#Cardinal Virtues

[allegorypaintings]

Wisdom (Prudence) and Temperance

Artist: Antonio Zucchi, RA (Italian, 1726-1796)

Date: 1767

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: Royal Trust Collections, United Kingdom

[littleflowerfaith]

“Humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less”

C.S. Lewis

[sea-salted-wolverine]

The House of Usher and the cardinal virtues

I thought to myself it's no good to whine about slotting characters into boring reductive categories without a good rebutal, so here's a dose of slightly more interesting archetypes.

Prospero reflects the cardinal virtue of Diligence and its mirror the sin of Sloth ("But he has an orgy so it has to be lust," by god you're so boring) He is the only Usher who tries to make anything of value. When Camille goes on her little spiel about how Ushers don't make stuff, she's not wrong. Perry got pretty ruthlessly shot down when he was presenting his ideas for trying to make value and start a night club chain, rather than just taking credit for someone else's work like all of his siblings and his dad. But he was at least trying. His drive to prove himself and gain respect is how he gets himself into the whole mess. However, it is the act of not doing his due diligence that kills him.

Camille has an interesting one because while breaking into a lab facility to expose mistreatment of animals would seem like the cardinal virtue of kindness, she's only there to get one over on her sister. The inverse of Kindness is Envy, and for as important as her role is as the family spin doctor, Camille is valued the least. Everyone suspects Perry when they hear about an informant, but that's because he's an idiot baby. Victurine is useful with her heart mesh implant, Napoleon took the role of the "chill fun sibling", and the other two are original Ushers, so Camille is left as the unfavored child.

Napoleon tried to buy his way out of his problem with Charity. He could have come home with a different cat entirely and told his boyfriend he was looking in shelters for Pluto and accidentally fell in love. Name it Mars, let the boyfriend chalk it up to a weird grief response. Bummer Pluto never came home. Verna would have had him trip over the thing on the stairs in the middle of the night and that would have been that. Instead, everything was transactional as he maximized what he could get out of his relationships for the least amount of effort. The boyfriend can live with him, the boyfriends cat can move in too, but as soon as that becomes even the slightest bit more effort (like when boyfriend wants to meet the family, or curb the drug use, or the cat brings home a dead thing) Napoleon wants it gone from his life.

Victurine likewise could have had a painless clean death had she mustered up the Humility to say that the device didn't work. Her demise, unlike her younger siblings, was a compilation of smaller shitty decisions and white lies. She could even recognize that each choice was morally wrong, but it was little choices that were easier to brush off. A dead monkey, a foraged signature, a rightfully concerned patient reassured with platitudes. Even before she was scrubbing blood off the floor to Bonnie Tyler, her inability to admit her choices were flawed was getting her in trouble.

Tamralane with her perfectly manicured curated life, is the one to take Temperance to its furthest extreme. I think it was Atwood who wrote about women and the internal voyeur to preform for, but I'm not going to Google it for a post about horror characters losing their minds and dying horribly. She lives under a personal panopticon of her own expectations and can never allow herself to experience her own life lest she fall short. Her wealth rather than mitigating this exacerbates the issue, giving her access to any and every distance she could possibly want. Death by mirrors isn't so much her going insane as it is the culmination of the life shes built for herself.

(Plus, I know her lonely evening was meant to be ~spooky~ but babe, that is literally just ADHD. Can't remember where you put the thing? Can't remember doing the thing? CAN'T SLEEP?! DOES EVERYONE HATE YOU AND THINK YOU'RE AN INSANE BITCH FOR PERFECTLY VALID REASONS?! Looks like Adderall for you).

Fraudrick. You dickwad. No Patience to allow your very injured and traumatized wife explain herself. The inverse of Patience is Wrath. Demonstrated that one in spades. I'm on Verna's side on this one. Pliers, really?

(His wife's name is fucking Mori. As in momento mori.)

Which leaves Madeline and Rodrick. What's a Gothic horror story without some really fucking weird and unsettling sibling dynamic? Dull, that's what. Anyway, never letting anything touch them or impede them in their lust for power and wealth offers a strange sort of Chastity. There's no love, not for the kids or Annabelle Lee that could touch them, no moral they wouldn't overturn, no value they wouldn't abandon. Madeline values her freedom above all else but she spent her life bound to her brother. They wouldn't even spare each other in ruthless pursuit of just a little more power.

So yeah, bummer for August Dupain that he wound up against the most supernaturally fucked up family that ever lived.

