#The ancient 200 year old techniques are lost to time

[aphrocheesiac]

charlottan is the tartarian empire of tumblr

[quietsnooze]

Info dumping about my homebrew DnD world ahead!

Eidholme is a low magic fantasy DnD campaign setting wherein magic is very limited, feared, and persecuted. The continent is split into 5 kingdoms & 2 empires.

Here's a visualization using Azgaar's fantasy map generator, then painted by me using Inkarnate to show the landforms:

Long ago, there were racial variations (many of the expected DnD races), but war and mistrust tore apart the continent and drove out many as humans struck down the remaining.

Now, there are heritages in the bloodlines of many current day humans that lie dormant as also magic does

(Basically my way of saying "this is an all human campaign... mostly." When the players get to higher levels, they will manifest traits from their heritages if they want to have that aspect included. Most left that up to me to surprise them!)

The deities are known as Guardians. There are twelve who are revered across the continent in different capacities - the kingdom of the Reamers is highly religious and worships all 12, whereas others pick & choose their preferred "endorsed" Guardians.

The Guardians' sigils I designed:

• Pandor, of Pleasure

• Lilabet, of Patience

• Elnos, of Creation

• Phiphine, of Growth

• Aisling, of Endings

• Cohara, of Mercy

• Bodhi, of Progress

• Llyr, of Dominion

• Niamh, of Hearth-keepers

• Keros, of Justice

• Ashtur, of Aggression

• Ryasis, of Curiosity

The event that caused the humanization of Eidholme was over a millennia ago, but the hurt caused by the End of Magic is more recent - a little more than 200 years prior, with fear and abuse of it at an all time high, magic was almost universally banned across Eidholme.

What was the straw that broke the camel's back? The population does not know, other than it was surrounding the tensions that broke apart the Mountainlands into two empires: Marboke in the north, and Oakham in the south.

(My voice game players know tho! They participated in it in prologue)

The continent shares the equinox and solstice celebrations, but have differing, more local traditions for them. Here’s a calendar I created that shows them! In Launlia for example, the Primavernal is celebrated as the Awakening Festival locally, for Niamh, Guardian of Growth.

Another fun fact about Eidholme: the vast majority of the continent's trees and its ONLY forest exist in Duskhollow. The kingdom is shrouded in mystery, in ancient Woods magic, in protections that keep any out who it doesn't want to be there.

The Woods is alive. It decides.

I have a lot of documents my players can comb through for information at their leisure. This one factually lists information that the PCs would know. It is not necessarily Wiki-level accurate, however, as propaganda is a heck of a thing.

Cantrips aren't exactly rare, but depending on where you are, you wouldn't even want to risk casting one. Privilege allows some of higher station to play around with magic in a badly kept secret. Otherwise, you are licensed or regulated by the governing body on your usage.

And that, of course, is why both of the parties who play in this world stumbled across Wanted posters for their questioning and arrest! "Wanted in connection to blasphemy and magic usage in Launlia", while their allies are "wanted in connection to actions against the Crown"...

For as much as I limited in character creation for lore purposes, I gave back through the same world building. Characters can interact with the world, seeking lost ways of old magics, ancient techniques, connections with the natural world… even be taught new (homebrew) cantrips

This is one of those instances where the PCs fit the trope of “chosen one” levels of power, as few ordinary people are powerful like they are and will be. The catch? That also makes them HUGE targets for backlash. Without the right support, they’ll be on the run… everywhere.

That makes it a very socially driven, political ties sort of campaign story. They also have befriended nomads, who can help them in their own way.

Nomads are, expectedly, nomadic people dissenting of law and homeland. They are expectedly hunted or outlawed for their magic use.

Some places welcome them as a novelty, others allow them under tentative circumstances for services granted (easy to locally wash your hands of it and assign blame to nomads who are long gone by the time you’re found out). Their trust is notoriously difficult to gain.

Why? Because they’ve been lured by royals to perform, only to be mass incarcerated. They’ve been promised sanctuary and found instead themselves given to their enemies. The groups do not inherently trust one another, either- friendship with one doesn’t mean friend to all.

As for beyond the continent… not many know what lies beyond. Those who travel out rarely come back, those who do are driven back by storms and critical failures of their ships. The Brackish Tears is the only kingdom who receives imports from beyond the vast waters.

There's a tale of a Tearsian prince memorialized in statue: Eóghan Griogal - a prince, second son to King Cian and Queen Siobhan, beloved by his people in the 17th century, about 200 years BME (Before magic’s end) or prior to the new age. His romance to the wispy foreigner - had many people talking, some excited in the chattering and others devastated by his betrayal. For he found love at sea, a man whose affinity with water was undeniably clear, closer bonded to it than even the water births of the Reamers would boast.

The lore creates a very interesting challenge for a fantasy world:

- wood is expensive and rare, so describing anything, from building materials to origins of fruit, is adjusted

- gemstones are extremely rare and not mined anywhere anymore as the source died with the elves

- magic is mostly outlawed

I'm currently running two games in this world. One traditional DnD via voice sessions who adventure across the continent, one written/play-by-post mixed with Good Society ttrpg, sandboxed in the Brackish Tears' capital.

Here is the star map and constellations. I have so many documents for my players to chew on, and I’m adding to them constantly.

[balanceoflightanddark]

Prehistoric Beast and the Dinosaur Renaissance

Prehistoric Beast is a 1984 short experimental stop motion film directed by Phil Tippett and the first film produced by Tippett Studio. Now if the name Phil Tippett sounds familiar...

...it should.

Phil Tippett was in charge of the dinosaur effects from the original Jurassic Park. But Prehistoric Beast would be his first project with the great reptiles that would eventually pave the way towards the summer blockbuster.

Prehistoric Beast occupies an interesting place in paleotological history, during the time of the Dinosaur Renaissance. For most of the 200 years of dinosaur research, dinosaurs were typically portrayed and believed to be slow, sluggish, cold-blooded lizards. It's right in the name: dinosaur means "terrible lizard". It wasn't until the late 60s, nearly 150 years after the first dinosaur was described, that our views on them changed and old ingrained ideas were upended.

It was during this Dinosaur Renaissance that the more modern view of dinosaurs became widely known. That they weren't sluggish lizards, but highly active and perhaps warm blooded. And their relations with modern day birds was becoming better understood. At the same time, public interest in dinosaurs was renewed whhich helped spark the imagination of filmmakers. Prehistoric Beast falls right around the time when this transition takes place, being produced a few years before the first Land Before Time film started adopting many of the new revisions. So this would be a good way to discuss both the changing view of dinosaurs, and a short I happen to enjoy.

The film starts out with a fitting establishing shot of a dark and foreboding forest under the light of the full moon. Text shows up telling us this is Alberta, Canada 65 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous, right before the infamous meteor hits and kills off the dinosaurs (though it's nowhere to be seen here). We hear an animal in distress as it's being attacked and killed by an unseen assailant, the eponymous "Prehistoric Beast". We cut to a scene of said kill, a dead Edmontosaurus being gorged upon by a Tyrannosaurus rex.

We get our first transition as the morning dawns on the ancient forest, and we see a herd of Monoclonius (an outdated name for Centrosaurus), a type of ceratopsian in the same family as Triceratops but more closely related to Styracosaurus in the Centrosaur family (this family had more elaborate frills with horn adornments and much longer nasal horns than their Chasmosaur counterparts). The dinosaurs here are portrayed with stop motion, a technique as old as dinosaur portrayal in media itself dating back to the 1925 classic, The Lost World. Here though, the technique is modified with go motion where motion blur is added to smooth the movements and make them more organic. A technique later perfected in Dragonslayer, another film that involved Phil Tippett.

The camera pans to the edge of the forest where we zoom in on one Monoclonious wandering away from the herd, feeding on ferns along the way. There's no narration for this film, so the narrative is told via camera angles, music, and visuals. In this case, the Monoclonious is apparently drawn to a meadow of flowers within the forest where it spends some time happily feeding on a good chunk of the vegetation. The rest of the herd is still audible, so the dinosaur ventures further in to look for more food, probably counting on being able to make it back should it run into trouble.

Course our first sign of trouble shows itself as the camera holds still on the area the Monoclonious departed and an ominous shadow falls upon a log...

Indeed, the Rex from the opening scene is slowly beginning to stalk the unwary vegetarian, and we get a little bit of the updated portrayals I was hinting at earlier. For starters, the Rex is holding its body and tail horizontally rather than standing upright like a kangaroo and dragging its tail like earlier portrayals. A body more fit for an active predator rather than a cold-blooded reptile.

As it slinks through the wood, the Rex steps on a branch, alerting the Monoclonious to danger. It calls out to the rest of its herd...that's out of earshot. The herbivore had blundered too deep into the wood, and now it's lost. We get a hauntingly beautiful shot of towering trees dwarfing the dinosaur as it calls out for its herd, showing that it's out of its element and thoroughly lost.

Nervously, it starts trudging through the wood trying to find its way back out by following a trail. It's here when the camera pans looking up at the wanderer, showing that while it's lost, the Monoclonious isn't defenseless, being a big herbivore that can put up a fight even if cornered. These shots are intermixed with the Rex stalking its prey, growling as it's illuminated by sun shining through the trees.

The trail abruptly ends with a fallen tree...and the remains of the previous victim, picked clean of meat. Cue an ominous shot of the Monoclonious looking at the skeletal remains...and the enormous Rex lurking in the background behind the trees.

An interesting note here is that the Rex is surprisingly stealthy. Most portrayals of T.rex before now depicted a bloodthirsty monster that attacks its prey head-on while roaring. This Rex on the other hand behaves more like a rational predator, using the trees as cover to get to a good ambush spot, showcasing its intelligence to make a clean kill rather than risk injury.

And indeed, it does spring the ambush, though it makes its surprise attack head-on. This allows the Monoclonious to back up and protect its vulnerable neck as the Rex bites down on its tougher hide. We get a frantic fight scene as the two dinosaurs jockey for a better position, the Monoclonious trying to spear the Tyrannosaurus with its horn, while the Rex is able to dance out of the way while it continues the attack, showcasing it's a bit more nimble than previous portrayals. Unfortunately, its luck doesn't last forever as the vegetarian is able to spear the Rex through the leg with its horn.

It's not a killing blow, but it does give the Monoclonious breathing room to face down the Rex and slowly begin to back away. While the predator is certainly hurt, it doesn't back down as it slowly approaches the herbivore. And here we get that predatory cunning I mentioned earlier. Predatory dinosaurs were portrayed as bloodthirsty brutes that run head first into a fight regardless of their safety. Here though, the Tyrannosaurus is cautious, not charging the Monoclonious and clearly respecting the sharp horn that skewered it. It's also likely the herbivore might be worse off than the hunter so it might be worth the risk to finish it given the vicious mauling from earlier.

The ceratopsian though manages to hold the Rex back...until it hits the dead-end tree right next to the previous victim. Now cornered and badly wounded, the Tyrannosaurus's shadow looms overhead as its massive jaws rush to the camera to make the killing blow. We don't actually see the kill, but we do see the herd from earlier calling out for their lost friend. The film itself ends with the T. rex stalking off into the night looking for a place to rest on a full stomach, and to presumably lick its wounds.

Prehistoric Beast is in many ways indicative of the shifting attitudes towards how dinosaurs were portrayed. Rather than being portrayed as a mindless killing machine, the Tyrannosaurus is portrayed as being more stealthy and safety conscious like a real predator. The Monoclonious isn't portrayed as being a hapless prey item either since it was able to wound the Rex and hold it at bay for a little bit. Again, dinosaurs prior to this were mainly portrayed as...well, "dumb" for lack of better terms. Evolutionary dead ends effectively. Hear though, they're portrayed as being respectable animals in their own right.

The film itself was shown at various film fests where it got the attention of Robert Guenette who commissioned Tippett to provide more dinosaur sequences for the documentary Dinosaur!, presented by Superman himself Christopher Reeves. The documentary featured new segments, as well as portions of Prehistoric Beast. His experience with dinosaurs later on down the line eventually got him his position in Jurassic Park as dinosaur supervisor even though the special effects had shifted from the previously planned stop-motion to modern CGI. And the rest, was history.

As for me personally, this is a great short film dripping with atmosphere, good animation that characterizes the dinosaurs, and an aura of tension that heightens the mood. It serves as a time capsule to when public perception of dinosaurs was shifting, and it helped pave the road for one of the all-time classics that would be remembered for years to come.

The short film itself was later remastered and uploaded on YouTube by Phil's official channel right here. Feel free to take a look:

Phil Tippett's Prehistoric Beast - YouTube

[ammakou]

I see some more KnY / Demon Slayer blogs have followed me...may I direct y’all to my KnY AU? It has spoilers, so I’ll put the spoiler-free summary down right here:

Amaterasu is the sun god, long forgotten by the people of Japan. Her existence is only acknowledged in various folktales and legends, where she’s claimed to have saved Japan from monsters (demons) in ancient times. Unknown to all, Amaterasu still lives, but in the form of a white crimson-marked wolf who suffers from amnesia.

The land is now being plagued by demons again, and she innately feels she’s meant to do something about it. She isn’t too sure where to start though, but after coming across a young boy who was training under the retired Water Hashira, things start to slowly fall into place...

THINGS TO KNOW:

Ammy is essentially the reason why the Hinokami Kagura / Sun Breathing style exists. She didn’t create either or, but let’s just say it’s fate her descendant did...

Her Celestial Brush techniques don’t exist, as she being able to just use Sunrise to kill all demons would be OP. She still possesses immense purifying power, plus the ability to grow and heal plantlife (& cleanse water). She also has her Divine Instruments, but only the first / weakest of each type (Divine Retribution, Devout Beads, and Tsumugari).

This is more of an RP / Plot Wishlist idea, but I looooove the concept of Amaterasu joining Tanjiro on his quest to find Muzan. He probably views her as being a special wolf, perhaps a guardian deity watching over him and Nezuko (though other people just assume she’s his pet dog), but the poor boy doesn’t know that he actually isn’t too far off the mark there. When Zenitsu and Inosuke join the group, she too makes it her mission to keep them as safe as possible...with plenty of shenanigans ensuing along the way.

TLDR of the complete AU under the cut, but beware the spoilers!:

Demons of a blatantly more supernatural origin used to plague Japan millennia before the beginning events of KnY, but after people prayed to the sun, Amaterasu descended from the sky and slayed them all. She retreated to live a more lowkey life away from the “celebrity” status she gained, and eventually started a family with a mortal man. She gave birth to her demigod son, Oshiho.

After a very powerful demon (Tokoyami) sought Ammy out to kill her, she managed to seal him but lost her physical form because of her injuries. 5 year old Oshiho was left to be raised by his father, who ended up passing away from old age decades later. Oshiho then roamed Japan, and for 200 years, he spread folktales of the sun god’s valent deeds. Amaterasu became legend, and Oshiho was thought to be some kind of prophet of hers...for the people who believed such things of course.

Oshiho started a family of his own with a woman and passed his surname of Tsugikuni onto her - thus starting the Tsugikuni family line. Amaterasu’s blood would be passed down, resulting in their children occasionally bearing markings that appeared similar to Oshiho’s. In the far future...Yoriichi Tsugikuni & Michikatsu Tsugikuni would be born. It would be the former’s destiny to slay Muzan Kibutsuji, the first artificial demon...though of course things didn’t work out that way.

THINGS TO KNOW:

Amaterasu is Yoriichi’s ancestor (great x50 or w/e grandmother), causing him to have divine blood as a result. The first children of the Tsugikuni family being descended from the sun god is total myth, but it’s more of a mere coincidence that he created Sun Breathing & named it that.

The reason why Ammy has been reincarnated back into a physical form is due to the imbalance between heaven and Earth caused by Muzan. He and all of the murderous demons he’s created are blights, and Ammy awakening is because of nature calling her spirit back to slay them, though her amnesia is the consequence of she having died previously.

Ammy has no idea she HAS descendants (but she does faintly remember Oshiho). She somehow meeting Yoriichi could be pretty interesting...

Should Ammy ever regain her memories, she’ll gain back the ability to take on a human form.

[okimargarvez]

First I want to say I love your stories. I noticed you cheer a lot for Garvez. How did all this start?

Hey, Anon, thanks for asking and for your words. Writing is the thing that makes me happier, even more than rambling about garvez and not only. 😂 I wish to became a real writer, one day... Anyway, I don't know if you mean how I started to write about garvez or to be so obsessed with them. But both started in the same time, so...

I begun to ship them even before watching a single scene, just knowing that Adam would play Luke role. I remember I read an article about Adam joining the BAU, and something on a dog and that was enough. I totally imagined Pen acting with him in a new and unexplored way. I have to say, if you don't know, that I'm Italian and, I joined Tumblr during season 13. I was so alone with my feelings for them. I was about to become really out of my mind. In Italy, sadly, we (not me, and not @veronicafiore88 and @myrxellabaratheon, sorry for the mention) are stuck in S11. Really, almost all aren't able to go ahead. I was Morcia, even if I did not ship them harder as garvez. It was a process, I needed a period of transition (and for that I written a fic with exactly this title), even if I fell in love with Luke suddenly.

In the same period I started to study for my second degree. It's important because it was a degree in Music and Entertainment (Musica e Spettacolo), it's very difficult translating it! But, anyway, I was more for the spectacular courses, but still I had to study also for music ones. And one was about music instruments, especially old and ancient. But it was so technical that I was afraid I would be not able to pass that exam. For make you understand, one of my music professors, said that that course was 'like anatomy for med school). If you are still reading, thank you, I promise that there is a reason if I'm telling this. Because the same day that I watched 12x1, i.e. the first episode with garvez, at University we talked about... FINGERING TECHNIQUES. Really. It was a coincidence? I don't believe it. I was so stupid about music theory, before this course (If you want to know, it's Organology, but they told us that in Anglo-American world it's called like History and Technology of music instruments), and I'm sure I would haven't laugh so much, if I didn't follow this course (I have to confess that wasn't required but the alternative seemed even worst).

Then I spent almost an year just falling more and more in love with them, but alone. I searched on Google, I read all the garvez stories that existed, and I found this place. Reading the stories of one of the most good garvez writers (I don't mention her because I don't know if she would like to, but sure most will guess who is she), I decided to try to write too something more, because I had already few stories (less than 10, it seemed impossible now to believe🤦‍♀️). My first totally garvez was New Year without crime, I written it during the winter pause for S12. My really first garvez was Abyss, but it's also Morcia. I written it before seeing Adam playing Luke. But I lost my mind with writing garvez fics (I mean, now I written more than 200 stories about them, almost 2000 words in total) when I started the Garvez collection. One shot for each song of my favorite Italian songwriter, Tiziano Ferro.

Months after this I decided to try to join Tumblr, even if I wasn't so sure about writing/talking in English... But life it's about risk, isn't it? So, I did it. And now I have to thank @theshamelessmanatee (sorry sis for the mention XD). She knows why. I will never regret that decision. Because I met wonderful people that live around the world (@thinitta and right yesterday @fandomsleaveuemotionallyscarred) with whom talking about garvez. My parents and boyfriend say thanks to all of you. 😂

I have to add something... Even if I'm aware I have exaggerated as always. Studying cinematographic and narrative theories for University made me write the rant or rambling that maybe you have read. I thought, why I shouldn't use them even for fun?

But the rants and the stories matched arm in arm, because when I'm rambling, almost always, it comes to my mind a new idea for a story. 🤦‍♀️

And here we are. 😊

Hope that I did not bother you, and that I did not sound self-centered... and I'm sorry for the length.

[enchanted-lifepath]

Liverpool History: The Lost Twin of Babylon

Liverpool History – You will learn more & have the best experience if you can find time to watch all the videos in the article along the way.

Be #Enchanted

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD1srYqtIV4%5B/embedyt%5D

New York 9/11 Code And The Lost Twin of Babylon – The Second City of The Empire – All Roads Lead To Liverpool

INTRO

As with a lot of my work, I seem to do things in present day not knowing the full meaning or relevance of what I am doing until one day in the future when I need the work or thing I have already done. Suddenly the bigger picture becomes clear and I can call on something I did in the past to help me. This is one of the biggest examples to date.

One of the first hunches I ever had after starting Enchanted LifePath was one about the City of Liverpool, the place I was born. My home seemed to have all the warning signs I had learned during research of how the world has been ran by Freemasons and secret societies with satanic beliefs. I learned that attacks are planned and even how history seems to repeat itself.

This lead me to embark on an 18 month investigation into topics surrounding the Hillsborough disaster. I was digging deep always searching for answers only finding more questions. I was revealing things about the city of Liverpool that had never been linked before. I was coming to conclusions that had never been documented.

After I had a strong feeling about my work I had to find a way to present it to the long-suffering people of Liverpool using my website and YouTube channel. I had to show not just my city and the families of victims what I had found. I had to show the world. This was not going to be easy.

For now, I need to show you what I am saying by directing you to this video. The rest will then follow more naturally to you.

Please be warned it does contain some distressful crowd scenes from one of the darkest days in Liverpool’s history. This video helps teach you the codes that are hidden in plain sight. It will help you understand the rest of the article in a more educated way.

Having studied constants in a sea of variables I began to see a pattern emerging. I was seeing the same signatures that are hidden to many. But to a lot of people like myself, this was all clear as day. I had no doubt at all by now that Freemasons had something to do with the Hillsborough disaster. The more I see the more I know it was planned by design. This was no accident and the usual law changes came shortly after with all seated stadiums being introduced.

This paved the way for an easier policing of crowds in what was very soon to become the most televised sport in the world with the foundation of the Premier League. This meant huge sums of money could be made through subscription based sports channels that were easily sold to the newly formed stay at home football fan. But how do I help everybody realise what I was seeing? I just did my best. I could now see a motive and a money trail, but these money trails at this level lead back to a group of people who have no compassion for human life.

I am referring to the elites of the world who carry out ancient mystery teachings via rituals and worship a set of deities that depict the devil. The power and control over the world is backed up by human sacrifices or maybe hoaxes that are also a form of spirit cooking. There is nothing new under the sun as they say and what you are about to see on this page will prove to you that the story we are presented with regarding Hillsborough is only the tip of the iceberg. Speaking of which, we will be paying some attention to icebergs later on when we look at how many people from Liverpool were killed on the Titanic that also fell on April 15th just 77 years prior to the Hillsborough tragedy.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPKIYuetm-k%5B/embedyt%5D

Two weeks after I published my findings via the video on YouTube the first mainstream news reports of Freemason involvement in the Hillsborough tragedy were published. I knew I was right but it was tough to explain such sensitive issues in this way to people who did not understand the type of synchronicity and research methods used to complete my work.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

This was followed by more investigations leading to more rabbit holes than I could imagine. After looking back over it all something hit me, the link, the gel bonding it all together, what did it all point to?

