historians-from-australia

"And, oh Britannia! should'st thou cease to ride Despotic Empress of old Ocean's tide;— Should thy tam'd Lion—spent his former might— No longer roar, the terror of the fight:— Should e'er arrive that dark, disastrous hour, When, bow'd by luxury, thou yield'st to pow'r; When thou, no longer freest of the free, To some proud victor bend'st the vanquish'd knee;— May all thy glories in another sphere Relume, and shine more brightly still than here; May this—thy last-born —then arise, To glad thy heart, and greet thy eyes; And float, with flag unfurl'd, A new in another world!"

"Proud Queen of isles! Thou sittest vast, alone, A host of vassals bending round thy throne: Like some fair swan that skims the silver tide, Her silken cygnets strew'd on every side, So floatest thou, thy Polynesian brood Dispers'd around thee on thy Ocean flood, While ev'ry surge that doth thy bosom lave, Salutes thee "Empress of the Southern Wave.""

"Harrison is no nostalgic reactionary. He acknowledges modernity’s gifts. But he warns against monochrome narratives of progress. One of his most provocative claims is that science, too, relies on “ implicita.” …As a scholar of new religious movements, I find Harrison’s thesis electrifying. He doesn’t mention my field, but I’ll extend his argument: many new religions are a renaissance of “fides implicita.” Converts don’t join because they’ve dissected theological treatises (although some may read them later). They join because they trust a guru, a prophet, a community. Just like early Christians and Muslims. The intellectual scaffolding may come later—or not at all. So, is “fides implicita” obsolete? Has secular science vanquished religion? Harrison—and I—say: not so fast. Belief, in its ancient form as trust, is alive and well. It’s just wearing new clothes."

"They proceeded, not with the sword, but with the olive branch."

"In this year [1824] the aborigines of the Island began to annoy the settlers to a degree that required some active measures of the Government to allay the outraged feelings of this ill-fated race of human beings. These poor bewildered creatures had been treated worse than were any of the American tribes by the Spaniards. Easy, quiet, good-natured, and well-disposed towards the white population, they could no longer brook the treatment they received from the invaders of their country. Their hunting grounds were taken from them, and they themselves were driven like trespassers from the favorite spots for which their ancestors had bled, and had claimed by conquest. The various tribes which formerly were at war with each other, about this time seemed to forget their private differences, and their great aim was to protect themselves from slaughter, and to be revenged! The stock-keepers may be considered as the destroyers of nearly the whole of the aborigines—the proper, the legitimate owners of the soil: these miscreants so imposed upon their docility, that at length they thought little or nothing of destroying the men for the sake of carrying to their huts the females of the tribes; and, if it were possible in a work like this to record but a tithe of the murders committed on these poor harmless creatures, it would make the reader's blood run cold at the bare recital. In self-defence were these poor harmless creatures driven to desperate means, their fine kangaroo grounds were taken from them, and thus were they in want of their customary food; and when every other means of obtaining a livelihood was debarred to them, necessity compelled them to seek food of their despoilers."

"Potent as was the wonderful lamp of Aladdin, and magnificent as were its successes, the power of gold has equalled in its marvellous effects all that the warm orient fancy has pictured for us in the Arabian Nights. Gold has done even more than ever mere magician achieved. It certainly has operated magically in Australia, and in no part of the country has it created greater marvels than in Ballarat ..."

"With no external threat to necessitate maintaining the formalities of international diplomacy, settler discourse seeks to shift Native Affairs out of the realm of international relations and reconstitute it internally as a depoliticised branch of the welfare bureaucracy. To this end, post-frontier settler policy typically favours assimilation, a range of strategies intended to separate individual Natives from their collective sovereignties and merge them irrecoverably into the settler mainstream."

"Rather than something separate from or running counter to the colonial state, the murderous activities of the frontier rabble constitute its principal means of expansion."

