Frithjof Schuon (, , ; 18 June 1907 – 5 May 1998) was a Swiss metaphysician of German descent, belonging to the Perennialist or Traditionalist School of thought. He was the author of more than twenty works in French on metaphysics, spirituality, religion, anthropology and art, which have been translated into English and many other languages. He was also a painter and a poet.

With René Guénon and Ananda Coomaraswamy, Schuon is recognized as one of the major 20th-century representatives of the philosophia perennis. Like them, he affirmed the reality of an absolute Principle – God – from which the universe emanates, and maintained that all divine revelations, despite their differences, possess a common essence: one and the same Truth. He also shared with them the certitude that man is potentially capable of supra-rational knowledge, and undertook a sustained critique of the modern mentality severed, according to him, from its traditional roots. Following Plato, Plotinus, Adi Shankara, Meister Eckhart, Ibn Arabī and other metaphysicians, Schuon sought to affirm the metaphysical unity between the Principle and its manifestation.

Initiated by Sheikh Ahmad al-Alawī into the Sufi Shādhilī order, he founded the Tarīqa Maryamiyya. His writings strongly emphasize the universality of metaphysical doctrine, along with the necessity of practising a religion; he also insists on the importance of the virtues and of beauty.

Schuon cultivated close relationships with a large number of personages of diverse religious and spiritual horizons. He had a particular interest in the traditions of the North American Plains Indians, maintaining firm friendships with a number of their leaders and being adopted into both a Lakota Sioux tribe and the Crow tribe. Having spent a large part of his life in France and Switzerland, at the age of 73 he emigrated to the United States.

Life and work

Basel, Switzerland (1907–1920)
Frithjof Schuon was born in Basel, in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, on 18 June 1907. He was the younger of the two sons of Paul Schuon, who was of German origin, and Margarete Boehler, a French-speaking Alsatian. His father, an amiable and distinguished man, was a concert violinist, and the household was one in which not only music but literary and spiritual culture were present. The Schuons, though Catholics, enrolled their sons in the Lutheran catechism, the predominant denomination in Basel.

At primary school, Schuon met the future metaphysician and art specialist Titus Burckhardt, who remained a lifelong friend. From the age of ten, his search for truth led him to read not only the Bible but also the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gītā and the Quran, as well as Plato, Emerson, Goethe and Schiller. Schuon would later say that in his early youth four things had always moved him most profoundly: "the holy, the great, the beautiful, the childlike".

France (1920–1940)
In 1920, Schuon's father died and his mother decided to return with her young sons to her family in nearby Mulhouse, France, where Schuon became a French citizen, consequent upon the Treaty of Versailles. One year later, when he was 14, he was baptized as a Catholic. In 1923 his brother entered a Trappist monastery, and Schuon left school in order to provide for the family, finding work as a textile designer.

He then immersed himself in the world of the Bhagavad-Gītā and the Vedānta; this call of Hinduism sustained him for ten years, though he was perfectly aware that he could not become Hindu himself. In 1924, while still living in Mulhouse, he discovered the works of the French philosopher René Guénon, which served to confirm his intellectual intuitions and provided support for the metaphysical principles he had begun to discover. Schuon would later say of Guénon that he was "the profound and powerful theoretician of all that he loved".

In 1930, after 18 months in Besançon on military service in the French army, Schuon settled in Paris. There he resumed his profession as a textile designer, and began to study Arabic in the local mosque school. Living in Paris also gave him the opportunity to be exposed to various forms of traditional art to a much greater degree than before, especially the arts of Asia with which he had had a deep affinity since his youth.

At the end of 1932 he completed his first book, Leitgedanken zur Urbesinnung, which would be published in 1935 and later translated into English under the title Primordial Meditation: Contemplating the Real. His desire to leave the West, whose modern values were so contrary to his nature, combined with his growing interest in Islam, prompted him to go to Marseilles, the great port of departure for the East. There he made the acquaintance of two key personages, both of them disciples of Sheikh Ahmad al-Alawī, a Sufi in Mostaganem, Algeria. Schuon saw the sign of his destiny in these encounters, and embarked for Algeria. In Mostaganem he entered Islam, and spent nearly four months in the Sheikh's zāwiya. The Sheikh gave him initiation and named him `Īsā Nūr ad-Dīn. However, Schuon was soon forced to return to Europe under pressure from the French colonial authorities.

Schuon did not consider his affiliation to Islam as a conversion, since he did not disavow Christianity; in each revelation he saw the expression of one and the same truth, in different forms. But for him, in the Guenonian perspective that he held at the time, Western Christianity no longer seemed to offer the possibility of following a "path of knowledge" under the guidance of a spiritual master, whereas such a path was still open within the framework of Sufism, Islamic esoterism.

Schuon reported that one night in July 1934, while immersed in reading the Bhagavad-Gītā, he experienced an extraordinary spiritual event. He said that the divine Name Allāh took possession of his being, and that for three days he could do nothing but invoke it ceaselessly. Shortly afterwards, he learned that his Sheikh had died on the same day.

