Shakespeares New Year and Christmas Quotes

Shakespeare's New Year and Christmas Quotes New Year Celebrations hardly feature in Shakespeare’s works and he only mentions Christmas three times. Explaining the lack of New Year quotes is easy enough, but why did Shakespeare dodge Christmas in his writing? Shakespeare New Year Quotes New Year barely features in Shakespeare’s plays simply because it wasn’t until 1752 that the Gregorian calendar was adopted in Britain. In Elizabethan England, the year changed after Lady Day on 25 March. For Shakespeare, the New Year celebrations of the modern world would have seemed bizarre because in his own time New Year’s Day was nothing more than the eighth day of Christmas. However, it was still customary in the court of Elizabeth I to exchange gifts at New Year, as this quote from Merry Wives of Windsor demonstrates (but note the distinct lack of celebratory tone): Have I lived to be carried in a basket, like abarrow of butcher’s offal, and to be thrown in theThames? Well, if I be served such another trick,I’ll have my brains ta’en out and buttered, and givethem to a dog for a new-year’s gift†¦Merry Wives of Windsor (Act 3, Scene 5) Shakespeare Christmas Quotes So that explains the lack of New Year celebration; but why are there so few Shakespeare Christmas quotes? Perhaps he was â€Å"a bit of a Scrooge!† Joking aside, the â€Å"Scrooge† factor is actually very important. In Shakespeare’s time, Christmas simply wasn’t celebrated in the same way as it is today. It was 200 years after the death of Shakespeare that Christmas was popularized in England, thanks to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert importing many of the German Christmas traditions. Our modern conception of Christmas is immortalized in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, from the same period. So, in many ways,  Shakespeare was â€Å"a bit of a Scrooge!† Here are the three times Shakespeare did mention Christmas in his plays: At Christmas I no more desire a roseThan wish a snow in May’s new-fangled mirth;Love’s Labours Lost (Act 1, Scene 1) I see the trick on’t: here was a consent,Knowing aforehand of our merriment,To dash it like a Christmas comedy:Some carry-tale, some please-man, some slight zany,Love’s Labours Lost (Act Five, Scene 2) SLY. Marry, I will; let them play it. Is not a comonty a Christmas gambold or a tumbling-trick?PAGE. No, my good lord, it is more pleasing stuff.The Taming of the Shrew (Intro, scene 2) Did you notice how downbeat these Shakespeare Christmas quotes are? That’s because, in Elizabethan England, Easter was the main Christian festival. Christmas was a less-important 12-day festival known for pageants put on at the Royal Court and by churches for townspeople. In the quotes above, Shakespeare does not hide his dislike of pageant acting: In Love’s Labours Lost, Berowne guesses that a wooing strategy has failed and that the ladies are now ridiculing the men. The ridicule is compared to a Christmas play: â€Å"dash it like a Christmas comedy.†In The Taming of the Shrew, Sly disregards the action as a Christmas â€Å"gambold†, a word meaning a frolic or light entertainment. Page suggests that it will be better than that awful acting you see at Christmas. Overlooking New Year and Christmas The lack of New Year and Christmas celebration may seem strange to the modern reader, and one must look at the calendar and religious conventions of Elizabethan England to contextualize this absence. None of Shakespeare’s plays are set at Christmas, not even Twelfth Night, which is commonly considered to be a Christmas play. It is widely believed that the play’s title was written for a performance on the twelfth day of Christmas at the royal court. But a reference in the title to the timing of the performance is where the Christmas references of this play end. It actually has nothing to do with Christmas.