"The tide of history canonizes the fait accompli, harnessing the diplomatic niceties of the law of nations to the maverick rapine of the squatters’ posse."

"When invasion is recognized as a structure rather than an event, its history does not stop—or, more to the point, become relatively trivial—when it moves on from the era of frontier homicide. Rather, narrating that history involves charting the continuities, discontinuities, adjustments, and departures whereby a logic that initially informed frontier killing transmutes into different modalities, discourses and institutional formations as it undergirds the historical development and complexification of settler society."

"Settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event."

"Why should ostensibly sovereign nations, residing in territory solemnly guaranteed to them by treaties, decide that they are willing, after all, to surrender their ancestral homelands? More often than not (and nearly always up to the wars with the Plains Indians, which did not take place until after the civil war), the agency which reduced Indian peoples to this abjection was not some state instrumentality but irregular, greed-crazed invaders who had no intention of allowing the formalities of federal law to impede their access to the riches available in, under, and on Indian soil."

"Settler colonialism is an inclusive, land-centred project that coordinates a comprehensive range of agencies, from the metropolitan centre to the frontier encampment, with a view to eliminating Indigenous societies."

"Natives have been subjected to a recurrent cycle of inducements – allotment (held out as personal endowment), citizenship, tribal enrolment, termination (held out as individual freedom), and self-determination – each of which has sought to present domination as empowerment and thereby assert Natives’ consent to their own dispossession."

"Acts—usually violent and secret—that have been carried out by people who were not officially commissioned to carry them out ... have generally occurred behind the screen of the frontier, in the wake of which, once the dust has settled, the irregular acts that took place have been regularized and the boundaries of White settlement extended. Characteristically, officials express regret at the lawlessness of this process while resigning themselves to its inevitability."

"The story of European settlement is the story of aboriginal decay, decimation and death, for the first chapters were written together, and each section as written up to the present has revealed marvellous progress running on contemporaneously with lamentable deterioration, rapid decay, and fast following death—the black man falling as the white man rose."

"[T]he Australian black, without exception, nurtures, one might almost say from the cradle to the grave, an intense hatred of every male at least of his race who is a stranger to him. The reason they themselves assign for what I must term this diabolical feeling is, that all strangers are in league to take their lives by sorcery. The result of this belief is that whenever they can, the blacks in their wild state never neglect to massacre all male strangers who fall into their power. Females are ravished and often slain afterwards if they cannot be conveniently carried off. Such being the normal state of things amongst the Australian blacks, the cause of war, of which I am now treating is generally set down to the sorcery of some hostile or little-known tribe. In such cases a party will set out after the burial, mad for bloodshed; march by night in the most stealthy manner, perhaps fifty or a hundred and fifty miles, into a country inhabited by tribes the very names of which they may be ignorant of. On discovering a party of such people they will hide themselves, and then creep up to their camp during the night, when the inmates are asleep, butcher the men and children as they lie and the women after further atrocities. If the parties discovered be too large to slaughter wholesale, one or two will be disposed of by sudden onslaught or otherwise, and the invading party will quickly retire, to be followed in due course by warriors seeking their revenge. In melees of this sort it sometimes happens that a man or woman belonging to a tribe associated with the one whose members made the onslaught is killed in the darkness and confusion unrecognised the result of which is further complications and bloodshed. Should a man under any circumstances accidently kill one of his own tribe he has to undergo certain penalties. Though the custom of carrying on war in this manner is general throughout Australia, under no circumstances, I believe, is a sentinel ever posted. I have known a whole tribe pretty near, when apprehensive, watch until perhaps eleven o'clock and then all go to sleep. Onslaughts of this kind are usually made a couple of hours before daylight. Should blacks at any time come on a man with whom they are unacquainted they invariably kill him, if possible. Strange children are killed in a like manner. A black hates intensely those of his own race with whom he is unacquainted, always excepting the females. To one of these he will become attached, if he succeeds in carrying her off, otherwise, he will kill the women out of mere savageness and hatred of their husbands. I have never heard of a tribe yielding to another, for no quarter would be given; nor of a strong tribe attempting to possess itself of the territory of a weak one, as so commonly happens in Africa. No idea of conquest exists, nor properly speaking of battle, for their fights do not lead to slaughter or spoils, and are devoid of the ordinary consequences which follow battles and victories in civilized countries. This sort of warfare is favourable to the weak. As a token of peace, the Australians hold up green boughs."

