19a. Definition and Intent // 19b. Story Eight
1744. Waiting for Carol at Kroger Marketplace on Columbus Pike. We had supper at Five Guys, the price is up twenty percent from when we used to come here. It was under twenty, and this time, for the same food, the price was twenty-six dollars -- good food, though. This is how it is when heartansoulanmind are not involved -- practical stuff of no real consequence beyond immediate pleasure and necessity. No empathy, no sympathy, just get what you need, do what you have to do to stay safe and healthy, and move on to the next day. We go to Kim's tomorrow afternoon for a virtual session with Andy about our portfolio. It is tomorrow at two. On Thursday at two, we have our dental appointments in Mason with Dr. Erbeck.
Evening. You had a fairly quiet day. Yesterday you wanted to add a Wikipedia article on Epistemology as a further definition for this Blog. Drop it in. – Ms. Havisham
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EPISTEMOLOGY
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Epistemology (from Greek ἐπιστήμη, epistēmē 'knowledge', and -logy) is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemologists study the nature of knowledge, epistemic justification, the rationality of belief, and various related issues. Epistemology is considered one of the four main branches of philosophy, ethics, logic, and metaphysics.[1]
Debates in epistemology are generally clustered around four core areas:[2][3][4]
1. The philosophical analysis of the nature of knowledge and the conditions required for a belief to constitute knowledge, such as truth and justification
2. Potential sources of knowledge and justified belief, such as perception, reason, memory, and testimony
3. The structure of a body of knowledge or justified belief, including whether all justified beliefs must be derived from justified foundational beliefs or whether justification requires only a coherent set of beliefs
4. Philosophical skepticism, which questions the possibility of knowledge, and related problems, such as whether skepticism poses a threat to our ordinary knowledge claims and whether it is possible to refute skeptical arguments
In these debates and others, epistemology aims to answer questions such as "What do we know?", "What does it mean to say that we know something?" "What makes justified beliefs justified?" and "How do we know that we know?".
BACKGROUND
ETYMOLOGY
The word epistemology is derived from the ancient Greek epistēmē, meaning "knowledge," and the suffix -logia, meaning "logical discourse" (derived from the Greek word logos meaning "discourse").[8] The word's appearance in English was predated by the German term Wissenschaftslehre (literally, the theory of science), which was introduced by philosophers Johann Fichte and Bernard Bolzano in the late 18th century. The word "epistemology" first appeared in 1847, in a review in New York's Eclectic Magazine. It was first used as a translation of the word Wissenschaftslehre as it appears in a philosophical novel by German author Jean Paul:
The title of one of the principal works of Fichte is ′Wissenschaftslehre,′ which, after the analogy of technology ... we render epistemology.[9]
The word "epistemology" was properly introduced into Anglophone philosophical literature by Scottish philosopher James Frederick Ferrier in 1854, who used it in his Institutes of Metaphysics:
This section of the science is properly termed the Epistemology—the doctrine or theory of knowing, just as ontology is the science of being... It answers the general question, ‘What is knowing and the known?’—or more shortly, ‘What is knowledge?’[10]
It is important to note that the French term épistémologie is used with a different and far narrower meaning than the English term "epistemology", being used by French philosophers to refer solely to science philosophy. For instance, Émile Meyerson opened his Identity and Reality, written in 1908, with the remark that the word 'is becoming current' as equivalent to 'the philosophy of the sciences.'[11]
During the subsequent Hellenistic period, philosophical schools began to appear to focus on epistemological questions, often in the form of philosophical skepticism.[1] For instance, the Pyrrhonian skepticism of Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus held that eudaimonia (flourishing, happiness, or "the good life") could be attained through the application of epoché (suspension of judgment) regarding all non-evident matters. Pyrrhonism was particularly concerned with undermining the epistemological dogmas of Stoicism and Epicureanism.[1] The other major school of Hellenistic skepticism was Academic skepticism, most notably defended by Carneades and Arcesilaus, which predominated in the Platonic Academy for almost two centuries.[1]
In ancient India the Ajñana school of ancient Indian philosophy promoted skepticism. Ajñana was a Śramaṇa movement and a major rival of early Buddhism, Jainism and the Ājīvika school. They held that it was impossible to obtain knowledge of metaphysical nature or ascertain the truth value of philosophical propositions; and even if knowledge was possible, it was useless and disadvantageous for final salvation. They were specialized in refutation without propagating any positive doctrine of their own.