I now knew. It was right in front of me all along as I wrote every word or studied every article, made every video or when talking to other people and viewers posting comments which I would read and learn more from.

Having gathered all of the information I needed over the years I now have enough evidence to piece together here for you now to help you understand what I have been saying all along. This will be the most unique pieces of investigative film making and journalism work ever seen in Liverpool.

I will explain how the rise and fall of Liverpool was planned. How each and every attack we have come under as a city is the price we have paid for success going back centuries. This will highlight how our proud little city in the northwest of England ruled the waves for the British Empire with slavery and sacrifice being our main trade. We stood shoulder to shoulder with the biggest places on earth for over two hundred years.

If we examine the History of Liverpool over the past 200 years, we see a pattern. We brought the horrors of the slave trade to the world bringing the city vast riches and stature. It was then from Liverpool that the slave trade was abolished. Did this anger the Powers That Be? After that, Liverpool was outright invaded by the Britsih army as well as having our economy halted in August, 1911 (911). This was during the 1911 Liverpool general transport strike, also known as the great transport workers’ strike.

Although it was called the transport strike, other tradesmen from the city took to the picket lines in support. This was pivitol in the establishment of trade unions. Strike action began on the 14th of June which is the same date as the Grenfell Tower fire and Donald Trumps birthday. On August 13, 1911, police smashed into 85-100.000 people with batons injuring 350 with 3.500 troops positioned in the city. This was known as Bloody Sunday, it is the third one I am aware of in the UK and Ireland. The cruiser HMS Antrim was also in the Mersey with orders coming from then Home Secretary, Winston Churchill and the War Office.

Two days later, soldiers of the 18th Hussars opened fire on a crowd on Vauxhall Road, injuring fifteen, two fatally: John Sutcliffe, a 19-year-old Catholic carter, was shot twice in the head, and Michael Prendergast, a 30-year-old Catholic docker, was shot twice in the chest. An inquest into their deaths later brought in a verdict of ‘justifiable homicide’.

A general strike of all transport workers in Liverpool was arranged for the night of August 14, and the next day saw the city come to a complete halt. Any movement of goods was closely guarded by troops, most of whom were drafted in from outside of Liverpool as the territorials of the city had largely been confined to barracks, the authorities wary of their loyalty.

Eight months later on April, 15th, 1912, the same date as Hillsborough, Liverpool lost key figures in the Titanic disaster. Next we had the wars with WW2 most notable on Merseyside for May Day Blitz. It seems as though Churchill got his wish to see Liverpool turned to rubble after all. This devastated our docks and the city had its economy blown to bits. Next, we had the formation of the European Commission in 1958 which meant Liverpool’s US trade facing docks were now playing second fiddle to those on the east coast of the UK that faced Europe. Liverpool was on its legs. The decline had taken full effect by the 1980s as unemployment, homelessness and drug abuse soared.

But this again was managed as we are about to learn with Margaret Thatcher’s managed decline of Liverpool.

After the Toxteth riots in 1981, Marget Thatcher’s Tory’s engaged with the Prime Minister and urged her to “Let Liverpool Rot”

This was followed by an attack on Liverpool that ripped the prosperity out of the city, though it never ripped the heart out of us, that is impossible.

Liverpool was branded a city full of “Bin Dippers” but where did that tag come from? It was this government-sponsored televised propaganda disguised as a World In Action documentary that was aired between 1982 and 1985.

During the programming, the country was shown parts of the Wirral that had fallen foul to unemployment after the closure of the world-renowned Camel Laird shipyard. The yard built its first vessel, an iron barge, in 1828. Some of Britain’s most famous ships have rolled down the slipway, including the first Ark Royal aircraft carrier, two of the four Polaris nuclear missile submarines – Revenge and Renown – and the Conqueror, the nuclear-powered submarine that sank the Belgrano during the Falklands war.

Locals, ravaged by poverty during the managed decline took to the waste tips to salvage whatever they could to get by. Items were taken from the tip and then used at home or sold for a small profit which went towards surviving, not in the same midset as living costs, this was survival horror. This is why Liverpool people are called Bin Dippers because of state broadcasters using public perception manipulation techniques against our city. The rest of the country would not realise that the Wirral is not Liverpool, totally missing the point because of close proximity and accent. Truth be told, it is like Manchester people being called something over a program that was filmed in Stockport.

The 1985 Heysel stadium disaster was next. This was another huge event in Belgium that has been followed by many other since then that have been proven to be false flags or outright loaded with crisis actors as covered on this website many times before.

But in Belgium, in the city of Brussels on one summer night in May 1985, another tragedy involving the city of Liverpool took place. This was when the city of Liverpool, most notably Liverpool Football Club supporters were branded murderers by the rest of the nation. Another tag from the 1980s that is still used today. But was this another set-up?

May 29, was the date, May 29 leaves us with 216 days left in the year. You will see the significance of the number 216 very shortly when we look into a Michael Jackson gig at Aintree racecourse in 1988. But for now, we are looking at the official story at Heysel.

Here is that official story.

The stadium was crammed with 58,000–60,000 supporters, with more than 25,000 for each team. The two ends behind the goals comprised all-standing terraces, each end split into three zones. The Juventus end was O, N, and M and the Liverpool end was X, Y, and Z as deemed by the Belgian court after the disaster. However, the tickets for the Z section were reserved for neutral Belgian fans in addition to the rest of the stadium. This meant the Juventus fans had more sections than the Liverpool fans with the Z section occupied by neutrals which is thought to have heightened prematch tensions. The idea of the large neutral area was opposed by both Liverpool and Juventus, as it would provide an opportunity for fans of both clubs to obtain tickets from agencies or from ticket touts outside the ground and thus create a dangerous mix of fans.

At approximately 7 p.m. local time, an hour before kick-off, the trouble started. The Liverpool and Juventus supporters in sections X and Z stood merely yards apart. The boundary between the two was marked by temporary chain link fencing and a central thinly policed no-man’s land.

Hooligans began to throw stones across the divide, which they were able to pick up from the crumbling terraces beneath them.

As kick-off approached, the throwing became more intense. Several groups of Liverpool hooligans broke through the boundary between section X and Z, overpowered the police, and charged at the Juventus fans. The fans began to flee toward the perimeter wall of section Z. The wall could not withstand the force of the fleeing Juventus supporters and a lower portion collapsed.

Contrary to reports at the time, and what is still assumed by many, the collapse of the wall did not cause the 39 deaths. Instead, the collapse relieved the pressure and allowed fans to escape. Most died of suffocation after tripping or being crushed against the wall before the collapse. A further 600 fans were also injured. Bodies were carried out from the stadium on sections of iron fencing and laid outside, covered with giant football flags.

In retaliation for the events in section Z, many Juventus fans rioted at their end of the stadium. They advanced down the stadium running track to help other Juventus supporters, but police intervention stopped the advance. A large group of Juventus fans fought the police with rocks, bottles, and stones for two hours. One Juventus fan was also seen firing a starting gun at Belgian police.

Despite the scale of the disaster, UEFA officials, Belgian Prime Minister Wilfried Martens, Brussels Mayor Hervé Brouhon, and the city’s police force felt that abandoning the match would have risked inciting further trouble and violence, and the match eventually kicked off after the captains of both sides spoke to the crowd and appealed for calm.

The blame for the incident was laid on the fans of Liverpool FC. On 30 May official UEFA observer Gunter Schneider said, “Only the English fans were responsible. Of that there is no doubt.”

UEFA, the organiser of the event, the owners of Heysel Stadium and the Belgian police were investigated for culpability. After an 18-month investigation, the dossier of top Belgian judge Marina Coppieters was finally published. It concluded that blame should rest solely with the English fans.

A total of 34 people were arrested and questioned with 26 Liverpool fans being charged with manslaughter – the only extraditable offence applicable to events at Heysel. An extradition hearing in London in February–March 1987 ruled all 26 were to be extradited to stand trial in Belgium for the death of Juventus fan Mario Ronchi. In September 1987 they were extradited and formally charged with manslaughter applying to all 39 deaths and further charges of assault. Initially, all were held at a Belgian prison but over the subsequent month’s judges permitted their release as the start of the trial became ever more delayed.

The trial eventually got underway in October 1988, with three Belgians also standing trial for their role in the disaster: Albert Roosens, the head of the Belgian Football Association, for allowing tickets for the Liverpool section of the stadium to be sold to Juventus fans; and two police chiefs — Michel Kensier and Johann Mahieu — who were in charge of policing at the stadium that night. Two of the 26 Liverpool fans were in custody in Britain at the time and stood trial later. In April 1989, (same month as the Hillsborough disaster) 14 fans were convicted and given three-year sentences, that were half suspended for five years, allowing them to return to the UK.

Gerry Clarkson, Deputy Chief of the London Fire Brigade, was sent by the British Government to report on the condition of the stadium. He concluded that the deaths were “…Attributable very, very largely to the appalling state of [the] stadium.”

He discovered that the crush barriers were unable to contain the weight of the crowd and had the reinforcement in the concrete exposed, the wall’s piers had been built the wrong way around and that there was a small building at the top of the terrace that contained long plastic tubing underneath. His report was never used in any inquiry for the disaster.

Despite its status as Belgium’s national stadium, Heysel was in a poor state of repair by the time of the 1985 European Final. The 55-year-old stadium had not been sufficiently maintained for several years, and large parts of the stadium were literally crumbling. For example, the outer wall had been made of cinder block, and fans who did not have tickets were seen kicking holes in it to get in. Liverpool players and fans later said that they were shocked at Heysel’s abject condition, despite reports from Arsenal fans that the ground was a “dump” when Arsenal had played there a few years earlier. They were also surprised that Heysel was chosen despite its poor condition, especially since Barcelona‘s Camp Nou and Santiago Bernabéu in Madrid were both available. Juventus president Giampiero Boniperti and Liverpool CEO Peter Robinson urged UEFA to choose another venue, claiming that Heysel was not in any condition to host a European Final, especially a European Final involving two of the largest and most powerful clubs in Europe. However, UEFA refused to consider a move. It was later discovered that UEFA’s inspection of the stadium lasted just thirty minutes.

When we take a step back from emotions and look at what happened that night in 1985, is it not a good question to ask if all of this seemed to be put in place by the powers that be who set a trap for Liverpool Football Club and its supporters who were not only from Liverpool due to the clubs outstanding success over the years?

The venue, just like Hillsborough, was deemed unsafe for use after various warning signs were ignored leading up to the events. A perfect storm was created by the Global elites who govern all industries, including sport. This led to new laws being created as usual with these situations. And when we ask ourselves who benefits, a bigger picture becomes a possibility.

Our great city fell further into decline for the remainder of the 1980s, but it was built by monsters just like other great cities of the Empires that have fallen for thousands of years. I can prove to you Liverpool is a lost Babylon, we are Rome, we are Egypt, the second city of the Empire.

Now it is time for one of the biggest questions about our city.

What is the 9/11 code and how is Liverpool tied in?

I SEE YOU

Liverpool Foundation – 1190

Liver Buildings – Opened: 1911 During the transport strike

Travel time from Liverpool to New York, World trade Centre – 9 hours 11 mins

Liverpool, New York (USA) Daylight hours in December 9 hours 11 mins

Liverpool May Day Blitz (Beltane Fire Festival) 119 other explosives such as incendiaries were used.

Distance from Liverpool to WTC New York is 3306 miles.

Liverpool was also home to world’s first oversea’s American consulate.

THE 9/11 CODE

Liverpool and New York have many ties but I bet you did not expect them to be linked to the Babylonian Empire did you?

If I asked 100 people to think of a number that reminds them of New York most would say 9/11. This would be a pretty common answer post the September 11, 2001, World Trade Centre attacks which shook us into the new age of ‘fake terror’ we still live in today.

The 9/11 code was present in the blue prints of New York’s twin city, Liverpool, England, hundreds of years before New York was even founded.

The City of Liverpool (The New York, of Europe, Second City of The Empire) was founded in 1190, which is 811 years before 9/11.

Once again we have another highly cryptic number with the 88 code embedded when we look at 8×11 = 88.

Truth Bomb, the 9/11 attacks were coded into the foundation of Liverpool 811 years before the World Trade Centre Twin Towers and building 7 were brought down, do you still think this was an accident?

I showed you in this video from 2013/14 season, remember this one about Liverpool Football Club, the phrase Rise Up and the Liver Buildings depicted with Daniel Sturridge number 15, Steven Gerrard number 8 and Luis Suarez number 7 totalling 33? Take a look.

http://enchantedlifepath.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/9-11-Attacks-Coded-Into-Liverpool-1190-Foundation-811-88-Years-Before-9-11-New-York-Of-Europe.mp4

Wikipedia tells us: The history of Liverpool can be traced back to 1190 when the place was known as ‘Liuerpul’, (LuprEvil) possibly meaning a pool or creek with muddy water, settled by Romans, Liverpool had early ties to the Babylonian beliefs which had re-manifested through the Roman Empire. The city became known as “the second city of the Empire“, and was also called “the New York of Europe” amidst the slave trade. During the Second World War, the city was the centre for planning the crucial Battle of the Atlantic, and suffered a blitz second only to London’s.

1190 was an interesting year as most key events listed on Wikipedia are about the Massacre of Jews! This is huge. Over the Ides of March on the 16th, in 1190, 150 Jews were ambushed by a mob who killed those who did not commit suicide. All Jews killed in Norwich on the 6th. Stamford fair massacre is also mentioned.

We have just seen some 9/11‘s and 88‘s but what if I had more to show you concerning the city of Liverpool and another huge event where reports of a crush were ignored by police just months before Hillsborough? What would you think if it took place on September 11, 1988?

The venues was Aintree Racecourse and the event was the last leg of the Michael Jackson World Bad Tour. The event was watched by 125.000 spectators in the famous venue which had just a 50.000 capacity. Merseyside police played down reports of a crush at the gig but medical reports and world press all stated there was at least 3500 people treated for injuries after being crushed.

This incident took place 216 days before Hillsborough. I told you earlier I would explain the 216 number. 216 is 6x6x6. It is known as the 216 constant. You can read all about the gig and how police played reports from the public down on my article below.

http://enchantedlifepath.com/2019/04/21/michael-jackson-bad-gig-crush-aintree-88/

April 15 – Hillsborough disaster ritual – The Fordicia, also called Hordicidia, was a Roman festival for the goddess Tellus held on April 15. During the ceremony, a pregnant cow was sacrificed, the calf fetus burned and the ashes saved for the Parilia festival.

http://enchantedlifepath.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/THE-RAVEN-Notre-Dame-Fire-I-Pet-Goat-2-DECODED-Fordicia-April-15-MUST-SEE.mp4

April 15 The Ongoing Fordica Ritual?

FACT: The Ides of April Notre Dame Fire falls one month after the Ides of March Christchurch Mosque shootings when Brenton Tarrant played the song Hellfire after his alleged rampage.

Beware The Ides Of April – The 15th day of the 4th month brings historical incidents in a cryptic pattern that can not be ignored.

1452 Fordicia – Birth Of Leonardo Da Vinci – Born on Fordicia and died during The Beltane Fire Festival some 500 years ago on May 2nd 1519. Da Vinci was featured in the World In 2019 front cover and article as reported on by Enchanted LifePath in December 2018. Leonardo Da Vinci Full Reduction = 88.

1865 Fordicia – Abraham Lincoln Assassination – 1865 is 911 (1+8=9) (6+5=11). Abraham Lincoln Reverse Full Reduction = 93, Notre Dame Spire height 93 meters. Number 93 meaning, Sun worship, sun allegedly 93 million miles away. Thelema Alistair Crowley 93. Lincoln death came 413 years after the birth of Da Vinci. 4×13 = 52 which reduces down to 7. Building 7 WTC.

1912 Fordicia – Titanic Disaster – 47 years after Lincoln, WTC Building 7 had 47 floors 911.

1955 Fordicia – Birth of Dodi Fayed 43 Years after Titanic – (4+3=7) Dodi Fayed Died August 31, 2007, next Princess Diana (Goddess of the hunt) in Paris.

1989 Fordicia – Hillsborough Disaster – 34 (7) years after birth of Dodi 96 Liverpool Football Club fans died after being crushed in a mass Fordicia sacrifice at Hillsborough stadium, Owlerton, Sheffield.

2013 Fordicia – Fake Boston Bombings – 3 reported deaths 24 years after Hillsborough (24/42 mirrored a rainbow can only be seen at 42 degrees) 2+4=6 but 6 is not a master number so it can be reduced to 33 which is a master number so we stick.

2014 Fordicia – Boko Horam Kidnapped 276 School Girls – 2+7+6=15. Dates of Fordicia. The child grab is alleged to have happened 365 Days after Boston Bombings – 365 is 3×11=33 3x(5+6). 

2019 Fordicia – Notre Dame Cathedral Fire – Thought to be as symbolic as 9/11 the fire took place on April 15 Day 105 which is the 15:06 time the match was abandoned at Hillsborough (15/1+5=6).

What is the link?

FORDICIA

What is Fordicia?

The Roman Pagan Festival in honor of Tellus, the Roman earth goddess Diana the Huntress, The Mother of All Gods, and here she is all over the Notre Dame Fire and all the other historical, tragic or staged events listed above.

The deity that all these events are connected to.

I have often pointed out how I felt more people from Liverpool died on the Titanic on April 15, 1912, than at the Hillsborough disaster on April 15, 1989. I was able to confirm my hunch quite easily. Let’s not forget the New York connection either as that is where this ship was heading. The Titanic was full of scousers, we made up a huge number of the crew members, we helped design and build the ship. The band playing as the ship went down, who featured in the movie were from Liverpool. The ships main corridor was so long it was nicknamed Scotty Road by locals on board the vessel. This corridor was to play a huge part in the sinking of the Titanic. Another disaster with Liverpool all over it.

The man who shouted “ice berg dead ahead” in the movie Titanic starring Leonardo Di-Caprio and Kate Winslet was a scouser. I often wonder if Jack was portaying a scouser seeing as Liverpool had a major input into all aspects of the stricken vessel.

Scotland Road was a long corridor that ran the entire length of the ship along the port side of E Deck. It was used by crew members and steerage passengers to quickly move between the ends of the ship. There was also an entrance from shore here, single men boarded the ship at this entrance and ended up on Scotland Road. Several Third Class areas could be reached from Scotland Road like the open space and the dining room. The boiler rooms also had an exit on Scotland Road.

The name “Scotland Road” was given affectionately by members of the ship’s crew, many of whom hailed from Liverpool. Scotland Road remains a major thoroughfare in the northern part of the city. Crew members from the surrounding area noted the similarity with the corridor on Titanic, which played a similar role as a primary route, hence the name.

The flooding of Scotland Road

When the ship was sinking, Scotland Road allowed the water to quickly flood all compartments accessible through the road. Because the water could only move this freely at port side, Titanic started to list to port as soon as E Deck flooded at 1:00 A.M. and the developing starboard list was countered.

You can see the work of devious Freemasons all over this one even down to the lies that were published in news articles the next day claiming all passengers had been saved from the ship. How they could print this after such an event is beyond me but it happened. Look at these publications then I will move on to who was on board the alleged Titanic.

We all know the Titanic never even set sail, and it was the identical sister ship, The Olympic who was part of the White Star insurance claim ploy, manipulated by the cabal.

The insurance job reminds me of the recent vanishing of MH370 in one regard, that being, on the stricken plane, were reported to be 4 out of 5 patent holders for RFID technology with the one patent holder not on the plane that day being a Rothschild. Leaving himself sole patent holder. Now how is this similar to the sinking of the Titanic? Look at these three men.

There is no real evidence that the Titanic hit an iceberg. What’s especially interesting is the list of people who, at the last minute, did not board, and the other list of people who stayed onboard. The list of people who did not board includes a great many billionaires, and the other list, of those who did board, also contains a list of billionaires. The survivors, those who did not board, are now among the list of families who run the world. Meanwhile, since eleven Canadian billionaire did board, Canada ceased to be much of a competition to the USA after the outcome of the Titanic. The same was true of a great number of other important and mega rich people who died on the Titanic – their fortunes and power were permanently wiped out. To sum up – the list of people who did not get on board the Titanic reads like a who’s who of ‘most powerful people of the 20th century and beyond.’

Was the Titanic switched with the Olympic? Survivors of Titanic reported hundreds of explosions. The Titanic only had two boilers, two out of the four smoke stacks were allgedly fake. Many water tight compartments were not water tight. JP Morgan got off boat in England unexpectedly. All is very much like the World Trade Center-built cheaply, explosions heard, hundreds of people had pre knowledge of 9/11, especially Mormons, Freemasons, and Elite connect family members like Bush’s, Guillani’s, and more.

I said I feel more Liverpudlians died on the Titanic/Olympic than they did at Hillsborough so let’s look into why I say that.

The diagram below is from an archive of Liverpoool born crew and passengers on board the Titanic on the night of the Disaster. The picture links through to the original source. It shows 72 people. I know this is less than the 96 who lost their lives at hIllsborough but the key word here is Liverpool born and I must point out the fact that this list may not contain a high number of stowaways on baord the ship when it sank. I feel the actual figure will be higher again. People being trafficked must also be brought into account too. Prostitutes on board the Titanic possibly all unaccounted for. Jack in the movie may well have been portraying a scouser, he was a stowaway, they were not all listed.

Less than 50 people from the city of Liverpool died at Hillsborough. This can be confirmed by looking at all the names and where they were from on the list of victims. I excluded people from the Wirral in that count as it is not Liverpool and I am stating more people from Liverpool died on the Titanic than they did at Hillsborough.

There are various occult (hidden) days of significance throughout the calendar year which have special importance. From March 22nd to May 1st is known as the ‘season of sacrifice,’ which as a period of time when many false flag events have occurred.

LIVERPOOL – LIVERPOOL, NEW YORK & LIVERPOOL – EVIL TWIN

Liverpool, UK, has been linked to New York in this article. But did you know New York had a town called Liverpool, New York? The town was settled by Jesuits and the map is shaped like the baphomet. Here is a video I uploaded in 2016 after an area of Liverpool, New York, called Syracuse was trending on Twitter. Syracuse, New York, nicknamed The ‘Cuse, Salt City, Emerald City, The Heart of New York, also shares its name with Syracuse, Sicily, which was founded in ancient Greek times.