"The white race seems destined to exterminate the blacks."

"Savage and objectionable as the is, it has played an important part in the past of the Australian race, for it tended strongly to keep up communication between the tribes. The renewal of friendly relations between tribes is always marked by a corroboree. When tribes corroboree, it is a gauge of peace; and this peace is, so far as I know, ratified in no other way. A quarrel between two associated tribes is usually brought to an end by an invitation to fight which invariably ends in a corroboree. A great point in it, as a medium of reconciliation, is that it excludes for the most part explanations, questions, and reflections. Two tribes at variance meet, a fight ensues, in which generally not much harm is done and then a corroboree takes place, and every point of honour is satisfied ipso facto. On the other hand, ill feelings, and eventually war, not infrequently originate at these meetings, and almost invariably as the result of outrages on women. Though advantages of some sorts have certainly resulted from the corroboree it was undoubtedly, especially when several tribes were present, often an occasion of licentiousness and violence."

"A turbulent emptiness seized the people as they moved into a post-Christian, post-Enlightenment era. No one any longer knew the direction of the river of life. No one had anything to say."

"By the middle of the seventeenth century the Dutch had written the very first page in the history of European civilization in Australia by stating that there was no good to be done there. William Dampier popularized this idea amongst the English reading public half a century later."

"Civilization did not begin in Australia until the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The reason lies partly in the environment and way of life of the people inhabiting the continent before the coming of the European, and partly in the internal history of those Hindu, Chinese, and Muslim civilizations which colonized and traded in the archipelago of south-east Asia. The early inhabitants of the continent created cultures but not civilizations."

"The proposals for the use of a southern continent had a history almost as long though by no means so distinguished as the history of its discovery. Some saw it as land dedicated to the Holy Spirit; some saw it as a land fit only for the refuse of society, on the principle that the political body, like the human body, is often troubled with vicious humours, which one must often evacuate."

"Australians must decide for themselves whether this was the land of the dreaming, the land of the Holy Spirit, the New , the Millennial , or the new demesne for to infest."

"He always looked sartorially like a colonel of cavalry who had just left Tattersall's Sale Ring with a field-marshal after having bought a steeplechaser."

"The inhospitable environment and the past had predisposed the minds of its European inhabitants to hand over the government of their country to men who were wary of visionaries and all those who held out a promise of better things for mankind. Australians seemed chained for decades to come to the role of being a New Britannia in another world. The young Henry Lawson and all the other prophets of Utopia were doomed to a bitter disenchantment."

"But as a whole they [Kassites] were not Aryans. Though they adopted the Babylonian language and culture, the local scribes have recorded the Kassite names for god, star, heaven, wind, man, foot, etc. ; not one of these is in the least Indo-European. Moreover, the majority of the personal names of the period ... suggest rather a kinship between the Kassites and the Asianic folk to the north-west. Yet in the names of their kings occur elements recalling Indo-Iranian deities — SuriaS (Sun-god cf . Sans. Surya) IndaS (cf. Sans. Indra)y MaruttaS (cf. Sans. Mantiah, storm-gods) and -bugaS (cf. Iran, baga, god). Moreover, these Kassites introduced the use of the horse for drawing chariots into the Ancient East and its later Babylonian name sitsu seems to be derived from the Indo- Iranian form ^asm (Sans. aim). It is then highly probable that the Kassite invasion was due to the pressure of Aryan tribes on the highlands of Iran, and that its leaders were actually Aryan princes."