After the ancient philosophical era but before the modern philosophical era, several Medieval philosophers also engaged with epistemological questions at length. Most notable among the Medievals for their contributions to epistemology were Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham.[1]
Epistemology largely came to the fore in philosophy during the early modern period. Historians of philosophy traditionally divide up into a dispute between empiricists (including John Locke, David Hume, and George Berkeley) and rationalists (including René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Leibniz).[1] The debate between them has often been framed using whether knowledge comes primarily from sensory experience(empiricism), or whether a significant portion of our knowledge is derived entirely from our faculty of reason (rationalism). According to some scholars, this dispute was resolved in the late 18th century by Immanuel Kant, whose transcendental idealism famously made room for the view that "though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all [knowledge] arises out of experience".[14] While the 19th century saw a decline in interest in epistemological issues, it came back to the forefront with the Vienna Circle and analytic philosophy development.
Scholars use several different methods when trying to understand the relationship between historical epistemology and contemporary epistemology. One of the most contentious questions is this: "Should we assume that the problems of epistemology are perennial, and that trying to reconstruct and evaluate Plato’s or Hume’s or Kant’s arguments is meaningful for current debates, too?"[15] Similarly, there is also a question of whether contemporary philosophers should aim to rationally reconstruct and evaluate historical views in epistemology, or to merely describe them.[15] Barry Stroudclaims that doing epistemology competently requires the historical study of past attempts to find a philosophical understanding of human knowledge's nature and scope.[16] He argues that since inquiry may progress over time, we may not realize how different the questions that contemporary epistemologists ask are from questions asked at various different points in the history of philosophy.[16]
Nearly all debates in epistemology are in some way related to knowledge. Most generally, "knowledge" is a familiarity, awareness, or understanding of someone or something, which might include facts (propositional knowledge), skills (procedural knowledge), or objects (acquaintance knowledge). Philosophers tend to draw an important distinction between three different senses of "knowing" something: "knowing that" (knowing the truth of propositions), "knowing how" (understanding how to perform certain actions), and "knowing by acquaintance" (directly perceiving an object, being familiar with it, or otherwise coming into contact with it).[17] Epistemology is primarily concerned with the first of these forms of knowledge, propositional knowledge. All three senses of "knowing" can be seen in our ordinary use of the word. In mathematics, you can know THAT 2 + 2 = 4. Still, there is also knowing HOW to add two numbers, and knowing a PERSON (e.g., knowing other persons,[18] or knowing oneself), PLACE(e.g., one's hometown), THING (e.g., cars), or ACTIVITY (e.g., addition). While these distinctions are not explicit in English, they are explicitly made in other languages, including French, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, German and Dutch (although some languages related to English have been said to retain these verbs Scots). The theoretical interpretation and significance of these linguistic issues remains controversial.
In his paper On Denoting and his later book Problems of Philosophy, Bertrand Russell brought a great deal of attention to the distinction between "knowledge by description" and "knowledge by acquaintance". Gilbert Ryle is similarly credited with bringing more attention to the distinction between knowing how and knowing that in The Concept of Mind. In Personal Knowledge, Michael Polanyi argues for the epistemological relevance of knowledge how and knowledge that; using the example of the act of balance involved in riding a bicycle, he suggests that the theoretical knowledge of the physics involved in maintaining a state of balance cannot substitute for the practical knowledge of how to ride, and that it is important to understand how both are established and grounded. This position is essentially Ryle's, who argued that a failure to acknowledge the distinction between "knowledge that" and "knowledge how" leads to infinite regress.
A PRIORI AND A POSTERIORI KNOWLEDGE
One of the most important distinctions in epistemology is between what can be known a priori (independently of experience) and what can be known a posteriori (through experience). The terms may be roughly defined as follows:[20]
· A priori knowledge is known independently of experience (that is, it is non-empirical, or arrived at before experience, usually by reason). It will henceforth be acquired through anything independent from experience.