Before we watch the video, I just realised something else! Emerald City is known to be the heavens in the bible and its walls are said to be made of jewels such as Emerald. The Heavens green in scripture with Gods throne being in Emerald city. It is known as the Throne Of God. The Emerald is hexagonal in shape. This takes us straight back to the HEX, Saturn worship, the Baphomet and the 6 pointed star of Satan.

The book of Revelation revolves around 7’s, and all jewels do, as well. Everyone of them falls into one of 7 categories.

The diamond is cubic.

The emerald is hexagonal.

The ruby is trigonal.

And so on for 7 different types. 7 is God’s perfect number, and He created all jewels to fall into 7 categories, which reveals His love for order, which is part of the beauty of His creation. Beauty and order will characterize the eternal environment of the New Jerusalem.

When God created the Devil he also created jewelry and made him a garment of jewels. Let me show you.

Satan is the first being that we have any record of who was clothed with precious stones. In Ezek. 28, he is described as the model of perfection in beauty. Then in 28:13 we read, “You were in Eden the garden of God; every precious stone adorned you: ruby, topaz and emerald, chrysolite, onyx and jasper, sapphire, turquoise and beryl. Your settings and mountings were made of gold; on the day you were created they were prepared.“

Revelation 21:19

And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manner of precious stones. The first foundation was jasper; the second, sapphire; the third, a chalcedony; the fourth, an emerald;

http://enchantedlifepath.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/BAAL-DENVER-DOLL-HEAD-MYSTERY-Syracuse-Evil-Twins-Liverpool-New-York-WARNING-HUGE-DISCOVERY.mp4

Liverpool is a lakeside village in Onondaga County, New York, United States. The population was 2,347 at the 2010 census.[1] The name was adopted from the city of Liverpool in the United Kingdom.[2] The village is located on Onondaga Lake, in the western part of the town of Salina and is northwest of Syracuse, of which it is a suburb.

The area was originally inhabited by the Iroquois, starting in the 16th century. In the mid-17th century, Canadian French Jesuits (Black Popes) visited the area, setting up missions. These were not very permanent, however. An example of these missions is Sainte Marie among the Iroquois, on Onondaga Lake just outside the village. Once the (Erie Canal) and (Oswego Canal) were built, the area was settled by Irish canal workers, Yankee settlers, and, later, German immigrants. The early recorded name for the village was “Little (Pagan) Ireland”.

The Lucius Gleason House and Liverpool Cemetery are listed on the National Register of Historic Places

TWIN TOWERS OF LIVERPOOL & NEW YORK

The infamous World Trade Centre stands in our memories as a symbol of terror, I spotted another synchronicity when looking at the Royal Liver Buildings, Liverpool and the World Trade Centre, New York. Both landmarks overlooked world famous waterfronts. The two buildings had the twin theme running through them. Liverpool’s Twin Towers will of gone generally unnoticed as twin towers before now, so what does water and twins link to?

This makes me think of Gemini (Twins & The Creator) and Aquarius.

Aquarius is the eleventh astrological sign in the Zodiac, originating from the constellation Aquarius. The water carrier represented by the zodiacal constellation Aquarius is Ganymede, a beautiful Phrygian youth.

Gemini is the third astrological sign in the zodiac, originating from the constellation of Gemini. Under the tropical zodiac, the sun transits this sign between May 21 (3) and June 21 (3). Gemini is represented by The Twins Castor and Pollux. 11 x 3=33.

The Liver building opened in 1911, the same year as the transport strikes. The building is the purpose-built home of the Royal Liver Assurance group, which had been set up in the city in 1850 to provide locals with assistance related to losing a wage-earning relative. One of the first buildings in the world to be built using reinforced concrete, the Royal Liver Building stands at 98.2 m (322 ft Skull & Bones) tall to the top of the spires, and 50.9 m (167 ft) to the main roof.

It is located at the Pier Head and along with the neighbouring Cunard Building and Port of Liverpool Building is one of Liverpool’s Three Graces, which line the city’s waterfront.

Look at the Freemasonic tea-party that was held around the clock faces before they were hoisted up to the twin towers. This big magic circle is a classic ritualistic layout and you will see similar things in many places including at Mecca when pilgrims circumnavigate around the cube which represents Saturn. The center of this circle looks like the sun in another song and dance connected to sun worship. This photograph was taken a year before the sinking of the Titanic, it begs the question, how many of these men were on board the stricken vessel?

The two clock towers were the crowning point of the building,taking it to over 300 feet in height and allowing sailors from all over the River Mersey to see what time it was. The four clocks were easy enough to see, as their diameter of seven and a half meters made them the largest clock faces in the country, bigger than those on Big Ben (BB=22) in London, which are 6.9 meters (69/96 as above so below). 18 inches (666) shorter than the Liver Building clock faces.

The clocks were made by Gent & Co of Leicester, whose electric timepieces were on display in railway stations all over the world. They each consisted of 27 sections Before installation, forty Royal Liver executives and civic dignitaries held a special dinner, with one of the clock faces used as a dining table. The huge clock faces, whose hands alone weighed 5cwts, were then hoisted up to the towers in May 1911 in readiness for the big switch on, which would see the clocks being controlled electronically from the Greenwich Observatory.

The clocks were started on 22nd June 1911 (Summer Solstice) at 1.40pm, the precise time George V was crowned. It was the Royal Liver Chairman Mark Lewis who started them off, telling the VIPs (Freemasons) gathered that Liverpool had always been loyal to kings and queens and it was only right that the largest electrical timepieces in the world should be started at the time His Majesty was crowned. On turning the lever, Mr Lewis said ‘In the name of God I turn on this lever’ before his suggestion that they be known as he Great George Liver Clocks was greeted with warm applause. On the river ships’ sirens blew while on the ground several verses of the National Anthem were sung.

World Trade Center (1973–2001, the building complex that was allegedly destroyed by hijackers using airplanes on September 11, 2001.

The World Trade Center was a large complex of seven buildings in Lower Manhattan, New York City, United States. It featured landmark twin towers, which opened on April 4 (4/4 the Obama number, Caesar, Half of 88), 1973, and were destroyed in the September 11 attacks, with 7 World Trade Center collapsing later that day due to the damage it suffered when the twin towers collapsed that morning. The other buildings in the complex were severely damaged by the collapse of the twin towers, and their ruins were eventually demolished.

THE LIVER BIRDS

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yt8-otWr4dU%5B/embedyt%5D

Liverpool has many well-known landmarks with the city having made a lasting impression on the world stage through the Football Clubs, The Beatles and the Slave Trade of course. We live in a very symbolic city (as I am showing you here on this article) with one of the great visual icons being The Liver Birds which have sat proudly on top of the Royal Liver Buildings since 1911 (9/11). But again, there is a story behind the Liver Birds that is hidden in plain sight and yes it is another song and dance about Satan, Sun Worship, and sacrifice.

Most people associate Liverpool with the two liver birds but there is another on a Grade II-Listed building in the city known as the Mersey Chambers which was built in 1878 for the Harrison Shipping Line.

This is known as the mother bird, it is said to pre-date the two birds that are on top of the Liver Buildings.

It made the news in recent years when it’s left-wing mysteriously went missing. Seems very political to me lol.

As with all secret traditions and belief systems which herald from ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt they carry mythology with them through generations with the whispers of the people keeping stories alive by telling children the tales of the past. As well as Liverpool being steeped in symbols from those mythologies, for example, you only have to walk around the city center to see the Neptune statues and carvings in a lot of the buildings, but Liverpool has its own mythology in the story of the Liver Birds. But where did the story originate from? Let’s take a look at the Wikipedia version first.

After King John founded the borough of Liverpool by royal charter in 120, the city The borough’s second charter was granted by Henry III in 1229,  giving the townspeople the right to form a guild with the privileges this came with, including the right to use a common seal.

This was the birth of Liverpool’s association with what is known as the Liver Bird, but what type of bird is it and what else does it symbolise?

The Liver Bird is thought to of originally been an Eagle which was used as the symbol of John the Evangelist who was the namesake and the Patron Saint of King John ( St Johns Market). Records tell us The plant sprig is interpreted as broom, a badge of the Plantagenet dynasty. Also visible on the seal is a star and crescent, one of King John’s personal badges.

In the 17th century, the birds identify had been forgotten and started to be known as either as a cormorant, a common bird in the area or as a “lever”.  It is when we look into the cormorant bird and mythology around it when we start to see why it is looking down over our city.

The amount of secret references to Satan discovered on this article regarding this city is beyond belief but this next one is something which will again highlight just how these crafty bastards code the devil into almost every detail within our surroundings.

The cormorant bird features in biblical teachings in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve are watched by Satan from on top of the tree of life having turned into the bird after leaping down from Mt. Niphrates toward Earth. Observing God’s creations from the Garden, he found it’s beauty fascinating, yet, weighing up his role in the world, he decided his best option was to either destroy God’s Kingdom or at least divide it as he chose Evil. This came before he presented himself to Adam and Eve as a serpent having seen their love for each other as a symbol of Gods image he then set about to destroy their peaceful life in paradise with the temptation to eat the forbidden fruits from the Tree of Knowledge.

“Sitting on the tree of life sits the three forms of the Devil. According to Milton’s Paradise Lost, Satan enters Eden three times, once as a toad, once as a cormorant, and lastly as a snake.”

Cormorants feature in heraldry and medieval mythology, usually in their “wing-drying” pose, which was seen as representing the Christian cross, and symbolising nobility, sacrifice and greed.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H_JVWLfl1U%5B/embedyt%5D

Let me bring you to Liverpool FC’s recent win in the 2019 Champions League final which made it a total of 6 European cups for the club. Remember 6 is the number of Satan, the 6 pointed star is a good starting point if you want to look into it some more.

We have found out that Liverpool represents Paradise, the garden of Eden, but in the devil’s image this is hell. Paradise has fallen. They keep showing us. It is written on the walls of our city. Secretly coded into the streets, embedded into our consciousness.

But the cormorant and the bittern shall possess it; the owl also and the raven shall dwell in it: and he shall stretch out upon it the line of confusion, and the stones of emptiness. (Isa 34:11)

The whole of the city was bombarded with mass rituals this week as we step forward to current day as my research on these subjects surrounding Liverpool continues 5 years after I first began. The photograph above is from the player’s trophy parade after returning from Madrid where they beat Tottenham Hotspur 2 – 0 to win the Champions League. 750.000 Liverpool FC supporters flooded the streets of Liverpool to welcome home their heroes. The symbology around the day and the cup win was starting to build into a frenzy and the parade took place on Sunday, June 2, 2019. The cup win was the night before on Saturday, June 1. The city was turned red. Here is the highly masonic St. Georges Hall and the Radio City Tower in all their Satanic Glory. I will come back to the 96.7 Radio City Tower shortly.

As the open-top bus approached the city center we began to see a lot of red smoke, fireworks and the Liver Buildings of course. That iconic shot was a must for this event and I watched the whole parade at home so I could take screenshots of the whole thing and out of the 300 or so I took here is a couple which caught my eye.

This one shows the Liver Buildings with red smoke coming from one of Liverpool’s Twin Towers. It was the East Tower, the one that faces over the city, the people, prosperity.

The image strikes me as odd for a few reasons but the main one being the fact that this red smoke was an organised part of the celebrations. There were fireworks and smoke planned into the route, this was the big finale. A lot of effort went into this scene from the technicians who will have put this all in place. One question I had was why was only one of the towers used? Why did the red smoke come from just one tower? Why did it appear as though one of the birds was on fire? One of the towers esoterically destroyed by flames? Was this a reference to a future event or was it maybe pointing back to the Notre Dame fire that we have linked to Hillsborough?

Revelation 9:2-3

He opened the bottomless pit, and smoke went up out of the pit, like the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by the smoke of the pit. Then out of the smoke came locusts upon the earth, and power was given them, as the scorpions of the earth have power.

The smoke coming out of the tower is one thing but the Liver Bird right above it is another! This looks like the Phoenix rising out of the flames does it not?

Here is what I am talking about so you have more visualisation of what I am showing you.

Look at the two images.

Isaiah 4:5

Then the LORD will create over the whole area of Mount Zion and over her assemblies a cloud by day, even smoke, and the brightness of a flaming fire by night; for over all the glory will be a canopy.

Revelation 15:8

And the temple was filled with smoke from the glory of God and from His power; and no one was able to enter the temple until the seven plagues of the seven angels were finished.

Genesis 19:28

And he looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the valley, and he saw, and behold, the smoke of the land ascended like the smoke of a furnace.

Smoke and red flares are used by Orthodox Greeks each Easter as they perform a ritual called the Burning Of Judas as depicted below.

All this talk of fire and destruction mixed with jubilation is giving me the creeps but let’s carry on. The Liver Buildings are now seen in a whole new way by anyone who has reached this stage of the article. I have made claims and backed them up by lining it up to the information that we are presented with. Look at this about the Liver Bird. My case against this city just grows and grows. I was born here remember.

This is what is looking down over Liverpool with the Liver Buildings representing the tree of life and the city is the Garden of Eden which Satan has set about to ruin. The devil deceives, this is why instead of a Lord’s Cross on top of the Liverpool Twin Tower Liver Buildings we have a bird that featured in the Bible before the serpent. This is why this city is cursed, these are the spells placed over us all each day as we go about our lives earning our daily bread, our home is built to celebrate sacrifice and sin.

“And the little owl, and the cormorant, and the great owl, (Leviticus 11:17 KJV)”

The Tree of Life references and connections are building so let us take a look at this. I have just been looking at old maps of Liverpool I noticed this map looks like a Tree of Life shape. I combined the images so you could see. what do you think?

Next I compare the Tree of Life to the Liverpool FC logo and a picture of the Champions League cup that was part of the advertising campaign in the build-up to the final.

The Liverpool F.C logo that you can see below on the left is an old-style more original club crest. It bears comparisons to the shape of the Champions League trophy that we see on the far right of the 3 pictures. Both the club logo and the European cup resemble the Tree of Life.

We can see Liverpool players and Jurgen klopp making up the tree that is in the heavens (the firmament) as we can see depicted by the stars and galaxies in the background. The arms of the cup look like wings of an angel. Fallen angels. Jurgen Klopp seems to be top of the tree in a God-like position. We see the Egyptian King Mo Salah praying and Roberto Firmino (the firmament)  with Sadio Mane’s back turned revealing his shirt and squad number 10. If we think about the number ten in an esoteric or biblical context then we can highlight many factors such as the ten commandments. In Genesis 1 we find the phrase “God said” 10 times, which is a testimony of His creative power.

The Passover lamb was selected on day 10 of the 1st month (Exodus 12:3), as was Jesus, the Lamb that takes away the sins of the world (John 12:28 – 29; 1 Corinthians 5:7). Day 10 of the 7th month is also the Holy Day known as the Day of Atonement. This unique day of fasting pictures the removal of Satan, the author of sin, before the Millennial reign of Jesus begins (Revelation 20:1 – 2).

The last great world-ruling kingdom of man under Satan is symbolized prophetically by the 10 toes of Daniel 2 and the 10 horns of Revelation 13 and 17.

The 10 plagues God sent on ancient Egypt, in order to free his people, represented his complete and total judgment of the pagan empire.

The Nile River is turned into blood

Plague of Frogs

Plague of Lice

Swarms of Beasts

Plague on the Cattle

Boils

Great storm of hail, thunder and lightening

Locusts

Darkness over the entire land for three days

The death of the firstborn of both man and beast

We have learned a couple of things about the city of Liverpool such as the Liver Birds which not many people are aware of so let us take a moment to look into the meaning of the eagle which is what the Liver Bird was originally thought to be.

The Eagle is symbolic to the Scottish rite of 33rd degree Freemasonry and is used on masonic logos by secret societies who have carried on the mystery teachings of ancient Babylon. There is proof of their existence all around us it is just a matter of training your eyes to be able to spot the signs and symbols, in a way, you need to learn how to see backwards to decode it all.

The double headed eagle is associated with the concept of Empire. Most modern uses of the symbol are directly or indirectly associated with its use by the Roman/Byzantine Empire, whose use of it represented the Empire’s dominion over the Near East and the West.

To understand why the eagle is a satanic symbol I have to explain the story of Nimrod, the Sun God to you briefly.

The Freemasonic eagle with two heads looking left and right, east and west, is symbolic of Nimrod in the role of Eannu. Eannus, is said to have held the keys to the doors of heaven and he was the sole intermediary between God and humanity.

Nimrod (the great grandson of Noah) followed in his father’s footsteps (Cush) and rebelled against God with his wife Semiramus. Nimrod was sentenced to death and his body was chopped up into pieces and parts were sent to other cities as a warning.

His wife fled in despair, after claiming her husband had ascended to the Sun she went around each city collecting the parts of her beloveds corpse and was able to collect all except for his penis which is why we see the phallic symbol on world landmarks and is the true meaning of the Christmas tree also with Nimrod’s birthday falling on December 25th. This proves the festive season to be just another repackaged ancient Babylonian mystery teaching like everything else we celebrate blindly.

Semiramus gave birth to a son on December 25th and claimed it was the reincarnation of Nimrod who had returned to rule the world, this time of year is known as the birth of the new Sun. The dance of creation and destruction is riddled throughout this story and that brings us to the sun and moon worship and how the Liver Buildings have this same theme etched into them.

The Liver Birds face east and west. The male looks over the city to the east (the people) while the female looks over the River Mersey (Prosperity) to the west. Anybody who lives in Liverpool can look at the sky every day and see the Sun rise in the east and watch it follow it’s path right over the city before setting over the Mersey to the west, this is what the Liver Birds are depicting. They are honouring the sun and moon as they travel across the city.

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I mentioned Neptune earlier, Neptune was the name that ancient Romans gave to the Greek god of the sea and earthquakes, Poseidon. He was the brother of Jupiter (Zeus) and of Pluto (Hades).

Below is an image of the Liverpool Coat of Arms and look who features with his pitchfork along side our flying friends….

The ambassador of Liverpool, the Devils brother himself, oh what a lovely tea-party.

Neptune features heavily in Liverpool, a stroll on a sunny day with your head up looking at the buildings architecture instead of down at your mobile phone will begin to open your eyes to your surroundings and you will see exactly what I am stating for yourself.

Church street in Liverpool city centre is very busy at any given moment of the week with hundreds if not thousands of shoppers and workers occupying the area unaware of what is directly above them on one of the most well known shopping buildings in L1. Mark’s & Spencer historically known as Compton House.

The masonry work on the building is impressive, as are many of the buildings in the city centre. Showing the fine craftsmanship of the people of Liverpool who will of built the buildings to the architects designs but they will not of realised what they were etching into the stone as they worked. Here you can see Neptune with his trident on top of Marks & Spencer. There is also another Liver Bird on the side of the building which is hidden inside a pyramid-like shape with an all seeing eye at the top of the triangle.

This is a good chance to look into some of the alpha numerical conversions of some of the words of interest after the topics we have just covered regarding the Liver Birds and buildings along with the city.

As we can see the word Liverpool comes out with a Reverse Ordinal of 119 which is 911 in reverse. We also see Reverse Full Reduction of 47, this is significant as the numbers add up to 11, but more references to the Twin Towers and WTC exist here as I mentioned earlier The World Trade Centre building 7 had 47 floors before being demolished. The Full Reduction of the word Liverpool is 52 which is also 5+2=7. 

The 42 in Chaldean is a reference to the Rainbow which can only be viewed from 42 degrees by the human eye. This is why the LGBT community have adopted the rainbow as their logo as it is another mockery of Gods image and goes against reproduction process of human life. 4+2 is 33 and we know where we have seen that number before.

The next word I want to show you is liver as in the first half of the word Liverpool this is something I have been eager to get to, and as always I did learn a thing or two myself. So here goes with one of the most revealing parts of the article as it confirms Liverpool is under a spell and how we are caught up in a spiritual war that is unknown to the masses.

This is a cryptic corker if ever I have seen one and the numbers don’t lie. Straight out the bag we have 30 in the Full Reduction but Freemasons do not recognise the zero so this drops down to a 3 and 3 is the magic number which is a reference to the Holy Trinity and the Rosa Mystica which we will get back to later when we look at Nelsons Monument on the grounds of Liverpool Town Hall, and believe me it is loaded with 88’s.

Reverse Full Reduction of the word Liver gives us the number 33 which is not good. The Reverse Ordinal is 69 and this brings us to the 69/96 as above so below mirror. This is seen on every Masonic Lodge entrance and is symbolic of the Royal Arch. The number 96 has left an ever lasting pain on The City of Liverpool with the victims of the Hillsborough tragedy tallying up to the occult number. The diagram below shows the number 69 on the Royal Arch. Can you see the hallmark of the Freemasons all over Hillsborough? I can.

In case you wanted more information on the Royal arch, here is a screenshot from the Liverpool Group of Lodges & Chapters website which you can click to be directed to the page that explains all.

Here we can see a list of Masonic Lodges in the North West but look how many are registered in Liverpool that you know of but did not know they were riddled with Freemasons. Click the image to view more information.

To finish off on the word liver we have Chaldean 17 which is 1+7=8 which is a Saturn reference, I will cover that subject later on in the article but we end the numbers game on English Ordinal 66.

In Greek mythology, Prometheus was punished by the gods for revealing fire to humans, by being chained to a rock where a vulture (or an eagle) would peck out his liver, which would regenerate overnight. (The liver is the only human internal organ that actually can regenerate itself to a significant extent.) Many ancient peoples of the Near East and Mediterranean areas practiced a type of divination called haruspicy, where they tried to obtain information by examining the livers of sheep and other animals.

In Plato, and in later physiology, the liver was thought to be the seat of the darkest emotions (specifically wrath, jealousy and greed) which drive men to action. The Talmud refers to the liver as the seat of anger, with the gallbladder counteracting this.

The term “Talmud” normally refers to the collection of writings named specifically the Babylonian Talmud.

In other biblical and spiritual references the liver also signifies interior purification, for the liver purifies the blood, but the intestines purify those things from which the blood is derived. This denotes the good of the external or natural man, is because by the bullock, in which is this caul, is signified the good of innocence and of charity in the external or natural man (AC 9990).