"By the end of the fourth millennium B.C. the material culture of Abydos, Ur, or Mohenjo-daro would stand comparison with that of Periclean Athens or of any medieval town. . . . Judging by the domestic architecture, the seal-cutting, and the grace of the pottery, the Indus civilization was ahead of the Babylonian at the beginning of the third millennium (ca. 3000 B.C.). But that was a late phase of the Indian culture; it may have enjoyed no less lead in earlier times. Were then the innovations and discoveries that characterize proto-Sumerian civilization not native developments on Babylonian soil, but the results of Indian inspiration? If so, had the Sumerians themselves come from the Indus, or at least from regions in its immediate sphere of influence?”"

"The simplest explanation of the presence of a Centum language in Central Asia would be to regard it as the last survivor of an original Asiatic Aryan stock. To identify a wandering of Aryans across Turkestan from Europe in a relatively late historical period is frankly difficult."

"(The Hittite language) cannot be accepted without qualification as Aryan. ... The deviations in the inflection are puzzlingly numerous. ... Again the number of Indo-European words and stems identified in the vocabulary is but small. Finally, the syntax remains essentially un- Aryan... Now if these documents dated from the 14th century AD, few would hesitate to declare that they were written in an Indo-European language and explain the discrepancies as due to the familiar phenomena of decay, assimilation of forms, and foreign borrowing. But the texts... are many centuries older than the oldest written memorials of Sanskrit or Greek. Yet their language diverges from the hypothetical original Aryan tongue far more than Greek or Sanskrit differs from the parent speech or from one another. It is a fact impossible to believe that a truly Indo-European language would look so odd in the 14th century before our era."

"These [Mitanni] numerals and divine and personal names are the oldest actual specimens of any Aryan speech which we possess. The forms deserve special attention. They are already quite distinctly Satem forms ; in fact, they are very nearly pure Indic. Certainly they are much more nearly akin to Sanskrit than to any of the Iranian dialects that later constituted the western wing of the Indo-Iranian family. Thus among the deities Nasatya is the Sanskrit form as opposed to the Zend Naonhaitya and all the four gods are prominent in the oldest Veda, while in the Iranian Avesta they have been degraded to secondary rank (Mithra), converted into demons (Indra) or renamed (Varuna =Ahura Mazda). The numerals are distinctively Indic not Iranian ; aika is identical with the Sanskrit eka while ' one ’ in Zend is aeva. So the s is preserved in Satta where it becomes h in Iranian (hapta) and the exact form is found, not indeed in Sanskrit, but in the Prakrits which were supposed to be post-Vedic. Even the personal names look Indic rather than Iranian. Thus Biridaswa has been plausibly compared with the Sanskrit Brhadasva (owning a great horse). If this be right the second element, asva, horse, is in contrast to the Iranian form aspa seen in Old Persian and Zend. ... Finally we know that there existed among the Mitanni at this time a class of warriors styled maryanni which has suggested comparison with the Sanskrit marya young men, heroes."

"Not only are they (the theories of racial anthropology] worthless; they are mischievous. They have induced their votaries to postulate all sorts of migrations, for which there are as yet not a particle of evidence. To but­ tress the Nordic s claim to be the ruling race p a r excellence, attempts have been made, and are still being made, to prove that the earliest dynasties of China, Sumer, and Egypt were established by invaders from Europe and even today the vision of certain prehistorians is absolutely distorted by this preconception. Such misdirected enthusiasm also injures science in another way. The apotheosis of the Nordics has been linked to the policies of imperialism and world domination: the word "Aryan” has become the watchword of dangerous factions and especially of the more brutal and blatant forms of anti-Semitism. Indeed the neglect and discredit into which the study of Indo-European philology has fallen in England are very largely attributable to a legitimate reaction against the extravagancies of Houston Stewart Chamberlain and his ilk, and the gravest objection to the word Aryan is its association with pogroms.(287)"