In 1935 he returned to the zāwiya of Mostaganem, where Sheikh Adda ben Tounes, Sheikh al-Alawī's successor, conferred on him the function of muqaddam, thus authorizing him to initiate aspirants into the Alawī brotherhood. Returning to Europe, Schuon founded a zāwiya in Basel, another in Lausanne and a third in Amiens. He resumed his profession as a textile designer in Alsace for the next four years.

One night towards the end of 1936, after a spiritual experience, Schuon sensed, without a shadow of a doubt, that he had been invested with the function of spiritual master, of sheikh. This was confirmed, he later related, by visionary dreams that several of his disciples reported having had the same night. The differences of perspective between Schuon and the Mostaganem zāwiya gradually led to Schuon's assuming independence, supported by Guénon.

In 1938, Schuon traveled to Egypt, where he met Guénon, with whom he had been in correspondence for 7 years. In 1939, he embarked for India with two disciples, making a long stopover in Cairo, where he saw Guénon again. Shortly after his arrival in Bombay, World War II broke out, forcing him to return to Europe. Serving in the French army, he was interned by the Nazis, who were planning to incorporate all soldiers of Alsatian origin into the German army to fight on the Russian front. Schuon escaped to Switzerland, which was to be his home for forty years.

Lausanne, Switzerland (1941–1980)
He settled in Lausanne, where he continued contributing to the Guénonian journal Études Traditionnelles, as he had done since 1933. In 1947, after reading Black Elk Speaks by John G. Neihardt, Schuon, who had always been deeply interested in the North American Indians, was convinced that Black Elk knew much more about Sioux tradition than was contained in the book. He asked his American friends to seek out the old chief. Following this initiative, the ethnologist Joseph E. Brown collected from Black Elk the description of the seven Sioux rites which would form the content of The Sacred Pipe.

In 1948 Schuon published his first book in French, De l'Unité transcendante des religions. Of this book, T. S. Eliot wrote: "I have met with no more impressive work in the comparative study of Oriental and Occidental religion." All his subsequent works – more than twenty – would be written in French, apart from a major reworking in German of the text of The Transcendent Unity of Religions (Von der Inneren Einheit der Religionen), published in 1982.

In 1949 Schuon married Catherine Feer, a German Swiss with a French education who, besides being deeply interested in religion and metaphysics, was also a gifted painter. He received Swiss citizenship shortly after his marriage. While always continuing to write, Schuon and his wife travelled widely. Between 1950 and 1975, the couple visited Morocco about ten times, as well as numerous European countries, including Greece and Turkey, where they visited the house near Ephesus presumed to be the last home of the Virgin Mary.

In the winter of 1953, Schuon and his wife travelled to Paris to attend performances organized by a group of Crow dancers. They formed a friendship with Thomas Yellowtail, the future medicine man and Sun Dance Chief. Five years later, the Schuons visited the Brussels World's Fair, where 60 Sioux were giving performances on the theme of the Wild West. New friendships were made on this occasion also. Thus it was that in 1959 and again in 1963, at the invitation of their Indian friends, the Schuons journeyed to the American West, where they visited various Plains tribes and had the opportunity to witness many aspects of their sacred traditions. During the first of these visits, Schuon and his wife were adopted into the Sioux family of Chief James Red Cloud, grandson of Chief Red Cloud, and a few weeks later, at an Indian festival in Sheridan, Wyoming, they were officially received into the Sioux tribe. Schuon's writings on the central rites of Native American religion and his paintings of their way of life attest to his particular affinity with their spiritual universe.

The 1970s saw the publication of three important works composed of articles previously published in the French journal Études Traditionnelles. These works have been translated under the titles:
Logic and Transcendence, in which the author examines modern philosophy, the proofs of God, universal Substance, emanationism and creationism, intellect and sentiment, the qualifications for the spiritual path, the love of God, spiritual realization, the spiritual master, beauty, intelligence, certitude;
Form and Substance in the Religions: Truth and divine Presence, the religions, Ātmā and Māyā, the degrees of reality, elucidations concerning the Koran and the Prophet, the Virgin Mary, the virtues and women in Buddhism, the two natures of Christ, evil and the divine Will, sacred texts, spiritual dialectic, paradise and hell;
Esoterism as Principle and as Way: exoterism and esoterism, the universal veil, the hypostatic dimensions of the Principle, the Tree of Life, human nature, the virtues, sentiment, sincerity, sexuality, trials, spiritual realization, beauty, art, the importance of forms, relics, celestial apparitions, the Sun Dance, spiritual inwardness in Sufism.

Throughout his life, Schuon had great respect for and devotion to the Virgin Mary, and expressed this in his writings. As a result, his teachings and paintings are imbued with a particular Marian presence. His reverence for the Virgin Mary has been studied in detail by American professor James Cutsinger, who relates the two episodes in 1965 when Schuon experienced an especial Marian grace. Hence the name Maryamiyya ("Marian" in Arabic) of the Sufi tarīqa he founded as a branch of the Alawiyyah-Darqawiyyah-Shadhiliyyah order.

United States (1980–1998)
In 1980, Schuon and his wife emigrated to the United States, settling in Bloomington, Indiana, where there was already a large community of disciples. The first years in Bloomington saw the publication of a number of important works including From the Divine to the Human, To Have a Center, Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism, and Roots of the Human Condition.

