Recent world events involving caricatures and religiously-motivated attacks on free speech merely validate the ancient wisdom that "the pen is mightier than the sword", any sword. Tyrants and fascist religions and institutions have never understood this wisdom and even in our modern age continue to think that the sword is mightier, even though their own reaction to the power of the pen proves the contrary.
Drawing the Line has an informative posting on political cartoons and relates an interesting story from America in this regard:
"In perhaps the best known example of the force of the political cartoon, Thomas Nast’s images in Harper’s Weekly played an important role in the overthrow of the Tweed Ring in 1870s New York City. An exasperated Boss Tweed is recorded to have demanded of his henchmen, “Stop them damn pictures. I don’t care so much what the papers write about me. My constituents can’t read. But, damn it, they can see pictures.”"
We think that free speech is not limitless and that there should be some limits on caricature (e.g. caricature which functions as libel and defamation), but there is obviously no reason that certain historical figures should be exempted from cartoon portrayal. Indeed, no historical figure is viewed uniformly by all of humanity, and no segment of humanity has the right to instruct other humans as to how to view some personage, even an alleged prophet.
In our view, the most recent "Prophet of God" was Albert Einstein, who showed us how the universe works, and yet, caricatures of Einstein are widespread without in any way detracting from his "message". There is one difference. Einstein's message is true. That is why certain nations, rather than to rely on the antiquated messages of their own alleged prophets, are attempting to gain nuclear weapons, whose construction is based on Einstein's message.
In any case, one of the reasons that blogging has become such an important part of the media scene is precisely because it is an exercise of the "power of the pen".
When just a few cartoons can provoke world-wide reaction far out of proportion to the cost of the ink and the paper used for publication, the power of the pen has been aptly proven.
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Thursday, February 02, 2006
Sky Earth Native America
American Indian Rock Art Petroglyphs Pictographs
Cave Paintings Earthworks & Mounds as Land Survey & Astronomy,
Volume 1, Edition 2, 266 pages, by Andis Kaulins.
Sky Earth Native America 2 :
American Indian Rock Art Petroglyphs Pictographs
Cave Paintings Earthworks & Mounds as Land Survey & Astronomy,
Volume 2, Edition 2, 262 pages, by Andis Kaulins.
Both volumes have the same cover except for the labels "Volume 1" viz. "Volume 2".
The image on the cover was created using public domain space photos of Earth from NASA.
Both book volumes contain the following basic book description:
"Alice Cunningham Fletcher observed in her 1902 publication in the American Anthropologist
that there is ample evidence that some ancient cultures in Native America,
e.g. the Pawnee in Nebraska,
geographically located their villages according to patterns seen in stars of the heavens.
See Alice C. Fletcher, Star Cult Among the Pawnee--A Preliminary Report,
American Anthropologist, 4, 730-736, 1902.
Ralph N. Buckstaff wrote:
"These Indians recognized the constellations as we do, also the important stars,
drawing them according to their magnitude.
The groups were placed with a great deal of thought and care and show long study.
... They were keen observers....
The Pawnee Indians must have had a knowledge of astronomy
comparable to that of the early white men."
See Ralph N. Buckstaff, Stars and Constellations of a Pawnee Sky Map,
American Anthropologist, Vol. 29, Nr. 2, April-June 1927, pp. 279-285, 1927.
In our book, we take these observations one level further
and show that megalithic sites and petroglyphic rock carving
and pictographic rock art in Native America,
together with mounds and earthworks, were made to represent territorial geographic landmarks
placed according to the stars of the sky using the ready map of the starry sky
in the hermetic tradition, "as above, so below".
That mirror image of the heavens on terrestrial land is the "Sky Earth" of Native America,
whose "rock stars" are the real stars of the heavens,
"immortalized" by rock art petroglyphs, pictographs,
cave paintings, earthworks and mounds of various kinds (stone, earth, shells) on our Earth.
These landmarks were placed systematically
in North America, Central America (Meso-America) and South America
and can to a large degree be reconstructed as the Sky Earth of Native America."
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