"Aryan people first emerge from the gloom of prehistory on the northern borders of the Fertile Crescent of the Ancient East... So it is clear enough that the dynasts installed on the Upper Euphra­ tes by 1400 B.C. were Aryans, closely akin to those we meet in the Indus Valley and later in Media and Persia... (the first Aryans were racially Nordics and) the Nordic's superiority in physique fitted them to be vehicles of a superior language. (Childe 1926: 16,19,212)"

"How precisely did the Aryans achieve all this? It was not through the superiority of their material culture. We have rejected the idea that a particular genius resided in the conformation of Nordic skulls. We do so with all the more confidence that, by the time the Aryan genius found its true expression in Greece and Rome, the pure Nordic strain had been for the most part absorbed in the Mediterranean substratum: the lasting gift bequeathed by the Aryans to the conquered peoples was neither a higher material culture nor a superior physique, but that which we mentioned in the first chapter—a more excellent language and the mentality it generated. . . . At the same time the fact that the first Aryans were Nordics was not without importance. The physical qualities of that stock did enable them by the bare fact of superior strength to conquer even more advanced peoples and so to impose their language on areas from which their bodily type has almost completely vanished. This is the truth underlying the panegyrics of the Germanists: the Nordics’ superiority in physique fitted them to be vehicles of a superior language. (pp. 211–212)"

"To whatever physical race or races they [the Aryans] belonged, they must have possessed a certain spiritual unity reflected in and conditioned by their community of speech. To their linguistic heirs, they bequeathed, if not skull types and bodily characteristics, at least something of this more subtle and more precious spiritual identity... [T]he Aryans must have been gifted with exceptional mental endowments, if not in enjoyment of a high material culture."

"No multiplication of weapons of war and battle‐scenes attests futile conflicts between city‐ states as in Babylonia nor yet the force whereby a single king, as in Egypt, achieved by conquest internal peace and warded off jealous nomads by constant preparedness … The visitor inevitably gets an impression of a democratic bourgeois economy, as in Crete, in contrast to the obviously centralized theocracies and monarchies hitherto described. (Childe, quoted in Wheeler, 1955: 191)"

"[l]anguage, albeit an abstraction, is yet a more subtle and pervasive criterion of individuality than the culture-group formed by comparing flints and potsherds or the “races” of the skull-measurer. . . . they [the Aryans] must have possessed a certain spiritual unity reflected in and conditioned by their community of speech. To their linguistic heirs they bequeathed, if not skull types and bodily characteristics, at least something of this more subtle and precious, spiritual identity. . . . The Indo-European languages and their presumed parent-speech have been throughout exceptionally delicate and flexible instruments of thought. They were almost unique, for instance, in possessing a substantive verb and at least a rudimentary machinery for building subordinate clauses that might express conceptual relations in a chain of ratiocination. It follows then that the Aryans must have been gifted with exceptional mental endowments, if not in enjoyment of a high material culture. (p. 4)"

"The archaeologist who was most influential in this century on the ques­tion of Aryan origins was V. Gordon Childe, author o f The Aryans: a Study of Indo-European Origins, published in 1926. Childe was influenced by linguistic data in his effort to establish a homeland of the ancient people whose Indo-Euro­ pean languages formed a philological bond between his British countrymen and their colonial subjects in India. He was influenced, too, by the “Four Empires” concept which lent a mystical quality to the shift of civilisation from the Near East to northwestern Europe. Gustav Klemm's idea of creative and passive races appealed to Childe, the people of the Orient being characterised as stagnant and degenerate while Europeans were held to be superior in the qualities o f energy, inventiveness and independence. In his biography of Childe Bruce Trigger (1980) observes that national character rather than history and geography were held by Childe to be the causes o f these ethnic differences, prehistoric peoples being asc­ribed the same qualities as their living descendants. Thus racial identity could be discovered from a philological approach, and these data could be employed by the archaeologists to identify the races o f the people whose sites were excavated. Even while admitting that the early developments of agriculture, metallurgy and the sciences came from the speakers of the Semitic languages o f the N ear East, Childe held that when these inventions were adopted by Indo-European popula­tions they were brought to their highest development and into the realm of true civilisation. The Indo-European speakers achieved this not because o f superior intelligence or culture, but because o f the higher qualities of their language which was the hallmark of a more competent mentality."