According to Patrick Laude, Schuon became known, through his many books, articles and letters, "as the principal spokesman of the intellectual current sometimes referred to in English speaking countries as perennialism", or the Traditionalist School. During his years in Lausanne and Bloomington he regularly received visits from "practitioners and representatives of diverse religions".

Thomas Yellowtail remained Schuon's intimate friend until his death in 1993, visiting him every year and adopting him into the Crow tribe in 1984. During these sojourns, Schuon and some of his followers organized what they called "Indian Days", in which Native American dances were performed, leading some to accuse him of practising ritual nudity. These gatherings were understood by disciples as a sharing in Schuon's personal insights and realization, not as part of the initiatic method he transmitted, centered on Islamic prayer and the dhikr.

In 1991, one of Schuon's followers accused him of misconduct during collective gatherings. A preliminary investigation was begun, but the chief prosecutor concluded that there was no proof, noting that the plaintiff was of extremely dubious character and had been previously condemned for making false statements in another similar affair in California. The prosecutor declared that there were no grounds for prosecution, and the local press made amends. Some articles and books, including Mark Sedgwick's Against the Modern World, discuss this event and the related "primordial" practices of the Bloomington community in Midwestern suburban America in the late twentieth century.

Schuon continued to receive visitors and maintain a correspondence with followers, scholars and readers. At the very end of his life, he wrote a major collection of over three thousand lyrical "teaching-poems" (Sinngedichte or Lehrgedichte), which combine metaphysics and spiritual counsel, as well as reminiscences of his life. Like the poems of his youth, these were written in his native German, following a series in Arabic and another in English. They are a poetic synthesis of his philosophical and spiritual message, which is articulated around four key elements: "truth, prayer, virtue and beauty". Less than two months before his death on May 5, 1998 at the age of 90, Frithjof Schuon wrote his last poem:Ich wollte dieses Buch schon lang beschließen –
Ich konnte nicht; ich musste weiter dichten.
Doch diesmal legt sich meine Feder nieder,
Denn es gibt andres Sinnen, andre Pflichten;
Wie dem auch sei, was wir auch mögen tun:
Lasst uns dem Ruf des Höchsten Folge leisten –
Lasst uns in Gottes tiefem Frieden ruhn.
                                                   Das Weltrad VII, CXXX
I have for long wished to end this book —
I could not do so; I had to write more poems.
But this time my pen lies down of itself,
For there are other preoccupations, other duties;
Be that as it may, whatever we may wish to do:
Let us follow the call of the Most High —
Let us repose in God's deep Peace.
                                                World Wheel VII, CXXX

Views based on his written works
For Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Schuon is at once "metaphysician, theologian, traditional philosopher and logician", versed in "comparative religion", in "traditional art and civilization", as well as in "the science of man and society"; he is also known as "a critic of the modern world in not only its practical but also its philosophical and scientific aspects".
In his writings, Schuon's principal themes are "essential and hence universal metaphysics with its cosmological and anthropological ramifications, spirituality in the broadest sense, intrinsic morals and aesthetics, traditional principles and phenomena", religions and their esotericisms, sacred art.

Doctrinal foundation

Perennialism
The traditionalist or perennialist spiritual perspective was initially enunciated in the 1920s by René Guénon and in the 1930s by Frithjof Schuon. The metaphysicians and art specialists Ananda Coomaraswamy and Titus Burckhardt also became prominent advocates of this intellectual current. According to the perennialist writer William Stoddart, "the central idea of the perennial philosophy is that Divine Truth is one, timeless and universal, and that the different religions are but different languages expressing that one Truth" – hence the title given by Schuon to his first book in French, De l'unité transcendante des religions. For Patrick Laude, a perennialist author is "one who claims the universality and primordiality of fundamental metaphysical principles and the perennity of the wisdom that actualizes these principles in man, as expressed in all great revelations and major teachings of sages and saints throughout the ages".

According to Harry Oldmeadow, this primordial truth or wisdom has "carried many names: Philosophia Perennis, Lex Aeterna, Hagia Sophia, Dīn al-Haqq, Akālika Dhamma, Sanātana Dharma", etc. Schuon points out that primordial wisdom is expressed in the work of Adi Shankara, Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus and several other representatives of quintessential esoterism.

In Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism, Schuon comments on the three notions of perennial philosophy (philosophia), perennial wisdom (sophia) and perennial religion (religio) to show both their concordance and their particularities: The term philosophia perennis, which appeared as early as the Renaissance and was used extensively by neo-scholasticism, designates the science of the fundamental and universal ontological principles; a science that is immutable like these principles themselves, and primordial by the very fact of its universality and infallibility. We would readily use the term sophia perennis to indicate that this is not a matter of "philosophy" in the standard and approximative meaning of the word – suggesting mere mental constructions springing from ignorance, doubt, and conjectures, indeed from the taste for novelty and originality – or we could also use the term religio perennis when referring to the operative side of this wisdom, thus its mystical or initiatic aspect.

For Laude, it is not the notion of the "transcendental unity of religions" that primarily characterizes Schuon's teaching, but rather "a reformulation of the sophia perennis, or religio perennis, conceived as the conjunction of a metaphysical doctrine and a means of spiritual realization".

