Medieval Hymn for Jerusalem: O Jerusalem - Hildegard of Bingen (Lyric video)

A Scythian ceremonial golden helmet with a fighting scene, excavated in the burial mound Perderieva Mogila near Zrubne in the Don basin, 4th century BC; a showpiece of the archaeological Museum of Historical Treasures of Ukraine, Kiev.

Source: De Krim. Goud en geheimen van de Zwarte Zee. Allard Pierson Museum Series volume 4, 35.

Van der Laarse, R. (2016). Who Owns the Crimean Past? Conflicted Heritage and Ukrainian Identities. A Critical Biographic Approach of Europe’s Past: Proceedings Finissage Colloguium Ename. (pp. 15-53).

Aesop's Fables: The man with the two mistresses

"There was a woman who had a middle-aged man as her lover and although she was no spring chicken herself, she concealed her age with exquisite grace. There was also a beautiful young girl who had caught the man's fancy.

Both women wanted to seem a suitable partner for him, so they began plucking out his hair in turn. The man imagined that his looks were being improved by their attentions but in the end he went bald, since the young girl plucked out every one of his gray hairs, while the older woman plucked out all the black ones."

The Moral: Tis a much harder thing to please two Wives, than two Masters; and he's a bold Man that offers at it. (L'Estrange, 1692)

Aesop's Fables [Translated by Laura Gibbs]
Art: Johannot, T. (1803-1852). L’homme entre deux ages et ses deux maîtresses.

The Nemean Lion
Initially, Hercules was required to complete ten labors, not twelve. King Eurystheus decided Hercules' first task would be to bring him the skin of an invulnerable lion which terrorized the hills around Nemea.
Setting out on such a seemingly impossible labor, Hercules came to a town called Cleonae, where he stayed at the house of a poor workman-for-hire, Molorchus. When his host offered to sacrifice an animal to pray for a safe lion hunt, Hercules asked him to wait 30 days. If the hero returned with the lion's skin, they would sacrifice to Zeus, king of the gods. If Hercules died trying to kill the lion, Molorchus agreed to sacrifice instead to Hercules, as a hero.
When Hercules got to Nemea and began tracking the terrible lion, he soon discovered his arrows were useless against the beast. Hercules picked up his club and went after the lion. Following it to a cave which had two entrances, Hercules blocked one of the doorways, then approached the fierce lion through the other. Grasping the lion in his mighty arms, and ignoring its powerful claws, he held it tightly until he'd choked it to death.
Hercules returned to Cleonae, carrying the dead lion, and found Molorchus on the 30th day after he'd left for the hunt. Instead of sacrificing to Hercules as a dead man, Molorchus and Hercules were able to sacrifice together, to Zeus.
When Hercules made it back to Mycenae, Eurystheus was amazed that the hero had managed such an impossible task. The king became afraid of Hercules, and forbade him from entering through the gates of the city. Furthermore, Eurystheus had a large bronze jar made and buried partway in the earth, where he could hide from Hercules if need be. After that, Eurystheus sent his commands to Hercules through a herald, refusing to see the powerful hero face to face.
Many times we can identify Hercules in ancient Greek vase paintings or sculptures simply because he is depicted wearing a lion skin. Ancient writers disagreed as to whether the skin Hercules wore was that of the Nemean lion, or one from a different lion, which Hercules was said to have killed when he was 18 years old. The playwright Euripides wrote that Hercules' lion skin came from the grove of Zeus, the sanctuary at Nemea:

1989 Tiananmen Square, "Nothing happened here"

Public Radio International. (2014). For many Chinese born after the Tiananmen Square protests, 1989 is the year nothing happened. [online] Available at: https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-06-04/many-chinese-born-after-tiananmen-square-protests-1989-year-nothing-happened.

The Races of Hercules: the Spartans

The Spartans regarded themselves as a people of multiple bloodlines, one group claiming descent from Hercules. They considered themselves Heraclidae—descendants of Hercules—who joined with the Dorians and settled in Peloponnesus, which was not their original homeland.

"The Heraclidae who joined with the Dorians, and came into Peloponnesus, became a numerous and glorious race in Sparta... but the kings were chosen out of two only, called the Eurypontidae and the Agiadae." (Plutarch)

Special racial restrictions were imposed on Hercules’s descendants to prevent mixing:

"Lysander, who was still ephor, resolving to be revenged on Leonidas, drew up an information against him, grounded on two old laws: the one forbids any of the blood of Hercules to raise up children by a foreign woman, and the other makes it capital for a Lacedaemonian to leave his country to settle among foreigners." (Plutarch)

The Spartans of Herculean descent considered it a crime to allow bastards or foreigners to rule over them and also prohibited other bloodlines from producing kings:

"...the kingdom would be a lame one if bastards and false-born should govern with the posterity of Hercules."

This means that the famous Spartan kings like Leonidas I, who fell fighting against the Persians, would be of Herculean blood. Plutarch also explained that this is how they maintained their supremacy in the region:

"Greece presently saw Sparta exert her sovereign power over all Peloponnesus... freed Greece from Illyrian and Gaulish violence, and placed her once again under the orderly rule of the sons of Hercules."