"It turns out that these things, too, can be done. So, in an economic emergency, few of the usual rules apply. Governments can marshal the resources and can threaten the narrow interests of private businesses. Hardcore libertarians despise these measures as rampant socialism. From their perspective, they’re right: the very existence of such programs is condemnation of the free market capitalist model that they promote. But they are best seen only as another approach to the management of the capitalist economy. The fact that governments across the are now prepared to spend trillions of dollar to save the from collapse only confirms that the world economy cannot be left safely in the hands of “the market”. And, the situation clearly confirms that when the capitalist class and governments deem it necessary to save their system, lots of measures they once denounced as “unaffordable”, not permitted by the condition of “the economy”, are actually affordable and permitted. Governments can act when required. The ideological justifications of yesterday are revealed as threadbare. But nor are government interventions of this nature geared towards the interests of the working class, only the interests of the bosses."

"In pretty much every spending package, subsidies to business, government loans and tax concessions account for two-thirds or more of the funds outlaid. Things that directly benefit workers – the big majority of the population – account for only one-third of the money."

"Every student with the misfortune to have studied economics at school or university will know that “the market” is the god before which we must all kneel. Markets bring s and producers together to ensure an equilibrium of , the textbooks tell us. We may all be individuals each pursuing our own private interests, but this selfish endeavour miraculously results in an optimum outcome for all. You don’t even have to step inside a classroom to have received this lesson. It’s rammed home in normal times in every newspaper, in every news bulletin on the TV, in every politician’s speech. Just listen to them. Governments can’t expand spending on Newstart because “the markets” won’t allow it. Governments shouldn’t ramp up public housing because that will throw property markets into a spin. Competition should be opened between universities because a market in education will sift out the bad providers from the good. The champions of the market, if challenged to explain how it is that markets consistently result in supplies of goods lurching from shortages to gluts, point to the economic dysfunction of the old Soviet Union as proof that if “planning” replaces the market, a much bigger disaster ensues. It doesn’t take an Einstein to see what rubbish this is. The last thing any capitalist wants is “free competition”, because that might squeeze their profits. Just look at how the supermarkets have destroyed small shops or how any new industry that emerges is soon dominated by three or four companies globally."

"One of the most prevalent ideological mantras of Western capitalism is that the market should rule. But as the latest health and economic crises demonstrate, capitalists soon forget their worship of the market when times get tough. They scream for government money, and plenty of it. It turns out that “the market” is fine when it comes to whipping workers to accept lower wages, but when it comes to lower profits, the market can go hang."

"is urging the federal government to provide wage subsidies to workers, equivalent in value to Newstart to all businesses experiencing a sharp downturn. It is also asking the government to provide concessional loans of up to half a million dollars, with 80 percent of the debt guaranteed by government, as well as wage subsidies to cover sick leave entitlements. Nothing but corporate welfare of a kind that they have long decried when applied to workers themselves. In the short term, working class households will get some benefits from this cash splash. In Australia welfare beneficiaries will be getting $750 in their bank accounts. in In the United States it is likely that Americans will receiving close to $1,000. But this is just short term relief to get the economy moving. The long term benefits will go to the capitalist class in the form of and other financial concessions. The current crisis demonstrates not only that all the ideological nonsense about the virtues of the free market is quickly thrown overboard when capitalist interests are threatened, but also that the idea that governments are essentially powerless in the face of the markets is rubbish. Governments are not helpless victims who cannot do anything in the face of “economic reality”. In the normal course of events, when we demand things like better welfare, health care or education, governments tell us that it isn’t possible."

