoisan did not have farming or domesticated chickens
until a few hundred years ago, when they adopted the domesticated
cattle and sheep of the Bantu that had spread in advance of the people’s
actual arrival.

Khoisan is a term used by physical anthropologists to distinguish the
aboriginal people of southern Africa from their black African farming
neighbours.
The original San hunter-gatherer groups lived on this land for about 100
000 years before the arrival of other black people and European
settlers. When the pastoral KhoiKhoi appeared 2 000 years ago, they saw
people similar to them in physical appearance, but with a different
culture. They called these elders of the land ‘the San’, which means
‘people different from ourselves’. The San men usually hunted antelope
using bows and arrows smeared with poison. @therealblackhistorian” 

https://www.instagram.com/p/BnI7tsYFDK5/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=7gee8uonpwm5

“Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this
world but people capable of giving them their attention. The capacity to
give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing;
it is almost a miracle, it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they
have this capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness,
pity are not enough. The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply
means being able to say to him: ‘What are you going through?’ It is a
recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a
collection, or a specimen from the social category labeled
‘unfortunate,’ but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped
with a special mark by affliction. For this reason it is enough, but it
is indispensable, to know how to look at him in a certain way. This way
of looking is first of all attentive. The soul empties itself of all its
own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking
at, just as he is, in all his truth.”


— Simone Weil, “Reflection on the Right Use of School Studies” from the Simone Weil Reader, p. 51

“Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
 ― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
— Simone Weil, from an April 13, 1942 letter to poet Joë Bousquet