Reference:
Life of Lysander by Plutarch. Available at: https://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/lysander.html

A Chinese man stopping a type 69

Fallen victims of the massacre

On June 11, 1963, Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk from the Linh-Mu Pagoda in Hue, Vietnam, burned himself to death at a busy intersection in downtown Saigon, Vietnam.. Eye witness accounts state that Thich Quang Duc and at least two fellow monks arrived at the intersection by car, Thich Quang Duc got out of the car, assumed the traditional lotus position and the accompanying monks helped him pour gasoline over himself. He ignited the gasoline by lighting a match and burned to death in a matter of minutes.

Thich Quang Duc had prepared himself for his self-immolation through several weeks of meditation and had explained his motivation in letters to members of his Buddhist community as well as to the government of South Vietnam in the weeks prior to his self-immolation. In these letters he described his desire to bring attention to the repressive policies of the Catholic Diem regime that controlled the South Vietnamese government at the time. Prior to the self-immolation, the South Vietnamese Buddhists had made the following requests to the Diem regime, asking it to:
1. Lift its ban on flying the traditional Buddhist flag;
2. Grant Buddhism the same rights as Catholicism;
3. Stop detaining Buddhists;
4. Give Buddhist monks and nuns the right to practice and spread their religion; and
5. Pay fair compensations to the victim’s families and punish those responsible for their deaths.
When these requests were not addressed by the Deim regime, Thich Quang Duc carried out his self-immolation. Following his death, Thich Quang Duc was cremated and legend has it that his heart would not burn. As a result, his heart is considered Holy and is in the custody of the Reserve Bank of Vietnam.

Achilles and the slaying of Hector

Achilles glared at him and answered, "Fool, prate not to me about covenants. There can be no covenants between men and lions, wolves and lambs can never be of one mind, but hate each other out and out and through. Therefore there can be no understanding between you and me, nor may there be any covenants between us, till one or other shall fall and glut grim Mars with his life's blood. Put forth all your strength; you have need now to prove yourself indeed a bold soldier and man of war. You have no more chance... you shall now pay me in full for the grief you have caused me on account of my comrades whom you have killed..."

...Achilles mad with rage darted towards him, with his wondrous shield before his breast, and his gleaming helmet, made with four layers of metal, nodding fiercely forward...

Homer. The Illiad.

On October 7, the Church celebrates the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, but not many people know how this feast originated.

A few centuries after Christianity, the religion of Islam was born. By the middle of the seventh century, Islam spread through the Middle East. But toward the end of the first millennium, the Moslem Turks, began to invade and conquer the rest of the Christian world. This became known as the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire began a rapid expanse that extended as far East as Western Europe.
Right around Halloween, we begin seeing Dracula movies on TV. Count Dracula was actually a historical figure, Vlad Dracula, also called Vlad the Impaler, who was a medieval warlord who defended his homeland of Transylvania from the invading Ottoman Turks. Transylvania is a region in modern day Romania. That’s how far west the Moslems expanded.
The Moors also annihilated Christianity in the North of Africa, crossed the straits of Gibraltar, and invaded Spain. In Spain, In fact, the Moors remained in Spain until the late 1400’s, when King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain married, combined their kingdoms and drove the Moors back across the Straits of Gibraltar into Africa. Ferdinand and Isabella are, of course, most famous for funding the expedition of Christopher Columbus several years later in 1492. But when they succeeded in driving the Moors out of Spain it marked the beginning of the end of the Ottoman Empire.
This brings us to the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. In 1571, the Ottoman Turks, in one last ditch effort to conquer Europe, decided on a naval action. And launching their fleet from Northern Africa, they sailed across the Mediterranean in an attempt to take Lepanto and launch an invasion from there. Had they succeeded, they would have split the Christian world in two, and could divide and conquer it.
Since no one was expecting an invasion from the sea, no one was prepared for it. Yet the Christian fleet sailed out to meet the Moslem one in an attempt to repel, or at least slow down, the invasion. The night before and the morning of the battle, the sailors of the Christian fleet, convinced they were sailing to their doom, repeatedly prayed the Rosary. At the same time, the Pope led a Rosary procession in Rome, praying for success against the Muslim invaders. And on October 7. 1571, the day of the battle and of the Rosary procession in St. Peter’s Square, the Christian fleet not only succeeded in repelling the Moslem fleet, but, for the Moslems, it was a complete disaster. The loss was so complete and
catastrophic that the Ottomans were never able to launch a major offensive against the Christian world again. From there, the Ottoman Empire slowly began to retreat back to the Middle East.
Pope Pius V established the feast day of Our Lady of the Rosary on the anniversary of that epic battle to demonstrate and celebrate the intercessory power of the Rosary. In fact, with the exception of the Mass, the Rosary is one of the most powerful prayers we have been given, since this devotion doesn’t just invoke the intercession of a saint, but it is a meditation on salvation history itself.
The Rosary remains a powerful prayer to defend us on earth, and a powerful tool to help us attain eternal life. In every approved apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary, our Lady stresses the need to pray the Rosary.