· A posteriori knowledge is known by experience (that is, it is empirical, or arrived at through experience).
Views that emphasize the importance of a priori knowledge are generally classified as rationalist. Views that emphasize the importance of a posteriori knowledge are generally classified as empiricist.
BELIEF
One of the core concepts in epistemology is belief. A belief is an attitude that a person holds regarding anything that they take to be true.[21] For instance, to believe that snow is white is comparable to accepting the truth of the proposition "snow is white". Beliefs can be occurrent (e.g. a person actively thinking "snow is white"), or they can be dispositional (e.g. a person who if asked about the color of snow would assert "snow is white"). While there is no universal agreement about the nature of belief, most contemporary philosophers believe that a disposition to express belief B qualifies as holding the belief B.[21]There are various different ways that contemporary philosophers have tried to describe beliefs, including as representations of ways that the world could be (Jerry Fodor), as dispositions to act as if certain things are true (Roderick Chisholm), as interpretive schemes for making sense of someone's actions (Daniel Dennett and Donald Davidson), or as mental states that fill a particular function (Hilary Putnam).[21] Some have also attempted to offer significant revisions to our notion of belief, including eliminativists about belief who argue that there is no phenomenon in the natural world which corresponds to our folk psychological concept of belief (Paul Churchland) and formal epistemologists who aim to replace our bivalent notion of belief ("either I have a belief or I don't have a belief") with the more permissive, probabilistic notion of credence ("there is an entire spectrum of degrees of belief, not a simple dichotomy between belief and non-belief").[21][22]
While belief plays a significant role in epistemological debates surrounding knowledge and justification, it also has many other philosophical debates in its own right. Notable debates include: "What is the rational way to revise one's beliefs when presented with various sorts of evidence?"; "Is the content of our beliefs entirely determined by our mental states, or do the relevant facts have any bearing on our beliefs (e.g. if I believe that I'm holding a glass of water, is the non-mental fact that water is H2O part of the content of that belief)?"; "How fine-grained or coarse-grained are our beliefs?"; and "Must it be possible for a belief to be expressible in language, or are there non-linguistic beliefs?".[21]
TRUTH
Truth is the property of being in accord with facts or reality.[23] On most views, truth is the correspondence of language or thought to a mind-independent world. This is called the correspondence theory of truth. Among philosophers who think that it is possible to analyze the conditions necessary for knowledge, virtually all of them accept that truth is such a condition. There is much less agreement about the extent to which a knower must know why something is true to know. On such views, something being known implies that it is true. However, this should not be confused for the more contentious view that one must know that one knows to know (the KK principle).[2]
Epistemologists disagree about whether belief is the only truth-bearer. Other common suggestions for things that can bear the property of being true include propositions, sentences, thoughts, utterances, and judgments. Plato, in his Gorgias, argues that belief is the most commonly invoked truth-bearer.
Many of the debates regarding truth are at the crossroads of epistemology and logic.[23] Some contemporary debates regarding truth include: How do we define truth? Is it even possible to give an informative definition of truth? What things are truth-bearers and are therefore capable of being true or false? Are truth and falsity bivalent, or are there other truth values? What are the criteria of truth that allow us to identify it and to distinguish it from falsity? What role does truth play in constituting knowledge? And is truth absolute, or is it merely relative to one's perspective?[23]
JUSTIFICATION
As the term "justification" is used in epistemology, a belief is justified if one has good reason for holding it. Loosely speaking, justification is the reason that someone holds a rationally admissible belief, on the assumption that it is a good reason for holding it. Sources of justification might include perceptual experience (the evidence of the senses), reason, and authoritative testimony. Importantly however, a belief being justified does not guarantee that the belief is true, since a person could be justified in forming beliefs based on compelling evidence that was deceiving.