Elsewhere the liver signifies the external good of innocence such as belongs to infants, because before the rest of the viscera have been fully formed for their use, which is the case when the infants are embryos, these are nourished through the liver, all the nutritious juice is brought there through the placenta and the umbilical cord from the womb of the mother. This juice corresponds to the good of innocence.

That this good is signified by the liver is evident in Jeremiah:–

Mine eyes have been consumed by tears, my inwards have been troubled, my liver hath been poured forth on the earth, for the breach of the daughter of my people; the infant and the suckling faint in the streets, they say to their mothers, Where is grain and vine? (Lam. 2:11, 12);

in this passage is described the grief of the vastated church; grief for destroyed truth is signified by the eyes being consumed by tears; grief for the destroyed truth of innocence, by the inwards being troubled; and grief for the destroyed good of innocence, by the liver being poured forth on the earth. Wherefore the infant and the suckling are said to faint in the streets, and they say to their mothers, Where is grain and wine? The daughter of the people for whose breach is this grief, denotes the church (AC 2362, 3963, 6729); eyes denote the things of the internal sight, thus the truths of faith (AC 4526, 4528, 9051); the inwards denote the truths of innocence (AC 3294); the liver denotes the good of innocence; for the infants and sucklings who faint in the streets, denote those who are in the good of innocence (AC 430, 3183, 4563, 5608); the grain and wine concerning which they say to their mothers, Where are they? denote the good of truth and the truth of good; grain, the good of truth (AC 5959); wine, the truth of good (AC 1071, 1798).

Do you understand this is why Liverpool has so much pain over the years? This is the reason we endure tragedies like Hillsborough, whilst the families have been forced to fight these Freemasons for Justice for the 96 for almost three decades.

It has been said before that you can’t knock Liverpool down and keep it down, the people will remain strong spirited through the darkest days and these people who initiate this pain on our city know this. They have us placed in an emotional loop of which they thrive on the negative energies it creates. Yes our city has had its good times but they have come at a price. The founders of Liverpool struck a deal with the devil in return for prosperity and the pain inflicted since has been the price to pay for success. it is coded into the name of the city it is in our faces day in day out. We live in the liver loop. The liver (spirit) regenerates the pool (people) after purification of the blood occurs (sacrifice) and it will go on forever (loop).

Occult Liverpool The Home Of The Wicca Man – Gerald Gardner

Such an occult region has got to have some well-reknowned occultists either living here or who have been famed for witchcraft on Merseyside. This brings us to the man who founded modern Wicca, Blundellsands born Gerald Brosseau Gardner, also known by the craft name Scire. Scire means ‘Know’ in Latin.

A craft name, also known as magical/magickal name, is a secondary religious name often adopted by practitioners of Wicca and other forms of Neopagan witchcraft or magic.

His birthplace may well be the reason occultist popstar Lana del Rey was so eager to visit Crosby Beach during her second stay at the city as she performed at the ECHO arena during the August Lunar Eclipse in 2017.

Born on Friday, June 13, 1884, Gardner had a very good chance of being a creep from day one. He is internationally recognised as the “Father of Wicca” among the Pagan and occult communities. Born into a middleclass family on Merseyside, Gardner was able to travel the world and gain a lot of information that most people would have no access to. After returning to England to retire, he Settled down near the New Forest, and joined an occult group, the Rosicrucian Order Crotona Fellowship.

Founded in 1920 by George Alexander Sullivan, the Fellowship had been based upon a blend of Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, Freemasonry and his own personal innovation, and had moved to Christchurch in 1930.

Another belief held by the group that Gardner found amusing was that a lamp hanging from one of the ceilings was the disguised holy grail of Arthurian legend. Gardner’s dissatisfaction with the group grew, particularly when in 1939, one of the group’s leaders sent a letter out to all members in which she stated that war would not come. The very next day, Britain declared war on Germany, greatly unimpressing the increasingly cynical Gardner.

Through the fellowship, Gardner, said he had encountered the New Forest coven into which he was initiated in 1939. Believing the coven to be a survival of the pre-Christian witch-cult discussed in the works of Margaret Murray, he decided to revive the faith, supplementing the coven’s rituals with ideas borrowed from Freemasonry, ceremonial magic and the writings of Aleister Crowley to form the Gardnerian tradition of Wicca.

Moving to London in 1945, he became intent on propagating this religion, attracting media attention and writing about it in High Magic’s Aid (1949), Witchcraft Today (1954) and The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959). He also Founded a Wiccan group known as the Bricket Wood coven.

On May Day 1947, Gardner’s friend Arnold Crowther introduced him to Aleister Crowley, the ceremonial magician who had founded the religion of Thelema in 1904. Shortly before his death, Crowley elevated Gardner to the IV° of Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.) and issued a charter decreeing that Gardner could admit people into its Minerval degree. The charter itself was written in Gardner’s handwriting and only signed by Crowley.

Gardner hoped to spread Wicca, and described some of its practices in a fictional form as High Magic’s Aid. Set in the twelfth-century, Gardner included scenes of ceremonial magic based on The Key of Solomon.

Queen Victoria Monument

Liverpool Crown Court is built on historical land that was originally home to Liverpool Castle. On he grounds of the court we have the Queen Victoria Monument.

The Queen Victoria Monument is a large neo-Baroque or Beaux-Arts monument at Derby Square in Liverpool.

A large ensemble featuring 26 bronze figures by C. J. Allen (some in New Sculpture style), it was designed by F. M. Simpson of the Liverpool School of Architecture, in collaboration with the local architectural firm of Willink and Thicknesse and built of Portland stone. The foundation stone was laid on 11 October 1902 by Field Marshal Lord Roberts, Commander-in-Chief of the Forces. The monument was unveiled on 27 September 1906. It is a Grade II Listed structure, a preservation category for structures of special public interest.

I find it highly strange that September 27 is also the 270th day of the year, can you see what I see? Remember 9+9+9 is 27, 999 is 666.

There are four groups of figures around the pedestal, representing agriculture, commerce, industry and education. Among the figures representing education is a statue modelled on Sir Oliver Lodge. A large (4.42 metres (14.5 ft) statue of Queen Victoria is at the centre, centred in four groups of columns which support a baldacchino-like open dome (which Terry Cavanagh called the monument’s “least successful feature”). On top of the column groups are four allegorical figures representing justice, wisdom, charity, and peace. Atop the dome itself is a large figure representing fame.

In Greek mythology, Pheme (/ˈfeɪmeɪ/ FAY may; Greek: Φήμη, Roman equivalent: Fama), also known as Ossa, was the personification of fame and renown, her favour being notability, her wrath being scandalous rumors. She was a daughter either of Gaia or of Elpis (Hope), was described as “she who initiates and furthers communication” and had an altar at Athens. A tremendous gossip, Pheme was said to have pried into the affairs of mortals and gods, then repeated what she learned, starting off at first with just a dull whisper, but repeating it louder each time, until everyone knew. In art, she was usually depicted with wings and a trumpet.

In Roman mythology, Fama (“rumor”) was described as having multiple tongues, eyes, ears and feathers by Virgil (in Aeneid IV line 180 and following) and other authors. Virgil wrote that she “had her feet on the ground, and her head in the clouds, making the small seem great and the great seem greater”

Nelson Monument Liverpool Town Hall

Nelson’s Monument is another symbol of Liverpool that has esoteric undertones hidden within its design, just like the Twin Tower Liver Buildings. You can find Nelson’s Monument at Liverpool’s Town Hall.

The Nelson Monument is a monument to Admiral Horatio Nelson, in Exchange Flags, Liverpool, England. It was designed by Matthew Cotes Wyatt and sculpted by Richard Westmacott. It stands to the north of the Town Hall and was unveiled in 1813.

Wikipedia tells us some information about the design of the monument. Look at the numbers game in this.

The monument consists of a bronze statue on a stone base. Its overall height is 29 (11) feet (8.8 m 88), and the circumference of the base is 95 feet 4 inches (29.1 m 1191). The base consists of a drum-shaped pedestal in Westmorland marble 8 feet 10 inches (2.7 m 9+9+9=27 9×3=27 Sun Worship) high, standing on a granite basement 6 feet (1.8 m 18=666) high. Seated around the pedestal are four statues depicting manacled prisoners sitting in poses of sadness; they represent Nelson’s major victories, the battles of Cape St Vincent, the Nile, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar. Set into the drum between the statues are four bronze bas-reliefs depicting other naval actions in which Nelson was involved. Encircling the pedestal above the statues are swags of laurel hanging from behind lions’ heads. Attached to rings in the lions’ mouths are chains that descend to manacle the prisoners. At the top of the pedestal is a cornice with an inscription in metal letters reading ENGLAND EXPECTS EVERY MAN TO DO HIS DUTY .

On top of the pedestal is a bronze group of figures 14 (14=77) feet 2 inches (4.3m 4=3=7 G on Masonic Compass = 7) high, each figure being 7 feet (2.1 2+1=3 trinity) in height, and forming a roughly pyramidal structure. There are five figures surrounded by the drapes and poles of captured flags, with an anchor and a rope on the ground. An idealised nude representation of Nelson stands with one foot on a cannon and the other on an enemy’s corpse, holding upright a sword on which Victory is placing the last of four crowns. To the right of Nelson is the figure of Death reaching out to touch him. On the left of Nelson is a British seaman striding forward. Behind Nelson is the figure of Britannia holding a laurel wreath and Nelson’s decorations.

The monument was the first item of public sculpture to be erected in Liverpool, and is recorded in the National Heritage List for England as a designated Grade II* listed building. Grade II* is the middle of the three grades of designation for listed buildings and is applied to “particularly important buildings of more than special interest”.

SPEAKING OF TRIANGLES – THE SLAVE TRADE.

200 Million Deaths

100 Million Native Americans Culled

100 Million Hebrew Africans Culled

Liverpool’s Rise And Shame Of Torture & Death

Another huge black spot on the history of Liverpool is indeed the slave trade. The slave trade held many dark stories but one I have always thought about is how slaves were thrown overboard during times of low food and illness. It gets worse as owners of the slaves then documented to have filed and won insurance claims for loss of stock. The atrocity was aboard the Liverpool slave ship, Zong. 133 slaves to the new world as they were called were killed in the Zong massacre.

Many factors led to the demise of slavery including revolts, piracy, social unrest, and the repercussions of corruption such as slave insurance fraud, e.g. the Zong massacre case in 1783. It was Liverpool born politician William Roscoe who spearheaded the anti-Slavery movement in parliament at the time.

Estimates of total deaths in the entire slave trade range from 50 to 200 million, but even the lower estimates qualify the transatlantic slave trade as the greatest crime in human history. (The Nazi Holocaust and Stalin’s Gulag Archipelago are the only contenders.)

On 3 October 1699, the very same year that Liverpool had been granted status as an independent parish, Liverpool’s first ‘recorded’ slave ship, named Liverpool Merchant, set sail for Africa, arriving in Barbados with a ‘cargo’ of 220 Africans, returning to Liverpool on 18 September 1700. The following month a second recorded ship, The Blessing, set sail for the Gold Coast.

Vast profits from the slave trade transformed Liverpool into one of Britain’s foremost important cities. Liverpool became a financial center, rivaled by Bristol, another slaving port, and beaten only by London. In the peak year of 1799, ships sailing from Liverpool carried over 45,000 slaves from Africa.

Slavery in British colonies was finally abolished in 1833 and slave trading was made illegal in 1807 though some slavery apprenticeships ran until 1838 (911). However, many merchants managed to ignore the laws and continued to deal in underground slave trafficking, also underhandedly engaging in financial investments for slaving activities in the Americas.

THE CURSE OF HAM UNLEASHED ON AFRICANS BY LIVERPOOL

The curse of Ham father of Canaan was invented by the Pharisees who were descendants of Cain. Cain was the biological son of Satan.

LIVERPOOL FOOTBALL CLUB

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Liverpool FC was founded on June 3rd, 1892 although first became a club earlier in the year on the 15th March 1892.

There are 96 years between June 3rd, 1892, and the day of the Hillsborough disaster – April 15th 1989.

From 3/6/1892, Liverpool founded, to 15/4/1989, Hillsborough disaster, = 96 yrs plus 96+96+96 days and 96+96+96+96+96+96+96 hours. (96 yrs and 316 days.), 96 dead.

http://enchantedlifepath.com/2017/05/08/scary-forshadowing-exposed/

This is the weirdest thing you will ever see, the very start of me uploading videos to Youtube, and it is a very very very good date for us to look back over. It was march 15th 2014, in all its significance the ides of March. It was also the day Russia annexed Crimea.  I was watching the football highlights program in the UK, Match of the day. A very big show, more so that night because Liverpool fc had played Manchester United, another of the top 5 well known and supported clubs in the land.

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Liverpool versus Manchester is watched all over the world. This episode of Match of the day will have been watched by millions as Liverpool fc were looking good to go on and win the championship for the first time in 22 years. They beat Manchester Utd 3 – 0 on the day after Getting 3 penalties, missing one at Manchester United’s Stadium, Old Trafford. Considering the support in all Continents for the teams images seen in the above video certainly got the job done, but what did it mean ”ALL ELITES LEAVE THE PLANET” or something?

As you can see there is a lot more to it than what meets the eye, excuse the pun!! A bigger pattern can now stem from this so let’s begin to look deeper.

It was 2015, the hit show Match of the day first aired in the UK 46 years prior on the 22 August 1964. We have a 64 46 mirror here. Liverpool Versus Arsenal was the first ever game to be shown.

I’ve always known the year the club was founded but Liverpool Shockingly enough I discovered the club was created on the date of March 15th of the year 1892 (1892 is 9/11). It gets deeper, we knew at the start of my investigation. Do you remember the date of the match of the day show from earlier and the running theme of the strange symbols.

March 15 is the 74th day of the year (75th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 291 days remaining until the end of the year. In the Roman calendar March 15 was known as the Ides of March, and it was on this day that Julius Caesar was murdered. Next I calculated the days and years between the date of Liverpool fc foundation and the day of the spooky match of the day symbolism was it a secret birthday message.

From and including: Tuesday, 15 March 1892 (9/11) To and including: Saturday, 15 March 2014 (15 is 6 which is 33 the masonic number) Result: 44,560 days – we find the obama number 44 again and 5+6 is 11 It is 44,560 days from the start date to the end date, end date included Or 122 years, 1 day including the end date Alternative time units 44,560 days can be converted to one of these units:

3,849,984,000 seconds 64,166,400 minutes 1,069,440 hours 44,560 days 6365 weeks and 5 days

44,560 = 44 – 11 

HOLY SHIT SHERLOCK IS LIVERPOOL F.C TIED TO PRESIDENT OBAMA AND JULIOS CAESAR AND 9/11 SURLY NOT – WELL CLEARLY SO.

The assassination of Julius Caesar was the result of a conspiracy by forty Roman senators, the self-styled Liberatores. They were led by Cassius  (see links to Mohammad Ali) and Brutus. The conspirators stabbed Caesar to death in the Theatre of Pompey on the Ides of March, 15 March 44 BC (here we see the 44 number the Obama number). Caesar was the dictator of the Roman Republic at the time. He had been declared dictator perpetuo (dictator for life) by the Senate. This declaration resulted in many senators fearing that Caesar’s ambition was to overthrow the Senate in favour of a tyranny.

Next we take a quick look at the huge phallic symbol that was lit up in red for the Champions League celebrations in the city. The Radio City 96.7 tower formerly known as St. Johns Beacon is one of many phallic symbols in the city. You can see an image below where I have joined the tower up with a picture of a phallus at Vatican City, Rome. This is symbolic of Nimrods lost penis. This will be explained later on in the article

I agree with anyone who says it is just a common aviation control tower, but for these purposes and the energy needed for these rituals this is a blatant phallus.

It is not just me who can see these things in this city and here is a very awakened friend of mine, Bob Mizer, who posted this next information on Facebook hours before Liverpool’s triumphant victory that seems more staged the more we look at it.

Something else worth pointing out is how when we seen players on the back of the parade bus we only ever seen two players with the number 6 on the back of their shirts. We would see the two 6’s next to each other at all times and the bus decorations had the 6 trophies that the club have now won on their display. This was 666 on display all day to the world. Over 750.000 people attended the parade as mentioned and the YouTube footage alone from @LFCTV had around 200.000 viewers as it was live.

Another point I must make is about the royals. We can never get through an entire ritual like this without the Royals being coded into it somewhere. For example at the Manchester Arena bombing we had royal bloodlines coded in via the name of a park near a terror attack. The Queen Victoria Gardens. This is quite common. So I was not surprised when I looked at the date of the parade June 2nd and found it did line up to alleged nobility.

June 2 is the 153rd day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. 212 days remain until the end of the year.

The 212 days remaining are a 33 day, the 33 is mirrored by 2+1 and then the 1+2 giving us the two 3’s.

The Mirror date of June 2nd is July 31st. this is because July 31st is the 212nd day of the year. We may want to keep an eye out for an event on July 31st, 2019. But for now I am heading somewhere with this.

I mentioned the Royals and rightly so. This is because 66 years to the date of the parade we seen Queen Elizabeth the 2nd being crowned at her coronation. Here is a breakdown of the time duration between June 2nd 1953 and June 2nd 2019.

To ensure the mass ritual carried on in full flow, the next stage was set at Anfield for a nicely timed Take That comeback gig at the famous football ground on June 6th 2019, yes that 66 again, 6/6!

As I was taking the weeks events in like wow, wow, wow, I felt excited for the team I have supported all my life winning the 6th European Cup. But wow to how in my face all these synchronicities were. We really have been hammered this week. They have spirit cooked the living daylights out of us. Anyone with a basic understanding of the occult will confirm this to you with one look at this article if it is new to you.

Watch this video and look at the big screens, they are another fiasco hidden in plain sight.

I have no words for that big giant God of War behind Take that and Gerry Marsden at Anfield. Can somebody explain to me what it has got to do with Take That, Gerry Marsden, You’ll never Walk alone or Liverpool or shall I tell you what it is because it has nothing to do with any of the above whatsoever. The backdrop to the Take That and Gerry Marsden Satanic performance was a bad omen. Why would anyone want to show so many people so many bad omens all centered around one seemingly joyful occasion?

Here is some more articles of mine that show moons and Mars and why they are omens. Take note we have a blood moon due on around the 16/17th of July 2019. This follows Junes Summer Solstice on the 22nd when all the pagans and druids will be out in force as usual. If we see an uptick in animal slashings again this year such cat mutilations and horses attacked to obtain blood for rituals then we know who to blame.

http://enchantedlifepath.com/2017/04/21/april-21-attack-warning/

http://enchantedlifepath.com/2016/10/02/black-moon-rises-lileth-ww3/

We have seen the number 6 ever since June 1st. What else can I dig out for you to highlight how this all works? Let us look at the number 6 a moment.

In the Bible, the number 6 symbolizes man and human weakness, the evils of Satan and the manifestation of sin. Man was created on the sixth day. Men are appointed 6 days to labor.

A Hebrew slave was to serve six years and be released in the 7th year. Six years were appointed for the land to be sown and harvested. The number 6 is also associated with Satan in his temptation of Jesus.

The bringing together of three 6‘s is the number and mark of the end time Beast of Revelation. As such, it represents the very best system of governance that mankind can produce WITHOUT God and under the constant influence of his chief adversary.

Man’s system on earth is made up of three parts (economic, religious and governmental) all of which are influenced and led by Satan. When 666 is multiplied by 7 it equals 4662, which depicts man’s total imperfection under Lucifer. When added across, 4 + 6 + 6 + 2 = 18; and 18 divided by 3 is 6.

6% Of 666 is 39.96, I find this interesting. I do not have to point out the 96 to Liverpool fans or people who understand 96 as meaning as above so below again but i will. Now what about that 39? 13×3=39. Jesus is linked by the 39 lashings he received during his crucifixion. Mars is said to be 39 million miles away. There are 39 members of the Bilderberg group. if we flip the numbers we which we relate to Aleister Crowley and his Thelema 93 teachings as well as the sun allegedly being 93 million miles away.

The 11.100% we got from dividing 666 by 6 left us with a 111. This gives us a 3 which is the number of the Holy Trinity. Symbol of the Trinity of God, One and Three times Saint. It represents the God-Father in the Holy Trinity. It symbolizes also the Sky.

According to the narration of Maria Valtorta, during of the bearing of the Cross until the Golgotha just like at the moment of his crucifixion, Jesus is escorted by 111 Roman soldiers: 1 commander, named Longin, 10 knights and 100 other soldiers. It is Longin who, having seen how Jesus had expired, declared “In truth this man was the Son of God” (Mk 15,39).

The popes John-Paul I and John-Paul II have been elected both by a conclave of 111 cardinals.

The magic square using the first 36 numbers is associated to the sun and has for sum 111. If we add each number up from 1 to 36 we get 666.

Can you remember when Liverpool beat Paris Saint Germain 3-2 in the group stages of the Champions League at Anfield? They were leading 2-0 only for PSG to drag it back to 2-2 before Roberto Firmino came of the bench to score a late winner days after hurting his eye and being deemed unfit to start the match?  He covered his eye to mock an all seeing eye as his celebration. Roberto Firmino is covered in sigils as you can see on his tattoos. Research illuminati star tattoo meaning.

You can read my article about Liverpool F.C’s biblical transfers that no one noticed when I featured Roberto Firmino, Mo Salah, Sadio Mane and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain here.

http://enchantedlifepath.com/2017/08/30/liverpool-f-c-biblical-transfers/

Liverpool have reached 3 European finals in a row since Jurgen Klopp took charge and the German made it 3rd time lucky with the 2019 Champions League win after defeat in the final a year earlier to Real Madrid who are based in the city where Liverpool lifted their 6th European Cup. The semi-final draw last year was very dubious as Liverpool were drawn against Roma but the match seemed to be fixed from the start as Roma fans were sent emails with ticket and travel information for a tie with Liverpool before the draw had been made. I covered this last year. Here is my article below.

http://enchantedlifepath.com/2018/04/14/roma-v-liverpool-draw-fix-exposed/

There is more than one team in Liverpool and this brings me to my next topic I want to talk about. The red/blue, Everton/Liverpool divide and conquer tactic used on the people.

You see, in Liverpool we are born boy or girl, (no offence to LGBT alphabet community intended) or a Liverpool or Everton fan. The success levels between the two clubs suggest it is the Evertonians who have been drawn the short straw when their allegiance is sworn for them by parents when they are young. The tit-for-tat between us Liverpool fans and Evertonians is outright childish and pathetic. It was out in force during the build up to the final with Everton fans resorting to placing Tottenham Hotspur flags outside their homes or even using Spurs club logos as facebook profile pictures.