Metaphysics
Schuon characterizes "pure" metaphysics as 1) "essential", i.e. "independent of all religious formulation"; 2) "primordial", namely "the truth that existed before all dogmatic formalism"; and 3) "universal", in that it "encompasses all intrinsically orthodox symbolism" and "can therefore be combined with any religious language". For him, pure metaphysics can be summarized by the following vedantic statement:  (Brahman is real, the world is illusory, the individual soul is not different from Brahman).

The metaphysics expounded by Schuon is based on the doctrine of what the Hindu Advaita Vedānta refers to as Ātmā and Māyā. Ātmā (Ātman) is the Self, both transcendent and immanent; in correlation with Māyā, Ātmā designates the Real, the Absolute, the Principle, Beyond Being, Brahma (Brahman); and Māyā the illusory, the relative, manifestation. Schuon develops this metaphysical principle, notably in Form and Substance in the Religions, basing himself on the Sufi doctrine of the degrees of reality, known as "The Five Divine Presences":

 Degrees 1 and 2, taken together, correspond to God, the Principle, the Absolute:

1. Ātmā: Beyond-Being, Impersonal Divinity, Supreme Principle, Absolute Reality, Essence, nirguna Brahman.

 Degrees 2 to 5 correspond to Māyā:

2. Māyā in divinis (the "relative Absolute", "Ātmā as Māyā"): Being, Personal God, creating Principle, uncreated Spirit, saguna Brahman, Īshvara.

 Degrees 3 to 5 correspond to manifestation, the cosmos, creation:

3. Supra-formal manifestation: created Spirit (Intellect, Logos, Buddhi), paradise, angels.

 Degrees 4 and 5 correspond to formal manifestation:

4. Subtle or animic manifestation: the world of the soul and the "spirits" (jinns, sylphs, salamanders, gnomes, etc.).

5. Gross or material manifestation: the visible world.

In the human being (the microcosm) the five degrees, ordered inversely, correspond to the body and the sensorial, mortal soul (5); the supra-sensorial, immortal soul (4); the created spirit (or intellect) (3); the uncreated spirit (or intellect) (2); the absolute and infinite Self (1). The presence of the three superior degrees in man "made in the image of God" confers upon him the possibility of a knowledge that transcends the limitations of subjectivity, thus in principle allowing him to "see things as they are", that is, objectively: this is gnosis.

As did Plato in ancient Greece, Adi Shankara in Hinduism, Meister Eckhardt and St Gregory Palamas in Christianity and Ibn Arabī in Islam – to name some examples –, Schuon attests that the essential discernment in metaphysics is that between the Real and the non-real (the illusory), Ātmā and Māyā. He emphasizes that the Real, or Beyond Being, which is absolute and infinite, is the essence of all good (the Sovereign Good). As St Augustine reminds us, it is in the nature of the Good (Agathôn) to radiate, hence the projection of Māyā, which is simultaneously divine (Īshvara), celestial (Buddhi and Svarga) and "earthly", the latter including the domain of transmigration (samsâra). Every good offered by the world comes from the radiation of the Sovereign Good, every evil comes from Its remoteness. Mâyâ both veils and reveals God, the Absolute.

Quintessential esoterism
Most religions comprise an exoteric and an esoteric dimension. This religious esoterism is qualified as "relative" by Schuon, to differentiate it from "absolute" or "quintessential" esoterism, which is neither limited nor totally expressed by a particular religious form.

For Schuon, integral metaphysics – which starts from the distinction between Ātmā and Māyā (the Absolute and the relative) – is the very substance of pure esoterism, To the metaphysical doctrine must be joined a method of realization because, as Patrick Laude points out :
The esoteric perspective is not reducible to a conceptual understanding, since it is essentially an intellective and "existential" conformity to Reality or a spiritual and moral assimilation of the nature of things. As Frithjof Schuon has often reminded us, to know is to be. Lived esoterism is, at its apex, the wisdom in which being and knowing coincide.
There is therefore continuity between exoterism and esoterism when the latter appears as the inner dimension of the former and consequently adopts its "language", and there is discontinuity when esoterism transcends all religion: this is the religio perennis, the timeless, essential, primordial and universal esoterism. It constitutes "the transcendent unity of religions" and is based, methodically, on one of the revelations while having as its object the one Truth common to all of them.

Sufism
For Schuon, Sufism (tasawwuf, in Arabic) – "the marrow of Islam" – is essentially "sincerity of faith". "On the doctrinal level" this sincerity arises from an "intellectual vision" which draws "from the idea of Unity its most rigorous consequences; its ultimate conclusion is not only the idea of the nothingness of the world but also that of supreme Identity". Patrick Laude underlines the distinction made by Schuon between a "quintessential", purely esoteric, Sufism and a "moderate" Sufism which, though tending towards esoterism, remains dependent on the exoteric mentality, whence a propensity to the "intensification of pious acts, emotional exteriorization, obediential zeal, and an inordinate emphasis on formal scruples and the perspective of fear". For Laude, "the most accurate and succinct definition" of quintessential Sufism – as of every other spirituality in its essential dimension – is "Schuon's fundamental doctrinal dyad, entailing discernment between the Absolute and the relative, along with the corresponding method of exclusive concentration on the Absolute".

