Parallels between Scottsboro and Maycomb Essay Example for Free

Parallels between Scottsboro and Maycomb Essay To Kill a Mockingbird, a classic novel written by Harper Lee, is focused on racism that takes place in Maycomb, Alabama during the 1930s, where African Americans were segregated by white men. Harper Lee said that the Scottsboro trial, which was a trial that started because of discrimination, inspired her on writing To Kill a Mockingbird. Despite the differences between the Scottsboro Boys and To Kill a Mockingbird, both of them had an impact on the racial implications and laws of the south. The Scottsboro Trials was a sad tragedy that took place in Alabama during the 1930s. While nine black youth, ages from 13 to 21, were on a train heading to Memphis, Tennessee to find a job, a fight between the nine black youths and a group of white men started. After the white men were kicked out of the train, they reported what had happened to a stationmaster, and the station master stopped the train at a town called Paint Rock. After the train stopped, a group of policed jumped on the train and arrested the nine black youths. When they are caught on the train, two white women, dressed in men’s clothes, were found hiding on the train. Then the two white women accused the nine black youths raping them without any evidence. Because raping in 1930s in the Deep South was a big crime, so many trials started. At the end, every one of the Scottsboro Boys were sentenced to death except for the youngest one, Roy Wright, who was 13 years old. The reason why the jurors did not sentence him to death is because of his age. Although he was not sentenced to death, he was still sentenced for spending his life time in jail (The Scottsboro Case (1931)) (Lanset). Maycomb, Alabama is the main setting that the book, To Kill a Mockingbird, took place. Maycomb and the Scottsboro Trials are similar because they both relate to the discrimination between African Americans and white men. It was Tom Robinson, who was accused of rape by a white woman, just as the Scottsboro Boys was, and he was sentenced guilty by all-white juries even though he did nothing wrong. Although he wasn’t sentenced to death, he was still killed by jail guards who shot seventeen bullets at him just because he tried to escape. To Kill a Mockingbird and the Scottsboro Boys are similar because Harper Lee based her story on the Scottsboro Trials. The first case took place during April 1931, and it was taken to the juries around three pm. For less than two hours, the juries announced the verdict, death penalty; after the crows outside heard it, they yelled of approval. Also, the juries also warned people who were in the courthouse that there must be no demonstration staged after the verdict, so the people in the courtroom just applauded, while people outside cheered wildly. The second trial that was held on April 8th, for eighteen-year-old Haywood Patterson. Then the jury announced a verdict of death penalty within three hours. The third case was tried with five boys; Olin Montgomery, who was seventeen and nearly blind, Andy Wright (18 years old), Eugene Williams (17 years old), Willie Robeson (17 years old), and Ozie Powell, who was 16 years old. During this trial, Willie RObeson was suffering from a bad venereal disease, so it was pretty much impossible to rape somebody with that disease. However, the case went to the jury at four pm, and next morning, the verdict was still a death penalty. During the trials, Governor Benjamin Miller even sent the Alabama National Guard to Scottsboro to prevent a death sentence, but at the end, eight of the Scottsboro Boys were still sentenced to death, except for the youngest one, Roy Wright. Although Roy Wright wasn’t sentenced to death, he was still sentenced to be in jail for his whole life (Linder) (Salter). All the trials of Scottsboro started pretty much because of discrimination. On June 22, 1933, Jude James Horton was convinced that Victoria Price was lying because all her stories were inconsistent; also, she had no witnesses and medical evidences for her claims too. Another person, Dr. Lynch, who asked to talk to Horton privately, said that the girls were lying too. As a result, Judge Horton took his verdict of death penalty back, and announced that there will be a new trial. Attorney General Knight also promised that there would be evidences for Victoria Price’s rape story; Orville Gilley, a white boy on the train agreed to testify for the prosecution. William Callahan, a judge whose age is about 75, was going to participate in Haywood Patterson’s next trial on November 1933. During the trial, Judge Callahan cut off all the questions about Victoria Price’s chastity, character, and reputation. Also, when Leibowtiz queried Price about her probability of having sex with someone other than a Scottsboro Boy, Judge Callahan stopped him. He did these because he wanted to debunk this event off the American’s newspaper. Similarly to the Scottsboro trials, Tom Robinson’s trial in To Kill a Mockingbird also started because of discrimination. Mayella wanted to protect her dad, so she accused Tom, an African American, of raping her. She accused a black guy because she knew that in a fight, white men always win (Linder). The Scottsboro Trials incident had impacted the community’s racial climate and the ideologies during the 1930s. Firstly, it had forced the country to look back to their racial practices although white men disliked black men. Secondly, the African Americans changed from republicans to democratic community. Thirdly, the Scottsboro Trials made black men realize how badly the white men were treating them. For example, racial practices and how they were looked upon by law. Lastly, it also changed the way the legal system of the United States is viewed. Because of the Scottsboro Boys, the African Americans learned to fight for their rights†¦ (Ross) (Scottsboro Boys Hist2081) The discrimination between African Americans and white men was the reason why the Scottsboro Trials and the trial in To Kill a Mocking happened. Although black men lost in their trials, they later realize their power, and started to fight for their rights. The Scottsboro Trial is an event that impacted the whole world, especially America, making them realize several things they had done wrong, and to never repeat it again.

Company Profile of Sainsbury

Company Profile of Sainsbury SAINSBURY is one of the leading food retailers in UK. It is a public limited company and is registered with LSE and FTSE 100. The company is the oldest food chain retailers in UK being established in 1869 by J.J Sainsbury. At present the company owns around 800 stores including supermarkets and convenience stores. The company is the third largest food-retailer in UK and has a share of around 16.3 percent of the total market. The company after leading the UK food retail market for decades faced a downfall during the 1990s. At present, the company is trying to retrieve its position in the UK market and expand its global market share. In this report, an attempt has been made to analyse the different business strategies used by the company at different times and to compare its strategies to that of its competitors in order to assess the effectiveness. The first section of this report deals with the company profile of Sainsburys and a recap of its early establishment. This will help in understanding the activities of the business and the business strategies adapted by it. The second section analyses the different strategies adapted by the company. The third section deals with the competitors of Sainsburys i.e. Tesco and Asda and a short analysis of the strategies adapted by them. And finally, the report has been concluded in line with the different activities carried on by Sainsburys and the strategies that should be followed by it in order to be more competitive. REPORT ON BUSINESS ANALYISIS In this report, an analysis of the business strategy of an organisation is required to be carried out. Business strategy refers to the various activities carried out by an organisation at different stages of its growth and expansion plan. (Tayeb, M. 2000) All the stages of a business growth commencing from the start up involves some type of business strategies. A business strategy can be defined as a long term plan designed to attain a specific organisational goal. The strategy acts as a guide for the business to reach its target. A successful business strategy will design and plan all the activities to be or required to be carried out in order to reach the organisational goal successfully. (Source: Rapid Business Intelligence Success; http://www.rapid-business-intelligence-success.com/definition-of-business-strategy.html, Accessed on 23.05.2010; 16:15hrs). Therefore, from the above discussion on business strategy it can be concluded that a business strategy plans the growth of a business and describes the pathway for attaining it. Business strategy involves analysis of various factors involved with the organisation (i.e. external and internal organisational environment, market size, organisational structure, economy of the market, local and regional economy, target customer, income of the local people, customer preference, socio-cultural issues etc.). All these factors help in forming a business strategy suitable for an organisational. A business organisation aiming at growth, expansion and value creation is an outcome of the vision of an entrepreneur. Once the entrepreneur locates the opportunity in a society, he/she tries to implement some innovative ideas in order to exploit that opportunity and gain profit. The process relating to the implementation of the innovative idea and bringing the opportunity into reality is termed as business. (Kuratko, 2009) A business plan is required in order to bring the business into reality. Similarly, a business strategy is required for attaining the business goal. The strategy gets involved from the beginning of a business i.e. early start-up. But the strategy involved in the different stages of organisational growth will be distinct from the other. The following diagram will help us in further understanding the different business strategies involved in different stages of organisational growth. (Adapted from: HIT; Business, organisation and information architecture; http://www.hit.nl/Product_BusinessStrategy.asp) In this report, I am going to analyse the various business strategies of Sainsburys and have made an attempt to compare those strategies with that of Tesco and Asda, the two famous competitors of Sainsburys. I have chosen Sainsburys, Tesco and Asda for this report. An attempt has been made to analyse and compare the different strategies adapted by these companies. All the organisations dealt with in this report are multinationals based in UK and are continuously growing. Moreover, Sainsbury has been selected because of its diversified ownership structure, different strategies adapted by it in the recent days which have helped it to gain its market share and increase its profitability besides being a sluggish growth in the economy and the main reason being its history. COMPANY PROFILE: SAINSBURYS is a public limited company registered in the London Stock Exchange and FTSE 100. It is one of the leading UK food retailers and had been part of the financial and property sector. The retail food chain is the main business accounting for the major turnover of the company. Sainsburys group employs more than 145,000 people and therefore, is one of the major players of the economy. Sainsburys its known for its quality and service besides its price. Sainsburys success can be traced back in 1869 when the company was founded by J. J Sainsbury. It started with the aim of providing its customers the ‘best butter in the world at an affordable price. Sainsburys started with the fresh foods and later enter the market for packaged food products. It mainly focused on the dairy products, however, it was the first retail food chain to improvise, petrol stations, fresh food and poultry counter in their retail stores. Since inception, Sainsburys tried to aim at providing best quality at low prices. At present Sainsburys retail food chain consists of more than 800 stores including supermarkets and convenience stores. It started its journey from London and is now spread all over UK with stores in Scotland, Ireland, Belfast and North east United States. Sainsburys used to be the largest grocery chain in UK till 1995 whereby, Tesco overtook the first position and Asda became the second largest chain in 2003. The company started its activities in 1869 as a business owned and operated by the Sainsbury family. It carried on its culture till 12 July, 1973, when the organisation became public. However, the major shareholding of 85% was with the family and therefore, after becoming public also, the organisation carried on its legacy and the traits of a family business. But, the company started facing some managerial issues with the new management in 1993 and since then, the family has divested their ownership. At present, Qatar Holding LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Qatar Investment Authority is the major stakeholder owning around 26 percent of the companys share. (Sainsburys Corporate Website; http://www.j-sainsbury.co.uk/index.asp?pageid=229, Accessed on: 25.05.10, 10:15hrs) Sainsburys was among the first few organisations, which hired women employees during the World War, since most of their male employees had to b there in the war front. They develop a separate and exclusive training programme