Clay Plates with Stylized Ornithomorphic Representations from Section Vi of the Gorbunovo Peat Bog*

Clay plates with stylized representations of birds found at Section VI of the Gorbunovo Peat Bog (Trans-Urals) in 1926 and 2009 are described here with regard to technology, typology, function, and age. Similarities with Suzgun and Late Cherkaskul artifacts (13th – 12th centuries BC) point to the date of the plates. Suzgun sanctuaries and Andronovo burial sites suggest that the site with which the plates are associated might be either ritual or memorial.     

灵魂与灵魂密语的繁富人生——从纳兰性德诗《西苑杂咏和荪友韵》看其人格理想

本文试图从纳兰性德的个案诗作做为切入点,在众所周知的是清代大词人和具有"哀感顽艳"词风的赞誉中,在与其好友严绳荪《西苑侍直杂诗》二十首的比对中,来观照构成其深邃的心灵世界的人格理想,在隐逸的伤情中亦凸现着入世狂举的豪情,这二者的对立统一,似灵魂与灵魂的密语,从而彰显出一个完整而繁富的纳兰性德。     

Neurology and the soul: from the origins until 1500

The mind-brain dichotomy recalls the soul-body duality and the tendency to individualize in the nervous system a location for the soul. In this paper, the author analyses some of the principal theories which attribute the soul to a cerebral location, from the origins until the year 1500.     

Biblical beliefs in the shaping of modern nations

The ideology and culture of modern nations and nationalism have been profoundly influenced by two traditions that reach back into the ancient world, the biblical and the classical. Here, the focus is on the particular contribution of the Hebrew Bible to the political ideals of modern nationhood. Modern Western nations, unlike non‐Western and ancient nations, are distinguished by their quest for territorial integrity and sovereignty, citizenship, legal standardisation, cultural homogeneity and secular education, while modern nationalism is a pro‐active, ideological movement that seeks to ‘build’ autonomous, unified, distinctive and ‘authentic’ nations out of ethnic populations deemed by some members to constitute actual or potential ‘nations’. While modern European nations emerged out of the matrix of Christianity, as Adrian Hastings argued, it was the political model and ideals of community found in the Hebrew Bible, which Christianity adopted (while rejecting the Jews) and which the New Testament lacked, that so often provided the dynamic of modern nationalism and the values of modern Western nations. Chief among these were the Pentateuchal and prophetic narratives of Exodus, Covenant, Community of Law (Torah), the holiness of a ‘chosen people’, the messianic role of sacred kingship and the dream of fulfilment in the Promised Land. These ideals did not fully come into their own until the Reformation. In this period, state elites expressed growing national sentiments and biblical texts were being rendered into the vernacular, while a more rigorous biblical form of ‘covenantal nationalism’ emerged in early modern Netherlands, Scotland and England, taking the narrative of the deliverance of the Israelites as its starting point. In the eighteenth‐century Enlightenment, the novel cults of ‘Nature’, ‘Authenticity’ and ‘Human Perfectibility’ secured an opening for neo‐classical political ideas in the formation of nations. But it was the biblical ideals of liberation, Covenant, election and promised land that provided the basic model of the modern nation and nationalism in Europe, from the French Revolution, and German and East European nationalisms to the Hebraic Protestant nationalism of Victorian Britain. To a large extent, the modern age owes to the Jewish Bible its fundamental vision of a world divided into distinctive and sovereign territorial nations.     

Cerebral automatism, the brain, and the soul in Bram Stoker's Dracula

Neither literary critics nor historians of science have acknowledged the extent to which Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) is indebted to late-Victorian neurologists, particularly David Ferrier, John Burdon-Sanderson, Thomas Huxley, and William Carpenter. Stoker came from a family of distinguished Irish physicians and obtained an M.A. in mathematics from Trinity College, Dublin. His personal library contained volumes on physiology, and his composition notes for Dracula include typewritten pages on somnambulism, trance states, and cranial injuries. Stoker used his knowledge of neurology extensively in Dracula. The automatic behaviors practiced by Dracula and his vampiric minions, such as somnambulism and hypnotic trance states, reflect theories about reflex action postulated by Ferrier and other physiologists. These scientists traced such automatic behaviors to the brain stem and suggested that human behavior was "determined" through the reflex action of the body and brain-a position that threatened to undermine entrenched beliefs in free will and the immortal soul. I suggest that Stoker's vampire protagonist dramatizes the pervasive late-nineteenth-century fear that human beings are soulless machines motivated solely by physiological factors.