Schuon considers that "the whole of Sufism [...] [can be] summed up in these four words: Haqq, Qalb, Dhikr, Faqr : "Truth", "Heart", "Remembrance", "Poverty".

 al-haqq (truth, reality) "coincides with the Shahādah, the twofold testimony ("lā ilāha illā Llāh, Muhammadun rasūlu Llāh: there is no god but God, Muhammad is the envoy of God"), which enounces "metaphysical, cosmological, mystical and eschatological Truth". Summarizing Schuon, Laude notes that the first testimony means theologically or exoterically that there is only one God, and metaphysically, that He is the only reality. This latter meaning – that of the Sufis – signifies for Schuon not only "that God alone is real, in contrast to the world, which, being contingent, is illusory", but also "that no existence can be situated outside God, that everything that exists 'is not other than He', otherwise the world would not exist". Laude notes that this second meaning also emerges from the second testimony, which esoterically enounces the unitive relationship between "the conditioned and the Unconditioned, the relative and the Absolute".
 al-qalb (the heart) "is the existential and intellectual centre" of the human being, "the seat of the divine Presence and thus also of metaphysical certitude", and also, more commonly, the seat of faith. "It represents the Intellect with respect to both knowledge and love" and "thanks to the miracle of immanence, it opens onto the divine Self and onto the infinitude, both extinctive and unitive, of the knowable, hence of the Real". Thus truth (al-haqq) "must not be accepted with the mind alone but with the Heart, thus with all that we are".
 al-dhikr (remembrance, mention, invocation) is for Schuon "the actualization of faith or gnosis by means of the sacramental word", whose seat is the heart. Although the word dhikr encompasses all practices directed towards God, Harry Oldmeadow emphasizes that Schuon, when he speaks of Sufism, always uses this term in its highest sense: the invocation of the name "Allāh". According to Laude, this rite – subject to authorization –, is considered by Schuon, in accordance with the Sufi tradition, to be "the central practice of tasawwuf".  To the question "why invoke?", Schuon answers: "the most profound reason would no doubt be 'because I exist', for Existence is in a certain way the Word of God, by which He names Himself. God pronounces His Name in order to manifest Himself – to 'create' – in the direction of 'nothingness', and the relative being pronounces this Name in order to 'be', that is to say, to 'become once again what he is' in the direction of Reality". "The supreme Name", whatever the spiritual path practised, "is both metaphysical Truth and saving Presence".
 al-faqr (spiritual poverty) is "simplicity and purity of soul, rendering possible" the actualization of faith or gnosis "by conferring upon it the sincerity without which no act is valid". For Laude, commenting on the Schuonian perspective, al-faqr is "humility as the absence of all egocentricity and an emptiness for God." Schuon sees "spiritual virtue par excellence" in this attitude of "holy poverty" or "effacement", an attitude that implies "detachment, sobriety, patience, contentment", "resignation to the Will of God and trust in His Mercy"; it is "like an anticipation of extinction in God".

Spiritual practice

Spiritual path
According to the writer Ali Lakhani, "Schuon emphasizes that the meaning of life is nothing less than the quest for [...] God, [...] for the Truth that resides within each of us; [...] it is the return to the heart-consciousness of the Divine Presence." For Schuon, man is "a bridge between Earth and Heaven"; on the other hand, "the notion of the Absolute and the love of God constitute the very essence of [his] subjectivity; this subjectivity [...] is a proof both of [his] immortality and of God; [it] is, properly speaking, a theophany."

Schuon reminds us that religious or spiritual life offers three fundamental paths, which correspond to as many human temperaments: 1) the path of action, works, asceticism, fear (the karma-mārga or karma-yoga of Hinduism); 2) the path of love, of devotion (bhakti-mārga); and 3) the path of gnosis, of unitive contemplation (jñāna-mārga); in Sufism: makhāfah, mahabbah, ma`rifah. The first two are dualistic and exoteric, and are based on revelation, whereas the path of knowledge is monistic and esoteric, and based on intellection supported by revelation. Just as the path of love cannot do without good works and reverential fear, so the esoteric or metaphysical path cannot exclude the two other modes.

According to Schuon, the path of knowledge or of gnosis, which is present at the heart of every religion, is essentially: 1) discernment between the Real and the illusory, ātmā and māyā, nirvāna and samsāra, the Absolute and the relative, God and the world; 2) concentration on the Real, and 3) intrinsinc morality, virtue. This discernment would remain purely mental in the absence of concentration on the Real through rites and prayer, i.e. without an effective link with God, the Sovereign Good, based on an authentic piety and sufficient detachment from the ego and from the world. The way towards God, as Schuon points out, "always involves an inversion: from outwardness one must pass to inwardness, from multiplicity to unity, from dispersion to concentration, from egoism to detachment, from passion to serenity."