for their women employees who will help them work effectively in this new environment. Though, Sainsburys has lost their position of being the market leaders but still it is one of the biggest names in UK food retail chain and moreover, in the recent years it has achieved a remarkable growth. ANALYSIS OF THE DIFFERENT STRATEGIES The business strategies as discussed before, is an inseparable part of a business and is linked with all the activities of a business organisation. The companies adapt several strategies for the start-ups, entering a new market, growth strategy, marketing strategy. COMPETITIVE STRATEGIES Sainsburys started its journey as a grocery chain aiming at producing quality goods at affordable price. The organisations aim of producing â€Å"quality goods at affordable prices† can be treated as its market entry strategy. On further analysis of this strategy, it has been noted that its market entry strategy possess the qualities of a low-pricing strategy. Low-pricing strategy is an integral part of the business-level strategy. It helps the organisation enjoy a competitive advantage over its competitors. Low-pricing strategy aims at producing quality goods but at lower prices than offered by its competitors. It is mainly followed in a competitive commodity market where the products are more or less similar. The low-pricing strategy leads to lower profit margin and therefore, it is not adapted by all the organisations. The business has to be confident about the product and service offered by it. Moreover, has to develop a cost structure which will help the business sustain in this low price strategy. Low prices and lower product quality is something normal, and thus can easily be followed by the competitors. However, producing similar quality goods at a lower price is a challenge as it requires a developed cost structure. Moreover, the cost structure has to be developed in such a way that the competitors cannot easily follow it. Therefore, the key challenge lies in structuring the cost in a manner that will help the organisation to enjoy a sustainable advantage following the low pricing strategy. In regard to this scenario, Sainsburys has developed a unique cost structure by developing close relationships with its suppliers and by irradiating the agents in between. Both these policies helped the organisation enjoy a cost advantage over their competitors. Moreover, the companys manufacturing and packaging cost are developed in a way to keep the product cost lower than its competitors. The company being the market leader also enjoyed the volume of the quantity produced and thus, enjoy the economies of scale. (Johnson, G., 2002) Low-pricing strategy adapted by Sainsburys helped the organisation to become the market leader whereas, its in-house product variants helped it to develop a wide market and attract customers from all the strata of society. The product variants are the result of the product differentiation policy adapted by the company. Sainsburys has a varied chain of in-house products. Moreover, it has also differentiated its in-house products and brands in such a way that it can reach all the segments of the market, this strategy helps Sainsburys to capture a large share of the household market. Sainsburys differentiation strategy helped it to come up with different lines of similar products. The differentiation was done on the basis of the cost and the product quality. The product differentiation was done in several stages. The company came up with a basic product line followed by superior quality products. The basic line of product is cost effective but maintains the quality. With the higher line of product the company brought in higher variants of similar by adding value to it. The higher variants not only has added value in respect of the quality of the product, but also the product packaging and marketing. For the basics, Sainsburys has adapted minimalistic packaging cost and marketing structure. The differentiation strategy is really important for an organisation aiming at growing its market share. The differentiation strategy helps the organisation to provide products and services different from those offered by its competitors in terms of quality, uniqueness and value addition. The differentiation strategy helps the organisation to increases its market share and thus enabling it to enjoy a cost advantage. Therefore, cost function can be termed as a function of product differentiation. (Johnson, G. et. al, 2002) Sainsburys product differentiation has enabled it to gain a major market share of the lower and the middle income group. It has introduced product differentiation in all the product lines offered by it, may it be, dairy products, meat and poultry products, fresh and packaged vegetables and fruits, spices, household products etc. For e.g. The oatmeals and cornflakes comes in several variants. The range of basic oatmeals and cornflakes range between 48 pence and 64 pence whereas the higher end product variants of the similar line range between 150 190 pence. The above example, helps us to understand not only the product variants and product differentiation but also that the company follows a focused differentiation strategy. In order, to aim the higher strata of the society, the company came up with products with better packaging, added quality and thus adding on to the value of the products. Moreover, the higher variants not only come up with added quality but also innovative products which them to differentiate from the similar kind of products offered by its competitors. For e.g. Sainsburys raisin-filled oatmeals, raspberry-filled oatmeals differentiate its products from the other competitors The company with its own differentiated line of products comes up with several other products offered by leading retailers and therefore, gives its customers a varied choice of products. The varied products attract customer base and thus enabling it to increase the market share. In addition, the company has incorporated several innovative ideas in its supermarket model like petrol stations, fresh bakery items, fresh meat, cooked meat and fish selling counters which makes them different from its competitors. This idea has not only differentiated them from their competitors but as helped them to act according to their value of providing healthy and quality foods. The different competitive and strategies in order to be competitive and gain the market share has enabled it form a hybrid strategy comprising of the main elements of low pricing, differentiation and focussed differentiation strategy. All these strategies merged together helped the business grow at a faster pace. LOCATIONAL STRUCTURAL STRATEGIES Since early period, Sainsburys built in the concept of departmentalisation in its stores. Its early food stores were divided into 6 departments, dairy products, ham and bacon, poultry and game, fresh meats, cooked meat and groceries. It was an unique concept at the 1900s which shows its innovative thinking from its inception. The use of mosaic floors, marbled topped counters, uniformed staffs, white tiles background not only enabled to have a comprehensive and similar looks through the stores but also shows their innovativeness and capability of thinking ahead than others.(The Sainsbury Archive; Accessed on 25.05.2010; The Design Journal 1966. Further, a companys store location plays an important role in its business. In the case of Sainsburys, it has always chosen a central position in the parade for a larger display and better connectivity to overcome the constraints relating to limited vehicles for home delivery. It was the first retail store chain to bring in home delivery service in UK. All these strategies helped the business to grow and become a pioneer in its field. The organisation also pioneered in the self service supermarket in UK between 1950s and 1960s. All these add up to the locational and structural strategies adapted by the company since its inception to be a market leader. ORGNISATIONAL STRUCTURAL STRATEGY The organisational upbringing of Sainsburys has been pretty different from that of its competitor e.g. Tesco. Unlike, Tesco, Sainsburys relied on the family mode of business. The company went public in 1973; however, the major shareholding has always been within the family till 1990s when the major shareholdings by the family were divested following a strategic downfall. Unlike Tesco, which was mostly depended on the market wealth and capital generated from the equity market for its expansion and growth, Sainsbury mainly focussed at the inner source of capital and reserves for its expansion. Following the diversification of the shareholdings in 1995, the major share holding is with QIA, a foreign investment company. The companys early strategy of not involving market equity capital has helped the organisation to maintain cohesiveness in the organisational activities and has enabled the initial growth and expansion. Employee employer relationshiphas always been an advantage for the company. The company has always given preference to the organisational and personal requirements of its employees. The employee policy designed by the organisation has helped it in its success. It is rated as one of the leading recruiters of UK at present. It has a very large yet strong organisational base which has evolved with time. The organisational structure of the company has always been subjected to a change. The hierarchal set-up during the early stages evolved into a much flatter organisational set up with time and changing society. This proves the adaptive strategy followed by the company. Supplier retailer policyadapted by Sainsburys since its inception, has helped the organisation to enjoy a lower cost and better quality. The supplier management strategy is very essential for a growing transnational organisation like Sainsbury. The company has always aimed at maintaining a good relationship with supplier, thus enabling them to be a market leader. However, the companys downfall during the early 1990s has been an effect of a major relationship difference between the reailer and supplier. Building up a supplier-retailer relationship and maintaining it is the role of a successful organisation. STORE FORMATS The company adapted the hyper-market policy during the early 1970s following its competitors. The company operated this format of stores through bigger outlets (over 45000 sq.ft ) and varied range of products under the brand Sainsbury Savacentre. But, later it got incorporated into the main channel being a part of the integrated sales and back office operations unlike, Tesco. The product distribution followed the policy of equal distribution between groceries and non-food items as followed by Tesco. The supermarket (average of 34000 sq.ft) the hypermarket store format only differ in the size and the quantity of product variants offered by the two types of stores. The company also followed the concept of convenience stores followed by the other food retailers like Tesco, The Cooperative store, etc. This store format is also be termed as local store and is meant for a local market, much smaller in size (between 2000-6000 sq.ft) with limited variants offering top-ups and go and grab deals. Asda, did not follow the concept of convenience stores. The store formats helped us analysing the customer serving strategy and the customer base of the organisation. FRANCHISING Unlike its competitors, Sainsburys does not involve franchising. Tesco recently has planned to go for a franchising in order to enter further into this multi-billion dollar market of retail groceries. Its considering the franchising scope followed the step taken by its French competitor Carrefour. Franchising will help Sainsbury to reach a broader customer base and reach further corners which is no possible through direct acquisitions and mergers. Further, acquisitions involve managerial constraints which can be easily avoided in case of franchising. MERGER ACQUISITION In line to the discussion Mergers and acquisitions it can be rightly pointed out that the company is rightly catching up the growing model of business UK and worldwide. Its acquisitions of Bell supermarkets which operate in north east England and a merger with Shell stations will help it to grow the number of convenience stores and petrol stations in UK. (Food Drink Europe.com http://www.foodanddrinkeurope.com/Retail/Sainsbury-s-image-takes-another-knock). The company went for a merger with Shaws Supermarket Inc. a leading super-market chain in U.S and later acquires the company accompanied by its acquisition of Star Markets. These acquisitions have helped Sainsburys to control competition in the foreign market. However, a detailed analysis has pointed out that the business acquisition decisions and deals have not been of much success and therefore, affecting its worldwide turnover. OTHER MODES OF OPERATION Sainsbury has started providing financial services through Sainsbury Bank which is joint venture between Sainsbury and Lloyds Banks. Its property management team is helping its property management business to reach new heights. The company has started diversifying its portfolio and its activities bt it will take time in attaining the aimed success. COMPETITORS Sainsbury is the UKs third largest food retail chain trailing behind Tesco and Asda. TESCO, the leading retail food chain has started its operation since 1919 as a surplus grocery store in East End of England under Jack Cohen. The first TESCO store came into existence in 929 after being a limited company in 1924. Tescos growth was mainly through