Sulphurous and tormenting flames

England was in religious turmoil in the 1500s and 1600s as the tide of the reformation ebbed and flowed under Henry the VIII, Mary Tudor and Elizabeth. People have often speculated about Shakespeare's religious sympathies and whether he or his family were secretly Catholic. My guess is that, like many English people of that period, he was a bit of both.

Just based on a reading of the plays, he always struck me as fairly sympathetic towards Catholicism. One example of that happens in Act 1 scene 4 of Hamlet, when the ghost of Old Hamlet describes his torments in Purgatory, a Catholic idea if ever there was one.

Apparently Old Hamlet's experience of Purgatory was a lot nastier than that described by Dante. In his words:

My hour is almost come,
When I to sulphurous and tormenting flames
Must render up myself...

I am thy father's spirit,
Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine:
But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood.

All this brings up a point in the art of tragic murder. If you REALLY had it in for somebody, you didn't just whack them. Instead, you waited until they were in a state of sin, preferably mortal, and THEN whacked them. That way the dying was the easy part and the worst was yet to come.

SIGN OF THE TIMES. Food stamps, once stigmatized, have gained greater support across political lines.

DOUBLE STANDARDS. Some of the most vocal opponents of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, aka the stimulus, are all to eager to take advantage of it.

UNDERVALUED. If we placed a dollar value on the necessary services nature provides for free, we'd probably do things very differently.

URGENT WEIRD SEA CREATURE PICTURES here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Lucky you

This guy had some bad luck.

El Cabrero has been musing lately about the role of luck in human affairs. By luck, I mean things that affect us for good or ill that we can't anticipate or control. We go though our lives vacillating between automatic pilot and conscious planning, but even when we try to leave nothing to chance,the universe gets a vote of its own.

My sense is that while the universe is not out to get anybody personally, it probably won't stay up nights worrying about us.

Even on those rare occasions when things work out according to plan, I'd say we were pretty lucky. Think of all the things that could have happened that didn't.

I know that some people believe there is no luck or chance, but I choose not to blame God for everything that happens and could never work my mind into a strict naturalistic determinism. Even if the universe really was a closed, deterministic system, we don't experience it that way and certainly don't have a God's eye view.

Whilst perusing many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore on the subject of luck, I came across this little quote by the American philosopher John Dewey:

No one knows what a year or even a day my bring forth, The healthy become ill; the rich poor; the mighty are cast down' fame changes to obloquy. Men live at the mercy of forces they cannot control. Belief in fortune and luck, good and evil, is one of the most widespread and persistent of human beliefs. Chance has been deified by many peoples. Fate has been set up as an overlord to whom even the Gods must bow. Belief in a Goddess of Luck is in ill repute among pious folk but their belief in providence is a tribute to the fact no individual controls his own destiny.

So good luck out there today.

SPEAKING OF CHANGING LUCK, big business lobbyists are anticipating some, according to this item from McClatchy papers.

SIGN OF THE TIMES. Retail sales took a nosedive in October.

LOOKING BACK (AND AHEAD). This New Yorker item ponders the presidency.

THE NEXT BIG CRUNCH is likely to be ecological.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED