#witsen

[random-brushstrokes]

Willem Witsen - Voorstraatshaven. Dordrecht (1900)

[huariqueje]

Amsterdam view of the Herengracht  -   Willem Arnold Witsen  , 1901.

Dutch ,  1860-1923

Watercolour on paper ,  54.1 x 71.8 cm.

[rossodimarte]

Willem Witsen (1860-1923), Winter landscape

[mioritic]

Willem Witsen (Dutch, 1870–1923)

"Standing nude drying herself", undated lithograph (ca. 1919)

Rijksmuseum

[leatherandmossprints]

‘Leidsegracht te Amsterdam’ by Willem Witsen (1860-1923)

[camillevanneerart]

willem - graphite | 20 x 12

[mscoyditch]

"Voorstraatshaven, Dordrecht". 1900.

By Willem Arnold Witsen. Dutch. 1860-1923.

> random-brushstrokes

[twafordizzy]

NL-4K-J

Joseph Jesserun de Mesquita (1865-1890, Amsterdam) werd maar 25 jaar en toch was zijn invloed op zijn tijdgenoten groot. Joseph fotografeerde vooral. Niet zoals toen gebruikelijk geregisseerd en geënsceneerd, maar losser. Het vasteleggen van een bestaand moment, zoals deze groepsfoto waarop we tijdgenoten en kunstenaars Willem Witsen, Willem Kloos, Hein Boeken en Maurits van der Valk zien. Die…

[cmonbartender]

Sitting girl in leotard - Willem Witsen

[talonabraxas]

Toltec Shaman🌵 Keepers of spiritual knowledge and practices of the ancient masters

Our first recorded glimpse of what was to become known a shamanic practice, accessing the spiritual knowledge of all ages, labelled shamans (men) and shamankas (female) by anthropologists to define the role of the spiritual leaders and keepers of the knowledge in the 1400s in Siberia and Mongolia.

The word ‘shaman’: The root of the word means ‘to know‘ and may originate from ‘šamán‘, most likely from the Tungus language of Mongolia. The word was thought to be brought to the west in the 17th century by the Dutch traveller Nicolaas Witsen, who recounted his experiences with the Tungus-speaking people of Siberia in a book Noord en Oost Tartaryen, which was published in several languages.

Don Miguel Ruiz is one such modern shaman, who shares the ‘Toltec Spirit’ of the ancients, and the Toltecs of today, our modern shamans, are still spiritual warriors…

A modern movement led by writer Miguel Ruiz is called ‘Toltec Spirit’. In his famous book The Four Agreements, Ruiz outlines a plan for creating happiness in your life. Ruiz’s philosophy states that you should be diligent and principled in your personal life and try not to worry about things you cannot change.

No one knows why the Toltec culture disappeared sometime in the 12th century and, other than the name ‘Toltec’, this modern-day philosophy has absolutely nothing to do with the ancient Toltec civilisation.

From the Mastery of Love, by Miguel Ruiz:

“Thousands of years ago, the Toltec were known throughout

southern Mexico as “women and men of knowledge.”

Anthropologists have spoken of the Toltec as a nation or a race, but in fact, the Toltec were scientists and artists who formed a society to explore and conserve the spiritual knowledge and practices of the ancient ones. They came together as masters (Naguals) and students at Teotihuacan, the ancient city of pyramids outside Mexico City, known as the place where ‘Man becomes God.’

“Over the millennia, the Naguals were forced to conceal the ancestral wisdom and maintain its existence in obscurity. European conquest, coupled with rampant misuse of power by a few of the apprentices, made it necessary to shield the knowledge from those who were not prepared to use it wisely or who might intentionally misuse it for personal gain.

“Fortunately, the esoteric Toltec knowledge was embodied and passed on through generations by different lineages of Naguals. Though it remained veiled in secrecy for hundreds of years, ancient prophecies foretold the coming of an age when it would be necessary to return the wisdom to the people. Now, Don Miguel Ruiz, a Nagual from the Eagle Knight lineage, has been guided to share with us the powerful teachings of the Toltec.

“Toltec knowledge arises from the same essential unity of truth as all the sacred esoteric traditions found around the world. Though it is not a religion, it honours all the spiritual masters who have taught on the earth. While it does embrace spirit, it is most accurately described as a way of life, distinguished by the ready accessibility of happiness and love.

[geritsel]

Willem Arnold Witsen - Amsterdam, Halvemaansteeg, corner Amstel in winter, etching.