acquisitions along with organic growth. During early 1970s TESCO group owns around 700 stores nationwide. Tesco was the pioneer in offering the customers several facilities like customer rewards and club points which were previously unheard of. It introduced in internet shopping for the customers that help in growing the business and building up its brand image among its customers. During 1980s and 1990s it went through couple of successful takeovers including that of William low, a Dundee based firm competing with Sainsbury. In 1997, Tesco also went into a business alliance with esso in order to get a lease of its several petrol filling stations. In July 2001 Tesco became involved in Internet grocery retailing in the USA when it obtained a 35% stake in GroceryWorks.In 2002 Tesco purchased 13 HIT hypermarkets in Poland. It also made a major move into the UK convenience store market with its purchase of T S Stores, the owner of 870 convenience stores in theOne Stop, Dillons and Day Nite chains. At present, Tesco is leading the UK retail food chain though its 27 hypermarkets all over UK. Tesco and Sainsbury growth structure mainly differs. Tesco has mainly focused on the growth through takeovers, acquisitions and mergers on the other hand; Sainsburys growth was mainly based on organic growth. Growth through takeovers, acquisitions and mergers has helped Tesco to gain better and more market knowledge, technological knowledge and management knowledge. Whereas, organic growth for Sainsburys has taken through a longer period of time and through the evolution of the own management and acquired knowledge. On analysing, the growth factors, it can be pointed out that the growth strategy adapted by Sainsbury has been a major reason for its slower growth rate. ASDA STORES LIMITED was founded asAssociated Dairies Farm Stores Limitedin 1949 in Leeds. However, the present name of Asda came into existence following a merger with Asquith chain of three supermarkets and Associated Dairies in 1965. The company however, parted with its dairy department on a management buyout. The company followed the growth policy similar to that of Tesco in order to grow and provide different kinds of products. The newly focused food retail group in order to expand its activities beyond the north England, went for buyout in the south where it took over the large format stores ofGateway Superstoresin 1989. On 26 July, 1999 Asda was purchased by the US retail-giant Wal-Mart. Since then the company, has operated as a subsidiary of the Wal-Mart group. However, Asdas management has gone though a restructuring when it was sold to a Leeds based investment subsidiary of Wal-Mart, Corinth Services Limited in 2009. Asdas marketing campaigns has always been in limelight. The major strategic similarity between Asda and Sainsbury is that, both the organisations aim at low pricing. Therefore, the low pricing strategy that helped Sainsbury, to attract more customers and a major share in the market needs to be revised. Moreover, being an US subsidiary, it also followed several managerial set-ups those were previously unknown. A global growth of the Wal-Mart group, helped Asda gain its position as the second largest food-retailer in UK. Both Tesco and Asda have structural, organisational and managerial differences with Sainsburys but on comparing the whole set-up, it can be concluded that Tesco and Sainsburys have some structural similarity. On the lines of structural strategy, it can be concluded that Tesco follows a more diversified activities by using several variants like, Express, Metro, superstore, Extra and Homeplus which helps them to reach larger number of customers with different kinds of variants.   CONCLUSION While concluding this report, it can be said Sainburys has several strategical differences with its leading market leaders Tesco and Asda, however, it has started working on its set back and is currently responding to the organisational and social needs in a better way. Instead of a sluggish growth of the economy post 2008 it has recorded an increase in the total turnover thus, showing its organisational and managerial strength. On analysing the retail food market and the activities of the major market leaders, it can be predicted that Sainsburys will enjoy a fast and steady growth following the path of organisational mergers, takeovers and most recently franchising. All these will help Sainsbury to grow at a faster pace. All the discussions, that have been done in this report are not absolute and are subject to limitations regarding the information, word limit and time.

Halloween And Christianity :: essays research papers

Halloween and Christianity It is often said that Halloween is not the "harmless" holiday it is thought to be, instead it is believed to be a pagan ritual which dates back to the ancient Celtic Druids. According to the article "Should Our Kids Celebrate Halloween?" in Catholic Digest Halloween's origin is very much Christian and American. Although the ancient Celts celebrated a minor festival on the 31st of October, it fell on that day because the Feast of All Saints or "All Hallows" falls on November 1st. During the 840s Pope Gregory IV gad All Saints Day to be celebrated everywhere. The day before the feast became known as "All Hallows Even" or "Hallowe'en". At the time, that day did not have any real significance. In the year of 998, the abbot of the monastery of Cluny in southern France, St. Odilo added a celebration on November 2nd called All Souls Day. The new celebration was a feast whose purpose was to recognize those in heaven and in purgatory. The tradition of dressing up in costumes on Halloween is derived from the Feast of All Souls Day in France. During the 14th and 15th centuries when Europe was hit by outbreaks of the bubonic plague, about half of its population was wiped out. Since life spans were greatly shortened because of the plague, Catholics began to focus on the after life. The number of Masses help largely increased and people of all social classes gathered to dress in different garments and lead lost spirits to the tomb in a daisy chain which became known as the "Dance of Death". Dressing up did not become part of Halloween until the creation of the British colonies in North America. During that period of time, Catholics had no legal rights in England. At times English Catholics attempted to resist. One such occasion was a plot to destroy King James I and his Parliament with gunpowder. The plan was ill-conceived and easily foiled when the guard of the powder, Guy Fawkes, was found and hung on November 5, 1605. The date became widely celebrated in England. Bands of revelers began to wear masks on that date

Talkshow on Rom Whittaker

Romulus Whitaker was only four years old when he caught his first snake in the country estate that he shared with his mother and sister in northern New York State. It was the beginning of a fascination with reptiles and a journey to conserve nature. Although born in the United States in 1943, Rom Whitaker grew up in India where he nurtured his passion for reptiles exploring the wild as a student in a boarding school up in the mountains in south India. Dr. Whitaker is one of India's leading herpetologists and conservationists. His efforts have helped to put numerous endangered wildlife on the conservation map.The world-renowned herpetologist and author is changing perceptions of reptiles through his innovative work while championing the cause for conservation of India’s rich biodiversity. (He’s 69) In an exclusive interview Romulus Whitaker shares some of his thoughts and interesting experience through the course of his work. 1. What is it about reptiles that got you fas cinated about them? My love affair with reptiles began before my ‘age of reason', in fact I was catching and keeping snakes at the tender age of 5 years at Hoosick, NY I found my first snake, a Dekay's snake and I was hooked.I Kept a terrarium full of local snakes and when I was seven I moved to India, the land of snakes. Over the years my interest broadened to all herps. 2. Were your parents or friends influential in your decision to go into herpetology as a profession? My mother in particular was very supportive of my ‘unusual' interest and bought me books by Pope, Ditmars etc. 3. Where is your favorite herping spot in the world? I guess my best place in Agumbe, Karnataka State, near the west coast of India, where we have one of our research stations. 4.What herp in the wild still gives you chills and sends your excitement levels through the roof? What herp is at the top of your list to find in the wild? I guess the king cobra tops the list but I get great pleasure in seeing any of the wonderful herps we have here in the wild. Well, having found a lot of species in a lot of places I guess it's just the mere idea of finding ‘new' species, which I've never seen in the wild, which excites me. 5. Aside from the conservation programs you’ve set-up, do you keep any herps as personal pets?Nope, no herp pets. We live on an 11 acre farm with Russells vipers, cobras, kraits, saw-scaled vipers, rat snakes, trinket snakes, vine snakes and so on, so there are rarely ‘dull' moments here. 6. What’s the best avenue people can help your conservation trusts and efforts? People can donate out right of course but perhaps more of them might be interested in coming over to India on a ‘paying volunteer' program which allows people to stay on site and do work to help keep the research and general work going, bringing their own special inputs. 7.Any advice for students looking to get into the herpetological field? Handling venomous snakes? I think the best way is to attach yourself to an existing herp program in any capacity just to get that experience and to work with people who are obviously doing it right and learning from them. 8. Do you think the increase of interest in the herp-keeping hobby has helped or hindered reptile & amphibian conservation? I can't say much about the herp keeping hobby, I know that it should be done responsibly and people should learn and know where their animals are coming from.If most of the herps on the market are from captive bred stocks fine, but taking them from the wild can be a fatal rip-off and that has hammered several species worldwide. 9. What are some of the most fascinating aspects of your job as a Reptile Expert? Every day is a fascinating experience, simply because so little is yet known about reptiles, as compared with more ‘obvious' creatures like birds and butterflies. Perhaps most interesting of all is the fact that once you have studied and been close to reptil es long enough, you realize that they too are complex beings with individual personalities, some nice and some not so nice.Venomous snakes have their tremendous killing power yet they are timid and shy and want nothing more than to stay clear of horribly dangerous human beings. I don’t have dull moments except for when I have to go into the awful city to do some chore like renew my driver's license! 10. In the course of your career, you must have had several close and dangerous encounters with crocs, komodo dragons and snakes. Is there any incident that stands out in your mind which left you completely speechless? It's kind of hard to say which experiences stand out as being exciting and memorable, in my kind of life excitement is never far away.Perhaps the incident that sticks in my mind is the first time I encountered a king cobra. It was in Agumbe (where we now have a research station) and I saw the black tail of a large snake disappearing into the bushes. Thinking it was a large, harmless rat snake I did what any snake hunter would do, I leaped on it. I managed to grab the tail and in my now prone position I looked up to see the hood of a large king cobra spread over me and a pair of not so friendly eyes glaring down at me. I needed no more encouragement and quickly released the king cobra's tail and rolled out of the way.Luckily the snake didn't want to tangle with me any more than I wanted to tangle with it and it slid away into the forest. Phew! 11. What are the challenges you have faced to dispel some of the misconceptions people have about reptiles? The main challenge is to get people to realize that their old folk tales and beliefs about snakes are usually wrong and that the reality of snakes and other reptiles is of course much more interesting than these old tales. People have a tendency to think that wild animals are ‘out to get them' when actually it's just the opposite. 2. Do you think there is adequate support / assistance for cons ervation of reptiles today or more can be done? How? Certainly reptiles are still not too high in the popularity charts and there is always a need for understanding the misunderstood creatures that we share the planet with. More media exposure to the facts about reptiles, their usefulness to us in controlling rodents and cleaning the waterways (in the case of crocs) and controlling harmful insects in the case of lizards, will certainly help their plight. 13.What do you hope people will take away from your work and films on reptiles? Is there anything you would like to do in the future? Well, I know people are not going to start hugging reptiles overnight, but I do feel we are making headway by writing, making films and bringing people to the Madras Crocodile Bank and teaching them about the wonders of the reptile world. What will I do in future? Probably just what I'm doing right now. One project is to promote research on snake venoms and the perfection of the anti-venom serum again st snakebite in India. All good fun!