[thecatholicbozo]

"The principal human virtues are called the cardinal virtues, under which all the other virtues are grouped and which are the hinges of a virtuous life. The cardinal virtues are: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. Prudence disposes reason to discern in every circumstance our true good and to choose the right means for achieving it. Justice consists in the firm and constant will to give to others their due. Justice toward God is called "the virtue of religion." Fortitude assures firmness in difficulties and constancy in the pursuit of the good. It reaches even to the ability of possibly sacrificing one's own life for a just cause.

Temperance moderates the attraction of pleasures, assures the mastery of the will over instincts and provides balance in the use of created goods."

-Bishop Thomas J Olmsted, Manual For Men Quoting from the Catechism of the Catholic Church paragraphs 1805-1809, 1834-1838

[maimoncat]

Eiiii ti ricordi gli oc basati sull'Orlando Furioso che mi hai mandato? Bene allora sto facendo dei grafici di riferimento e volevo sapere tre cose:

1) Le corone le hanno e se si come sono

2) I colori

3)Cos'è la cosa nella testa di Andronica (Non offenderti ma non capisco)

Ah, certo

Per loro pensavo che, piuttosto delle corone, avessero la loro divinità collegata ai loro simboli iconografici, quindi Dicilla alla spada infuocata, Fronesia allo specchio magico

Andronica alla mazza di rovere

E Sofrosina alle due borracce d'acqua che tiene legate in vita

2) per i colori direi che Dicilla ha piume castane e veste verde, Fronesia squame blu cielo, Andronica pelo bruno scuro e corrazza gialla, con accenti e tunica arancioni, e Sofrosina pelle grigia e veste rosso spento.

3) dovrebbe essere un'ascia conficcata in testa. Non sapevo proprio come disegnarla per bene, scusa 😅

Inoltre ho dato a ognuna di loro una stella a quattro punte come punto di unione

Ah, e ho dato qui a Sofrosina un cappuccio, che secondo me le sta bene

Spero sia stato d'aiuto! <3

[j-august]

Parking spaces in downtown Hollywood were as scarce as the cardinal virtues.

Ross MacDonald, The Way Some People Die

[toadeyes-miqote]

Prompt #26: Last

Note - ShB role quest spoiler

She had been hearing bits of information during the time that she was here. Someone had finally managed to take them down.

The Mystel archer - Andreia went down first. Fallen by a pair of Mystel hunters. Or rather one Mystel hunter and an Eulmoran dandy playing at being a bounty hunter. The irony wasn’t lost at all.

Hearing someone spin a new tale about Renda Rea's life in the wake of that bounty earned was unexpected. It was as if someone knew who she was before. Having gone through all that trouble.

Word began to spread, then Dikaiosyne fell soon after. Word that it might have been the same hunter spread throughout the Crystarium that it was the Warrior of Darkness picking them off.

It was quiet for a spell and then Phronesis fell. The dwarf was sitting there downing drink after drink, it came as no surprise when a msytel dressed in a semi-familiar fashion came up to the table and place a drink before them. For the Warrior of Darkness to take an interest in Ardbert and his crew. Might she be the one to end it all? “I heard you were hunting down Soppo… Soppi…” “Sophrosyne.. Balam-Quitz got your tongue?” “Almost. How many more drinks would you like? I saved your story for the last.” This would prove interesting indeed as the green clad Warrior signal to her to bring more drinks.

[copela4692]

Patience - Virtues at Work

“Patience is one of the humble, workaday virtues; but it is, in a real sense, the root and guardian of all virtues, not causing them, but removing obstacles to their operation. Do away with patience and the gates are open for a flood of discontent and sin.” St. Thomas Aquinas, comp. to Summa, III, 394 Patience Escalier (1888), by Vincent Van Gogh What is Patience? Patience is a virtue, so the…

[syntonylife]

Mastering the 7 Cardinal Virtues: Your Guide to Law of Attraction Success

Attracting Abundance and Happiness Through the Power of Virtue: Unlock Your Potential Today! We have already explored how the 7 deadly sins can serve as stimuli to improve ourselves and deepen our path of personal growth to lead us to abundance, manifest our desires, and ultimately achieve happiness. Now I would like to highlight the seven cardinal virtues – those moral pillars that guide us…

[allegorypaintings]

Prudence (after Quellinus)

Artist: British (English) School

Date: c. 1674

Medium: OIl paint on wood

Collection: National Trust Collection, United Kingdom

Description

An oil painting on panel, full-length standing allegorical female figure of Prudence (after Quellinus), wearing an orange dress with red robe, British (English) School, c 1674. Prudence (one of the four Cardinal Virtues) stands, in a landscape, holding a snake, symbolic of wisdom, in her left hand and a mirror in her right, so that she can see herself as she really is.