Schuon emphasizes that the exoteric and esoteric rites of the religion practised – and of that one alone – are the basis for the spiritual method. Prayer is its central element, for without it – and without divine grace – the heart cannot assimilate or realize what the mind has been able to grasp. Schuon recalls the three modes of prayer: personal prayer in which the worshipper opens himself spontaneously and informally to God; canonical, impersonal prayer, prescribed by his tradition; and invocatory prayer or "prayer of the heart" (japa, dhikr), which "is already a death and a meeting with God and places us already in Eternity; it is already something of Paradise and even, in its mysterious and 'uncreated' quintessence, something of God". This form of prayer is the invocation of a divine name, a sacred formula, a mantra; it reconciles the transcendence and the immanence of Truth, because if, on the one hand, Truth transcends us infinitely, the gnostic, asserts Schuon, knows that it is also "inscribed in an eternal script in the very substance of [his] spirit"; God is both the highest and the deepest, and the knowledge the realized being has of God is in reality the knowledge that God has of Himself through that being.

Virtue
In his writings, Schuon insists that the two requirements of doctrine and method would remain inoperative without a third element, virtue, since the spiritual path must necessarily integrate the three fundamental human faculties, namely intelligence (doctrine, truth, discernment), will (method, prayer, concentration) and soul (character, virtue, moral conformity). For Schuon, virtue is indeed "the initial form of spiritual union; without it, our knowing and our willing are of no use to us." According to him, to have a virtue is above all to be without the fault that is contrary to it, for God created us virtuous. He created us in His image; faults are superimposed. Moreover, it is not we who possess virtue, it is virtue which possesses us. [...] Virtue is like a reverberation of the Sovereign Good, in which we participate through our nature or through our will, easily or with difficulty, but always by the grace of God.
For Schuon, humility, charity and veracity, that is to say effacement of the ego, gift of self and attachment to truth, are essential virtues, corresponding to the three stages of the spiritual path: purification, expansion and union. Moreover, the sense of our littleness, the sense of the sacred and piety are indispensable conditions for the blossoming of the virtues. Summarizing the author, James Cutsinger notes that perfect virtues coincide with metaphysical truths; they realize these truths existentially. In other words, as Schuon points out: "truth is necessary for the perfection of virtue, just as virtue is necessary for the perfection of truth".

Beauty
Although Schuon considers that the foundations of any spiritual path are truth, prayer and virtue, he also insists upon the importance of a fourth element: beauty. For him, the interiorization of beauty presupposes nobility of character and at the same time produces it. Its function "is to actualize in the intelligent and sensitive creature the recollection of essences, and thus to open the way to the luminous Night of the one and infinite Essence".

To the awareness of divine beauty must correspond not only inner beauty, that is to say virtues, but also the sense of outer beauty, whether in the contemplation of nature or in artistic sensibility, without forgetting the interiorizing role of a traditional home ambiance made of beauty and serenity, foreign to the whims of modernity. "Beauty, whatever use man may make of it, belongs fundamentally to its Creator, Who thereby projects into the world of appearances something of His Being." For Schuon, these considerations find their source and justification in the theomorphic nature of man, a changeless, non-evolutive nature, contrary to what modern science may think.

Developments

Criticism of modernism
Summarizing Schuon's thought, Seyyed Hossein Nasr reminds us that it was in Europe, during the Renaissance, that the "modernist" or reductionist vision of the human condition and the universe took shape, before it affected the other continents a few centuries later. By reducing man more and more to his rational and animal aspects, to the detriment of his spiritual dimension and the purpose of earthly life, modernism has influenced philosophy as much as religion, science or art. According to Schuon, its main characteristics are rationalism, which denies the possibility of a supra-rational knowledge, materialism, according to which only matter gives meaning to life, psychologism, which reduces the spiritual and the intellectual to the psychic, skepticism, relativism, existentialism, individualism, progressivism, evolutionism, scientism and empiricism, without forgetting agnosticism and atheism.

Regarding modern science, in spite of the scale of its discoveries on the physical plane, Schuon reproaches it for being "a totalitarian rationalism, which eliminates both Revelation and Intellect, and at the same time a totalitarian materialism, which ignores the metaphysical relativity of matter and the world; it does not know that the supra-sensible, which is beyond space and time, is the concrete principle of the world, and that it is consequently also at the origin of that contingent and changeable coagulation called 'matter'". Thus, still according to Schuon, the contradiction of scientism is to "want to give an account of reality without the help of this initial science that is metaphysics, thus ignoring that only the science of the Absolute gives meaning and discipline to the science of the relative". This conception of a universe which ignores as much the principle of "creative emanationism" as much as that of the "hierarchy of the invisible worlds", has engendered "that most typical offspring of the modern spirit", the theory of evolution, with its corollary: the illusion of "human progress".

Schuon's criticism extends to philosophy – "the love of wisdom" – which was originally the fact of "thinking according to the immanent Intellect and not by reason alone". It "is the science of all fundamental principles". It operates with intellectual intuition – intellection – "which perceives, and not with reason alone, which concludes", hence the abyss that separates the certainty of the sage from the opinion of the modern philosopher.

For Schuon, there are ultimately only two possibilities: "integral, spiritual civilization, implying abuses and superstitions, and fragmentary, materialistic, progressivist civilization, implying – quite provisionally – certain earthly advantages, but excluding that which constitutes the sufficient reason and final end of all human existence".