Marshmallow Lab

Sabrina Gournaris Period 3 March 27, 2012 Marshmallow: The Snack That Acts Like A Gas Objective: Record and observe marshmallow and compare it to Boyle’s law. Materials: -2 mini marshmallows -1 syringe -A pen Experimental Procedure: 1. Take out marshmallow. 2. Draw face on marshmallow. 3. Open stopcock. 4. Pull plunger out. 5. Put marhmallow in syringe. 6. Put plunger back into syringe. 7. Push plunger so it’s barely touching the marshmallow. 8.Pull plunger back and record observations. 9. Remove marshmallow and replace it with the second marshmallow. 10. Close stopcock and push plunger so it’s barely touching the marshmallow again. 11. Record observations. Data Table: Trial| Open| Closed| 1 (without marshmallow)| Nothing, Easy to push. | Nothing happened. | 2| Nothing, Easy to push. | Marshmallow got bigger. | 3| Nothing, Easy to push. | Marshmallow got bigger. | 4| Nothing, Easy to push. | Marshmallow got bigger. | 5| Nothing, Easy to push. | Marshmallow got b igger. | Observations:Every time you push with the marshmallow in the tube, the air inside the marshmallow is released. The marshmallow decreases in size. Conclusion: Boyle’s law states that for a fixed amount a gas at a fixed temperature volume is opposite to its pressure. The air in the marshmallow is what follows Boyle’s law. The marshmallow is similar to a gas because when the pressure in the syringe is decreased the pressure in the marshmallow is increased. The volume increases in the marshmallow. So basically when the plunger is pulled out the pressure in the syringe decreases and the volume of the marshmallow increases.

Carrying the Fire Individuation Toward the Mature Masculine

Carrying the Fire Individuation Toward the Mature Masculine and Telos of Cultural Myth in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men and The Road maggie bortz So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. (McCarthy, 1999b, 143) It was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all. (McCarthy 1999a, 284)Although many critics consider Cormac McCarthy to be the greatest living novelist in America, his dark, compelling vision did not reach a mass audience until the film adaptation of his novel No Country for Old Men (2005) was released in 2007. The film, directed by Ethan and Joel Coen (2007), won the Academy Award for Best Picture. A film adaptation of his latest novel, The Road (2006), which won the Pulitzer Prize, was released in la te 2009. McCarthy now has the public’s rapt attention. McCarthy’s visionary works can be read as dreams of our contemporary culture.Great works of art, like dreams, perform a compensatory function to the conscious attitudes of a society and may carry teleological implications. Jung viewed great art as an aperture to the collective unconscious, through which the role of the archetypes in shaping the psychological development of individuals and societies might be discerned (1930/1966, CW 15,  ¶Ã‚ ¶157, 161). McCarthy’s later novels, speaking in image and myth, the language of the unconscious, frame the collective psychic dissociation that prevents us, individually and collectively, from growing up.The final, transcendent image in No Country for Old Men, which appears in an old man’s dream, and the father-son imagery in The Road suggest that a reunion and recalibration of the inner Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, Volume 5, Number 4, pp. 28–42, ISSN 1934-2039, e-ISSN 1934-2047.  © 2011 Virginia Allan Detloff Library, C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website at www. ucpressjournals. com/reprintinfo/asp.DOI: 10. 1525/jung. 2011. 5. 4. 28. Maggie Bortz, Telos in No Country for Old Men and The Road 29 father and son, representing a â€Å"union of sames† in the split masculine archetype, constitute the requisite path of healing and maturation. This imagery may prefigure the emergence of a new cultural myth. Jungian analyst Joseph Henderson identified specific thresholds of initiation or psychological rites of passage â€Å"which make possible the transition from childhood to adolescence, from adolescence to early maturity, and from maturity to the experience of individuation† (2005, 11).Our culture, however, remains dominated by male adolescent energy, seemingly arrested in anachronistic identification with the uninitiated hero, still living out a negative mother complex: a myth of male regeneration through escalating violence inflicted on a feminine earth and on humanity. This entrenched cultural complex manifests in and is reinforced by social constructs of what it means to be male in modern America, including the myth of the self-made man and the ethic of individualism. This complex also bears â€Å"a revolutionary unattached shadow that would smash all fetters† (Hillman 2005, 56–57).To give a clinical example, some of my clients, on parole from the Oregon Youth Authority, are very likable boys for the most part who, at 14 or 15, have already spent a year behind bars in the state’s â€Å"baby† prison system. Their yearnings for identity are shaped by a culture of outer action devoid of inner meaning. The lack of connection to an inner life also appears in adult male populations in presenting symptoms like workaholism, anger issues, substance abuse, relationship problems, and sexual obsession. In older men, the dissociative phenomenon is related to the common tragedy of suicidal depression.Women, of course, are not immune to any of these things. It is axiomatic that masculine cultural dominants affect women’s lives and impact their relationships with men. On a deeper level, masculine psychological energy is present and problematic in the female psyche as well. Jung personified the unconscious masculine energy in a woman as an interior male image, the animus. â€Å"Her unconsciousness has, so to speak, a masculine imprint† (1951/1968, CW 9ii,  ¶29). James Hillman personified â€Å"the psychological foundation of the problem of history† in the archetypal magery of the senex (old man) and puer (young man) (2005, 35). Old men and young men are ubiquitous images in McCarthy’s work. No Country for Old Men and The Road appear to validate Hillman’s theory that a split in the masculine senex-puer archetype underlies the psychic malaise of our time and that work toward a â€Å"union of sames† must begin at the senex pole of that archetype. Although the reticent McCarthy seems to write from a Jungian-informed perspective, I was unable to discover any biographical data linking him to an interest in Jungian psychology.However, he frequently associates with physicists at the interdisciplinary Santa Fe Institute, a think tank located at the former site of the Manhattan Project, a collaboration McCarthy has tersely attributed to his enduring interest â€Å"in the way things work† (Voice of America 2008). C. G. Jung collaborated with Nobel 30 jung journal: culture & psyche 5:4 / fall 2011 Prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli and was struck by the cogent parallels between quantum physics and his psychological theory (Pauli and Jung 1992/2001).Beyond the shared observer effect and the subject-object bond , quantum physics and Jungian psychology both venture into depths where the distinctions between energy and matter collapse. Following the development of nuclear weapons, Jung and Pauli also shared a deep concern about the future: they feared that in the absence of a greater understanding of man’s potential for evil, humanity would â€Å"destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science† (1957/1970, CW 10,  ¶585). Although McCarthy’s canon garners critical acclaim, his work also provokes controversy.Yale literary critic Harold Bloom admits to a â€Å"fierce† passion for Blood Meridian (1985), which he considers a masterpiece of American literature. Bloom also confesses that he had a hard time finishing the book because he â€Å"flinched from the overwhelming carnage that McCarthy portrays† (2009, 1). Literary critic Morris Philipson has written: â€Å"For culture, just as for therapy, symbols are not intuitions by themselves; th ey are only brute facts that must be interpreted† (1992, 226–227). There are brute facts aplenty inMcCarthy’s canon: scalping, massacres, executions, necrophilia, cannibalism, every imaginable kind of human evil, but his artistic vision reflects the ultimate mystery of the unconscious and does not lend itself to facile reduction. Symbolic images, whether interpreted or not, affect us. They represent living psychological dynamics that we experience as feelings, emotions, ideas, and impulses toward action. McCarthy’s earlier work is often celebrated for its lyrical style and long, commafree sentences.Critic Steven Frye wrote that, â€Å"for many of us that artistry, his mastery of beauty in language, is the only compensating factor for the bleak and uncompromising world he forces us to confront† (2005, 16). But in No Country for Old Men, the prose is clipped and minimalistic. The unconscious tends to turn up the music as required to equilibrate the co nscious attitude. Compensatory dreams may become repetitious or disturbing; symptoms may become more severe.Perhaps McCarthy’s style has changed because we have missed the subtler messages of the collective unconscious, and it is getting more obviously archetypal in its self-regulatory attempts. As if mirroring a quaternity, the pattern of psychic wholeness, No Country for Old Men contains four major characters. The landscape, as character, presents the energy of the dark, chthonic feminine. Llewelyn Moss, the hunter who becomes prey, embodies the immature masculine energy of the hero, a puer spirit contaminated by a negative mother complex. Anton Chigurh, the psychopathic killer, personifies evil in its human and god-like dimensions.The psychological protagonist, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, is a senex figure with positive and negative attributes who struggles against his own nature to assimilate his shadow and to individuate toward the mature masculine. Each represents an autonomou s complex at work inside the collective psyche. Complexes are split-off parts of the personality or culture that â€Å" behave like independent Maggie Bortz, Telos in No Country for Old Men and The Road 31 beings† ( Jung 1937/1969, CW 8,  ¶253). The ultimate meaning of the quaternity in this cultural dream remains ambiguous. Jung thought that the automatic eneration of quaternary images, â€Å"whether consciously or in dreams and fantasies, can indicate the ego’s capacity to assimilate unconscious material. But they may also be essentially apotropaic, an attempt by the psyche to prevent itself from disintegrating† (Sharp 1991, 111). Both possibilities, further evolution and collective psychosis, must be entertained in reading the work. The interpretation of a dream often begins with a careful consideration of the setting. No Country for Old Men unfolds in 1980 in the wild, scrubby borderlands of South Texas and Mexico.The landscape is a raw, barren land of spr awling desert plain, lava scree, red dirt, and creosote, sparsely inhabited by Mojave rattlesnakes, scorpions, and birds of prey. The image of the border itself suggests an unstable and volatile place between two worlds where the usual rules do not apply, a sort of psychological no-man’s-land where consciousness and unconscious meet. Borders are the domain of the archetypal Trickster, who incites psychic change through creative and destructive interventions that disturb the established psychological order.The archetypal feminine is always a silent, powerful, brooding presence in McCarthy’s work. In his novels, anima or soul is sometimes represented by animals, feral creatures who need human protection, like the pregnant wolf that Billy finds trapped at the beginning of The Crossing (1999b). Sometimes, and usually briefly, followed by tragic consequences, the anima is projected onto young women in McCarthy’s novels. But the chthonic feminine, as landscape, is alw ays present in his novels, both as a primitive force of nature and as a deeply unconscious psychological dynamic in the characters’ psyches.Anima figures fare pretty poorly in McCarthy’s work. Billy must kill the beloved wolf in The Crossing to save her from a slow, agonizing death in a dog pit, where she has become the main act in a blood sport that entertains older men. In The Road, anima as landscape has been killed off entirely: the chthonic feminine is a fading memory, a charred and ruined relic. In No Country for Old Men, anima appears as landscape in foreboding form: High bloodweeds along the road. Wiregrass and sacahuista. Beyond in the stone arroyos the tracks of dragons.The raw rock mountains shadowed in the late sun and to the east the shimmering abscissa of the desert plains under a sky where raincurtains hung dark as soot all along the quadrant. That god lives in silence who has scoured the following land with salt and ash. (McCarthy 2005, 45) The dark fem inine landscape in No Country for Old Men mirrors the alchemical process of calcinatio and its products: salt, a metaphor for bitterness or wisdom, and soot and ash, the residue of fire. â€Å"The calcinatio is performed on the primitive shadow side, which harbors hungry, instinctual desirousness and is contaminated with the unconscious.The fire for the process comes from the frustration of these instinctual desires† (Edinger 1994, 21–22). 