The Hare Krishna's Transformation of Space in West Virginia

This study examines the transformative process of turning unordered space into cosmos, or place imbued with meaning. Through integration of specific physical qualities of a particular location into a traditional Hindu perspective of a sacred place and by performance of symbolic acts such as meditation, worship, founding and settling a site and the building of Prabhupada's Palace of Gold, the Hare Krishna have established a temple-oriented spiritual commune on a West Virginia landscape.     

The Grant,the Hare,and the Survival of a Medieval Folk Belief

In the third book of Otia Imperialia (c. 1211), Gervase of Tilbury describes numerous wonders, among them an English belief regarding the Grant, a sparkling-eyed entity shaped like a bipedal foal, whose appearance racing through the streets forewarns of fire. This creature, attested to nowhere but in Gervase’s work, is something of a mystery for folklorists, who have tried to draw connections to other supernatural beings based on its name and its appearance. What has gone overlooked is the fact that the same elements of the Grant’s fire-omen belief existed well into the twentieth century in parts of England, albeit applied to hares. This article suggests that the Grant is an exaggerated hare, while exploring the larger topic of why it is that hares are so often associated with fire in European folklore.     

How the News was brought from Byzantium to Angoulême; or,The Pursuit of a Hare in an Ox Cart

Abstract

Adémar of Chabannes (988-1034) of noble family, a-monk in the monastery of St. Cybard (Eparchus) at Angoulême, compiled a Chronicon in three books. The first begins with the origins of the Franks and ends with the death of Pepin the Short in 768; the second deals with the reign of Charlemagne; the third covers the years 814 to 1030. The first two books and the first fifteen chapters of the third (down to the year 877) are wholly derivative from identifiable sources. But from chapter sixteen onward the third book provides valuable information chiefly on the period 877-1030 in Aquitaine, presumably drawn from local written sources and from the memories of Adémar's associates. These included notably his two uncles, who were attached to the monastery of St. Martial at Limoges, as was Adémar himself in his youth. It was at St. Martial that on a stormy night in 1010 Adémar had a vision in the heavens of a fiery Cross with Christ upon it weeping a great river of tears: an experience that rendered him so thunderstruck (attonitus) that he kept it secret in his heart until many years later when he was nearing the end of his Chronicon. Then he wrote it down. From St. Martial he returned at the age of twenty-two to St. Cybard, took orders, and spent his life in writing. The‘original’chapters of his Chronicon only occasionally evince any interest in or knowledge of events in France north of Loire.