In Plato's Theaetetus, Socrates considers some theories as to what knowledge is, first excluding merely true belief as an adequate account. For example, an ill person with no medical training but with a generally optimistic attitude might believe that he will quickly recover from his illness. Nevertheless, even if this belief turned out to be true, the patient would not have known that he would get well since his belief lacked justification. The last account that Plato considers is that knowledge is true belief "with an account" that explains or defines it somehow. According to Edmund Gettier, the view that Plato describes here is that knowledge is justified true belief. The truth of this view would entail that to know that a given proposition is true, one must believe the relevant true proposition and have a good reason for doing so.[25] One implication of this would be that no one would gain knowledge by believing something that happened to be true.[26]
Edmund Gettier's famous 1963 paper, "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?", popularized the claim that the definition of knowledge as justified true belief had been widely accepted throughout the history of philosophy.[27] The extent to which this is true is highly contentious, since Plato himself disavowed the "justified true belief" view at the end of the Theaetetus.[28][1] Regardless of the claim's accuracy, Gettier's paper produced major widespread discussion that completely reoriented epistemology in the second half of the 20th century, with a newfound focus on trying to provide an airtight definition of knowledge by adjusting or replacing the "justified true belief" view.[note 2] Today there is still little consensus about whether any set of conditions succeeds in providing a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge, and many contemporary epistemologists have come to the conclusion that no such exception-free definition is possible.[28] However, even if justification fails as a condition for knowledge as some philosophers claim, the question of whether or not a person has good reasons for holding a particular belief in a particular set of circumstances remains a topic of interest to contemporary epistemology. It is unavoidably linked to questions about rationality.[28]
INTERNALISM AND EXTERNALISM
A central debate about the nature of justification is a debate between epistemological externalists on the one hand, and epistemological internalists on the other. While epistemic externalism first arose in attempts to overcome the Gettier problem, it has flourished since as an alternative way of conceiving epistemic justification. The initial development of epistemic externalism is often attributed to Alvin Goldman, although numerous other philosophers have worked on the topic in the time since.[28]
Externalists hold that factors deemed "external", meaning outside of the psychological states of those who gain knowledge, can be conditions of justification. For example, an externalist response to the Gettier problem is to say that there must be a link or dependency between the belief and the state of the external world for a justified true belief to count as knowledge. Usually this is understood to be a causal link. Such causation, to the extent that it is "outside" the mind, would count as an external, knowledge-yielding condition. On the other hand, internalists assert that all knowledge-yielding conditions are within the psychological states of those who gain knowledge.
[* * *]
Though unfamiliar with the internalist/externalist debate himself, many point to René Descartes as an early example of the internalist path to justification. He wrote that, because the only method we perceive the external world is through our senses. Because the senses are not infallible, we should not consider our concept of knowledge infallible. The only way to find anything that could be described as "indubitably true", he advocates, would be to see things "clearly and distinctly".[29] He argued that if there is an omnipotent, good being who made the world, then it's reasonable to believe that people are made with the ability to know. However, this does not mean that man's ability to know is perfect. God gave man the ability to know but not with omniscience. Descartes said that man must use his capacities for knowledge correctly and carefully through methodological doubt.[30]
The dictum "Cogito ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am) is also commonly associated with Descartes' theory. In his own methodological doubt—doubting everything he previously knew so he could start from a blank slate—the first thing that he could not logically bring himself to doubt was his own existence: "I do not exist" would be a contradiction in terms. The act of saying that one does not exist assumes that someone must be making the statement in the first place. Descartes could doubt his senses, body, and the world around him—but he could not deny his own existence, because he was able to doubt and must exist to manifest that doubt. Even if some "evil genius" were deceiving him, he would have to exist to be deceived. This one sure point provided him with what he called his Archimedean point, to further develop his foundation for knowledge. Simply put, Descartes' epistemological justification depended on his indubitable belief in his own existence and his clear and distinct knowledge of God.[31]
While it was not until the modern era that epistemology was first recognized as a distinct philosophical discipline that addresses a well-defined set of questions, almost every major historical philosopher has considered what we know and how we know it.[1] Among the Ancient Greek philosophers, Plato distinguished between inquiry regarding what we know and inquiry regarding what exists, particularly in the Republic, the Theaetetus, and the Meno.[1] A number of important epistemological concerns also appeared in the works of Aristotle.[1]
During the subsequent Hellenistic period, philosophical schools began to appear which had a greater focus on epistemological questions, often in the form of philosophical skepticism.[1] For instance, the Pyrrhonian skepticism of Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus held that eudaimonia (flourishing, happiness, or "the good life") could be attained through the application of epoché (suspension of judgment) regarding all non-evident matters. Pyrrhonism was particularly concerned with undermining the epistemological dogmas of Stoicism and Epicureanism.[1] The other major school of Hellenistic skepticism was Academic skepticism, most notably defended by Carneades and Arcesilaus, which predominated in the Platonic Academy for almost two centuries.[1]
In ancient India the Ajñana school of ancient Indian philosophy promoted skepticism. Ajñana was a Śramaṇa movement and a major rival of early Buddhism, Jainism and the Ājīvika school. They held that it was impossible to obtain knowledge of metaphysical nature or ascertain the truth value of philosophical propositions; and even if knowledge was possible, it was useless and disadvantageous for final salvation. They were specialized in refutation without propagating any positive doctrine of their own.