32 jung journal: culture & psyche 5:4 / fall 2011 The characters in No Country for Old Men are ambivalent about the landscape. Uncle Ellis tells the sheriff: This country was hard on people. But they never seem to hold it to account. In a way that seems peculiar. That they didnt . . . How come people dont feel like this country has got a lot to answer for? They dont. You can say that the country is just the country, it dont actively do nothing, but that dont mean much . . This country will kill you in a heartbeat and still people lov e it. (McCarthy 2005, 271) On one hand, the landscape represents a terrible archetypal mother, the surrealistic backdrop of a burgeoning drug war, which is itself the continuation of many barbaric historical slaughters. In other respects, the characters identify positively with the landscape. She still nurtures according to her increasingly limited abilities. Moss can still find antelope in her deep interior space and a river saves him from certain death early in the book.All of the novel’s central male characters are veterans: they have gone to war and risked their lives to protect â€Å"the country. † The power of the landscape, however, is muted in No Country for Old Men as opposed to McCarthy’s earlier Western novels. Even the moon, the symbol of feminine consciousness, is disfigured. It is as though man’s relentless dominance, his continual conquests, savagery, and ever forward â€Å"progress† have effectively depotentiated the chthonic femini ne, and she has regressed more deeply into the unconscious.Behind the mask of our technological society lurks a negative mother complex, a dissociation from and opposition to the feminine principle. Complexes are not ours to eliminate. On the contrary, they commonly persist beyond the life of the individual and perpetuate themselves across generations. According to Jung, â€Å"A complex can be really overcome only if it is lived out to the full . . . If we are to develop further we have to draw to us and drink down to the very dregs what . . . we have held at a distance† (1954/1968, CW 9i,  ¶184).Unconsciously living out this collective negative mother complex is a dangerous and precarious proposition: it means consuming the natural world and each other in the process. The second major character, Llewelyn Moss, a welder and Viet Nam veteran, is hunting antelope in the desert when he stumbles across the surreal, slaughterhouse scene of a failed drug deal. Moss finds a case o f money, a load of heroin, and one dying Hispanic man pleading for water. He takes the money, but his conscience nags him and he comes back to the scene that night with a jug of water for the dying man.His belated act of compassion commences the novel’s ostensible journey: Moss runs with the money, pursued by Anton Chigurh, a rival hoard of drug dealers, and Sheriff Bell. Classical Jungian theory links both the puer and the hero to the Great Mother: the puer via regressive attachment, the hero via opposition. James Hillman argued, however, that whereas the hero is always bound up in a battle with the mother, the puer spirit is defined in relationship to the father and is not heroic in the classical sense. Maggie Bortz, Telos in No Country for Old Men and The Road 33Puer consciousness is a masculine psychological energy representing, in alchemical terms, â€Å"a new spirit born of an old spirit† (2005, 117). Hillman contended that whereas the emergent masculine ego migh t pattern itself in association with either archetype, an alchemical â€Å"union of sames† in the puer-senex archetype represents the requisite path of individuation toward the mature masculine. Moss initially seems to reflect qualities of the archetypal puer-like opportunist. Like other mythological puer figures, such as Icarus or Bellerophon,1 he does not recognize his limitations and is more vulnerable than he realizes.During his first encounter with the drug dealers, Moss injures his feet by walking barefoot in the river gravel and then traversing the country in wet boots. A gunshot wound suffered during his first encounter with Chigurh further lames him for the abbreviated duration of his life. The classic puer injury to the foot suggests a fatal weakness where this immature consciousness meets the world. Once Moss takes the money, however, his thoughts, feelings, and behaviors clearly pattern boy or uninitiated hero psychological energy.His heroic quest is about cashâ⠂¬â€his spirit is literalized in currency. Moss is skillful with weapons, which are described in elaborate detail. Literary critic Jay Ellis astutely observed the technological fetishism with which McCarthy describes Moss’ preoccupation with weapons and tools: To pre-adolescent (and increasingly, adolescent and older) male readers still uncertain about their vulnerability and power in the world . . . the minutiae surrounding objects that afford their user power in the world become all-important . . .Anything that can be added on to an already desirable object that will afford greater lethality, great speed, greater vision, or more information, fills in for what young men fear they lack. (2009, 138) Ellis noted that these powerful weapons and tools ultimately do little for Moss: he misses his opening shot at an antelope and is ultimately gunned down by drug dealers at a cheap hotel. Sheriff Bell, in contrast, is dubious of sophisticated weaponry. â€Å"Tools that comes into our hands comes into theirs too . . . Some of the old time sheriffs wouldnt even carry a firearm† (McCarthy 2005, 62–63).Moss’ interactions with women betray an oblique hostility and adolescent insecurity. He uses sarcasm to dismiss and deflect his young wife. Moss mentions â€Å"mother† specifically twice in the book, both times in relation to death, and appears to dialogue with her elsewhere. Shortly before he is murdered, Moss picks up a teenage girl who is hitchhiking. The mother complex speaking through Moss tells the girl: â€Å"Most people’ll run from their own mother to get to hug death by the neck. They can’t wait to see him† (McCarthy 2005, 234).Moss’ unconsciousness of his own limitations, of any transpersonal ideals, and of the insurmountable evil he both confronts and secretly carries within him, costs him his own life; the collateral damage includes the deaths of his wife and the young hitchhiker. 34 jung journal: culture & psyche 5:4 / fall 2011 At this point in the senescence of our culture, McCarthy seems to say, the hero is as good as dead. Although Moss’ heroic tale entices the reader into the novel, as critic Jay Ellis (2009) has noted, this part of the story collapses midway through with Moss’ death when Sheriff Bell’s process emerges to dominate.This apparent literary dismissal of the heroic neurosis may reflect its psychological status as a secondary pathology, as a symptom of failed initiation that masks a religious problem: the missing God â€Å"who offered a focus for spiritual things† (Hillman 2005, 121). The third major character, Anton Chigurh, psychopath and assassin, represents the most potent force in the collective psyche at this time. He is a complex, quasiarchetypal shadow figure, a paradoxical psychic presence who acts as the dynamist or catalyst in the larger psychological process of the novel.When the reader meets Chigurh, he is a prisoner i n a small, rural county jail. While the arresting deputy chats on the phone, Chigurh, in one fluid move, gets his manacled hands in front of his body and around the jailor’s neck. After the grisly murder, Chigurh nonchalantly uses the bathroom, binds his injured wrists with tape and paper towels, and sits at the desk â€Å"studying the dead man gaping up from the floor† (McCarthy 2005, 6). There is no emotion in the scene beyond the horror it evokes in the reader. The motif of the murdered jailor has appeared elsewhere in McCarthy’s work.Here, Chigurh represents an archetypal impulse or tendency that has been banished, repressed, â€Å"locked up,† but has now freed itself to act. Chigurh, unlike Moss, is not motivated by money. When he eventually recovers the satchel of stolen cash, he returns it. Killing people is Chigurh’s job. The world is his abattoir. He is the quintessential bounty hunter, a contemporary iteration of the scalp hunters in Bloo d Meridian. He prefers to dispatch his victims (and to open doors) with a cattlegun. Other people become objects or livestock to him, and in this way, he prefigures the cannibals in The Road.Anton Chigurh seems to embody shadow qualities properly belonging to the personal unconscious of the other characters, as though the archetypal split between the contaminated puer and ineffectual senex created a psychological void that he is obligated, through some inscrutable psychological rule, to fill. In some respects, he is like a photographic negative of Moss. He even mirrors Moss’ limp, sustaining a leg injury while inflicting one. When Chigurh is injured in a car crash late in the book, he buys a boy’s shirt to make a sling for his broken arm, mirroring Moss’ earlier purchase of a boy’s coat on the Mexican border.Chigurh certainly needs no help from anyone. Women who spend too much time around Chigurh, like those who become involved with Moss, wind up dead. An aura of the negative hero seems to radiate around him. At the same time, Chigurh seems to carry some qualities of the negative senex that seem related to Sheriff Bell. As a senex figure, Bell represents, among other things, Maggie Bortz, Telos in No Country for Old Men and The Road 35 justice, law, and the process whereby these concepts are enforced in human affairs through the sometimes arbitrary power of an established order.Within an individual psyche, these ordering and moral functions are often associated with the senex archetype, and, inevitably, a murky shadow accompanies them. â€Å"A morality based on senexconsciousness will always be dubious. No matter what strict code of ethical purity it asserts, in the execution of its lofty principles there will be a balancing loathsome horror not far away† (Hillman 2005, 260). (The first line of the book suggests as much: â€Å"I sent one boy to the gaschamber at Huntsville† [McCarthy 2005, 3]. Like a dark reflection of the senex compulsion for law, order, and measurement, Chigurh is a man of exacting principles: â€Å"principles that transcend money or drugs or anything like that† (153). As Moss’ wife begs for her life, Chigurh shakes his head. â€Å"You’re asking that I make myself vulnerable and that I can never do. I have only one way to live and it doesn’t allow for special cases† (259). Anton Chigurh serves as a vehicle of unconscious projection for the reader. His sadistic acts and complete emotional detachment inspire terror. This character, so indefinably foreign, o marginally human, does not seem like one of us, but he is an irrefutable psychological truth that belongs to our culture. He represents something we should know about ourselves that remains unconscious, like a not yet understood