Maya Bloodletting Rituals - To Speak to the Gods

Maya Bloodletting Rituals - To Speak to the Gods Bloodletting- cutting part of the body to release blood- is an ancient ritual used by many Mesoamerican societies. For the ancient Maya, bloodletting rituals (called chahb in surviving hieroglyphs) were a way that Maya nobles communicated with their gods and royal ancestors. The word chahb means penance in the Mayan Cholan language, and may be related to the Yukatekan word chab, meaning dripper/dropper. The blood-letting practice usually involved only the highest nobles who would perforate their own body parts, mainly, but not only, their tongues, lips, and genitals. Both men and women practiced these types of sacrifices. Ritual bloodletting, along with fasting, tobacco smoking, and ritual enemas, was pursued by the royal Maya in order to provoke a trance-like state (or altered state of consciousness) and thereby achieve supernatural visions and communicate with dynastic ancestors or underworld gods. The trances were to petition their ancestors and the gods for rain, good harvests, and success in warfare, among other needs and desires. Bloodletting Occasions and Locations Bloodletting rituals were usually performed on significant dates and at scheduled state events through the Maya ritual calendar, especially at the beginning or end of a calendar cycle; when a king ascended to the throne; and at building dedications. Other important life stages of kings and queens such as births, deaths, marriages, and the beginnings and ends of war were also accompanied by bloodletting. Bloodletting rituals were usually carried out in private, within secluded temple rooms on the top of pyramids, but public ceremonies celebrating the bloodletting rituals were organized during these events and masses of people attended them, crowding into the plaza at the base of the main pyramid of the Maya towns. These public displays were used by the rulers to demonstrate their ability to communicate with the gods in order to obtain advice on how to balance the world of the living and to ensure the natural cycles of the seasons and stars. A statistical study by U.S. archaeologist Jessica Munson and colleagues (2014) found that most references to bloodletting on Maya monuments and in other contexts are from a handful of sites along the Usumacinta River in Guatemala and in the southeastern Maya lowlands. Most of the known chahb glyphs are from inscriptions that refer to antagonistic statements about warfare and conflict. Bloodletting Tools Stone Seat with Polychrome Reliefs Depicting Self-Sacrifice (Zacatapalloli), House of Eagles, Templo Mayor, Mexico City, ca. 1500. De Agostini / G. Dagli Orti / Getty Images Piercing body parts during bloodletting rituals involved the use of sharp objects such as obsidian blades, stingray spines, carved bones, perforators, and knotted ropes. Equipment also included bark paper to collect some of the blood, and copal incense to burn the stained paper and provoke smoke and pungent odors. Blood was also collected in receptacles made out of ceramic pottery or basketry. Cloth bundles are illustrated on some of the murals, thought to have been used to carry around all the equipment. Stingray spines were definitely a primary tool used in Maya bloodletting, despite, or perhaps because of, their dangers. Uncleaned stingray spines contain venom and their use to pierce body parts would have caused a great deal of pain, and perhaps include deleterious effects ranging from secondary infection to necrosis and death. The Maya, who regularly fished for stingrays, would have known all about the dangers of stingray venom. Canadian archaeologist Haines and colleagues (2008) suggest that it is likely that the Maya either used stingray spines that had been carefully cleaned and dried; or reserved them for special acts of piety or in rituals where references to the necessity of risking death was an important factor. Bloodletting Imagery Late Classic Limestone Lintel at Maya Yaxchilan. Arild Finne Nybà ¸ Evidence for bloodletting rituals comes primarily from scenes depicting royal figures on carved monuments and painted pots. Stone sculptures and paintings from Maya sites such as Palenque, Yaxchilan, and Uaxactun, among others, offer dramatic examples of these practices. The Maya site of Yaxchilan in Chiapas state in Mexico  offers a particularly rich gallery of images about bloodletting rituals. In a series of carvings on three door-lintels from this site, a royal woman, Lady Xook, is portrayed performing bloodletting, piercing her tongue with a knotted rope, and provoking a serpent vision during the throne accession ceremony of her husband. Obsidian blades are often found in ceremonial or ritual contexts such as caches, burials, and caves, and the presumption has been that they were bloodletting tools. U.S. archaeologist W. James Stemp and colleagues examined blades from Actun Uayazba Kab (Handprint Cave) in Belize and compared the microscopic damage to the edges (called use wear) on the archaeological blades to those produced during experimental archaeology. They suggest that they were indeed bloodletters.   Sources DePalma, Ralph G., Virginia W. Hayes, and Leo R. Zacharski. Bloodletting: Past and Present. Journal of the American College of Surgeons 205.1 (2007): 132-44. Print.Haines, Helen R., Philip W. Willink, and David Maxwell. Stingray Spine Use and Maya Bloodletting Rituals: A Cautionary Tale. Latin American Antiquity 19.1 (2008): 83-98. Print.Munson, Jessica, et al. Classic Maya Bloodletting and the Cultural Evolution of Religious Rituals: Quantifying Patterns of Variation in Hieroglyphic Texts. PLoS ONE 9.9 (2014): e107982. Print.Stemp, W. James, et al. An Ancient Maya Ritual Cache at Pooks Hill, Belize: Technological and Functional Analyses of the Obsidian Blades. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 18 (2018): 889-901. Print.Stemp, W. James, Meaghan Peuramaki-Brown, and Jaime J. Awe. Ritual Economy and Ancient Maya Bloodletting: Obsidian Blades from Actun Uayazba Kab (Handprint Cave), Belize. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology  (2018). Print.