Faith · Observations · Ethnography

The Hasidic tish: how the rebbe distributes challah and how it recalls the Last Supper

I am not hinting at anything, but if you wish to feel how Jesus handed out bread and wine to his disciples at the Last Supper, try finding video of Hasidic feasts. To attend such a gathering would be nothing short of a miracle, if only because the way there

Archaeology · Faith · Museums

Iron Age rhyton in the form of a pig's head from a burial at Sheikh Zenad, found in 1924

The rhyton is a vessel like a horn, fashioned in the form of the lowered head of an animal. This rather rare Iron Age rhyton in the shape of a pig's head was found during the building of a road out of Tripoli in 1924, in a rich

Architecture · Faith · Observations · Nature

An unreal church in Luxembourg: I drove past this hairpin road last year, when Auntie Nina and I went to the market for meat (Luxembourg is considerably cheaper than Belgium), and I even thought, surely a cross cannot be sticking straight out of the roads

An unreal church in Luxembourg. I drove past this hairpin road last year, when Auntie Nina and I went to the market for meat (Luxembourg is considerably cheaper than Belgium), and I even thought, surely a cross cannot be sticking straight out of the roadside, I must have imagined it.

Archive · Faith · Monarchies · Saint Petersburg · Humour

Pahlen arrested Bishop Sestrentsevich instead of a chamber page on the orders of Paul I

A Very Short Story about Dim but Dutiful Officials, Which Could Quite Easily Have Happened in Our Own Day. One day Paul I was receiving the Governor-General of Saint Petersburg, Count Pahlen, and the Catholic bishop Stanisław Siestrzeńcewicz, who enjoyed the Emperor's particular favour. How far the

Faith · Observations · Humour

The shared origin of the Russian words blagogovenie, govyadina and zagovenie

Next time you feel reverence, remember that the word shares its origin with beef and with the eve of a fast. Govyada is the old name for horned cattle, pointing back to govenie, originally a string of prayers and sacrifices, evidently of the flesh of domestic livestock.

Majolica dish painted in blue, green and orange: a kneeling saint in a monk's habit with a crucifix above him, a second monk beside him and an ornamental border.

NB! · Faith · Art · Humour

Early 16th-century dish from Deruta showing Francis of Assisi receiving the stigmata

Italian dish of the early sixteenth century, comune of Deruta. If you thought that Francis of Assisi was flying a kite in the shape of the crucified Christ, then cross yourself: the scene depicts the saint's receiving of the stigmata from Jesus himself

Faith · Art · Monarchies · Humour

Mary of Modena and the Jesuit James Petre in an image with the infant James Stuart

Mary of Modena was the heroine of such images. Here she is apparently being egged on by the treacherous and, for some reason, exceedingly swarthy (probably for greater conviction as to his malicious intent) Jesuit Sir Edward Petre, counsellor to James II, accused of complicity in the substitution of Mary&

Archaeology · Faith · Art · Museums

Relief of the 2nd century AD dedicated to the goddess Vesta, guardian of the hearth and patroness of the millers' guild, set up at the expense of the baker Pupius Firminus and his wife Mudasena Trophima

Relief of the 2nd century AD dedicated to the goddess Vesta, guardian of the hearth and patroness of the millers' guild, set up at the expense of the baker Pupius Firminus and his wife Mudasena Trophima. In one hand Vesta holds a sceptre, in the other a plate of

Faith · The East · Art · Ethnography

Saint Helena Discovers the True Cross of the Lord

Saint Helena Discovers the True Cross of the Lord. Jan van Eyck, 1424. Perhaps it is precisely this legend that lies behind the custom of knocking on wood three times, to ward off bad luck or to invite good. The aged mother of the Emperor Constantine, Helena, searched long in

Archaeology · Faith · The East · Art · Museums · New York

An alabaster figurine from a Parthian-period necropolis, probably depicting Ishtar, the Akkadian goddess of love, fertility and war

An alabaster figurine from a Parthian-period necropolis, probably depicting Ishtar, the Akkadian goddess of love, fertility and war. The central female deity of the Mesopotamian pantheon is shown as a beautiful girl with a high bust and a narrow waist, ruby eyes, a headdress in the form of a

NB! · Architecture · Faith · Paris · Nature

The holy-water stoup in the Baroque church of Saint-Sulpice, made from a giant tridacna shell: the largest mollusc of its kind weighed 333 kilograms and measured more than a metre in length

Faith · Books · Observations · Humour

Incredibly modern, given the state of affairs in our society, the fifteenth-century Dominican monk Giovanni Dominici, cardinal and persecutor of the Hussites, encoded in the chapter titles of his treatise "The Firefly in the Night" a quotation from the Go

The text, however, is anything but enlightening. And although Giovanni himself stressed that he was not versed in the differences between nouns and verbs and did not know the rules of grammar, he boldly declared that "Poets are the enemies of the true faith and must be removed far