Liverpool went on to win the cup and the Everton fans were sent into a frenzy very much with the opposing energy of that from the Liverpool fans. It drove them nuts watching us basque in our teams glory.

Everton’s iconic Rupert’s tower was vandalised by Liverpool fans who placed 6’s on the historical landmark that is featured on the Everton F.C club badge.

Evertonians retaliated by spray painting the word nonce on a wall mural of Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp.

The problem here is the people doing it could not see the problem. In fact, they could not see the meaning of it all in the first place and this leads us into the merging of the red and blue to make purple and why that is important to the occult realm.

I mentioned bloodlines earlier and this is why. This is where I wanted to explain it to you because the red and blue is important.

There are many factors to the symbolism behind the colour coding around our two famous football teams whose stadiums are separated by just a park. The closest teams in the Premier League with around a mile between them.

Brothers, sisters, friends, lovers and colleagues all around the city have a common difference. Households are split in two by the red and the blue of Liverpool and Everton Football Clubs.

This now takes down another line of research that I have waited a very long time to explain properly all in one place and the city and teams we love provides us with the perfect platform for me to do just that.

Red and Blue is Fire and Ice, is that phrase familiar to you after the last 8 years of Game of Thrones? I thought so!

The red represents the sun and the blue is symbolic of the moon. Yes we have more sun and moon references but it gets deeper.

Sun and moon on a cloudy sky forming Yin Yang balance symbol

The Scarab Beatles

The Beatles are another gang of crafty string pullers and they are next on the page and boy are we going to have a good time with this section.

SACRIFICE & RITUAL DATES

March 11 – Creation Day – A blot is done in honor of the Creation of the world bo Odin, Vili, and Ve on this day (3/11=33). – Ken Dodd Death, 2017.

http://enchantedlifepath.com/2018/04/03/ken-dodd-freemasonic-funeral/

March 15 – Ides of March – Caesar murdered 44BC (one month before the Hillsborough disaster, Fordica Roman festival) –

“The Reed Entered”. Its exact significance is uncertain (the reeds may refer to the river bank where Attis was exposed as a child and rescued by Cybele). A nine-day period of abstinence from bread, pomegranates, quinces, pork, fish, and probably wine began. Only milk was permitted as a drink.

Key events include the Christchurch Masacre in 2019. Also be sure to check out my true prediction where I named the date and place for the Ides of March 2018 bridge collapse after the Valentines day, Florida school shootings when I decoded that event.

http://enchantedlifepath.com/2019/03/30/christchurch-shootings-audio-enhanced/

March 22 – Hilaria (7 days after Ides of March) – Skull & Bones (322 3/22) – Brussels Airport Bombings 2016.

“The Tree Entered” (Arbor intrat). A pine tree from a wood sacred to Cybele is felled following the sacrifice of a ram at its roots. The tree was carried in procession through the city as if in a funeral to the Temple of Cybele on the Palatine Hill.http://enchantedlifepath.com/2018/02/10/winter-olympics-ritual-watch-s-korea/

http://enchantedlifepath.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/EXPOSED-Brussels-Bombings-322-Skull-Bones-3-22-Hilaria-Pagan-Festival-ANOTHER-SACRAFICE.mp4

March 23 – A day of mourning – The Salii, dancing priests of Mars performed their sacred dance and the mourning and fasting continued. Salii has also been  also viewed as as marking the opening and the closing of the yearly war season. The opening would coincide with the day of the Agonium Martiale on March 19, and the closing with the day of the Armilustrium on October 19 (8  days after the Ides, 8 = 44, Saturn, Obama number)

http://enchantedlifepath.com/2018/03/24/trebes-ritual-three-evils-69-war/

March 24 – “The Day of Blood” (Sanguis). Frenzied rites including scourging and whipping. Castration rituals would take place on this day. The tree is symbolically buried.

March 25 –  “The Day of Joy” (Hilaria) celebrating the resurrection of Attis. This was the hilaria proper (as opposed to the mournful tone of the previous days).

March 26 – A day of rest.

March 27 – “The Washing” (Lavatio). Added by Marcus Aurelius.

March 28 – Possible ceremony at the Vatican sanctuary. Appears in the Calendar of Philocalus.

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Liverpool History Liverpool History

Liverpool History – The Untold Story: Second City Of The Empire Decoded

Liverpool History: The Lost Twin of Babylon Liverpool History – You will learn more & have the best experience if you can find time to watch all the videos in the article along the way.

Liverpool History – The Untold Story: Second City Of The Empire Decoded Liverpool History: The Lost Twin of Babylon Liverpool History - You will learn more & have the best experience if you can find time to watch all the videos in the article along the way.

[ejbarnes]

Book review: _The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structures of Alchemy_ by Mircea Eliade, translated from the French by Stephen Corrin, Harper Torchbooks 1971

Prolific Romanian-born writer Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) wrote Forgerons et Alchimistes (Smiths and Alchemists) in the 1950s, and Flammarion published it in 1956. It’s a good thing that, by the time I read the 1962 translation by Stephen Corrin, I’d done a great deal of reading on the theory and history of Western alchemy and the occult, not to mention both popular and scholarly history in general – or I’d have been much more easily impressed by Eliade’s ostentatious displays of erudition.

These displays consist of piling on examples meant to demonstrate his theses, all too rarely bothering to step through the logic (even the emotional logic). This pattern is especially marked in the early chapters, where he illustrates various cultural concepts associated with metallurgy by listing various peoples who hold them; but it crops up in other chapters as well, most stultifyingly in the chapter on Chinese alchemy, in which he quotes a range of Chinese sources vouching for the exact same idea or practice. This is a very old-fashioned – as in pre-Enlightenment – way of framing an argument (as noted by Wayne Shumaker in his book The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance). Many peoples are mentioned without mentioning where they are, what their general technological state is (other than the implication that they are “primitive”), or how much contact they have with neighboring cultures; many ancient, mediaeval, and early-modern writers on alchemy are cited without noting the threads of influence between them. In an ostensibly historical cultural study such as this, it is not enough to note that a person or culture embraces an idea; the why is a critical part.

In a few places, Eliade complains that he doesn’t have the space to go into depth on certain matters that would help him construct his argument more clearly and logically. This beggars belief, coming from someone who had previously written a 500-page book on shamanism – and cites himself in the current work (Le Chamanisme et les techniques archaïques de l’extase, 1951). Who set the terms under which the new book was to be written?

Where metallurgy fits into the history of material culture in general is only waved at; Eliade declares at the outset that there is less known about the spiritual significance of other crafts. Considering that material culture, as a subject of historical study, was in its infancy at the time he was writing, it’s hard to tell whether the blind spot here was his, or that of the entire field. Eventually, Eliade admits there’s not much known about the cultural history of metallurgy, either.

As he was writing in the 1950s, Eliade can be somewhat forgiven for using the word “primitive” (only sometimes in quotes) to describe cultures and communities that have not (yet) been overtaken by industrial methods of production. However, after chapter upon chapter of describing the metallurgy-related cultural practices of pre-industrial peoples – within historical times – belatedly, he admits that looking at modern “primitives” is not necessarily a reliable way to determine the by-definition-unwritten prehistory of cultural practices surrounding ancient technologies. Unfortunately, even if this is the best we can do, it really isn’t good enough for the purposes he wishes to serve.

It is easier to forgive Eliade for using ethnic terminology that has fallen out of fashion since the book was written, such as applying the term “Hamitic” to the Ma[a]sai. Alas, the translator, Stephen Corrin, stumbles in rendering the French versions of various ethnonyms into English, such as not realizing that the Achanti are the Ashanti, or that “Tziganes” are the French exonym for what English speakers would have called Gypsies (who call themselves, as Eliade points out, “Rom” or variations of the same).

Eliade makes interesting points about mythological significance of smelting and smithing, including the smith as both a heroic and a threatening figure. However, he implies that these themes are universal, when almost all of his examples are positive rather than negative; no effort seems to be made to explain why some metal-using cultures might not share in these themes. Critics over the years have accused Eliade of cherry-picking his data when writing cultural history, and Forgerons et Alchimistes may have been one example. In addition, almost all of the cultures he cites are Old World. “Metallurgy as such,” he writes, “in Central and South America, is probably Asiatic in origin.” The evidence he gives for this is grossly anachronistic, at least by modern research – although the source he cites, a German article from 1954, is the likely source of the problem. Other than this, he has little to say about indigenous/traditional New World cultures except in reference to their shamanic, rather than metallurgic, practices.

More importantly, the only universal that could apply to his argument about the history of metallurgy is the pre-industrial enchantment of the world, and with it both nature and all of material culture. The best parts, early in the book, address how ideas of organic growth, as well as sex and sexual reproduction, are applied to what we moderns would consider non-living matter, either natural or human-made. The disenchantment of the modern world encourages drawing a sharp line between living and non-living matter, whereas in the pre-modern view that line is often either nonexistent or highly permeable.

Smiths (and alchemists) are “Masters of Fire”, as one chapter puts it; but there are other members of any human culture who are. At the very least, they stand at the hearth instead of the forge – but who cared, in the 1950s, about how women use fire in traditional cultures?

The significance of gold in early Chinese culture, where it was too rare to use for coinage, is fluffed off in one of the appendices. (Interestingly, China is ranked, as of 2016, as the world’s top producer of gold.) Eliade never mentions that the Chinese knew, even in ancient times, that cinnabar was toxic, so the significance of tales of adepts ingesting it for “immortality” is not put in proper socio-mythic context. Is this a result of his stated decision to completely avoid discussing practical aspects of chemistry/alchemy because his focus is on the mystical aspects? The physical properties of materials drive their spiritual significance, not the other way around. For example, gold would not be “noble” if it corroded as easily as iron.

Illustrations from Michael Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens (reprinted under the title Scrutinium chymicum, the version Eliade references) are strewn through the book, but the only reference to Maier in the text quotes an entirely different work, Symbola aureae mensae duodecim nationem. In addition, none of the illustrations (including from another work, Rosarium philosophorum) have captions giving anything more than author, title of work, date and place of publication, and a brief translation of the text from the source. Thus, while many of the illustrations definitely reference ideas described in the book, there is no direct connection, and thus the reader is left to wonder why this illustration was selected until the text mentions the  idea -- without referencing the illustration – a circle that badly needed to be completed.

I do not know enough about the history of history of science to say whether it was known, at the time Eliade wrote, that all attributions of alchemical texts to Arnaud de Villeneuve and Ramon Llull were spurious. Certainly the “Geber problem” was well known by then, but he manages to skirt around it by only specifically referencing works definitely known to be by Geber (Jābir ibn Hayyān).

Once he gets to Western alchemy, Eliade in several places cites Baron Julius Evola, who wrote the influential but historically questionable The Hermetic Tradition. I’ve read too little anthropology from the 1950s to know if Evola was generally radioactive in European scholarship during this period, but his political leanings would not have been much of a secret. Unlike Eliade, Evola never distanced himself from his fascist past; he criticized the Fascist party from the right, and, after the war, continued to produce polemics for the Italian radical right, including calls for political violence. Evola’s scholarly interest in Hindusim was to no small degree colored by its karmic justification of caste society, a stratification he hoped would be re-embraced by the decadent, democratic West; there’s no reason for me to believe that Evola’s study of hermeticism was untainted by his personal politics, prescriptive for all civilization as they were. Can we trust what a misogynist such as Evola, who openly advocated the forcible subjection of women, would have made of the alchemical Hermaphrodite, or the female alchemical assistant depicted in Mutus Liber?

Ultimately, I came away from The Forge and the Crucible feeling snookered by false advertising. The book groups together smiths and alchemists as major topics in one ~200-page volume – and the English subtitle implies that the origins of alchemy are the main topic of the book. I was thus led to believe that a case would be made that the cultural practices surrounding early metallurgy evolved directly into alchemy as both a technical and mystical practice. Yet, when the time came, the process of tracing from one to the other was fudged with “probablys” and “must-have-beens.” This is the book’s single greatest weakness.

Toward the end of the book, Eliade can’t resist lamenting the sorry state of modernity and what was lost with the disenchantment of the world. Treating this topic with anything more rigorous than sentimentality would require acknowledging that our experience of the numinous is necessarily filtered through our subjective mindset, whether our cultural background or our personal psychology. Such a treatment would require a book of its own, one which would be incomplete without positing a non-sectarian methodology by which the external reality of our spiritual experiences could be judged. As I’m not a professional theologian, I am unaware of whether any such methodology is possible, let alone whether anyone has proposed one.

The standard format of historical or anthropological bibliographies may have changed since this book was published, or it may be (or have been) different in the Francophone circles for which it was originally written. As it stands, the bibliographical information is concentrated in several appendices rather than a single bibliography arranged in a format familiar to me – i.e. a list or group of topic-based lists alphabetized by surname of author or editor. In these appendices, works on related topics are clustered in paragraphs, making scanning for authors or titles a huge pain. The best appendix of the lot is the last, his essay on Jung.

An online blurb for the 1978 edition claims an updated appendix including more recent works on Chinese alchemy, as well as “the importance of alchemy in Newton’s scientific revolution.” I should probably have a look at this, as Newton’s alchemical work was little acknowledged until the 1970s.

The index is sparse, to the point of being nearly useless. Despite Eliade’s name-dropping numerous ethnic groups, only some ethnonyms make it into the index. Geber/Jābir (written by Eliade as Jâbîr) appears at least twice (at least once in the main text as well as in one of the appendices), yet, despite being a major figure in the history of alchemy, he does not appear in the index at all under either G or J. Other alchemists, such as Zosimos and Michael Maier, though mentioned in the text, are similarly omitted from the index. Whether the shameful carelessness of composing the index is a function of the original Francophone publisher or the Anglophone publisher is not something I am in a position to pinpoint.

Overall, I would not recommend this ~60-year-old book for anyone who is just starting out in the study of alchemy, as understanding it correctly requires a background in history of science, and perhaps more background than I have in the history of material culture. I would prefer to direct such readers to Lawrence M. Principe’s 2013 book The Secrets of Alchemy, in which he demonstrates that first and foremost, alchemy was (and, according to its modern adherents, apparently still is) a physical discipline which was capable of yielding observable results, regardless of whether the “gold” produced was real.

[worthless-weight-in-gold]

While the vampire universe is only listed on Jim Moriarty’s page, all of my muses can fit into it. 

Thew Daniels is a Guarding academy teacher. She creates a lot of the items used to help vampire hunters, comes up with techniques, etc. She’s like a professor that only teaches 1 class because she’s mostly employed by the school to do research and write books.

Jim Moriarty is an ancient vampire, the oldest one who is still active in society, and he’s rather mellow but still loves games and therefore adores navigating all the rules of old-vampire society.

Eun Yoo is a human who works at an old vampire club as a server.

Hakeem Porter is a Defense academy teacher. He used to work at one of the ones that got shut down by charmed his way out of consequences and got re-hired at the new one that popped up to replace it. He’s also a quarter breed that is currently flying under the radar, as people think he’s just human.

Bruce Wayne is basically the same as his normal verse. He’s a super rich human, enough to interact with the middle class of vampires freely, and by night he’s Batman; protecting innocents from those who prey on them.

Riah is a vampire hunter, ungraduated but trained by a Guarding School line. She became a hunter primarily because she wanted to walk the streets at night without fear, and only takes up the odd guarding job in order to make end’s meet.

Noa is a Kept with an unusually kind vampire as her protector. She creates art, and isn’t ever fed on due to health issues making her an unappetizing meal. She is famous in all societies except upper class vampires as The Dying Painter. She can walk around at night even more freely than most Kepts because it’s well known by vampires that she would make a gross meal, so there’s no real risk of being fed on.

Min-Jee is a vampire made during the war, lost between generations. She’s 400 years old and is technically in upper-class society but finds herself generally shunned due to her age.

Thespian is a young vampire, around 90, and is thriving. They’re partying in clubs. They’re drinking safe amounts from consenting humans. They work as a bartender in a young club. They’re living their best life.

Sanjit is an ancient who’s out of touch with modern times, having been asleep for the last 200 years after his lover was killed, and recently roused while finally starting to move on past his grief. He doesn’t interact with much of society and finds himself mostly wandering.

[taz-writes]

1, 12, 27 for that fantasy ask meme?

Hi! i’m answering this pretty late because I got busy! 

01. which world is your favorite? least favorite? why?

Feilan’s definitely my favorite fantasy world that I’ve created, just because it’s so old and so precious to me as a person that I will never stop adoring it. It’s got a lot of depth, because I’ve spent years and years making up ridiculous nonsense and then trying to explain it. 

I think the least favorite fantasy world I’ve tried to build was… I dunno. I’ve forgotten what I named it, because I scrapped it for being kind of a weird racist mess. I made it when I was in fifth grade and thought it was fine, but then I grew up and started looking at it and realized that it had all kinds of unfortunate implications that I’d been totally oblivious to. I didn’t know how to fix those, and the good parts of the ‘verse weren’t good enough to be worth saving, so it went bye-bye. Least favorite fantasy world that isn’t mine and that I didn’t make is a tough question, but I am very disappointed in a lot of YA fantasy worlds because so many of them seem really uninspired. They get treated as set dressing for a romance and that’s the end of it. 

12. is there an ocean in your story? what kind of creatures lurk in it?

Yes, there is! My fairies actually spend a lot of time there in book 2. It’s home to the underwater nation of Marazzia, home of the mersprites. My mersprites are… special people. I have a personal grudge against mermaids, but I’m fond of my interpretation anyways. They’re the diplomats of the sea! Since their home nation lies between the two major continents of the world, they find themselves in the middle of a lot of international trade and drama. They’ve taken advantage of this to control intercontinental trade and travel, even going as far as to negotiate and arbitrate surface wars and conflicts. Peace makes good business. And if you would choose to break the peace, well… you won’t be very welcome when you’re marooned in still waters, will you? Mersprites do not have internal aura magic like fairies, but they are masters of manipulating the magic in their environment. They’ve perfected the art of creating magical wands and amulets, including the amulets commonly used for physical shapeshifting and transformation. Visitors to Marazzia are often loaned diplomat amulets which let them take the shape of mersprites and travel underwater themselves, and the mersprites will engage in surface diplomacy using amulets that turn them human for a while. Rumor has it that the mersprites who speak with surface-dwellers wear some kind of amulet even under the water, to appear pleasant and pleasing to the eye. This sounds ridiculous, but they do look quite a lot like humans with pretty scaled tails, despite sometimes living at the depths of ocean trenches where light wouldn’t even reach for them to sea with…

27. is there a castle? what does it look like?

Hell yeah! There are a few of them, actually. 

The castle on Eth Zantaara is Kyrina’s stronghold. It’s pretty squat and wide, built up on a mountain face with one big fat tower. It looks like a kid drawing, Kyrina designed it herself when she was like 4 or 5 and blew an unfair amount of the country’s budget on construction. 

The Great Castle, Feilan’s most iconic building, is SUPER impressive. It’s located in Lanorium and has been the seat of royal power for thousands of years before Kyrina’s regents moved the capitol. It was built in the Age of Light, before written history, and the architectural techniques used to create it have been lost to time. It is SO huge and SO tall that it’s visible for miles, and it could potentially house the whole population of the surrounding city inside its walls. It consists of seven towers next to each other, like… symmetrical panpipes is the image I’m coming up with right now, surrounded by gardens. The towers feature spectacular and ENORMOUS multi-story stained glass windows, plus an opalescent finish to the stone that’s unique to the castle. Once again, nobody knows how they did that. It’s iconic enough that the castle is featured on Feilan’s currency as a symbol of the nation! The castle’s insides are also spectacularly huge. There’s a whole orchard and small farm located in one of the towers, which produces enough food to make the castle self-sustaining. There’s also a big cathedral, and a ballroom with special marble flooring that reflects dancers’ magical auras. Unfortunately, the westernmost tower was severely damaged in the fire that killed the previous Queen and Prince Consort, and due to the age of the architecture it’s unable to be fully repaired. The damage is visible from the outside as a nasty black char over much of the tower’s walls, and the nice pointed roof has caved in. 

The Tsi Citadel also sort of counts as a castle, although the royal family’s home is more of a palace, since it’s not fortified. The whole city is built up in the canopy of the Tsi Forest, reaching somewhere around 200 feet in the air. It’s surrounded by an ancient, crumbling wall, reinforced by vines and built onto the surrounding valley. There’s an old fortress down there too, but it’s been surrendered to the undergrowth. It’s safer and easier to live up in the trees. The aesthetic is…well, I’ve been describing it to people as Lothlorien but chunkier, and that’s pretty accurate. It’s very surreal and inhuman-looking, but also very strong. The architecture is modeled after traditional Germanic aesthetics. 

The Irkatzi Palace in V’Ianor is also worth mentioning, just because it’s really pretty. Like the Tsi city, V’Ianor is a treehouse town, but the aesthetic is TOTALLY different. Most of the trees in V’Ianor are pines, so the buildings often look like they’re on stilts supporting themselves on slimmer tree trunks. There’s an East Asian look to the designs, I’m still working out which specific type of East Asian but right now I’m leaning Chinese or Vietnamese. They’re similar looks but with different cultural implications. The Irkatzi palace is no exception, it has those gorgeous pagoda-style curved rooftops and some very nice detailing on the walls. The overall look is more graceful than the Tsi, very angular but very precise. A little elven. There’s water everywhere. The Irkatzi associate themselves with the goddess Harmonine and believe that their people came from the sea, and this expresses itself in water art, so their palace is full of these gorgeous enchanted streams and waterfalls that are guided through thin air using magic. Sculpting these water formations is a traditional Irkatzi art form. The palace has very famous water gardens in its courtyard. 

Thanks so much for the ask! I really love talking about my worldbuilding, it’s something I’m very proud of even though it’s still a work in progress in a lot of ways. 

[ebenvt]

Yunnan Xuanwei Ham (宣威火腿/xuān wēi huó tuǐ) Eben van Tonder 10 May 2020

Introduction

Xuanwei Han in Xuanwei City.  Reference China on the Way.

Yunnan is one of China’s premium food regions known for exquisite tastes. One of the major cities in this picturesque region is Xuanwei, where one of the world famous Chinese hams are produced, the others being Jinhua Ham from Zhejiang province and Rugao Ham from Jiangsu province. Yunnan Xuanwei Ham is known for its fragrance, appearance, and out-of-the-world taste.  Through the ages, there have been many references in literature to the health benefits associated with the hams. In order to produce these hams, there are at least two ingredients without which the hams can not be produced. The first ingredient is salt.