"It’s not that governments have suddenly discovered a big pot of gold in the basement of the . They say that they are taking these measures to both protect and to save the economy. But it’s obvious which takes priority. The new measures constitute the largest bailout bonanza in world history, carried out through state-administered transfers of public wealth and current and future debt to billionaires and big business: socialisation of losses, privatisation of profits. The outcome will be to further transfer, consolidate and concentrate wealth, just as has occurred since the GFC. While there is discussion about small handouts, nothing serious is being proposed to halt the mass layoffs now gathering steam."

"Most of the time we’re told that “the economy” can’t afford a decent for workers – higher minimum wages, liveable Newstart allowances, a massively expanded program to get people out of the private rental market, free university education. Budgets have to balance. Businesses have to be competitive. Taxes have to be kept low. And now, all of a sudden, we’re finding that the economy can, apparently, afford things that we have long demanded. Governments around the world are now laying out money on things that just weeks ago they would have attacked as unaffordable."

"By far the most famous outsider physicist today is a wealthy man. Stephen Wolfram is his name, and aside from being one of the youngest people to win a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, he was a mathematical prodigy who graduated with a Ph.D. from Caltech at the age of twenty. After he won the MacArthur, Wolfram left academia to forge a path of his own and made a fortune developing a software package used by scientists all over the world. Wolfram's wealth enabled him to pursue work on his own "Theory of Everything" unencumbered by the demands of academic tenure, and in 2002 he presented his ideas in a twelve-hundred-page, self-published book called A New Kind of Science ... Encompassed in Wolfram's theory was a new explanation for space and time, a new explanation for the laws of thermodynamics, a new account of the creation of the universe, an explanation for the origin of life, and his own account of free will."

"In many respects the mythico-religious dimension of Pythagoras' life bears an uncanny resemblance to the life of Christ depicted in the New Testament. Both men are said to have been the offspring of a god and a virgin woman. In both cases their fathers received messages that a special child was to have been born to their wives—Joseph was told by an angel in a dream; Pythagoras' father, Mnesarchus, received the glad tidings from the Delphic oracle. Both spent a period of isolation on holy mountain, and both were said to have ascended bodily into the heavens upon their deaths. Furthermore, both spread their teachings in the form of parables, called akousmata by the Pythagoreans, and a number of parables from the New Testament are known to be versions of earlier Pythagorean akousmata."

"The association between religion and mathematically based science has its origins in the mists of history. ...the very dawn of Western culture in sixth-century B.C. Greece. ...[W]hen the Greeks were turning away from the mythological picture immortalized by Homer and Hesiod, the Ionian philosopher Pythagoras of Samos pioneered a worldview in which mathematics was seen as the key to reality. In place of the mythological gods, Pythagoras painted a picture in which the universe was conceived as a great musical instrument resonating with divine mathematical harmonies. ...[inspiring] mystics, theologians, and physicists ever since. ...But to Pythagoras and his followers, mathematics was the key not simply to the physical world, but more importantly to the spiritual world—for they believed that numbers were literally gods. By contemplating numbers and their relationships, the Pythagoreans sought union with the "divine." For them, mathematics was first and foremost a religious activity."

"... Faraday's momentous discoveries did not immediately launch an electric power industry. For one thing, nobody yet imagined it would be possible to transmit this power over long distances. That realization did not come until the end the century, when physicists had acquired a formal mathematical understanding of how magnetism and electricity work together."

"Having been banished from his home and friends, Dante created in The Divine Comedy a new life for himself. Denied a voice in Florence, he recreated himself in fiction and gave this poetic "self" a voice that would ring through the ages. What we have in the poem is, in effect, a "virtual Dante." In fact we know far more about this virtual Dante (what literary critics call "Dante-pilgrim") than we know about the real historical person ("Dante-poet"). It is this virtual self who speaks to us across the centuries and is our guide through the landscape of medieval soul-space."