After the ancient philosophical era but before the modern philosophical era, a number of Medieval philosophers also engaged with epistemological questions at length. Most notable among the Medievals for their contributions to epistemology were Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham.[1]
Epistemology largely came to the fore in philosophy during the early modern period. Historians of philosophy traditionally divide up into a dispute between empiricists (including John Locke, David Hume, and George Berkeley) and rationalists (including René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Leibniz).[1] The debate between them has often been framed using the question of whether knowledge comes primarily from sensory experience(empiricism), or whether a significant portion of our knowledge is derived entirely from our faculty of reason (rationalism). According to some scholars, this dispute was resolved in the late 18th century by Immanuel Kant, whose transcendental idealism famously made room for the view that "though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all [knowledge] arises out of experience."[14] While the 19th century saw a decline in interest in epistemological issues, it came back to the forefront with the Vienna Circle and the development of analytic philosophy.
Scholars use a number of different methods when trying to understand the relationship between historical epistemology and contemporary epistemology. One of the most contentious questions is this: "Should we assume that the problems of epistemology are perennial and that trying to reconstruct and evaluate Plato’s or Hume’s or Kant’s arguments is meaningful for current debates, too?"[15] Similarly, there is also a question of whether contemporary philosophers should aim to rationally reconstruct and evaluate historical views in epistemology or to merely describe them.[15] Barry Stroudclaims that doing epistemology competently requires the historical study of past attempts to find a philosophical understanding of human knowledge's nature and scope.[16] He argues that since inquiry may progress over time, we may not realize how different the questions that contemporary epistemologists ask are from questions asked at various different points in the history of philosophy.[16]
Selected and edited from Wikipedia
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2127. Intent. Definitions are fundamental. I cannot logically function without providing myself definitions from time to time. I realize that this does not lend the Blog to much readership. Right now, it leads to none, but I will carry on because if I publish the book, I am now editing it will be available for background. The first book, which I completed last month, needs a final edit. Once I published it through Amazon, I realized the book, Diplomat's Pouch needs to be slightly edited and retitled because I should not have published it under Philosophy (Transcendental Philosophy). It can be read well enough as Fiction. I will republish it with a different title as fiction in the first half of 2021. On a further note, this book and the last which I hope to begin re-editing this next year will be two continued volumes of two genetically captured fictional family lines in the world. The point is that statistically, most any Reader could be related to at least one of the characters' characters. We are all Homo sapiens; our names were given to us by an adult in our lives until we decided to keep or change it legally. In five hundred years, our names will be as fiction because there will be no witnesses except within the science of our genetics.