dream. While Chigurh’s vulnerability to physical injury suggests a human shadow figure, his disappearing acts, miraculous escapes, and his association with fat e lend him a supernatural aura that suggests the archetypal shadow. By the end of the novel, Bell comes to believe that Satan â€Å"explains a lot of things that otherwise dont have no explanation† (McCarthy 2005, 218).Chigurh himself confesses that he has found â€Å"it useful to model himself after God† (257). For our culture at this time, we might say Chigurh is God, the dark God grown more human, closer to consciousness. Chigurh resembles the God-image Jung discovered in the Book of Job. Jung found that Yahweh, egged on by Satan, possessed, in part, â€Å"an animal nature† (1952/1969, CW 11,  ¶600) and, in this way, was â€Å"less than human† ( ¶599). Like Yahweh, Chigurh is guilty of â€Å"murder, bodily injury with premeditation, and denial of a fair trial† ( ¶581).For Jung, Yahweh’s cruelty to Job is â€Å"further exacerbated by the fact that Yahweh displays no compunction, remorse, or compassion, but only ruthlessness and brut ality† ( ¶581); we find the same divine heartlessness, fed by the unconscious, in Chigurh. Chigurh shares another trait with Yahweh: â€Å"Nowhere does he come up against an insuperable obstacle that would force him to hesitate and hence make him reflect on himself † ( ¶579). In Jung’s view, the Christ symbol represents only an intermediate stage in a process of divine development in which God effectively dissociated from his own dark side.Identification with the exclusively â€Å"good,† loving aspects of the divinity â€Å"is bound 36 jung journal: culture & psyche 5:4 / fall 2011 to lead to a dangerous accumulation of evil† (1952/1969, CW 11,  ¶653). Anton Chigurh symbolizes that magnetic, irrational pull to incarnate God’s darkness, â€Å"the ultimate source of evil, its absolute home† (Stein 1995, 144). Chigurh slays the cultural hero and provokes Bell’s psychological development: he is the dynamic agent, the terrorist , and instigator of Bell’s emergent connection to the unconscious. The realization of the self as an autonomous psychic factor is often stimulated by the irruption of contents over which the ego has no control† (Sharp 1991, 120). The irruption of contents like this can destroy the ego. In his Trickster role, Chigurh is not unlike Satan in the Book of Job or the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Evil serves a psychological function. â€Å"The stirring up of conflict is a Luciferian virtue in the true sense of the word. Conflict engenders fire, the fire of affects and emotions, and like every other fire it has two aspects, that of combustion and that of creating light† ( Jung 1954/1968, CW 9i,  ¶179).The conscious attitude determines whether the conflict is ultimately illuminating or destructive: we either evolve from our mistakes or we unconsciously dig deeper into our accustomed defenses. Sheriff Bell, a country lawman approaching sixty, is the novel’s psyc hological protagonist. As a senex figure, Bell seems to represent, at least in part, the conservative function of the archetype, â€Å"the fastness of our habits† (Hillman 2005, 48), â€Å"the principle of long-lasting survival through order† (284). Psychological movement, once incited by Chigurh, depends entirely on Bell’s interior process.Paradoxically, the path of psychic evolution begins with the senex in a process of disintegration. The novel takes its title from the first line of W. B. Yeats’ most celebrated poem, â€Å"Sailing to Byzantium,† which contrasts the material world with the transcendent world of art from the viewpoint of an aged man. It urges a belated attention to one’s soul. To the extent that art is an aperture to the collective unconscious, the journey to Byzantium implies an intrapsychic movement from the ego toward the Self.Critic John Vanderheide has observed that the renunciation of the physical world expressed in à ¢â‚¬Å"Sailing to Byzantium† and No Country for Old Men is forced on the narrator by old age and approaching death, conditions he is powerless to change (2005). Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity (Yeats 1926/1952, 490, stanza III, ll. 21–24) This felt sense of mortality, hopelessness, and limitation is often the cue that ignites the process of individuation.The collective unconscious calls aged men; whether they will respond and how is another matter entirely, but this painful territory is no country for young men. Maggie Bortz, Telos in No Country for Old Men and The Road 37 As senex figure, Bell is the ostensible boundary keeper of the cultural psyche, but he is flooded with content that he cannot repress. Bafflement pervades his monologues. He longs for times past when the world made more sense to him, but Bell’s nostalgia is more than a regressive symptom, it implies â€Å"a separation of halves, a missing conjunction† (Hillman 2005, 182).Bell carries notable qualities of the positive senex. His most authentic self is related to others. He sees himself as a shepherd to the people assigned to his care. â€Å"I’ve thought about why it was that I wanted to be a lawman. There was always some part of me that wanted people to listen to what I had to say. But there was a part of me too that just wanted to pull everybody in the boat† (McCarthy 2005, 296). His psyche is anchored in an imago of the positive feminine in the form of his anima figure, his wife of thirtyone years, Loretta.The escalating violence, his inability to contain it, and the imperatives of his own interior process force Bell to examine the psychological orientation that has guided his life. Bell confronts his own provisional life, an adulthood founded on a lie. As a young soldier in France during World War II, he fought bravely, but in the face of overw helming odds and certain death, fled the battlefield and his dead companions. He was awarded a Bronze Star for his service, an honor he tried to refuse. His election as county sheriff followed from this heroic misidentification.Bell confesses this history to his Uncle Ellis, an elderly lawman disabled in the line of duty, late in the book. â€Å"I didn’t know you could steal your own life,† he says (McCarthy 2005, 278). Bell concludes that his history resurfaces because â€Å"sometimes people would rather have a bad answer about things than no answer at all† (282). Bell endures the part of the alchemical process associated with the death and decay of the old substance, the old way of being in the world. He experiences his growing edge of consciousness as a defeat.Bell makes a final break with the inauthentic hero and our culture’s idea of what it means to be a man: he quits in the middle of the hunt. His decision to retire reflects an understanding of his own limitations and is guided by a deeper psychic injunction. I always knew that you had to be willin to die to even do this job. That was always true. . . . If you aint they’ll know it in a heartbeat. I think it is more like what you are willin to become. And I think that a man would have to put his soul at hazard. And I wont do that. I think now that maybe I never would. (McCarthy 2005, 4)Bell begins to acquiesce to and participate in his interior process, going back through his memories, paying attention to his dreams, engaging in active imagination. He ponders the memory of an image he encountered on the battlefield in France, â€Å"a stone water trough† carved â€Å"to last ten thousand years† (307). A trough contains water, a symbol of the unconscious, perhaps the personal unconscious, but perhaps the collective one. The trough symbolizes a way of understanding content arising from the unconscious and resonates as a religious symbol. For Jung, 38 jung jou rnal: culture & psyche 5:4 / fall 2011 an had the need for a felt connection to something larger than his ego deeply embedded into the fabric of his being, but man lost his sense of larger meaning and purpose somewhere amid the horrors and upheavals of the twentieth century. Jung believed that the modern collective failure to channel this instinct, to carve another indestructible stone trough, was both symptom and root cause of our collective dissociation. Bell rejects the notion of carving a trough himself; it must be a collective enterprise, and no new myth has yet emerged to replace the dying God-image of our culture.Bell’s only child, a daughter, died as an infant thirty years before the story begins. Childlessness is associated with the negative senex. â€Å"When the senex has lost its child . . . A dying complex infects all psychic life† (Hillman 2005, 263). Late in the book, Bell confides to the reader that for many years he has dialogued with this dead infant d aughter (McCarthy 2005, 285). In Jungian theory, that imaginary child would be considered a psychic reality. The novel’s ultimate meaning resides in two dreams about his dead father.In the first dream, â€Å"he give me some money and I think I lost it† (McCarthy 2005, 309). His father imparted something of great value to him for safekeeping, but he misplaced it, perhaps irretrievably. The second dream is a powerful reiteration of the first and evokes Jung’s famous dream of carrying a small light in the fog (Jung 1961/1965, 88). The setting is a cold, snowy night in a remote mountain pass. Bell and his father ride horseback. It was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through this pass in the mountains.It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothing. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. (McCarthy 2005, 309)Although the dream can be viewed as regressive, in that it invokes Bell’s childhood relationship and a longing to live out an old, honorable myth that has become irrelevant in the modern world, it clearly carries teleological implications. Bell goes forward into the dark night, into the unknown, toward death. He and his father ride horses, numinous animals in McCarthy’s work that suggest connection to anima or soul. Horses also represent an older and an arguably more connected way of moving through the world. Bell’s father carries fire, a symbol for the light of consciousness or spirit, in a horn, a Gnostic symbol of maturity. The hor n is a dual symbol: from one point of view it is penetrating in shape and therefore active and masculine in significance; and from the other it is shaped like a receptacle, which is feminine in meaning† (Cirlot 1962/1971, 151). While the image of the horn may suggest a new hieros gamos, a union of masculine and feminine energy, the dead father carries it, not the dream ego Maggie Bortz, Telos in No Country for Old Men and The Road 39 itself. Bell’s passivity in the dream seems problematic. On the other hand, it is conceivable that Bell’s lack of agency is an auspicious sign. In the absence of ego and into its emptiness an imaginal stream can flow, providing mythical solutions between the senexpuer contradictions† (Hillman 2005, 66). Bell’s own father aspects are deeply unconscious: he has no living children and, in this respect, has lost his father’s â€Å"inheritance,† a future presence in the chain of life. Paradoxically, behind Bellà ¢â‚¬â„¢s senex mask we find a son looking for the father within. As in most of McCarthy’s books, the missing psychic presence is the father: there is never a shortage of symbolically fatherless boys in his work.However, in this novel, the puer appears in the form of Bell as an old man. Bell’s unconscious frames its message in terms of a reunion and recalibration of the father and the son, as though directly addressing the split masculine archetype that appears to block the evolution of our culture. â€Å"This split gives us . . . the search of the son for his father and the longing of the father for his son, which is the search and longing for one’s own meaning† (Hillman 2005, 61). The dream image suggests a path of potential healing, a â€Å"union of sames† in this split archetype, and might represent the nascent emergence of a new myth.In the end, the dream’s telos remains hauntingly ambiguous. We are only at the beginning of a process. In the face of such pervasive and unbridled evil and unconsciousness, one man’s individuation seems like a very small thing, a very small thing that requires much effort, attention, devotion, and suffering. The last line of the book immediately follows the second dream: â€Å"Then I woke up† (McCarthy 2005, 309). â€Å"Waking up,† increasing consciousness, is the entire point. And thus the novel ends on a slender strand of hope.We must dream this dream on, in the Jungian tradition, and look toward the next dream for further clarification. McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, is properly understood as a psychological progression of No Country for Old Men. In The Road, McCarthy resolves the ambiguity of the quaternity image presented in No Country for Old Men. It becomes clear that the imagery portends a collective psychosis and, at the same time, the possibility that some individuals may be ready to assimilate unconscious content. In The Road, the ch thonic feminine as landscape has een killed off entirely in an unnamed catastrophe marked only by â€Å"a long shear of light and then a series of low concussions† (McCarthy 2006, 45). Given McCarthy’s long preoccupation with man’s proclivity toward evil, the apocalypse was likely manmade: perhaps an all-out nuclear war. There are few survivors. Civilization itself is a fading memory. A nameless father and son wander the scorched landscape, â€Å"the cauterized terrain,† hoping to scavenge enough canned food to survive while evading roving bands of cannibals (12). The boy’s mother has committed suicide in despair. 