The Industrialisation of Ham

Early references to Xuanwei hams go back to 1766. “Old chronicles recorded the Qing emperor Yong Zheng five years (the year 1727) located XuanWei (a city of YunNan province, China), so it is called XuanWei ham. (China on the Way) In 1909, Zhuo Lin’s (Deng Xiaoping’s third wife) father Pu Zai Ting, a businessman, mass-produced it for the first time.  He established Xuanhe Ham Industry Company Limited.  His company sent food technicians to Shanghai, Guangzhou (formerly Canton), and Japan to learn advanced food processing technology.

One example of the excellence pursued in Guangzhou relates to the cultivation of rice.  Rice breeding began in China in 1906.  However, by 1919, systematic and well-targeted breeding using rigorous methodologies was started at Nanjing Higher Agricultural School and Guangzhou Agricultural Specialized School. Between 1919 and 1949, 100 different rice varieties were bred and released. (Mew, et al., 2003) For a riveting look at the trade in Guangzhou, see the work by Dr. Peter C. Perdue, Professor of History, Yale University, Canton Trade.

By all accounts, Pu Zaiting was successful in creating a world famous ham (at least by probably standardising and industrialising the process).  In 1915 Xuanwei ham won a Gold Medal at Panama International Fair. The ham, which, in the Qing and Ming Dynasties, was a necessary gift for friends and guests and which, during the gourmet festival, became the main ingredient to create different delicious dishes achieved international acclaim. (chinadaily.com)

The Xuanhe Canned Ham Industry Company Limited was established on the back of canning equipment bought from the United States of America to produce canned ham. Most of what it produced were exported overseas.  In 1923 Sun Yat-sen tasted the ham at the National Food Exhibition held in Guangzhou.  Sun famously wrote of the ham, “yin he shi de” translating as “eat well for a sound mind!”  By 1934, four companies were producing the canned ham. (Kristbergsson and Oliveira, 2016)

Xuanwei Ham expanded greatly under the People’s Republic of China, established in 1949.  Supporting industries started to develop.  A factory was created to supply the cans used by the Municipal Authority of Kunming City. (Kristbergsson and Oliveira, 2016)

Production of Xuanwei hams rose by 1999 to 13 000 tonnes, made by 38 large producers.  In 2001 it got the status of a regional brand, protected by the People’s Republic of China.  A Chinese standard, GB 18357-2003 was subsequently issued.  By 2004 production rose to 20,750 tonnes with technology in manufacturing and packaging improving continuously. (Kristbergsson and Oliveira, 2016)

Apart from a rich and competitive environment, an entrepreneur, as the proverb goes, worth his salt, was needed to bring discipline to the production process and to establish this ham among the finest on earth.  In achieving this status, three elements were required, namely salt, the right meat and a solid production technique to yield this culinary masterpiece on an industrial scale.

Yunnan – Centre of Culinary Excellence

The first requirement for competitiveness is an environment of excellence and innovation.  The environment where this exquisite ham is produced testifies to culinary excellence.  Like Prague, which produced the ham press, nitrite curing and the famous Prague hams, the Yunnan hams likewise hail from an area replete with food and cooking innovations.   Yunnan is located on what was known as the Southern Silk Road and its culinary excellence is seen, among other things, in the equipment used in preparing their foods.   Joseph Needham, et al. reports that in restaurants in the cities of Yunnan, a very special dish is found “in which chicken, ham, meat balls and the like have been cooked in water just condensed from steam.  This is done by means of an apparatus called chhi  kuo (or formerly yang li kuo) made especially at Chien-shui near Kochiu.  It consists simply of a red earthenware pot with a domical cover, the bottom of the pot being pierced by a tapering chimney so formed as to leave on all sides an annular trough (figure 1490).  The chhi  kuo once placed on a saucepan of boiling water, steam enters from below and is condensed so as to fall upon and cook the viands of the trough, resulting thus after due process in something much better than either a soup or a stew in the ordinary sense.  Since the chimney tapers to a small hole at its tip no natural volatile substances are lost from the food, hence the name of the object and the purpose of its existence.  The chhi  kuo must claim to be regarded as a distant descendant of the Babylonian rim-pot (for it has and needs no Hellenistic side-tube) with the ancient rim expanded to form a trough, compressing the ‘still’-body to a narrow chimney.  But how the idea found its way through the ages, and from Mesopotamia to Yunnan, might admit of a wide conjecture.”  (Needham, et al.,1980)

The second essential ingredient for a salt-cured ham is salt.  Salt is something that China has been specialising in for thousands of years and which became the backbone of the creation of this legend.

Salt in China

Flad, et al. (2005) showed that salt production was taking place in China on an industrial scale as early as the first millennium BCE at Zhongba.  “Zhongba is located in the Zhong Xian County, Chongqing Municipality, approximately 200 km down-river along the Yangzi from Chongqing City in central China.  Researchers concluded that “the homogeneity of the ceramic assemblage” found at this site “suggests that salt production may already have been significant in this area throughout the second millennium B.C..”   Significantly, “the Zhongba data represent the oldest confirmed example of pottery-based salt production yet found in China.”  (Flad, et al.; 2005)

Salt-cured Chinese hams have been in production since the Tang Dynasty (618-907AD). First records appeared in the book Supplement to Chinese Materia Medica by Tang Dynasty doctor Chen Zangqi, who claimed ham from Jinhua was the best. Pork legs were commonly salted by soldiers in Jinhua to take on long journeys during wartime, and it was imperial scholar Zong Ze who introduced it to Song Dynasty Emperor Gaozong. Gaozong was so enamored with the ham’s intense flavour and red colour he named it huo tui, or ‘fire leg’. (SBS) An earlier record of ham than Jinhua-ham is Anfu ham from the Qin dynasty (221 to 206 BCE).

In the middle ages, Marco Polo is said to have encountered salt curing of hams in China on his presumed 13th-century trip. Impressed with the culture and customs he saw on his travels, he claims that he returned to Venice with Chinese porcelain, paper money, spices, and silks to introduce to his home country. He claims that it was from his time in Jinhua, a city in eastern Zheijiang province, where he found salt-cured ham.  Whether one can accept these claims from Marco Polo is, however, a different question.

Salt Production In and Around Yunnan

When it comes to salt, only a very particular variety is called on to create this legend.

Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau

Around the Yunnan-Guizhou plateau are three salt producing areas which took advantage of the expansion of China towards the west in the early modern era.  “Szechwan with a slow but steady advance; Yunnan with the speed and initiative characteristic of a developing mining area; Mongolia with a sudden, temporary eruption.”  (Adshead, 1988) As fascinating as Szechwan and Mongolia are, we leave this for a future consideration and hone in on Yunnan.

Szechwan not only supplied its own requirements for salt, but also that of Kweichow, Yunnan (trade started in 1726) and western Hupei. Despite the fact that Yunnan imported salt from Szechwan and possibly from Kwangtung, this was mainly to supply its eastern regions of the escarpment. On the plateau it had salt resources of its own.  By 1800, it is estimated that it produced 375 000 cwt (hundredweight).”These salines formed three groups:  Pei-ching in the west near Tali the old indigenous capital; the Mo-hei-ching or Shihi-koa ching in the south near Szemao close to Laotian and Burmese borders; Hei-ching in the east near the provincial capital Kunming. (Adshead, 1988) It is this last group that captures our imagination due to the connection with the Yunnan hams.

Although known as ching or wells, many of the Yunnan salines, especially those in the Mo-hei-ching group, were in the nature of shafts or mines, though the low grade rock salt was generally turned into brine and evaporated over wood fires.  The growth of the Yunnan salines in the Ch’ing period was the product of two forces. First, Chinese mining enterprise, often Chinese Muslim enterprise, which in the 18th century was turning Yunnan into China’s major source of base materials – copper, tin and zinc.  Second, the extension of direct Chinese rule into the area, the so-called kai-t’u kuei-liu, initiated particularly by the Machu governor-general O-er-t’ai between 1725 and 1732. (Adshead, 1988)

The distant past of Heijin comes to us, courtesy of Yunnan Adventure Travel, who writes that “the unearthed relics of stones, potteries, and bronze wares have proved that as early as 3,200 years ago, ancestors of some minority groups already worked and multiplied on this land. It’s recorded in the “Annals of Heijin” that, a local farmer lost his cattle when grazing on the mountain, he finally found his black cattle near a well; but to his surprise, when it lipped the soil around the well, salt appeared; thus in order to memorize the black well, the place was nicknamed as “Heiniu Yanjin” which means the black cattle and the salt well. It’s shortly referred to as Heijin afterwards.”   (www.yunnanadventure.com) Some accounts of the story have it that it was a Yi girl who was looking for her missing oxen when she came upon them licking salt from the black well.

Who better to take us on a tour of the old town than a seasoned traveller!  We meet such a wanderer in the old city of Heijin in the person of Christy Huang.  She takes us on an epic adventure, discovering the old salt kingdom of  Hei-ching.  She posted it on Monday, November 30th, 2015 and she called her post “Old Towns of Yunnan, Heijing.”  

Christy writes that “the quite fameless Old Town of Heijing (黑井古镇) – today one of the nicest in Yunnan – used to be famous for the high-quality salt which was produced there since hundreds of years. The once most important town of Yunnan is hidden at the banks of Longchuan River in Lufeng County of Chuxiong Prefecture of Yunnan.

Salt production in bigger scale began in the Tang Dynasty (618-907) and peaked during the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1912) Dynasties. Besides the overall beautiful picture of Hejing and its surroundings, there are a couple of scenic spots worth mentioning:

Courtyard of Family Wu,

Ancient Salt Workshop,

Dalong Shrine, as well as,

Heiniu Salt Well.

The Courtyard of Family Wu used to be the residence of former salt tycoon of Heijing Old Town. The mansion was built during 21 years in mid 19th century and is formed in the shape of the Chinese character wang (王), which means king. It has 108 rooms, which have been left more or less unchanged. Today it serves as an (expensive) hotel for Heijing visitors.

The Ancient Salt Workshop was Heijing’s core place and fortune fountain. The remaining huge water wheels and stages for making salt testify the great prosperity of the bygone times. The salt produced in Heijing is as white as snow. It was and is used for preserving Yunnan’s well-known Xuanwei Ham.” (Christy Huang, 2015)

Wujin pig

The third ingredient in the production of Yunnan Xuanwei Ham is the pigs. Traditionally, the rear legs of the Wujin pig breed are used.  The breed is known for its high-fat content, muscle quality and thin skin (chinadaily.com).

The breed is usually kept outdoors and is typical in the Xuanwei region. They are normally fed on corn flour, soybean, horse bean, potato, carrot, and buckwheat.  They are slow growers, but their meat is of superb quality.

Li Yingqing and Guo Anfei (China Daily) wrote a great article about these pigs for the Yunnan China Daily entitled “Yunnan’s little black pig by the Angry River.”

They write that “there is a quiet little revolution taking place by the banks of Nujiang River, the “angry river”, the upper stretch of the famous Mekong as it passes the narrow gorges near Lijiang. Here, little black pigs wander freely by steep meadows, grazing on wild herbs and foraging as freely as wild animals. They are relatively small, compared to their bigger cousins bred in farms. These sturdy little animals are reared for about two to three years before they are slaughtered and made into the region’s organic hams – called black hams for their deep-colored crusts.” (Yingqing and Anfei)

Li Yingqing and Guo Anfei report on “Wang Yingwen, a 47-year-old farmer who has raised the black pigs for more than 30 years, says the pigs are fed spring water and they live on wild fruits, mushrooms and ants on mountains, an all-organic diet if there was one. (Yingqing and Anfei)

With increased industrialisation came the demand for a faster growing animal. Wujin pigs were being crossed with Duroc (USA), Landrace (Denmark), and York (UK) to achieve faster growth. Wujin x Duroc were crossbred.  Other crossbreeds are York x (Wujin x Duroc) and DLY (Duroc x (Landrace x York). Yang and Lu (1987) found that the cross itself does not materially influence the quality of the ham as long as the breed contains 25% Wujin blood. (Kristbergsson and Oliveira, 2016)

In Xuanwei City, pig production is big business! In 2004, the city loaned 120 million yuan to breeders.  By this date, the city had 31 breeding facilities each yielding 3000 pigs annually. There were an additional 9600 small breeding facilities.  356 Animal hospitals support the breeding and husbandry operations.  In Xuanwei City, 1.2 million pigs were sold in that year.  (Kristbergsson and Oliveira, 2016)

Consumers want a great product (consistency, despite volumes offered by industrialised processes) and a great story (focussing on the ancient history of the process and ham itself).  Work to accomplish this was funded by the Yunnan Scientific Department, the Yunnan Education Department and Xuanwei City Local Government who all promoted the continued development of the Yunnan Xuanwei Ham (宣威火腿/xuān wēi huó tuǐ). (Kristbergsson and Oliveira, 2016) Modern processing methods moved away from seasonal production and embraced modern processing technology, but the great legends of the past remain as well as tailor-made production techniques catering for year-round production.

Processing Yunnan Xuanwei Ham

The Xuanwei climate explains the production methods used, as is the case with all the great hams around the world. Xuanwei City is located on a low-latitude plateau mansoon climatic area where the north sub-torrid zone, the southern temperature zone, and the mid-temperature zone coexist.  Winter lasts from November to January and spring occurs from February to April. February, March, April is sunny and clear and this leads to a low relative humidity during these months. From March to September it is overcast and rainy, and the relative humidity is comparatively high.  Winter  is the best time to salt the hams according to the old methods to limit microactivity till salt dehydrates the meat and reduces the water activity.  The rainy season is best for fermenting the ham. (Kristbergsson and Oliveira, 2016)

Production

As in all meat processing, making the hams start with good meat selection.  The process starts in the winter.  The animal is killed and all the blood pressed out by hand. Animals are between 90 and 130 kg (live weight) when slaughtered.

by Kristbergsson and Oliveira, 2016

A simple flow chart is given by Kristbergsson and Oliveira (2016).

Slaughtering and Trimming

Boiling water and scraping the pig’s hair. Reference: China on the Way.

Traditionally Xuanwei people kill the pigs usually before the last frost.  They add boiling water to a wok and scrape the pig’s hair.  Some people refer to killing the pig as washing the pig. For villagers, the killing of the pig is a sacred ceremony. (China on the Way)

The hind leg is trimmed into an oval shape in the form of a Chinese musical instrument, the pipa.  The legs of small pigs are cut in the form of a leaf. The legs cut off along the last lumbar vertebra.   After the blood is pressed out, the meat is held for ripening in a cold room at a temperature of 4 to 8 deg C, relative humidity of 75% for 24 hours. Ripened legs are known as green hams. (Kristbergsson and Oliveira, 2016) This step is an enigma to me since I am not sure what is accomplished in such a short period of time.  My guess is that it is not technically ripening, but rather allowing any excess fluids to drain out.  I will keep interrogating the processing steps to ensure that my sources have the right information.

Cutting and trimming the leg: China on the Way.

Salting

The First Salting: China on the Way.

The green hams are then salted.  The salt is a mixture of table salt (25g/kg of leg) and sodium nitrite (0.1g/kg leg).  (Kristbergsson and Oliveira, 2016) The inclusion of sodium nitrite is without question a modern development since nitrite curing of meat only became popular after World War I.  My instinct tells me that they originally only used salt and later, possibly, sodium nitrate, the production of which has been done for very long in Chinese history.

The salt is rubbed into the hams by hand massaging for around 5 minutes. “The salted hams are then stacked in pallets and held in a cold room at 4 to 8 deg C, 75 to 85% relative humidity for 2 days.  Salting procedure is then repeated.”  The salt ratios are this time changed to table salt of 30g/kg ham and sodium nitrite is kept at 0.1g/kg leg. The meat is rested for a further 3 days in the chiller after which another salting is done. The ratio of this salting is 15g of table salt per kg of ham and again, sodium nitrite is kept at 0.1g per kg ham. (Kristbergsson and Oliveira, 2016)

Kneeing the hams as salt is rubbed in by hand: China on the Way.

According to Li Yingqing and Guo Anfei, “traditionally made hams are cured with half the salt used in factories. Instead, they are allowed to dry-cure for at least eight months to about three years, so the meat has time to mellow and mature.” “The longer the ham is cured, the better the quality and the most popular product now is the three-year-old cured ham.”

Double Salted Hams: China on the Way.

Drying

The hams are then hung in the drying room with a temperature of 10 to 15 deg C and relative humidity of between 50 and 60%. (Kristbergsson and Oliveira, 2016)  Note how the temperature is increased and the relative humidity decreases to facilitate drying from the inside, out.

The excess salt is brushed away and the hams are dried for 40 days. Windows are kept open to facilitate air movement to air drying.  Screens are placed in front of openings to prevent flies, other insects and birds from entering.  If drying is too fast, a crust will form on the outside of the ham and if it is done too quick, the inside will not be dried and will spoil.  If drying is done too long, the meat will be too dry to accommodate the lactic acid bacteria which will be involved in the fermentation process.

Li Yingqing and Guo Anfei reports on the traditional way that drying was done. “If you visit the villages by Nujiang, you may chance upon a strange sight in winter, when the hams are hoisted high on trees so they can catch the best of the drying winds. These trees with hocks of ham hanging from them seem to bear strange fruit indeed.”

Fermentation

Drying and Fermentation: China on the Way.

After drying, the temperature is raised to 25 deg C. Relative humidity is pushed up to 70% and ideal conditions are created for fermentation. This process lasts for 180 days. Apart from creating an ideal condition for microbes, raising the temperature and humidity favours enzymatic activity, which is important in flavour development due to the partial decomposition of lipids (fat) and proteins. (Kristbergsson and Oliveira, 2016)

Traditionally, the fermentation process takes more than ten months.  When the surface is completely green, the hams are ready: China on the Way.

Aging

“Xuanwei ham is like good wine: the older the better. A ham that’s been aged at least 3 years can be eaten raw like prosciutto di parma.”

Control of Pests

During the curing and drying stages, flies pose a major risk. During fermentation and storage ham moths and mites (eg. tyrophagus putrescentiae) are the major danger. Relative humidity of over 80% attracts flies such as Piophila casei, Dermestes carnivorus beetle and mites. “There has been considerable work done in controlling mite infestation. Microorganisms such as the Streptomyces strain s-368 help prevent and treat mite investigation.”  (Kristbergsson and Oliveira, 2016)

Evaluation

Bone needles or bamboo needles are used to insert it into three specific sites to check the ham. The smell tells the evaluator if the ham is ready: China on the Way.

Xuanwei hams are evaluated by sensory evaluation. The odor is absorbed by a bamboo stick, used for the evaluation.  This is the most traditional absorption method to classify different ham grades.  For a detailed discussion and evaluation of this method, see Xia, et. al (2017), Categorization of Chinese Dry-Cured Ham Based on Three Sticks Method by Multiple Sensory Techniques

Storage

Storage is done under ambient conditions and the hams can be stored between 2 and 3 years.

A caravan travelling along an ancient road.  Pu Zaiting must have been driving just such a caravan, journeying from north and south: China on the Way.

 Physiochemical Indices

by Kristbergsson and Oliveira, 2016

“The physical and chemical properties of dry-cured ham are important determinants of its quality (Jiang et al. 1990 ; Careri et al. 1993 ). The lean portion of Xuanwei ham contains 30.4 % protein, 10.9 % fat, 10.3 % amino acids, 42.2 % moisture, and 8.8 % salt (Jiang et al. 1990 ). The whole ham contains 17.6 % protein, 29.1 % fat, 5.6 % amino acids, 24.8 % moisture, and 3.3 % salt (Jiang et al. 1990 ). Many essential elements are present in the ham as are some vitamins. The ham is particularly rich in vitamin E (45 mg/100 g). The characteristic bright red color of Xuanwei ham is mainly attributed to oxymyoglobin and myoglobin. The flavor and taste are associated with the presence of various amino acids and volatile organic compounds . The volatile substances present in Xuanwei ham have been extensively studied (Qiao and Ma 2004 ; Yao et al. 2004 ). Seventy-five compounds were tentatively identified in the volatile fraction. The compounds identified included hydrocarbons, alcohols, aldehydes, ketones, organic acids, esters, and other unspecified compounds.” (Kristbergsson and Oliveira, 2016)

Microflora

The dominant microorganism on the surface of dry cured hams is mold, which affects quality. During the ripening stage, molds play an important and positive role in flavour and appearance.  A study of Iberian dry-cured hams showed that yeasts are predominant during the end of the maturing phase of production whereas Staphylococcus and Micrococcus are absent. This surface yeast population has been shown to be useful for estimating the progress of maturation.  Its contribution to curing is suggested to be their proteolytic or lipolytic activity. (Kristbergsson and Oliveira, 2016)

In Xuanwei hams, researchers have shown Streptomyces bacteria to dominate and account for almost half of the Actinomycetes.  Aspergilli and Penicillia are common on the surface of Xuanwei hams during June to August. They found 8 species of Aspergillus. A. fumigatus was found to be dominant and accounts for one third of Aspergilli. Generally speaking, a high relative humidity encourages mold development on the surface of the hams.  (Kristbergsson and Oliveira, 2016)

The dominant fungi found on Xuanwei hams is yeast.  Yeast can be 50% of the total microorganisms found on mature dry-cured hams. Proteolytic and lipolytic activity of yeast is desirable.  Towards the end of maturation, yeast dominates on dry-cured hams. (Kristbergsson and Oliveira, 2016)

Which species to be found during the different stages of production depends on temperature and relative humidity. In the Xuanwei region, humidity and temperature are highest during the rainy season. Molds occur almost exclusively on the surface of the hams. Aspergilli and Penicillia occur mostly during May when relative humidity and temperature are high. These fungi peak in July and August. Molds begin to grow in May and are well established by June.  Spores are formed in August and September. The quantity of spores falls off gradually in September. (Kristbergsson and Oliveira, 2016)

“The growth of bacteria and Actinomycetes does not seem to be dependent on humidity in the curing room. Levels of bacteria are generally lower than levels of yeast. According to Wang, et al. (2006) yeast on ham multiplies exponentially from the beginning of the salting stage to reach a peak in April, and then the numbers drop and stabilise to around 2 x 107 cfu/g.Yeast levels within the ham show similar variation as the surface yeast. According to Wang et al. (2006) yeast accounts for 60 to 70% of the total microbial population on the surface of the ham. In some cases, no molds have been found growing on the surface of good-quality ham; therefore, some researchers believe that molds do not play a direct role in determining the quality of dry-cured ham, but an opposing view also prevails.” (Kristbergsson and Oliveira, 2016)

“According to the traditional view, high quality Xuanwei ham must have “green growth”  (i.e. molds) on it. However, fungi such as Penicillia , Fusarium , and Aspergilli are known to produce mycotoxin in foods such as dry-cured Iberian ham (Núñez et al. 1996 ; Cvetnić and Pepeljnjak 1997 ; Brera et al. 1998 ; Erdogan et al. 2003 ). More than 15 % of the mold strains examined were found to produce mycotoxins in Xuanwei ham (Wang et al. 2006 ). The toxins penetrated to a depth of 0.6 cm in the ham muscle. Because most of the fungi that occur on ham have not been examined for producing mycotoxins , contamination with toxins might be more prevalent than is realized.” (Kristbergsson and Oliveira, 2016)

Feasting

“The ham must be flame burned and washed before eating, in order to remove the rancid taste.” (China on the Way.)