* * *
"This next story is fictional except for the sample of human behavior that is plausible in most any human being if the circumstances were similar. Any willing Reader may find a character within to project her or himself into. In real life, one of your ancestors or a friend's ancestor may have found herorhimself somewhere in or between the lines of their genetic circumstance to have met or seen this legendary king first-hand. How would it have been to have witnessed much of the happenings below? The genes that you carry did take part in some sexual intercourse during those times, no question about that," smiles Grandma Earth
STORY EIGHT
We have a fictional tenth-century Irish love story between a druidic priestess, Gadelin of the North Woods, and a druidic priest, Mardynn Herremon of the East Woods, a cousin of the legendary Simon Breac mac Aedham, 44th High King of Ireland; King Simon had killed a king to become king. He had the first royal executed by drawing four horses, each attached to the old king's limb, in each cardinal direction. King Simon, whose father was Giallchadh, ruled from the year 909; Duach Fionn, son of the murdered king, avenged his father's death six years later. In the last year of Simon Breac's reign, the priestess and priest's love interest began. Gadelin was in her mid-twenties, and Mardynn was nearly thirty. At the Great Wooden Hall of Tara, they were ordered by King Simon to compete to be the new official Seer for the king. The old Seer had died quite strangely in drowning during earlier spring rains along the ancient river valley.
Simon, who was much older, was attracted to Gadelin because of her long coal-black hair, fair skin, and healthy as a horse, athletic build. She was a woman warrior. Simon liked his women to show their physical strength in love-making. As a priestess, she used her mind first and her body second. The king wanted her the other way around. No woman ever said no to a king unless it was his queen. Gadelin was no exception. She did not mind sleeping with King Simon as much as she did, setting up the appointments to do so. She always slept with him three days before a full moon, during a full moon, and again the third day after the full moon. The druid priestess slept with the king three nights a month. For three months running, she had been doing so when King Simon Breac ordered her to compete with her known lover druid-like Priest Mardynn, to be his official Seer.
The next day with less than the usual fanfare, the king announced the competition in Court at the sizeable wooden hall atop the five hundred and fifty-foot high Hill of Tara. Mardynn, of the greater royal family, slept with Gadelin on the half-moon. No one knew whom she slept with during the first and third quarter moons, but others assumed she had chosen one commoner for each. She bedded four men on the condition of the moon at least once a month, no matter what.
Gadelin was in love with the moon god, and Mardynn believed the moon was making love with her and not each of the four men. None of the four realized this, and as there were four men, she came to think of each of them as one of the cardinal points of the moon's surface. Thus, Simon the King was the North, and Mardynn the South point. As the Hall of Tara was aligned
North to South, she felt she would gain much wisdom from Mother Earth in the process. There was no reason for her to think the competition would be much. She controlled both men one night each month, and the king two others, she saw to that. When Gadelin of the North Woods had a man in bed, she was always in control. Anyhow, since she was twelve, living north of the River Boyne, and she was in power then too, with a cousin who was fourteen.
During the warm evening of the next half-moon after the competition had been announced, Priestess Gadelin confidently strolled into Mardynn's small, round stone-walled hut. This hut was in the East Woods south of the River Boyne to discover her priest was not at home. She sniffed at the air and did not detect his scent. 'He has not been here all day or last night,' she thought. She smiled, still confident.
'He'll be here. I know he thinks of me as the moon goddess when we make love. A man in love with a goddess gives himself completely.' Cleverness spread across her cheeks, 'He cannot know that I make love with the moon god at the same time.' Mardynn will be here. He would not want to disappoint his moon goddess.
It was true that when they made love, both were thinking of the Moon, but neither understood which half was whose. Was the goddess visible, or was the god? Both were in love with the visible half, but only I, Grandma, knew that.
After the competition had been announced, Priestess Gadelin confidently strolled into Mardynn's stone-walled hut to discover her priest was not at home. She sniffed at the air and did not detect his scent. 'He has not been here all day or last night,' she thought. She smiled, still confident. 'He will be here. I know he thinks of me as the moon goddess when we make love. A man in love with a goddess gives himself completely.' Cleverness spread across her cheeks, 'He cannot know that I make love with the moon god at the same time. Mardynn surely will be here. He would not want to disappoint his moon goddess.'
It was true that when both made quite passionate love, each was thinking of the moon, but neither understood which half was which. Was the goddess visible, or was the god? Both were in love with the visible half, but only I, Grandma, knew that. Half a love is not nearly enough in the grander scheme of things mixing with nothing. Trouble was brewing, and neither of them realized it.