40 jung journal: culture & psyche 5:4 / fall 2011McCarthy seems to suggest that the feminine will be eradicated from the picture entirely, the negative mother complex played out to its inevitable conclusion in man’s escalating shadow enactments before work on the fundamental problem can begin in what is left of humanity. As Anton C higurh says, â€Å"one’s path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly† (McCarthy 2005, 259). Despite the horrors, a new symbol, the image of a divine child, an elaboration of the dream imagery of No Country for Old Men, does emerge out of the ruin and ashes of The Road.This symbol arises from the ground of catastrophic loss. The end of the via longissima is the child. But the child begins in the realm of Saturn, in lead or rock, ashes or blackness, and it is there the child is realized. It is warmed to life in a bath of cinders, for only when a problem is finally worn to nothing, wasted and dry can it reveal a wholly unexpected essence. Out of the darkest, coldest, most remote burnt out state of the complex the phoenix rises. Petra genetrix: out of the stone a child is born. (Hillman 2005, 64)In The Road, the father and son are â€Å"each other’s world entire† (McCarthy 2006, 5), representing a â€Å"union of samesâ €  in the masculine archetype and, possibly, the beginning of a new cultural myth. The nameless father in The Road struggles to â€Å"evoke the forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them† (63). He views his son as a sacred being. As he is dying, the father sees his son â€Å"standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle† (230). Unlike Jesus, this son is not sacrificed back to the father. In the puer is a father drive—not to find him, reconcile with him, be loved and receive a blessing, but rather to transcend the father which act redeems the father’s limitations† (Hillman 2005, 161). The father’s job is to initiate the son before he dies: to provide a sense of meaning that makes existence tolerable. In The Road, individual meaning is symbolized in the son’s sacred responsibility to carry the light of conscio usness, the only thing of value in a post-apocalyptic world, into the overwhelming darkness that confronts him. This fragile possibility, however, resides in the individual, not within a culture or group.Critic Kenneth Lincoln saw McCarthy’s novels as â€Å"lamentational canticles of warning, not directives† (2009, 2). Part of Bell’s function is prophetic: he hints at â€Å"where we’re headed† (McCarthy 2005, 303). â€Å"I know as certain as death that there aint nothin short of the second comin of Christ that can slow this train† (159). McCarthy is first and foremost a storyteller. He is not an activist and does not make prescriptive statements, and it is a mistake to read him that way. The blind man in The Crossing explains the function of storytellers. â€Å"He said that they had no desire to entertain him nor yet even to instruct him.He said that it was their whole bent only to tell what was true and that otherwise they had no purpose a t all† (McCarthy 1999b, 284). I imagine that McCarthy shares the blind man’s views and also those of Jung, who in writing about art Maggie Bortz, Telos in No Country for Old Men and The Road 41 underscored the fundamental depth psychological tenet that â€Å"a dream never says ‘you ought’ or ‘this is the truth. ’ It presents an image in much the same way as nature allows a plant to grow, and it is up to us to draw conclusions† (1930/1966, CW 15,  ¶161).Those of us who are conscious enough to draw conclusions from this work must do so now and prepare ourselves as best we can for the dark new world to come. endnote 1. Bellerophon, son of the King of Corinth, was the hero of Greek mythology who killed the Chimera. Bellerophon, inflated by his triumph, felt entitled to join the gods on Mount Olympus and attempted to fly there on the winged horse, Pegasus. His presumption offended Zeus, who orchestrated the hero’s dismount. Belleroph on plummeted to earth, crippled in the fall. note References to The Collected Works of C. G. Jung are cited in the text as CW, volume number, and paragraph number.The Collected Works are published in English by Routledge (UK) and Princeton University Press (USA). bibliography Bloom, Harold. 2009. Bloom’s modern critical views: Cormac McCarthy. New York: Infobase Publishing. Cirlot, Juan Eduardo. 1962/1971. A dictionary of symbols. Trans. Jack Sage. New York: Philosophical Library. Edinger, Edward F. 1994. Anatomy of the psyche: Alchemical symbolism in psychotherapy. Chicago: Open Court. Ellis, Jay. 2009. Fetish and collapse in No country for old men. In Bloom’s modern critical views: Cormac McCarthy, ed. Harold Bloom, 133–170. New York: Infobase Publishing. Frye, Steven. 2005.Yeats’ â€Å"Sailing to Byzantium† and McCarthy’s No country for old men: Art and artifice in the new novel. The Cormac McCarthy Journal, 5, 1: 14–20. Henderson, Joseph. 2005. Thresholds of initiation. Wilmette, IL: Chiron Publications. Hillman, James. 2005. Senex and puer. Putnam, CT: Spring. Jung, C. G. 1930/1966. Psychology and literature. The spirit in man, art, and literature. CW 15. ———. 1937/1969. Psychological factors determining human behavior. The structure and dynamics of the psyche. CW 8. ———. 1951/1968. The syzygy: Anima and animus. Aion. CW 9ii. ———. 1952/1969. Answer to Job. Psychology and religion: West and East.CW 11. ———. 1954/1968. Psychological aspects of the mother archetype. The archetypes and the collective unconscious. CW 9i. ———. 1957/1970. The undiscovered self (present and future). Civilization in transition. CW 10. ———. 1961/1965. Memories, dreams, reflections. Recorded and ed. by Aniela Jaffe. Trans. Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Vintage Books. Lincoln, Kenneth. 2009. Cormac McCart hy: American canticles. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. McCarthy, Cormac. 1985. Blood meridian: Or the evening redness in the west. New York: Random House. 42 jung journal: culture & psyche 5:4 / fall 2011 McCarthy, Cormac. 1999a.All the pretty horses. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ———. 1999b. The crossing. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ———. 2005. No country for old men. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ———. 2006. The road. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. No country for old men. 2007. Screenplay by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. Based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, No country for old men, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. Directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. Pauli, Wolfgang, and C. G. Jung. 1992/2001. Atom and archetype: The Pauli/Jung letters, 1932– 1958. Eds. Carl Alfred Meier, Charles Paul Enz, and Markus Fierz. Trans. David Roscoe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Philipson, Morris. 1992. Outline of Jungian aesthetics. In Jungian literary criticism, ed. Richard Sugg, 214–227. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Sharp, Daryl. 1991. C. G. Jung lexicon: A primer of terms and concepts. Toronto: Inner City Books. Stein, Murray. 1995. Jung on evil. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vanderheide, John. 2005. Varieties of renunciation in the works of Cormac McCarthy. The Cormac McCarthy Journal, 5, 1: 30–35. Voice of America. 2008. Cormac McCarthy and Thomas McGuane write stories set in the American west. Interviewed by B. Klein and S. Ember. Radio broadcast (February 11), voanews. om (accessed October 27, 2009). Yeats, William Butler. 1926/1952. Sailing to Byzantium. In Immortal poems of the English language, ed. Oscar Williams, 490. New York: Washington Square Press. maggie bortz earned an M. A. in Counseling Psychology with an emphasis in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute, Carpinteria, California, and an M. J. in Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism. She is a Qualified Mental Health Professional (QMHP) working toward licensure as a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) at the Center for Family Development in Eugene, Oregon.She plans to open a private counseling practice in Portland in 2012. Correspondence: 5873 SW Terwilliger Blvd. , Portland, OR 97239. abstract This alchemical hermeneutical study analyzes Cormac McCarthy’s novels No Country for Old Men and The Road as cultural dreams using Jungian and post-Jungian theory. McCarthy’s work elucidates the archetypal process of individuation toward the mature masculine in our time. Following McCarthy’s imagery and James Hillman’s work, I focus on the split in the senex-puer archetype that structures the masculine psyche as the ultimate psychological site of our cultural dissociation.I also examine the teleological implications in the novel regarding the evolution of the God-image, which reflects manâ€℠¢s understanding of the objective psyche, as well as the nature and psychological function of human evil. key words alchemy, archetypal psychology, chthonic feminine, Coen brothers, cultural psychology, dream interpretation, Jungian interpretation of literature, landscape, literature as cultural dreaming, masculine archetypes, Cormac McCarthy, mechanization, No Country for Old Men, puer, The Road, senex, symbol Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

History of the Great Wall of China