Flame treatment: China on the Way.

There are an infinite variety of ways to serve the ham.  It can be steamed, boiled, fried, or used as accessories. Old legs can be eaten raw. When cooking, cook either the whole ham or large cuts on a slow fire or slow boil it to retain the flavour.

China on the Way.

Further Reading

Traditional Foods, Kristbergsson, K., Oliveira

—————————————————————–

Reference

Adshead, S. A. M..  1992.  Salt and Civilization. Palgrave.

chinadaily.com Updated: June 26, 2019

China on the Way, XuanWei Ham

Flad, R., Zhu, J., Wang, C., Chen, P., von Falkenhausen, L., Sun, Z., & Li, S. (2005). Archaeological and chemical evidence for early salt production in China. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 102(35), 12618–12622. http://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0502985102

Huang, Christy.  2015.  Old Towns of Yunnan, Heijing.  

Kristbergsson, K., Oliveira, J. (Editors). 2016.  Traditional Foods: General and Consumer Aspects. Springer.

Mew, T. W., Brar, D. S., Peng, S., Dawe, D., Hardy. B. (Editors). 2003. Rice Science: Innovations and Impact for Livelihood. International Rice Institute (IRRI).

Needham, J., Ping-Yu, H., Gwei-Djen, L..  1980. Sivin, N..   Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 5, Chemistry and Chemical Technology. Cambridge University Press.

SBS – http://www.sbs.com.au/food/article/2017/04/30/over-1000-years-ham-heres-where-it-all-began

http://www.yunnanadventure.com/index.php/Attraction/show/id/153.html

https://yunnan.chinadaily.com.cn/2012-01/16/content_14500704.htm

http://www.chinaontheway.com/xuanwei-ham/?i=1

Xia, D., Zhang, D. N., Gao, S. T., Cheng, L., Li, N., Zheng, F. P., Liu, Y..  2017. Categorization of Chinese Dry-Cured Ham Based on Three Sticks Method by Multiple Sensory Techniques Volume 2017, ID 1701756 https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/1701756

  Yunnan Xuanwei Ham (宣威火腿/xuān wēi huó tuǐ) Yunnan Xuanwei Ham (宣威火腿/xuān wēi huó tuǐ) Eben van Tonder 10 May 2020 Introduction Yunnan is one of China's premium food regions known for exquisite tastes.

[junker-town]

Why chiseled boxers lose, and flabby boxers win

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Why chiseled boxers lose, and flabby boxers win.

It was a meeting of two diametric body types: the impeccably chiseled vs. the swollen flab of the aesthetically aloof. An experiment to determine what a real fighter should look like.

There was James Toney, the short guy who’d eaten his way out of the 160-pound division up to a rotund 217 pounds. Once referred to by HBO broadcaster Jim Lampley as a “fat tub of goo,” Toney’s body was soft, with a paunch that peeked over his trunks, and a waistline that threatened to jailbreak his butt crack from his ever-lowering shorts. By conventional standards, he didn’t look like much of a fighter.

And there was Evander Holyfield, the heavyweight division’s elder statesman who, at 41, was still a physical marvel. As he grew older and bigger, his neck got shorter and thicker, slowly consumed by sloping trapezius muscles. His shoulders became cannonballs and his weightlifter chest deepened and expanded like armour. He resembled the marble statues of ancient Greece, or perhaps more notably, the copiously oiled bodybuilder bulk of Rocky Balboa.

Holyfield had also begun his career as a much smaller man. Unlike Toney, he worked up to the heavyweight ranks seeking greater glory and fortune. To help, Holyfield’s manager, Lou Duva, sought out Tim Hallmark, a fitness guru who would forge Holyfield’s body into what some purists considered a gaudy display of the human form.

Hallmark was first hired to help Holyfield prepare for cruiserweight champ Dwight Muhammed Qawi. After Holyfield won, Hallmark was asked to make the 190-pound fighter a heavyweight.

“I said ‘yeah, but what do you mean by heavyweight?’” Hallmark said.

“We want him big,” was the answer.

“They called it the Omega Project,” Hallmark recalled. “And they wanted him to get up to like 220.”

Hallmark cautioned them: any unneeded muscle would sap much-needed energy. As the boxing truism goes, punchers are born, not made. Extra weight only offers a marginal increase in power, if any.

Holyfield packed on 12 pounds in 1988, and continued to grow until he had heaped more than 25 onto his lean frame. When he met Toney in 2003, he weighed 219 pounds. Rumors swirled that Holyfield used steroids to help him gain weight. Those suspicions reignited when Holyfield’s name surfaced during two steroid investigations of pharmacies in 2007. Holyfield denied the allegations.

His conspicuous physique fascinated commentators, including Lampley, whose stentorian proclamations would bolster the legend of Holyfield’s fitness.

“Conventional wisdom is that Evander Holyfield is the best trained, best conditioned heavyweight in the sport and maybe in the history of the sport,” he exclaimed during Holyfield’s bout with Bert Cooper.

Holyfield acquired praise through years of grueling fights, including the 15-round battle of attrition with Qawi. But some ring observers saw a man who was naturally 190 pounds being weighed down by muscle, killing his stamina. Holyfield won fights with intellect and mental toughness more than lung capacity. He’d collected an array of barfighter techniques, hitting opponents below the belt or raking their noses and cheeks with his elbow. And he regularly employed the clinch, leading with his head as he went to hug his opponent.

Holyfield had effectively learned to stall, frustrate and catch breathers for himself. After eating too many of Holyfield’s headbutts in their first fight, Mike Tyson infamously bit a chunk out of Holyfield’s ear.

Toney was different. At 5’9, he was almost five inches shorter than Holyfield, his muscles lost islands in a rising sea. His bulky shimmer evoked none of the menace of pop-culture badasses. Even his nickname, “Lights Out,” might be mistaken for the final line of a children’s story.

When the pair met in Las Vegas, boxing’s glittering capital, Toney had just survived a punishing fight with Vassily Jirov, taking nearly 250 punches on his way to narrow victory. Jirov, known for fighting German shepherds in a closed hallway during his amateur days, was famously dedicated to his training. Toney outlasted him, knocking “The Tiger” down late in a split-decision win.

Both Holyfield and Toney were considered outstanding fighters, but Holyfield had the better earnings and reputation after knocking out the palpably violent Tyson and nearly beating champion Lennox Lewis. Holyfield would bring his own brand of relentlessness, fans thought, along with what some called world-class conditioning. Toney, conversely, was known as a hard partier who loved cheeseburgers and preferred sparring over other kinds of training.

Perhaps more than their resumes, the fighters were compared by their waistlines.

“The bottom line is, what kind of shape is James Toney in?” Showtime commentator Steve Albert observed. “We’ll soon find out.”

WireImage

Little time elapsed in the fight before the outcome was certain. Toney’s waist didn’t matter. His boxing was economy of movement, his torso swiveling to offer him vast counterpunching options. His defense followed the shoulder roll tradition of the old days. Whenever Holyfield tried to punch Toney, the slickster used a suite of defensive maneuvers to create odd angles.

Nine rounds later, Holyfield’s corner threw in the towel.

Both men carried substantial extra weight into the ring, but it was the fat man who breathed easy. And yet, the fight did little to deter a movement across boxing towards bigger, more sculpted fighters. Big men with big muscles, like Michael Grant, had already been established as standards in the prize ring. Tyson came out of prison and quickly acquired a six-pack, and Lewis’ chest and arms grew throughout his career.

Holyfield, after all, was old for a prizefighter, and had suffered from high-profile health problems for years. And Toney had already distinguished himself as one of the finest technical boxers of his day. The outcome was unexpected by the sports books, but understandable.

While old-school trainers felt they had established their version of a good fighter’s body, Hallmark and celebrity trainers like Mackie Shilstone successfully led an insurgent school of thought among the sport’s age-old ideas. More conditioning coaches would follow, like Alex Ariza in the camp of Filipino superstar Manny Pacquiao.

Though the fight’s outcome was conclusive, fans still debate what an ideal fighter’s body should look like, to the chagrin of the sport’s oldest experts.

Boxing’s roots reach all the way back to 1800s England, with influences from the ancient Greek martial art of pankration. The toughest fighters were immortalized in statues or mosaics, often with idealized musculature: big arms, huge chest and sprawling veins.

But weightlifting in boxing was far from becoming as rigorous as it is today. Bob Fitzimmons, one of the sport’s biggest stars until he retired in 1914, was renowned for his strength and power and won a heavyweight championship at only 167 pounds. He advocated running for seven or eight miles every day. And while he believed in training with dumbbells and a weighted bat, he never grew bulky.

Running has been a cornerstone of boxing training since then, along with jumping rope. Generally speaking, heavyweights of yesteryear had shredded, fit physiques, but lacked the same raw size as the Holyfield era.

Primo Carnera was the first blockbuster attraction to awe audiences with sheer mass. He was a circus strongman appropriately called the “Ambling Alp,” often weighing in at 275 pounds at a time when many heavyweights didn’t even crack 200. He collected a string of knockouts in the 1930s, with headlines to match. When Earnie Schaaf died shortly after losing to Carnera, the big Italian earned a dangerous reputation. But many thought that Schaaf’s earlier beating from Max Baer’s historically dangerous right hand was the real culprit.

Boxing lore alleges most of Carnera’s fights were fixed in his favor, and by the time Carnera challenged Baer, he was no longer considered invincible. In that fight, Carnera absorbed frightening punishment from Baer and was knocked down at least half a dozen times, showing little more than oafish technique and incredible heart.

Fat boxers could also grab headlines, but with skill. Even those men, like the infamous Tony Galento, were still partly viewed as sideshows.

Galento, a beer-guzzling New Jersey heavyweight who once fought an octopus, had skill and a left hook to be feared. He stood 5’8, and was 230 pounds of pasta and meatballs. Once, Galento was anointed “the bum of the month” and offered a chance to fight Joe Lewis. He was ultimately knocked out in four rounds, but not before he dropped Lewis with that sneaky left hook, proving that corpulence doesn’t negate good technique.

But the best fighters had both fitness and skill. During boxing’s golden age, championship fighters typically eschewed weightlifting. Jack Dempsey, for example, was known for speed and devastating power, and stayed in shape by jumping rope, chopping wood and swinging a sledgehammer.

Boxers also fought more often. The all-time great “Sugar” Ray Robinson went 11-0 when he first won the middleweight title in 1951, and sometimes fought more than 20 times in a year. The extra activity forced fighters to stay close to their fighting weight between bouts, the matches themselves giving them exercise that could never be properly replicated in training. Conversely, champions today usually fight two or three times a year at most. Floyd Mayweather was famously inactive while earning some of the highest paydays in the history of the sport.

Conditioning is to be able to do in the 12th and 11th what you did in the first with the same kind of snap and energy. You can go 12 rounds and loaf the last four.” - Trainer Abel Sanchez

Trainers agree that weightlifting surfaced within boxing in the 80s and 90s, partly as a way for fighters to move up to higher divisions where they might earn more lucrative fights.

Long-time trainer Abel Sanchez, most noted for his successful stewardship of Gennadiy Golovkin, has long maintained training methods consistent with the old ways. His stable is limited to eight or nine fighters at any time, and he doesn’t consult with strength and conditioning coaches or sports psychologists. His operation is just him, making his fighters do distance runs twice a week, and sprints three times a week.

“Weights have always been something that most fighters didn’t want to mess with because they thought it tightened them up,” he said.

Golovkin, a knockout artist known for his ability to surge late in fights, was long counted among the world’s best fighters.

“To me conditioning is not the ability to go 12 rounds,” Sanchez said. “Anybody can go 12 rounds. Conditioning is to be able to do in the 12th and 11th what you did in the first with the same kind of snap and energy. You can go 12 rounds and loaf the last four.”

Trainer Jeff Fenech became another old-guard boxing trainer after a fighting career distinguished by his conditioning and toughness. He fought at a blistering pace, regularly breaking his hands. Now, he preaches short, intense workouts. In his day, he ran three miles daily at a 15-minute pace, rested, then trained just an hour in the afternoon.

Good trainers tailor their methods for the fighter. Noted stamina freak Johnny Tapia, for example, didn’t believe in running, and instead jumped rope at least an hour a day, sometimes two. But all trainers and conditioning coaches agree that too much muscle is never good, and that no strength training can substantially increase punching power. Artificially going up in weight can lead to disaster.

“It’s a matter of physical structure. Ken Norton was really muscular but he had the build for it, he had long muscle instead of short, thick muscles,” Hall of Fame trainer Jesse Reid said.

“I think it’s a mistake when they start fooling around with steroids or they get these strength and conditioning coaches that think bodybuilding is going to work.”

Reid, and others see bulky chest and leg muscles as more cosmetic than functional. With no weight limit, heavyweights are free to indulge in culinary temptations in ways smaller fighters cannot. Fighters controlled by weight classes have to closely manage their bodies before every fight. Heavyweights can pack on all the size they like, sometimes against the better judgment of their handlers.

“A guy like George Foreman did a lot of natural training,” Reid said. “He got more relaxed with his body and he started pulling cars and lifting tires and built a lot of natural strength that way. He relaxed more with his body instead of being so tight and so muscular. When he was young he was a massive muscle man.”

Late in his career, Foreman built a persona around his added fat in his late career for marketing purposes. He’d jog while eating donuts in TV commercials, and once taunted trainer Teddy Atlas to “get me a sandwich.”

Foreman, known for devastating power and composure, was good at pacing himself, even as he fattened up. He went 31-3 in his second boxing stint after a 10-year hiatus. And while many of those early opponents were soft-touches to re-establish a famous name, Foreman’s ability to remain calm and manage his work rate carried him even against top young fighters. His mobility declined, but he compensated with a high ring IQ that grew with age. Most importantly, he maintained his one-shot knockout power, which gave him a chance to win fights even if he got behind. In 1994, Foreman reclaimed a version of the heavyweight title against the young, much more svelte Michael Moorer.

“On the club level I’ve seen many sloppy bodies beat up on body beautiful over the years,” PBC matchmaker Whit Haydon said. “I’ve seen many guys who looked like they just got out of a mariachi band beat up on a guy who looks like he just got out of Gold’s Gym. Especially heavyweights.”

Too often, heavyweights ruin what had been fine-tuned machines in pursuit of a bigger purse.

“They might have had whippy power when they first turned pro and then it looks like they’re pushing out their punches and a little bit more robotic,” Haydon said. “They lose that loose flow they had when they were younger.”

Getty Images

In the days since Holyfield became a jacked Adonis, fighters have only continued to get bigger. On June 1, 2019, boxing got another high-profile bout of fat man vs. brawn, a modern-day pugilistic Aesop’s fable.

Heavyweight king Anthony Joshua had ruled the heavyweight division, beating quality competition in almost every championship defense. The undefeated fighter was even more muscular than Holyfield had ever been, somehow stacking bulk on an already huge 6’6 frame.

He’d planned to fight Jarrell “Big Baby” Miller in 2019, a 315-pound unproven boxer not known for his punching power. After Miller tested positive for illicit performance-enhancing drugs three times, he was bounced from the fight. After several emergency inquiries, promoters found a replacement fighter of almost equal girth: 268-pound Andy Ruiz. He wasn’t the typical soft-touch replacement. Ruiz had developed a reputation as a smart, tough fighter whose quaking midsection belied his blurring hand speed.

While both men were natural heavyweights, unlike Holyfield and Toney, both carried extra pounds into their fight at Madison Square Garden. Fans foresaw a bloodbath that favored the British star. Experts, however, knew Ruiz would be a handful.

Joshua came out with relentless aggression. He knocked down Ruiz in the third round and, sensing an early victory, pressed the action. But Ruiz’s hand speed advantage came into play. He exploited Joshua’s recklessness and returned the knockdown with a devastating punch, catching Joshua behind the ear and wreaking havoc on his equilibrium. Ruiz scored another knockdown that same round before finishing the fight in the seventh.

Fans marveled at the surprise victory. How could a fat guy known for eating a Snickers bar before each fight beat a man with muscles out of a Marvel comic?

“When you have more muscle, you better believe you have to condition that muscle,” said Larry Wade, the conditioning coach for top fighters like Badou Jack. “Then a guy like Andy Ruiz is so big, why didn’t he get tired? He’s fat, but you don’t have a bunch of muscle to pump oxygen to.”

Commentators and pundits echoed Wade’s diagnosis. Joshua responded by changing his training. In the rematch six months later, Joshua weighed in 10 pounds lighter at 237 pounds, his waist noticeably less musclebound. Ruiz, on the other hand, told the media that Joshua “was made for me,” and shot up to 283.

Caution and lateral movement were Joshua’s keys to victory; his lighter weight allowing him to attack, in and out, numerous times without getting tired. The bout was yet another reminder that there’s a wrong kind of muscle.

Ruiz was derided for the loss. Many critics loudly wondered if the extra weight prevented him from cutting off the ring. But Ruiz hadn’t gassed out, in spite of his size.

Commentary before and after both bouts was driven more by the fighters’ body shapes than their fighting form. Joshua drew fans awed by his impressive size. Ruiz did the same, while others found solidarity in his everyman diet. But the fights offered no conclusive evidence of what a real fighter should look like. They only showcased the importance of good mobility and conditioning.

Like the statues of antiquity, fighters will forever be judged by their musculature. But though society may favor a chiseled specimen, history has shown there will always be a place for a fat man, waiting to creep up on the unsuspecting, deriding public and become the new heavyweight king.

[dualectic]

the alfie revamp: part II

(part I, which was a semi-successful attempt to whiten the yellowing on a nearly nine year old doll, can be found here)

So, where we left off from last time, I was concerned about the s-hooks in Alfie’s hands and feet digging and wearing away at the resin, and I wanted to reinforce those spots before they became truly structurally unsound. 

This was a pretty simple and quick fix - I just made the bars in the hands and feet thicker with epoxy carefully patted in with a toothpick (I used Milliput, as I’ve worked with it before, but I don’t think you have to). If you have dolls that are older and that are starting to see serious wear here, I’d definitely recommend trying this out! This was about a 2-hour project, not including downtime when the epoxy is curing. 

The only tricky thing about this is making sure that the reinforcement to the resin bar is still cylindrical so an s-hook will still smoothly glide over it. I initially made the bars too thick, and had to pry my s-hooks to be a little wider in order to accommodate the reinforced bars. You can also smooth and thin things out with a piece of sandpaper cut into a long, thin strip that’s the exact width of bar, looped through where the s-hook would go. A few back and forths with a coarser grit sandpaper did the trick for me! Since this is an area that’s totally hidden from view when the doll is assembled, I didn’t bother matching the epoxy to the resin, or making the thing particularly aesthetically appealing. 

Then I went ahead and blushed the hands, although this was a bit of a learning curve! I’m not really thrilled with these results, but it was my first time in almost three years working with pastel on resin and I think need to get my touch back. These feel overblushed, though I was trying to compensate for the fact that the peroxide-baking soda bath over-whitened his hands. I’m mainly upset about the wrinkles, because they’re too thick and read as lines of paint rather than realistic texture. 

So, that was sort of the easy part! At this point, Alfie’s been lightened up, is no longer pee-yellow, and has gotten the resin equivalent of some glucosamine and chondroitin in his old creaky joints. I redid his hot glue sueding and he’s holding poses much more stably. But boy, the real plunge was deciding to modify his face. 

This is Alfie, two weeks ago. In 2010, I gave Alfie a slight nose job to make his nose match the one I’ve always drawn for the character - it’s got that distinctive tip you can see in the profile shot above, and has a little bump on the bridge. That’s me - bulldozing the arguably more classically beautiful nose of the original Migidoll Ryu for my own ends. But the much bigger problem I’ve always had with this sculpt is its lack of jaw. Alfie, as I’ve drawn him since I was a wee teenager, has always had something of a Manly Jaw. 

pictured: super embarrassing drawing from circa 2010 where Alfie Has a Manly Jaw (also, Nell, a character currently housed in a modified migidoll Jina, but she’s another story)

One day, I’m going to sculpt Alfie from scratch and get his face exactly right, and I debated for a while about undertaking a more drastic additive mod to his current face. What’s the point of owning a Migidoll Ryu, a sculpt I admire immensely in its original form, if I’m going to do something that’s going to make him not look like a Ryu? Prior to this, the only other additive mod I’d ever done was a slight eye closing on my Migidoll Jina. Excuse this ancient image that’s super JPEG-lossy. 

Not only was that mod much less extensive, it was seven years ago and I haven’t touched epoxy since. In order to test the waters, I used some translucent Sculpey to quickly sketch out what the mod I had in mind would look like in the round. 

As it turns out, this test is nothing like the final epoxy result, because Sculpey behaves very different than Milliput and I think it’s a medium that leads to a different sculptural result than epoxy. Since it’s infinitely malleable until baked, I ended up tweaking and tweaking forever and ever until I felt like I had totally lost my intentions. But it did give me the guts to go forward with a large additive epoxy mod. 

The blessing of Milliput (or nightmare, depending on how you prefer to work) is that it starts to stiffen up at about the half hour mark, so it forces you to be decisive about your choices. I think I sculpted using larger, lumpier masses, with the knowledge that the stuff responds very well to sanding and that refinements could take place at that stage. Milliput can be smoothed out with water, and I did do this, but I didn’t stress about textural inconsistencies too much. 