Sacred art

Along with Ananda Coomaraswamy and Titus Burckhardt, Frithjof Schuon reminds us that "sacred art is first of all the visible and audible form of Revelation and then also its indispensable liturgical vesture". This art communicates "on the one hand, spiritual truths and, on the other hand, a celestial presence". James Cutsinger emphasizes that, for Schuon, an art is sacred "not through the personal aims of the artist, but through its content, its symbolism, and its style, that is, through objective elements", which must respect the canonical rules specific to the religion of its author. The latter, according to Martyn Amugen quoting Schuon, must be "sanctified or in a state of grace" because the language of the sacred "cannot spring simply from profane tastes, nor from genius, but must proceed essentially out of religion", which "cannot be replaced, far less can it be surpassed, by human resources". Icon painters, for example, "were monks who, before setting to work, prepared themselves by fasting, prayer, confession, and communion", in order to overcome the two pitfalls that threaten every artist: "a virtuosity tending towards the outward and the superficial, and a conventionalism without intelligence and without soul".

Echoing Schuonian thought, Cutsinger notes that the various forms of sacred art have as their object the "transmission of intellectual intuitions", thus conferring "a direct aid to spirituality", and he notes that this art "is able to transmit simultaneously metaphysical truths, archetypal values, historical facts, spiritual states, and psychological attitudes".

Evoking the transition from the Middle Ages – with its Byzantine, Romanesque and primitive Gothic arts – to the Renaissance, Schuon notes that "Christian art, which formerly was sacred, symbolical, spiritual", gave way to the advent of neo-classical art, with its naturalistic and sentimental character, which only responded "to collective psychic aspirations". Amugen, referring to Schuon, reports that art, having broken with tradition, became "human, individualistic, and therefore arbitrary", infallible signs of decline, and any desire to restore its sacred character must necessarily involve abandoning individualistic relativism in order to go back to its sources, which lie in the timeless and the immutable.

Sacred nudity

Author of a study on human theomorphism in Schuon's oeuvre, Timothy Scott notes this initial comment by Schuon: "The distinction between the Absolute and the Infinite expresses the two fundamental aspects of the Real, that of essentiality and that of potentiality; this is the highest principial prefiguration of the masculine and feminine poles". Schuon sees in the human body a "message of ascending and unitive verticality [...]; in rigorous, transcendent, objective, abstract, rational and mathematical mode" in man, "and in gentle, immanent, concrete, emotional and musical mode" in woman. As Patrick Laude points out, feminine beauty "plays a preponderant role in the spiritual alchemy that issues from the oeuvre and spiritual personality of Schuon". This role answers to "the highest expressions of gnostic Sufism", as evidenced by "Ibn Arabī and Rūzbehān among many others".

Summarizing Schuon, Scott reminds us that nudity represents the norm – primordial man was naked, primitive peoples are also naked – and that it "symbolizes quintessential esoterism [...], the Truth unveiled", the ordinary garment then representing exoterism. In his biography of Schuon, after noting the convergences of views that unite Schuon, Rūzbehān, Omar Khayyam, and Henri Corbin regarding the spiritual significance of nudity, Jean-Baptiste Aymard quotes this excerpt from a letter by Schuon: "Given the spiritual degeneration of humanity, the highest possible degree of beauty, which belongs to the human body, could not play a part in ordinary piety; however this theophany may be a support in esoteric spirituality, and this is shown in the sacred art of the Hindus and the Buddhists. Nakedness signifies inwardness, essentiality, primordiality and consequently universality [...]; the body is the form of the Essence and thus the essence of form".

In an interview published in 1996 by the American magazine The Quest: Philosophy, Science, Religion, The Arts, Schuon develops the sacredness of nudity:
In an altogether general way, nudity expresses – and virtually actualizes – a return to the essence, the origin, the archetype, thus to the celestial state: "And it is for this that, naked, I dance", as Lallā Yogishvarī, the great Kashmiri saint, said after having found the Divine Self in her heart. To be sure, in nudity there is a de facto ambiguity because of the passional nature of man; but there is not only the passional nature, there is also the gift of contemplativity, which can neutralize this, as is precisely the case with "sacred nudity". Thus there is not only the seduction of appearances, there is also the metaphysical transparency of phenomena which permits us to perceive the archetypal essence through the sensory experience. When the saintly bishop Nonnos beheld St. Pelagia entering the baptismal pool naked, he praised God that He had not put into human beauty just a cause of downfall, but also an opportunity for elevation towards God.

In a published passage from his largely unpublished Memoirs, Schuon remarks "how contemptible is the neo-pagan and atheistic cult of the body and of nudity. What is in itself noble in nature is good for us only in its function as a support for the supernatural; cultivated apart from God, it readily loses its nobility and becomes a humiliating fatuity, as the stupidity and ugliness of worldly nudism precisely prove".

