Archive for the ‘History’ Category

The Older Yoga Mudras

Friday, December 19th, 2014

  The mudras (seals) of the Hathayogapradipika compiled by Svatmaraman about 1450 AD, are not original to that work, but are also to be found in the following works which predate the HYP. (A1) Amrtasiddhi – 11th C (D) Dattatreyayogasastra – 13th C (V) Vivekamartanda – 13th C (G) Goraksasataka – 13th C (K) Khecarividya – ...

The Yoga Asanas before the Modern Period

Wednesday, December 17th, 2014

  The history of the specifically postural yoga that is the root of the yogas that are practiced in the modern West is not well known. We know that most forms of current Western practice can be traced back to the teachers Vivekananda, Yogananda, Sivananda, Kuvalayananda, Hariharananda, Krishnamacharya, and a few ...

Dying and Rising Gods

Sunday, November 30th, 2014

I knew that Frazer’s claim in his Golden Bough of a widespread myth of a dying and resurrected god had been heavily discounted amongst later researchers, but I still thought that the general template he presented was applicable to a significant number of myths, and not just around the Mediterranean. ...

The Great Vowel Shift

Thursday, November 6th, 2014

Over the course of several centuries beginning in the early 15th (probably) in the South of England (probably) there were a series of regular unconditioned (= not affected by their phonetic environment) vowel changes that affected the long vowels of ME. Those vowels were raised - or if they were ...

Vowel Movements

Friday, October 31st, 2014

Proto-Indo-European Origins It is proposed that Proto-Indo-European had a single original vowel timbre: e (though I've also seen original e and o claimed - by G. Bourcier, for example, in History of the English Language, (Stanley Thornes:Cheltenham, UK:1981, pp. 30ff.) The three proposed basic vowel timbres of the reconstructed system are ...

Consonantal Drift

Sunday, October 26th, 2014

The standard reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European stop consonant system is: voicelessvoicedvoiced aspirated labialpbbh dentaltddh velar, palatovelark, k'g, g'gh, g'h labiovelarkwgwgwh The remaining consonants are: fricative: s laryngeals: ...

Recognising the Seven Buddhas of this Age

Sunday, March 16th, 2014

When the Dharma is forgotten in the world another Buddha arises to renew it. The earliest version seems to have 7 buddhas in this age, of whom gOtama is the current. These are mentioned in the Pali canon in the dIghanikAya (ii, pp 5ff) and sa~yuttanikAya (ii, pp. 5f) of ...

Gobekli Tepe: Notes and Figures

Tuesday, March 13th, 2012

A temple site constructed, used, and reconstructed over a period of ~ 4ky from ~ 12.5 ky BP. Its material culture, location, and date make it part of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA.) The builders and users are assumed to be hunter-gatherers as no residential use structures have been discovered ...