[death-rebirth-senshi]

Where was demon slave and deadly sin ritual when the Umbra were being wiped out.

[corancoranthemagicalman]

Do you have a scene you really liked but weren't able to fit it in a fic? Would you care to share? Do you have a most recent favorite line or scene? What is it?

*Asks are sent for fun, no pressure to answer.

Oh, this is a fun question. I've been sitting on it for a minute trying to really think on it.

When I'm writing, I treat it a lot like my other forms of art—which is to say, I delete my darlings. When something doesn't work, unless it was really a killer line, it's gone and forgotten. I had this really fun dialogue convo in one of my current WIPs that just did not fit and kinda grew rampant, so I plucked her completely, and tbh in the retrospective, I don't think it was all that clever enough to have saved somewhere else. So bye-bye she went!

Even the parts that are on my "pieces and parts" doc are more...I could definitely strengthen them. They were more a feeling that I was on to that I'd love to expand upon more in a fic where they fit, if that makes sense. I've always wanted to capture "deleted scenes", so I should really document them more thoroughly in my writing process, but no scene that I was in love with didn't make it into one of my fics!

For the second part of this, mhm. I'll keep it to my published works, haha. It's definitely not recent, but so much of Compression (my Bagginshield fic) has kept so near and dear to my heart. Particularly the scene in which Thorin and Bilbo are at the forge, if I'm being honest.

For a more recent work (if we'll do the grace of over six months as recent lol) I also adore Deadly Sins and Cardinal Virtues, and not just because I got to write it with @snarky-synesthete and @cryptic-queer-cryptid . It was fun exploring my writing style in comparison to theirs, and growing from that, too. Flexing some poetry style meeting quirky character narration. I adore anything to do with apple symbolism, and there were quite a few in that fic. The one bit that really sticks out though is —

That lust-red hair was long again. Nothing fancifully braided or anything…just enough to grab hold of. Just enough that if Furfur dared, he could reach out and grasp it. Listen to what sounds might bloom from that mouth if he pulled hard enough…beckon that throat to move so that he could bruise its apple-flesh. And, oh, Furfur would. Pluck them from the forbidden tree and bite into their knowledge. Let whatever truth they had drip down Furfur’s chin like fresh wine. Bathe Furfur anew in nakedness. Furfur would tear into them—teeth to Crowley’s core—if it meant that he was the only one to know the apple. Gorge himself on the fruit and not spare a drop for the soil. The soil hadn’t deserved Crowley. Hadn’t deserved their blood, their skin, and certainly not whatever precious wine might pour out of their ecstasy…and Furfur would give them only the most tantalizing finish. Dig into their body until Crowley could only remember the moment where the serpent had swallowed a stag, or where the deer had pierced the snake.

I love experimenting with this sort of style, and I think again, overall, my writing is so much stronger for having written this with two wonderful authors. I've got a few good lines cooking in some WIPs, but I feel like I'm getting lost in the sauce of this ask and all of my stacked WIPs, haha. So I'll save those good lines for when they're published.

Thanks for the ask!! :)

[thecatholicbozo]

[payphoneangel]

Spellbound

Rating: Explicit Pairing: Rowena/Sam Word Count: 4,764 Tags: established relationship; master/apprentice; witch Sam Winchester; questionable uses of magic; bdsm; dom/sub; domme Rowena Macleoud; sub Sam Winchester; (cont on ao3)

Summary:

Sam wanted to learn magic from a master like Rowena. Except… He lingered on her wine-purple lips as she spoke to him, not fully processing the words they formed. He couldn’t stop his tongue from stumbling over his incantations when she looked up at him through her fluffy eyelashes. He wished he could stop the way his jeans felt a little too snug when she let her arm linger while grabbing another ingredient. “A spell of this nature requires a fair bit of concentration.” She pulled her hair off her back, deft fingers swirling the ringlets into an updo. Sam’s eyes wandered over her exposed shoulders. “And I can’t help but notice, dear, you seem distracted.”

[chicago-geniza]

Heard someone use the neologism "noblesse goblige" (noblesse oblige for goblins) and physically felt it burrowing into my brain through my ear

[toadeyes-miqote]

So...

Apparently Lue-Reeq does have a piece if you gave the first one to Renda-Rea or somehow think that it meant Exarch and not Lue.

I'm dense like that and Healer quest confirmed that exarch got a small piece. The rest be here if you are slow at leveling

So Lyse rematch?

fight fight fight!!! Let your fists do the talking.

dude why are you like this? this reminds me of that pre Garlemald trip and post In from the cold to storm Tower of Babil