My goal for this mod was to drastically build out the jawline, reinforce the rather thin undereye with epoxy so I could then later go back and carve out a more hollowed eyesocket without compromising the thin parts of the resin, and make the brow a little more prominent. Think of it as Doll Puberty!

The additions took place over the course of about three days, since I thought going overboard would have been really easy. I really wanted the avoid the kind of “puffy” face look I got when I did the test run in Sculpey. 

Nonetheless, the mod ended up colonizing way more of the original sculpt than I expected. I was referencing various stock images of men’s faces along the way in order to try and maintain some semblance of an understanding of the underlying structures of the face, and in doing so I realized exactly how much stuff needed to be added to his face to get that ~cut~ cheekbone and jaw situation. 

After that, it was all about sanding. So much sanding. While I was mainly sanding down the epoxy, I also inevitably sanded the base resin to get a smooth transition between the two. I wore a face mask and sanded wet, to minimize the amount of dust kickup, because resin dust is not something you want to inhale. In order to put less strain on my hands and wrists and provide a shape to carve with, I molded pieces of kneaded eraser into the desired shapes and then wrapped sandpaper over them, and used that to do most of the heavy sanding. It definitely makes a difference when you’re doing it for hours on end. 

And here’s the dude, all sanded up! I did most of the heavy subtractive sculpting with 200 grit sandpaper, and worked up in stages to a 3000 grit for the finishing and polishing. As you can see here, there’s a little pock mark on his cheek, from where an air bubble presumably got caught in the middle of my mods. I could have filled it in, but I kind of liked it and decided to keep it to later paint as a blemish or something. I also thought the end result here kind of just looked cool, like the inverse of a pattern of facial vitiligo or something. 

I initially thought (rather foolishly) that I might be able to color correct the epoxy to match the resin with pastel only. Here are two layers of pastel over MSC. As you can see, while it worked somewhat and gave the epoxy a cool texture, it just couldn’t get opaque enough. An airbrush is the ideal way to go when doing this, I think. 

Wel, I don’t own an airbrush, so I ended up hand painting, which gives...definitely a particular look, and one that I think not all people might like. I used various acrylic paints thinned out with water and matte medium. Since paint applies rather more thickly and with more visible brushstrokes when hand painting than when airbrushing, this gave his head a rather pasty, flat appearance initially, and also created a lot of texture. I decided to embrace it rather than fight it, and tried out a technique that Helene of @deleted-dollshe / @that-venitu / Rugged Realism / generally one of my favorite BJD people ever mentioned on her Instagram where she applied matte medium thickly over a doll head and then stippled it while still wet to create a pore-like texture over the resin. 

I have mixed feelings about this - I think it would look fantastic on a doll whose face wasn’t painted over with an opaque acrylic, because resin has a slight luminosity that’s lost with the acrylic “foundation”. Alas, it was unavoidable in this case. I think I am moving more towards a more “imperfect” style with my faceups where evidenced of the human hand is more apparent anyhow, so I worked with it. I added lots of very light mottling (dip a toothbrush in a very diluted mix of pastel and water or acrylic paint, and flick from a distance onto your doll, it’s ~magic~), veining, faint wrinkles, and shadows. 

And of course, the eyebrows. Who could forget? Alfie needs to be fleeky af or something. 

Hopefully you can see some of the detail and texturing in this closeup! I think this is a technically stronger faceup than the previous one I did on Alfie. I’m not mad at the linework, anyhow. 

And the other side, for good measure. After I sealed everything with MSC to make everything Very Very Matte, I actually went back in with matte medium on strategic points of the face. Contrary to its name, matte medium is in fact slightly more reflective than MSC, without looking outright glossy, so I dabbed some on the lips, waterline of the eyes, and down the nose, chin, and a bit under the eyes. I think it gives his face a more lifelike appearance in person, and you can see that it does photograph with a slight sheen. 

And here’s the guy wigged and dressed! I’m still getting used to photographing him with the new face, since this is a pretty drastic change from his previous appearance. I’m finding that while I’m generally happy with my mods, there are certain moments when I’m shooting him and I realize that the form doesn’t work 100% at every angle, but this was my really sculptural mod, so I’m trying not to beat myself up about it too much. Overall, I’m just thrilled that I had the guts to do this and finally try and make Alfie look more like how I draw him. I’m waiting on some eyelashes in the mail, and I have a backup wig that I want to try styling for him, but he’s pretty much all finished otherwise! Thanks for coming along for the ride!

I’ll leave you with this horrifying compilation of faceups and stages that Alfie’s been through with me since I got him in 2008. I have no doubt that he’s going to continue to change as I grow and get older, but here’s to 2017 Alfie anyhow!

[superhusbands4ever]

Harry Potter/Avengers Crossovers

@castlesbuiltintheair and @kitten-mittens asked for a masterpost of all my favorite Harry Potter/Avengers crossovers so here ya go <3 Most link to FF.net so be warned. As usual, my absolute favorites will be marked with **

**Man of Iron, Father of Gold by Lunabell Marauder Knyte - Kid!Harry/Dad!Tony - 49K

Tony’s in London on a business meeting and escapes for a little while. On his walk he runs into an orphan…he should walk away, he shouldn’t care, he wasn’t up for this… but when you tell one Tony Stark that he can’t do something, he does it anyway to prove you wrong. Besides…how can he say no to those woefully sad eyes that don’t belong on a six year old. Deaged Harry.

**Finding Home by cywsaphyre - MoD!Harry, Tony Is A Good Bro - 61K

When Harry finally accepted the fact that he had stopped aging, ten years had passed and he knew it was time to leave. AU.

(mobile watch out for the cut)

Harry Potter and the Aftermath by CJaMes12 - MoD!Harry, Tony Is A Good Bro - 93K

Who can walk away from a title like ‘The Master of Death?

The Almost Forgotten Marriage Contract of 1763 by worldtravellingfly - Fem!Harry/Tony - 13K

What would you do when suddenly confronted with a more than 200 years old marriage contract by a teen and her lawyer? Run for the hills? Call the nice guys with the comfy, white jackets? Certainly not - agree? Well, Tony Stark always was a bit - special.

Child of the Storm by Nimbus Llewelyn - Thor was actually James Potter - 822K

Once, Thor was James Potter, New Mexico being a refinement of Odin's technique (being murdered didn't do Thor's sanity any favours). After a decade, a mostly reformed Loki restores his memories, introducing Thor's son, Harry, to new family and friends. But soon, ancient secrets emerge along with enemies both old and new as darkness rises. Harry is left with a choice: Fight or Die.

Chance Encounters by Rain Seaker - 51K

Harry meets the members of the Avengers at different times throughout his life.

**Proof That Tony Stark Has A Heart by orphan_account - Harry/Tony, mpreg, Teddy is Harry & Tony’s biological son - 117K

With Voldemort defeated and Harry turning seventeen, the elder Weasley boys decide to give him a chance to be a normal teenager for a while; namely, by buying him a ticket to Malibu, California. But of course, Harry Potter can never do anything normally. Especially not once he meets Tony Stark in a club, and begins a holiday romance that leaves him with more than just memories.

Of Wizards and Heroes by littlelightsinourheart - Harry/Loki -

Centuries after that fatal day of the battle of Hogwarts, Harry Potter has fallen into legend, a bedtime story parents tell their children, a name whispered around campfires. He wanders the world alone and immortal, until one single reckless moment sends him hurtling into a parallel dimension of heroes and villains. A new enemy arises from an ancient power, and Harry must take a stand as the last wizard to protect this new world. If only SHIELD would stop trying to track him down...and someone could explain what the hell was an 'Avenger' was supposed to be. Honestly, muggles...

The Affliction of War by StrawberryGirl87 - Harry/Steve - 206K

Harry has a great job as head Auror, he has more money than he knows what to do with and yet he knows that something is missing in his life. His friends have moved on and created lives of their own beyond the war with Voldemort and yet Harry just feels lost. Until a new mission is given to him and he is sent to America but things are not as they first appear.

Great Expectations by CinnaAtHeart - Harry & Steve, Hermione/Tony - 76K

A man falls from the sky, and SHIELD is more than happy to help... even if Fury is tempted to shoot him before he manages to make his life more complicated than it already is. Now SHIELD's not quite sure what to do with him; especially when most of their experts claim he should be dead.

But then another turns up... and another, and SHIELD is half wishing they could rescind their offer of 'sanctuary'.

Magic users might just be more trouble than they're worth.

WIPs

**Making A Move by MusicLover19 - Harry/Tony - 55K

The war left Harry in a bad place. After five years of caring for Teddy he decides he needs to move. Luckily America is far away and a big place. However, Harry didn't take into account the muggle news. This means that Harry does not know about the Avengers, something which Tony Stark finds impossible to believe. Summary/rating might change later on.

**Petal by worldtravellingfly - Fem!Harry/Tony - 124K

Nine years after the Final Battle, Amaryllis Potter found herself working long shifts in a private hospital in New York City, combining Muggle and Magical Healing. The war never really let her go. And then suddenly her quiet, somewhat peaceful life changed abruptly as she ran into a stranger one night, after a long day at work. But not only her life changed… (Fem!Harry) [AU!]

My Son The Wizard by Savya398 - Kid!Harry/Dad!Tony - 171K

After his first year at Hogwarts Harry discovers a startling truth that throws him into an entirely new world. He finds a new family and a new home that drastically changes his life for the better, if not crazier. After all when you’re the son of Tony Stark, the one and only Iron Man, life is bound to be interesting.

[plasmamuffin-blog]

The Lord of the Rings review: Part 1

So first off, this review is mainly about the lord of the rings book, although i will be doing some things in different orders. I am partly making fun of the plot, and partly making fun of the way it's written, and additionally, this is not meant to show disrespect for LOTR or it's fans, just as a fun thing, and while i do like LOTR and think it's cool, i do have some things to complain about.

Without further ado, the review:

The Lord of the Rings. One of the most popular and respected works of fantasy fiction in the world. And yet, the most boring book to read since the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary. What makes LOTR so popular, and what makes it so boring despite such critical acclaim? Let's find out.

The story begins with a riveting 40 pages detailing a party that has little to no significance to the actual plot. During this time, we learn that this part of the story takes part in a place called the shire, a peaceful farming land with rolling green hills and inhabited by hobbits(rumor has it that tolkien originally called them "fat midgets" but changed this as it wasn't culturally sensitive enough). Soon(a mere 36 years or so) after the party, the main character, frodo, finds that bilbo's ring, which he had passed on to frodo, was in fact the most dangerous magical artifact since the stainless steel cheese grater. It also happens to be the only thing capable of bringing the antagonist to full power. Yes, this humble ring is in fact the Legendary One Ring, created by the most hated and feared enemy of the people of middle-earth, and whose name inspired the title of the book: The Dark Lord, "Of The".

Wait, no, sorry, his name was actually Sauron. Frodo's generic bearded mentor, gandalf, informs him that the only solution is to destroy The Mcguffin Ring by throwing it into the Fires Of Mount Doom in which it was forged(created). Armed with this knowledge, and his faithful minion friend and gardener, sam(and his cousins, mary merry and pippin) our humble young hobbit sets out on an epic journey to destroy the ring.

100 short pages later, something actually relevant to the plot happens, garnished throughout with important events such as the finding of mushrooms(you had to be there, these mushrooms were really good), the appearance of a disturbingly cheery weirdo freak person named tom bombadil, and a chase scene wherein four midgets hobbits used to a comfortable life of eating twice their weight in junk food and moving no more than is neccessary for using the bathroom somehow manage to outrun several dark, evil, and anciently powerful creatures riding dark, powerful horses with an apparent max speed of 7.5 MPH. This plot-worthy event occurs in the village of bree, where the four hobbits get drunk and, due to their shrewd intellect and four long seconds of consideration, decide to take on a creepy guy with a sword they just met(they just met him, not the sword) named strider as a companion on literally the most important quest in the world.

While our young hobbits are thus occupied, the old wizard gandalf gets captured by an old friend, saruman, who decided to turn to the dark side because he gets a cool plasma ball as a "Welcome to the club" gift. Gandalf escapes, with the aid of a suspiciously convenient pet bird he purchased from the "help, i'm trapped at the top of a 500 story building" store for the price of one moth(which it is suspected that he stole).

After leaving bree, thomas frodo and his friends make it to weathertop(literally, "Large Rock") where they were supposed to meet gandalf. Gandalf is, of course, absent, so strider, using his strategical skills and a dash of common sense, decides to abandon the hobbits while he goes sightseeing. It is, of course, just what the Dark Riders(known as Ringwraiths) from the last paragraph were waiting for, and they charge in and attack the hobbits using the tried-and true battle technique of Standing Around Looking Intimidating Instead Of Actually Attacking the targets who they could easily overpower armed with nothing more than a saucepan while they wait for the protagonist's backup to arrive. And arrive it does, with strider breaking in at the last second to save the group. One of the more astute ringwraiths surmises that it would likely be a good idea to actually attack the target, and so stabs frodo with a dagger so ancient and powerful it crumbles to dust as soon as it is removed from the wound. While frodo struggles to remember first aid and decides to substitute ancient elven language as a family-friendly replacement for swear words, strider bravely fends off these most Ancient and Powerful enemies using the legendary weapon that is the bane of evil creatures everywhere; that's right, the legendary Fire On A Stick.

After seeing that frodo is unlikely to survive the roughly 700km trek to rivendell(literally, "Convenient Elf City"), the group encounters a Convenient Elf named arwen, who takes frodo to the city on horseback. Arwen and the now unconscious(he spends much of the book like this) frodo are chased by the black riders to the front porch of rivendell, a river, which spontaneously floods as soon as the black riders attempt to cross it.

Frodo awakes safe in rivendell, brought back from the very brink of death through powerful elven healing magic and the fact that he's the protagonist. Gandalf greets him and explains the whole unpleasant "being captured" business, which is quickly followed by roughly 200 pages of boring and pointless exposition mixed with 7 page long songs(which, being in book form, have no set tune, causing readers to have to substitute familiar tunes such as "Yankee Doodle") after which the elves, gandalf, strider(who is fined by the elves after it was discovered he used a fake ID and his real name was in fact aragorn), and a crowd of racially diverse people such as dwarves, humans, and the other hobbits meet together to discuss the ring. The decision, voted on by the group, is that a phenomenally dangerous and evil artifact(e.g the ring) should probably be destroyed. This is agreed to, and after heated discussion of how to accomplish this(some suggest the use of acid, fire, clorox, or exposure to justin bieber CDs), it is mentioned that the ring must be destroyed by throwing it into an active volcano. Unfortunately, mount st. helens had not been invented yet, and so the only volcano on the entire continent is Mount Doom. It is henceforth unanimously agreed upon that the only thing capable of bringing the dark lord sauron back to power is to be brought to within three blocks of his house in an attempt to destroy it. The obvious choice for this mission is the most skilled, talented, and strong among them: The very likely overweight and chronically depressed hobbit whose entire experience in this field is that he's pretty sure he knows how to pronounce "Macguffin".

Before leaving, bilbo, who had moved to rivendell, gives frodo his old sword and a piece of rare "Plot Armor", which is impenetrable to all but the most fourth-wall breaking attacks.

And so, the group sets off, consisting of frodo, sam, merry, pippin, gandalf, aragorn, boromir, an elf named legolas, and a dwarf named gimli with anger issues. Shortly after leaving rivendell, the group is forced to cross a snowy mountain, upon which they realize that none of them brought any warm clothes. It is then decided that they will go through the mines of moria, a gigantic mining city that has evaded the regulations of OSHA for centuries.

After being attacked by Cthulhu outside the mines, gandalf, who forgot the password, contacts technical support and gets it reset, allowing them to enter said mines. It is then revealed that the entire population of the mines was wiped out by orcs(literally "Big Ugly Guys") with the I.Q. of warm salad. Being dwarves, the inhabitants of the mines needed plenty of ceiling room, and thus the mines are way bigger than is strictly neccessary or convenient. after wandering around lost for a while, the group encounters a large group of orcs, who, of course, being mighty and feared warriors, are easily dispatched by the group without them even breaking a sweat.

However, the orcs had broughten(broughted? broughtinated?) a cave troll with them, which managed to stab frodo before being defeated. However, frodo, who the rest of the group had presumed to be dead, is revealed to be absolutely fine due to the shirt of plot armor he is wearing. Despite being extremely important and worth more than the shire itself, this shirt is completely forgotten and never brought up again. After the attack, the group finds they are being pursued by a large and powerful creature called a balrog, which chases them into a structurally ludicrous room the size of north dakota that completely lacks guardrails. Upon being asked what a balrog is, gandalf replies that it is a foe beyond any of them in power, and subsequently decides to challenge it to a 1v1. After picking a spot(specifically, a balance beam over a bottomless pit AKA literally the worst place to fight a balrog in the entire mine), gandalf spleefs the balrog into the pit, but is thrown down into it himself after he wisely decides to stand there and watch instead of running to safety. The rest of the group, heartbroken, then decides to journey to lothlorien(literally, "Rivendell MK2") for refuge, where the elves, having a clear understanding of economics, provide food and shelter free of charge to a group of people they just met.

After receiving these gifts(including a rope for sam and a glowstick for frodo), the group sets off downriver in boats procured(read: basically stolen) from the elves and end up in amon hen, where frodo, showing wisdom beyond his 85 years, wisely decides to wander off by himself, upon which the ring corrupts boromir who subsequently attempts to take it from frodo. The rest of the group, also very skilled in the fine art of strategy, wanders off randomly by themselves as well in order to search for frodo, which causes boromir to have to sacrifice himself to save merry and pippin from the conveniently placed orcs, which end up capturing the two anyway. Upon finding boromir, who, thanks to the orc archers, now resembles a large pincushion, aragorn, legolas, and gimli get to watch him die from his wounds, after which they send him downriver in a boat in a makeshift burial at sea.

Meanwhile, frodo(who becomes wiser every page), attempts to sneak off to mordor on his own, but is caught by sam, who is determined to go with him.

This ends part 1 of the review of the lord of the rings.

[johnboothus]

900-Year-Old Belgian Brewery Rises From Ashes 200 Years After Burning to Ground

The beer brewing legacy at Grimbergen Abbey in Belgium dates back nine centuries. The Abbey was torched three times over the years as a result of war, but just like the phoenix that adorns its label, out of ashes the brewery always arose. Now, 200 years after the last fiery incident during the French Revolution, the Abbey Brewery’s being resurrected once again.

Danish multinational brewer Carlsberg joined forces with the Abbey to bring brewing back inside the walls for the first time since the 18th century fire. In celebration of the momentous occasion, Grimbergen is releasing three new beers: Grimbergen Magnum Opus Brut Beer, Grimbergen Ignis Quadruple, and Grimbergen Astrum Pale Ale.

The Grimbergen Abbey dates back to 1128, when the Lords of Grimbergen were granted permission to build the Abbey by Norbert van Xantan. The Fathers began brewing soon after, but the original building was lost to fire during the War of Grimbergen in 1142 and rebuilt soon after.

The religious wars of the 16th century were the cause of the second conflagration in 1566. Persecution for their religious beliefs prevented the Fathers from returning to Grimbergen for 30 years. The Abbey was reconstructed in 1629, and the order took on the phoenix for its logo, accompanied by the motto “ardet nec consumitur,” which translates to “burned, but not destroyed.”

The final incident occurred in 1798, when the violence of the French Revolution spread to religious orders, and all material goods owned by churches were liquidated by the masses. The ensuing fire ended the Abbey Brewery’s existence for more than two centuries.

Now back in the brewing business, Grimbergen aims to combine ancient techniques documented in books held in the Abbey’s library with innovative modern technologies to produce limited-edition craft beers.

With almost a millennium of experience and a wealth of history contained within the Abbey’s walls, Carlsberg CEO Cees’t Hart is confident that the new project will be a success, declaring in a recent press release: “We believe this beautiful Abbey Brewery will take us, and beer drinkers around the world, on an incredible journey of flavor discovery.”

The article 900-Year-Old Belgian Brewery Rises From Ashes 200 Years After Burning to Ground appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/booze-news/belgian-brewery-rises-from-ashes/

source https://vinology1.weebly.com/blog/900-year-old-belgian-brewery-rises-from-ashes-200-years-after-burning-to-ground

[wineanddinosaur]

900-Year-Old Belgian Brewery Rises From Ashes 200 Years After Burning to Ground

The beer brewing legacy at Grimbergen Abbey in Belgium dates back nine centuries. The Abbey was torched three times over the years as a result of war, but just like the phoenix that adorns its label, out of ashes the brewery always arose. Now, 200 years after the last fiery incident during the French Revolution, the Abbey Brewery’s being resurrected once again.

Danish multinational brewer Carlsberg joined forces with the Abbey to bring brewing back inside the walls for the first time since the 18th century fire. In celebration of the momentous occasion, Grimbergen is releasing three new beers: Grimbergen Magnum Opus Brut Beer, Grimbergen Ignis Quadruple, and Grimbergen Astrum Pale Ale.

The Grimbergen Abbey dates back to 1128, when the Lords of Grimbergen were granted permission to build the Abbey by Norbert van Xantan. The Fathers began brewing soon after, but the original building was lost to fire during the War of Grimbergen in 1142 and rebuilt soon after.

The religious wars of the 16th century were the cause of the second conflagration in 1566. Persecution for their religious beliefs prevented the Fathers from returning to Grimbergen for 30 years. The Abbey was reconstructed in 1629, and the order took on the phoenix for its logo, accompanied by the motto “ardet nec consumitur,” which translates to “burned, but not destroyed.”

The final incident occurred in 1798, when the violence of the French Revolution spread to religious orders, and all material goods owned by churches were liquidated by the masses. The ensuing fire ended the Abbey Brewery’s existence for more than two centuries.

Now back in the brewing business, Grimbergen aims to combine ancient techniques documented in books held in the Abbey’s library with innovative modern technologies to produce limited-edition craft beers.

With almost a millennium of experience and a wealth of history contained within the Abbey’s walls, Carlsberg CEO Cees’t Hart is confident that the new project will be a success, declaring in a recent press release: “We believe this beautiful Abbey Brewery will take us, and beer drinkers around the world, on an incredible journey of flavor discovery.”

The article 900-Year-Old Belgian Brewery Rises From Ashes 200 Years After Burning to Ground appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/booze-news/belgian-brewery-rises-from-ashes/