Introduction I foremost went to China last twelvemonth to analyze for a semester.The feeling I had when I arrived at that place, was something that can non be explained in words.I felt frightened because I was so little in such a large city.Day by twenty-four hours, I started to experience much more comfy, to go more familiar with the topographic points, the people and even with Chinese food.Back so, I did non recognize what this experience would intend to me. After analyzing a semester in a metropolis near Shanghai, I decided to travel to see Beijing, the great capital of China. There, I had the chance to see the Great Wall and I was impressed by its enormousness, hence my ground for taking this subject for my concluding paper. Known as the â€Å"7th admiration of the universeâ€Å" , the Great Wall, which stretches for over Chinese district of more than 7000 kilometres, is the largest edifice of the ancient military defence and it took longer to construct. This colossal wall began to lift in the ninth century. The people who dominated the cardinal fields, for illustration, the center and lower basin of the Yellow River, decided to support themselves from the onslaughts of the northern small town with a wall that joined the walls, the beacons and palaces located along the boundary line and from which they could watch the motions of the enemy. In the Spring and Autumn period and the Warring States, between 700 and 221 BC, the feudal Godheads lived locked in eternal wars to accomplish hegemony. The most powerful Godheads defended each other with walls that rose landforms advantage of boundary line countries. After 221 BC, when Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty unified China, the bing walls were linked. The formidable defensive barrier therefore formed, traversing the mountains of the northern boundary line, served to drive the onslaughts of the mobile cultural groups mounted on horseback, from the Mongolian steppes. At that clip, the length of the Great Wall was good over 5000 stat mis. The Han Dynasty, replacement to the Qin, was lengthened to more than 10 1000 kilometres. Over the following 2000 old ages, the entire length of the different subdivisions of the Great Wall reached more than 50 1000 kilometres, plenty to circle the Earth length. Today when we talk about the Great Wall, we frequently refer to the constructed during the Ming Dynasty ( 1368-1644 ) .It starts at the Jiayu Pass in western Gansu Province, through 9 states, municipalities and independent parts, and ends on the Bankss of Yalu River in the northeasterly state of Liaoning. Its length is 7,300 kilometres, or 14 thousand Li, hence besides known as the Great Wall of 10,000 Li. The wall, built with immense bricks, masonry, crushed rock and loess, has a tallness of about 10 metres. The breadth of the top between 4 and 5 metres, leting the coincident measure 4 equestrians and therefore facilitated the motion of combat units such as the conveyance of grain and arms. Inside the walls were stepss and corridors taking to the doors. The wall was punctuated by towers that were used to hive away arms and cereal for the remainder of the soldiers and as a safety in clip of war. It is besides used as beacons to warn of the presence of enemy fire or fume signals. Of class, today the Great Wall no longer meets any military map. But its arresting architecture has won and continues to win the bosom of many people. The beauty of the Great Wall is manifested in its stateliness, its strength, its illustriousness and its naturalness. Seen from a distance, the high wall extends along the ridges of mountain ranges clearly following the silhouette of a elephantine winging firedrake, shut up position, the powerful entreaty of your fabulous study, formed by enforcing stairss, walls that appear to travel in sensed zigzag and steep ups and platforms.In one word, a comeliness. To the historical and cultural value of the Great Wall we can add besides the touristry value. The Chinese frequently say: â€Å"He who has non climbed the Great Wall is non a existent individual. † Tourists, whether Chinese or aliens, are proud to hold gone to the Great Wall. The many caputs of province and authorities who have visited China are no exclusion. Several well-preserved subdivisions have become points of tourer involvement, which every twelvemonth attracts 1000s of visitants. Among the best known include Badaling Pass, Platform Shimatai, Mutianyu, Shanhaiguan Pass, besides known as First Measure of China, and Jiayuguan Pass, the western terminal of the Great Wall. The Great Wall of China is an internationally recognizable icon and is a permeant metaphor used to specify modern China’s national character, political attitude. Is a set of monumental semisynthetic constructions that has stood the trial of clip, much like the centuries’ old Chinese civilization. It has besides come to incarnate the rich history of the Chinese people, declarative mood of their strength and ability as a state. This Wall has come to stand for quintessential Chinese attributes in modern-day society and it is cardinal to how China defines itself. However, there is no individual ‘Great Wall’ . It is a set of walls, as I said before, built periodically over 1000s of old ages by different dynasties for changing intents. The Great Wall, crystallisation of wisdom, difficult work, blood and perspiration of 1000000s of workers in ancient China, has worthily survived over a thousand old ages of vicissitudes. Her ageless Martial and timeless entreaty have become a symbol of the spirit of the Chinese state. Since 1987, the Great Wall is considered a universe heritage. Chapter one The history of The Great Wall Year of building The history of the Great Wall began in 221 BC during the Qin dynasty when were foremost built 5,000 stat mis in two phases from four to six old ages ( 214-210 B.C ) . During the 2nd phase, the wall was built along the Yellow and the Tao River, at the same time being built 44 metropoliss and established 44 administrative units.The population brought in these metropoliss had provided the care and the enlargement of the wall.During the Han Dynasty, its length reached 10,000 kilometers.Only few subdivisions of the impressive building of Han Dynasty had been kept until today.The new subdivision of the Great Wall dates from the Ming Dynasty, and in 270 old ages, the emperors opened 50 topographic points in which people had the chance to work.The wall, during the Ming Dynasty, crossed nine states and independent parts by mensurating 8851.8 kilometer and holding the best proficient and military qualities. From the full length over 6,000 stat mis were built by Ming emperor’s people. Types of wall building To construct, , the 7th admiration of the world’’ , the Chinese have used five types of wall building. The first 1 was rammed Earth, an old building technique, used in the loess tableland from Datong to Jiayuguan and in Inner Mongolia. In kernel, the rammed Earth was prevailing.Other types used were adobe, rock, brick and drop. It is said that a fifth of China ‘s population at some point participated in its building. It is besides said that the Great Wall of China is the largest graveyard in the universe, because during its building more than 10 million workers died and were buried at that place. If were taken all the bricks that were used to construct the Great Wall of China during the Ming Dynasty, the Chinese could construct a high wall that can give five bends to Earth. The chief trouble was that, to accomplish a strategic advantage, they had to took advantage of the terrain ( bring forthing accidents ) , and in the tops of the mountains were localized munitions that could keep a good surveillance of the land, and at that place was where soldiers lived and where they had commissariats and armaments. The stuffs they used were different and depended on what could be used in each country they built. The Qin and Han was built chiefly with dirt, clay, reeds, wood and rocks. The Ming, 15 centuries subsequently, used clay bricks and carven rocks. In some subdivisions of the Wall, to attest the quality of the bricks, each maker imprinted his seal on them, and the day of the month of bringing. Rock pavers were cut and shipped from distant preies, some of them came to weigh a ton and were up to 3 metres. The Ming built in two phases: foremost raised two walls and so the infinite between them was filled. The base was wider than the top. Then were built garrisons and crenelations where guns were placed. To forestall eroding by rain, a whole drainage system was devised. The boring work, the hapless diet, the whether, and the enemies that continually kept coming, affected the workers. It is estimated that Ming took advantage of 100 workers. The nomads attacked and broke the defences in many parts of the Wall, but he had already fulfilled the undertaking of directing the dismay to the topographic point where the ground forces was placed. They had a system of fume signals in detailing the onslaught and how many enemies were destroyed. Later, the Ming, in add-on to smoke signals, had used a codification for guns to give the dismay. The wall has a tallness between seven and 10 metres. Its base steps about seven metres and six upper manus. The floors were paved utilizing a mixture of rock and howitzer, supported by tree short pantss rollers arranged in several beds. At regular intervals terraced towers were built and this thing allowed the guards made aˆâ€ ¹aˆâ€ ¹ optical signals which offered them a great communicating that stretched for stat mis. A wall is interrupted at some points so they can hold defence points, to which the soldiers could withdraw if necessary. Each tower has alone and hard stepss to entree in order to confound the enemy. The barracks and administrative centres were located at greater distances. In add-on to its defensive map, the Great Wall played an instrumental function as a mean of communicating and commercialism opening the doors of China to the Western universe.The celebrated â€Å" Silk Road â€Å" passed trough China, and merchandisers from the Persian Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean who traveled to the E could non make their finishs without traveling through the wall. The stuffs used are those available around the edifice. Near Beijing was used limestone and was besides used granite or fired brick.That made the wall really immune to impacts of siege arms. Defense The Great Wall is non merely a wall, but a defense mechanism system that integrated assorted walls, watchtowers and towers of fire for describing under the control of military degrees defined. For illustration, under the Ming, there were nine subdivisions of different military duties that are described as, ,Nine critical defense mechanisms in the borders’’ . It was assigned a commanding officer, describing straight to the National Ministry of Defence. About one million military personnels were deployed along the Great Wall to continue the state. During 2,000 old ages of building of the wall, the Chinese people learned a batch about defense mechanisms ( harmonisation with the topography and location of military forces, edifice stuffs, etc. ) The format of the walls varied depending on the topography and defense mechanism demands. In the strategic transitions, the walls were really high and solid, although they were low and narrow in high and steep mountains to cut down t he costs in money and labour. In some topographic points like Juyongguan or the Badaling subdivision, general regulation, the walls have seven to eight metres in tallness, four to five metres thick at the top and six to seven meters down. Inside the upper portion, there is a parapet of a meter barrier which prevented the soldiers fall, niches two meters high, every bit good as holes for pull or throw stones. In the strategic subdivisions, the upper portion is blocked by a series of cross walls to forestall the enemy to mount. During the dynasty of the Ming, General Qi Jiguang, celebrated for get the better ofing Nipponese plagiarists, improved the defence of the wall system, by adding towers, watchtower and the warehouses for arms and weaponry. Base on ballss are defensive strategic points throughout the wall.Fire coverage towers constituted one of the indispensable constituents of the defence system and an effectual agencies of conveying military information. During the Ming, sound s of detonation were added to heighten the consequence. As a defense mechanism system, the Great Wall crosses mountains, comeuppances and prairies, drops and rivers and harmonizes its construction to the complexness of the topography. It is a wonder of ancient architecture. The wall remained standing, so, for a long clip. Under the great Han dynasty became a great topographic point for the conflicts against the Huns, China utilizing projectiles countless ground forcess. During the following dynasty, the Chinese generals seized the immense wall as a base from which to come on in Hun Mongol heartland in Central Asia. That was the great migration of Germanic peoples. The building whose being had produced such effects spread over continents, merely partly protected China, and from its diminution in the 13th century was less protected. When in 1368 succumbed the Mongol dynasty in China under force per unit area from the Chinese reserves and riders steppe retreated to Central Asia, one of the first tasks the new Ming dynasty ( 1348-1644 ) aimed strictly Chinese, was the Reconstruction of the enforcing wall.