Mardynn stood in the peaceful Boyne River Valley, overlooking much clearer water. Earlier, the muddy spring rains had rumbling down the hills in a heavy brown high table of water. He glanced back at the lean-to he had made for the night. It was an easily gathered mass of limbs and small trees with two large trees as a backdrop and two thighs sized vertical poles out front about seven feet. Two more five feet high stakes from trees to verticals and sloped down about one foot.
Mardynn threw together a roof of assorted sticks, most about a forearm thick. He had been busy looking for the natural signs that might give him a hint to a prophecy for King Simon. He had memorized and notated with various colored pebbles with the kind of creatures he had seen on his meandering four-hour journey along the River Boyne. To begin, he had followed a blue heron. That was the first sign; he was sure of it. He watched several frogs in a streamlet. Flitting about the frogs and above banks were little finger long blue bodied dragonflies with black wings.
Some frogs stared at him, never taking their eyes off the priest who wore four colors. People knew he was at least a second cousin of the king, as the royal family wore five colors. The sunrise was orange. That was another good sign. The frogs along the banks were brown with green heads and eyes. He had seen a black snake and another woodland snake with three yellow stripes rather than the usual two. Bountiful and healthy foliage along the stream gave him green. A red-haired fox left the feathery remains of a hawk near the trail. Salmon and trout are bountiful in the river. It is a good day, he thought.
Then druid Mardynn noticed the evening sky. He forgot it was the night of the half-moon—his night with the moon-mistress. Gadelin will never forgive me, he thought. Never. The wind picked up. Thunder in the distance north. A bad sign. What will she think of me? Together we are one with the moon. There was no way he could return before she would leave his hut. She, too, would miss her night with the moon. She has always bedded on the half and the full, he thought. Anyhow, since she was twelve. She will have to find someone, and so will I. We are in two different places, and the moon is also in two, the visible and the invisible. He was struck with a sudden thought: I am visible, and she is not, and for Gadelin, she is visible, and I am not. Can it be possible to love one another and the half-moon from this distance?
Priestess Gadelin sat down on his skinned deer mat and stared at the tree branches and limbs at the ceiling of the hut. She could see out the smoke hole. It was cloudy, and the wind picked up. She could hear thunder in the distance. She thought, 'Who will I sleep with?' Gadelin walked the fifty feet to the River Boyne and glanced up and downriver. She ambled back to the hut and sat at the doorway. She started to get up to leave, then hesitated, and looked in at the empty floor mat. Can I sleep with the moon god without Mardynn present? How can I make love with my priest even though he is not here? Is it possible? 'I have never since I was twelve been to bed without a man on the half and full moon.
The option had never presented itself before, you see, smiled Grandma, and she winked knowingly. A priestess and a priest are about to have an enchantment they did not expect, but someone will pay for their pleasure. This is the way it is.
Gadelin stripped and lay naked on his mat with the June sweat from her back, butt and thighs dampening his deerskin. By the grace of the moon, she thought, I will make love in mind alone. She closed her eyes, spread her arms, and loins to earn the five points.
Gadelin breathed in imagination and breathed out an erotic fantasy. Dance of a moonstruck sphere, half here, half there, then whole again, then nothing again. Faeryland spirals on the stone next to a dance of two lines, one being and one not being. I am a stone singing not of this world—the moon moves, and I move with it. I am carried away. In and out, In and out. These are the first steps of dance like no other. Parallel lines, parallel lives. The flashing color wheel spins an always green, to orange, to green, to orange, to blue, to yellow, to red. The mind's a rainbow without the mist. A half-moon spinning wheel spinning fast, half to an apparent full. I, Gadelin of the North Woods, chance the inner light drunken with delight. Moon-god, moon god, the feast is set, the meal began.