[random-brushstrokes]

Willem Witsen - Rain, Thames Embankment, London (1890)

[huariqueje]

Forest in the snow -   Willem A. Witsen

Dutch, 1860-1923

Oil on canvas , 59.5 x 69.5 cm.

[rossodimarte]

Willem Witsen (1860-1923), Voorstraathaven IV (Zonreflectie)

[beguines]

Nationally, coal miners continually played a vanguard role. In 1897, although perhaps as few as four thousand miners belonged to the national union, two hundred thousand miners answered the UMWA call and struck, stopping 70% of national soft coal production, resulting in a national agreement with a 33% wage increase and an eight-​hour day. This victory, by many accounts, spurred other workers in the United States and Canada to organize. The leadership of the union, conservative in temperament, with an extremely militant constituency generally sympathetic to radicalism, was often of two minds. This is revealed, among other ways, by how it went about mobilizing support for the 1897 strike. Foner emphasizes that President M. D. Ratchford requested aid from Socialist Party (SP) leader Eugene V. Debs, especially in Pennsylvania, where SP organizers played an important role in aiding the strike. Taft chooses to highlight the degree to which Gompers and the AFL contributed money and organizers, playing a particularly active role in the formerly non-​union fields in West Virginia, continuing to aid the union financially, even after the strike. Both emphases, of course, are one-​sided, although each is factually accurate as far as it goes. Miners continually chafed at the conservative, class-​collaborationist orientation of the national leadership, never, however, succeeding in overthrowing it. At the 1910 UMWA convention, for example, they opposed the alliance of the AFL and former president John Mitchell with the business-dominated National Civic Federation (NCF), forcing Mitchell to resign from the NCF or lose his union membership. Although an exception had been made regarding the industrial jurisdiction of the UMWA in the 1901 Scranton Declaration by the AFL, the miners' organization as a whole continually agitated against the craft orientation of the parent organization, sponsoring resolutions, at AFL conventions, sheltering the radical Western Federation of Miners from craft union assaults, and even running John L. Lewis for AFL president against Gompers in 1921. Hatred for Lewis, however, was so intense among many radicals that some even supported Gompers against Lewis for president. The schizophrenic nature of the UMWA, exceptional militancy of miners, classwide feelings of solidarity, and sympathy for radical ideology, combined with a conservative class-​collaborationist leadership who sometimes expressed the more radical strains of the mineworkers, form a continual thread in the history of the union, playing an especially important role in the labor upsurge of the 1930s and 1940s, a legacy in which John L. Lewis fits comfortably—​which many mistakenly attribute to his idiosyncratic personality.

Miners were among the first southern industrial workers to organize. The Knights of Labor was active in coal in Texas, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia. Their struggles were as militant and dramatic as those we have come to expect of miners everywhere. The 1891 Coal Creek Rebellion in Tennessee epitomizes this. When the Knights of Labor contract expired at the Briceville mine near the town of Coal Creek, the company attempted to break the union, locking out the miners, evicting them from company housing, and bringing in convicts to work the mines. Merchants and property owners who depended on miners for their livelihood, along with miners, armed themselves. When the government called out the state militia, armed miners and other workers from around the state converged on Coal Creek, disarmed the militia, freed the convicts, and burned the stockade to the ground. Armed confrontations continued to occur, including one at Oliver Springs in 1892, where train crews refused to move troop trains to the mine areas. When Jake Witsen, a Black mine leader was killed, thousands of white miners and neighbors attended his funeral. Although these struggles were eventually defeated by the mobilization of the U.S. Army and the deputizing of large numbers of vigilantes, public opinion was so aroused against the use of convict labor that the legislature—​which had initially supported convict labor by a large majority—​ was forced to abolish it. The specter of armed miners converging from around the state, supported by farmers and townspeople, and the overwhelming majority of public opinion in the state constituted one of those rare situations in which the need for social stability trumped the extra profits to be gained from the use of prison labor in the mines. Both structural and associative power reinforced each other to gain this victory.

Michael Goldfield, The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s

[visualpoett]

The earliest known depiction of a Siberian shaman, produced by the Dutch explorer Nicolaes Witsen, who authored an account of his travels among Samoyedic- and Tungusic-speaking peoples in 1692. Witsen labelled the illustration as a "Priest of the Devil" and gave this figure clawed feet to highlight his demonic qualities