Category Culture

Rumi, the Dancing Poet

One of the most read and quoted Persian poets of the 13th century, Mevlâna Mohammad Jalal al-dîn Rumi, known as Rumi was a savant and mystic. Born in Balkh region, today’s Afghanistan (1207-1273), he and his family moved to Konya, Turkey after the Mongol conquest. Soon after his settlement in Konya, mystics, and Sufi dervishes gathered around him to benefit from his spiritual and intellectual knowledge. The spiritual life was embedded in the daily material life of the dervishes. Their gatherings were accompanied by spiritual…

The War of Gods at Troy

“Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another” wrote Homer in his timeless epic Iliad, which is considered as a pillar of ancient Greek literature. This outstanding masterpiece, presumed to be written around 700-800 BC, is set during the Trojan War, the ten year siege of Troy by the allied Greek kingdoms under the rule of Agamemnon. The myth begins with the beauty contest between Aphrodite, Athena and Hera. Aphrodite promises the…

Victor Hugo on Courage

  It is necessary, for the sake of the forward march of the human race, that there should be proud lessons of courage.   The legendary French writer and poet Victor Hugo (1802-1885), in his eternal book Les Misérables, portrays the nature of hesitation and indecision likening to a cat’s pause  : Everyone has noticed the taste which cats have for pausing and lounging between the two leaves of a half-shut door. Who is there who has not said to a cat : ‘Do come in…

How Laughter Creates Intimacy

  Laughter is the closest distance between two people.  –Victor Hugo “The sound of laughter is universal” state linguists and psychologists. Humans are born with the instinct of laughter. It’s part of the social contract. When one laughs, the other gets the urge to laugh too.  Having asked the question “what makes people laugh ? ”, the philosophers of ancient Greece said that one laughs at his own past self, as well as at the sense of superiority they felt over others in the face…

The Eternal Love of Cupid and Psyche

    Once upon a time, a king had three daughters. The beauty of the youngest, Psyche, ψυχή was beyond description. The fame of her beauty was spread all around that people from other countries would come to see her, and were fascinated by what they saw. In her praise, they sang odes to her and surrendered her with chaplets. So much so that even the altars of Venus were abandoned. Offended by the growing exaltation of a young mortal, Venus exclaimed : “ She…

The Ones Who Will Be Saved

  The renowned neuropsychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik links the present Covid crisis with the race for the performance of our globalized societies. He attributes the differences in individual reactions to crisis to the fact that people confronting it are not in equal terms and conditions. He lucidly explains the differing human condition :  Those who grew up in a stable and reassuring family, who have a good network of friends, those who have learned to communicate by telephone, will read, write, get back on the guitar,…

Creation Myths and the Dawning of the Universe

  Many myths about creation reached us from ancient Sumerians up to the present day, preserved on reliefs, stone tablets, pictures and epic legends.   According to what was written in Sumer (3000 BC) and the epic of Gilgamesh, which is one of the oldest sources, the universe and God existed since the beginning of time. The God of wisdom Enki created the rivers Tigris and the Euphrates, thus created the waterbeds, and made the water flow from the mountains to these rivers. Then he…

Age-old Remedies for Well-Being

600 years after the foundations of science set by Hippocrates (400 BC), the erudite shift in medicine was built up by the pioneers of Islamic medicine spreading from Alexandria to Edessa (Urfa in modern Turkey) and Athens. In the 10th century, the physicians could diagnose and treat various maladies from smallpox to removing cataracts, from relieving pain to setting fractures and to incisions to lifesaving surgical operations.  Learned in zoology and pharmacology, they were able to produce the essential medicines. The breadth of their medical…

The Solidarity of Collective Trauma

Boris Cyrulnik, the eminent neuropsychiatrist known for his work on resilience explains how societies can resist the present crisis of epidemic in the world: We have to adapt to this invisible aggression. Human evolution takes place only in crises. After this crisis, the family and the couple will once again become havens of peace. Crises are very common in the human condition. We have already known many epidemics who have forced cultural revolutions. With each epidemic, or natural disaster, there has been a cultural change.…

Majestic Exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci

“Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.”   The great Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) –timeless artist, engineer, architect, mathematician, and scientist, with profound knowledge in science from anatomy and optics to physics to light –is commemorated at the Louvre Museum, Paris for the fifth centenary of his death. In his quest to understand the relation between the physical and the metaphysical, he spent a lifetime studying the human being and its place in the universe. His extraordinary…