Ten miles to the west along the south side of the River Boyne, Mardynn sat under his lean-to and stared at the half-moon, moving the heavy clouds by. Lightning collapsed to thunder though, in the distance, it rolled the river valley. I can love the moon, he thought. Better half a moon than no moon at all. Priestess or not, my mistress and I will be one tonight. Mistress moon is bone white while I am the dark shadowed half in a trance. We will ride the sky together. Round and round, my mistress moon goes and where the moon stops is beneath my toes.
Peace is but a piece of the whole. It reflects my inner light; the mind's inner moonstone moves; tunneling is born to connect a dream to reality unborn. The colors of the world are but flavors in mind. Food of the gods turns hearts to stone and stone to dust. Earth, air, fire, and water, my skin turns cold, my heart turns hotter. Love is a leap of human consciousness. White lightning again strikes the nearby Ash.
Mardynn thinks I am in naked thunder uprooted. I am a furry dot and a dash. A tale timid with large ears while awaiting the morning to be nibbled into the day. A gold-eyed white rabbit will run from the glaring red fox of the noonday sun. An eye blinks in a whole mind hiding. The moon wheel spins half-round, half-round, with nothing a sight and nothing in sound—flowers of angel breath pedal from the root of the night into the stem of morning fog. Love in mind is a dangerous thing when two threads of consciousness equally sing.
Away, in his hut, Gadelin blinks flat out. A golden rabbit runs—my mind molds seams of the sacred well hole full of words and walled prophetic dreams. I am flying the moon and lying on Earth at the same time. The stones sing and dance, and I am air. My long black hair is a comet moving across my immortal soul. My heart is the sun while my soul aches to be a sliver of the moon to bring to an end this little tune. If the gold rabbit runs, can the red fox be far behind?
The separate and paired enchantment continued throughout the night, several hours of the erotically imagined ritual until though separate. Apart, the priest and priestess both soundly slept, exhausted by the long love of half a moon each while each being but a short ten miles of the river away.
Grandma twirled and did her own dance of lightning, then clapped her hands but once. She turned to Gray and said, "What is, is not, as the two each see it, both seers misinterpret and miss the secret message for the forty-fourth great high king of Ireland. Soon, before the long and the short of it, King Simon found four horsemen at his door. Four horses pulled King Simon Breac out to the ground that very half-moon morning, an act of revenge for killing a king six years before. How much good did the Seer competition do him? It did him in.
Round and round and round she goes --
And, where she stops, nobody knows.
Two seers confusing Fate for Necessity's Call,
Is to mistake a white Moby Dick for an Artic narwhal.
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This narrative has an edge, and it is more well-honed than before. What is the difference between Fate and Necessity's Call? Interpretations for both words are easily made -- choose your own.
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fate noun
1 I was ready for whatever fate had in store for me: destiny, providence, God's will, nemesis, kismet, astral influence, the stars, what is written in the stars, one's lot in life; predestination, predetermination; chance, luck, serendipity, fortuity, fortune, hazard, Lady Luck, Dame Fortune; Hinduism & Buddhism karma; archaic dole, cup, heritage.
2 I didn't want to put my fate in someone else's hands: future, destiny, outcome, issue, upshot, end, lot, due; archaic doom, dole.
3 the authorities warned that a similar fate would befall other convicted killers: death, demise, end, destruction, doom; ruin, downfall, undoing, finish, disaster, catastrophe; retribution, sentence.
4 (the Fates) the Fates might decide that it was his time to die: the weird sisters; Roman Mythologythe Parcae; Greek Mythologythe Moirai; Scandinavian Mythologythe Norns.
necessity noun
1 health should not be considered a privilege or even a luxury, but as a necessity and a right: essential requirement, prerequisite, indispensable thing/item, essential, requisite, necessary, fundamental, basic; Latin sine qua non, desideratum.
2 the necessity of taking expert advice | the necessity for young people to grow up with respect for the law: indispensability, need, needfulness.
3 political necessity forced him to consider it: force/pressure of circumstance, need, obligation, call, exigency; crisis, emergency, urgency; French force majeure.
4 the necessity of growing old: inevitability, unavoidability, certainty, inescapability, inexorability, ineluctability.
Selected and edited from the Oxford/American Apple Software
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All for today. Good night, Mr. Orndorff. – Ms. Havisham
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