Category: General

Site cleaning:

I am a lazy bastard.
Added some links to pages which are on my site but not linked to from anywhere, moved my sidebar to a php include so I can use it from the weblog, and moved some archived pages (from back when I was using blogger) to the correct place, instead of the ugly broken template pages I had there before.

Blogger lets you re-publish the archives with any template you want, so last time I visited their site, I changed the template and re-published. But I hadn’t moved them into the proper place (where they can be visited from this drop-down on the right) until now. Did that with a command-line Perl script. I am so a geek…

This entry makes no sense to anyone, does it? But I’m publishing it just to see the changes to the template in action.

A cool Siberian Shaman’s costume. Also, interesting stuff in the linked article:

In order to operate on this higher plane, the shaman must fully identify with the powers which he hopes to wield. Masks are one of the empowering mediums by which the shaman ‘becomes’ the spirit which he invites to possess him. Such possession is described as an ecstatic experience. Other tools which help bring about this transformation include ritual costume, weapons, drums, and perhaps psychotropic substances…

Looking up Mircea Eliade, the Rumanian scholar who wrote much about Shamanism, I found both a literary biography, a philosophical essay and an online version of a reference work he compiled about non-western religions, From Primitives to Zen.