Works

Philosophy (translated from French)
 The Transcendent Unity of Religions, Faber & Faber, 1953; revised edition, Harper & Row, 1975; introduction by Huston Smith, Quest Books, 1984, 1993
 Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, Faber & Faber, 1954; Perennial Books, 1969; new translation, Perennial Books, 1987; new translation with selected letters, World Wisdom, 2007
 Gnosis: Divine Wisdom, Perennial Books, 1959, 1978; revised, Perennial Books 1990; new translation with selected letters, World Wisdom, 2006
 Language of the Self: Essays on the Perennial Philosophy, introduction by Venkataraman Raghavan, Ganesh Madras, 1959; Select Books Bangalore, 1998; revised and augmented, World Wisdom, 1999
 Stations of Wisdom, John Murray, 1961; Perennial Books, 1980; new translation, World Wisdom, 1995, 2003
 Understanding Islam, Allen & Unwin, Penguin, Unwin Hyman, Routledge, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1972, 1976, 1979, 1981, 1986, 1989, 1993; World Wisdom, 1994, 1998, 2003; new translation with selected letters, foreword by Annemarie Schimmel, World Wisdom, 2011
 Light on the Ancient Worlds, Perennial Books, 1965; World Wisdom, 1984; new translation with selected letters, World Wisdom, 2006
 Logic and Transcendence, Harper & Row, 1975; Perennial Books, 1984; new translation with selected letters, World Wisdom, 2009
 Esoterism as Principle and as Way, Perennial Books, 1981, 1990; new translation with selected letters, World Wisdom, 2019
 Sufism, Veil and Quintessence, World Wisdom, 1981; new translation with selected letters, foreword by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, World Wisdom, 2006
 From the Divine to the Human, World Wisdom, 1982; new translation with selected letters, World Wisdom, 2013
 Castes and Races (this book's 3 chapters are also included in Language of the Self), Perennial Books, 1982; World Wisdom, 1999
 Christianity/Islam: Perspectives on Esoteric Ecumenism, World Wisdom, 1985; new translation with selected letters, World Wisdom, 2008
 Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism, World Wisdom, 1986, 2000
 In the Face of the Absolute, World Wisdom, 1989, 1994; new translation with selected letters, World Wisdom, 2014
 The Feathered Sun: Plains Indians in Art & Philosophy, introduction by Thomas Yellowtail, World Wisdom, 1990
 To Have a Center, World Wisdom, 1990; new translation with selected letters, World Wisdom, 2015
 Roots of the Human Condition, introduction by Patrick Laude, World Wisdom, 1991, 2002
 The Play of Masks, World Wisdom, 1992
 The Transfiguration of Man, World Wisdom, 1995
 The Eye of the Heart, foreword by Huston Smith, World Wisdom, 1997; new translation with selected letters, World Wisdom, 2021
 Form and Substance in the Religions, World Wisdom, 2002
 Primordial Meditation: Contemplating the Real, The Matheson Trust, 2015 (translated from the German)

Poetry

written in English
 The Garland, Abodes, 1994
 Road to the Heart, World Wisdom, 1995

translated from German
 Adastra & Stella Maris, foreword by William Stoddart, bilingual, World Wisdom, 2003
 Songs Without Names, Vol. I-VI, introduction by William Stoddart, foreword by Annemarie Schimmel, World Wisdom, 2006
 Songs Without Names, Vol. VII-XII, introduction by William Stoddart, foreword by Annemarie Schimmel, World Wisdom, 2006
 World Wheel, Vol. I-III, introduction by William Stoddart, foreword by Annemarie Schimmel, World Wisdom, 2006
 World Wheel, Vol. IV-VII, introduction by William Stoddart, foreword by Annemarie Schimmel, World Wisdom, 2006
 Autumn Leaves & The Ring, introduction by Patrick Laude, bilingual, World Wisdom, 2010

written in German (no translation)
 Sulamith, Urs Graf, 1947
 Tage- und Nächtebuch, Urs Graf, 1947
 Liebe / Leben / Glück / Sinn, 4 vol., Herder, 1997

Paintings
 The Feathered Sun: Plains Indians in Art & Philosophy, introduction by Thomas Yellowtail, World Wisdom, 1990
 Images of Primordial & Mystic Beauty: Paintings by Frithjof Schuon, Abodes/World Wisdom, 1992

Anthologies of Schuon's writings
 Treasures of Buddhism (formerly In the Tracks of Buddhism, Allen & Unwin, 1968; Unwin Hyman, 1989); World Wisdom, 1993; new translation with selected letters, World Wisdom, 2018
 The Essential Frithjof Schuon, edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr (formerly The Essential Writings of Frithjof Schuon, Amity House, 1986; Element Books, 1991), World Wisdom, 2005
 Echoes of Perennial Wisdom, World Wisdom, 1992; new translation with selected letters, edited by Patrick Casey, World Wisdom, 2012
 Songs for a Spiritual Traveler, selected poems, bilingual, World Wisdom, 2002
 The Fullness of God: Frithjof Schuon on Christianity, edited by James Cutsinger, foreword by Antoine Faivre, World Wisdom, 2004
 Prayer Fashions Man: Frithjof Schuon on the Spiritual Life, edited by James Cutsinger, World Wisdom, 2004
 Art from the Sacred to the Profane: East and West, edited by Catherine Schuon, foreword by Keith Critchlow, World Wisdom, 2007
 Splendor of the True: a Frithjof Schuon Reader, edited by James Cutsinger, foreword by Huston Smith, State University of New York Press, 2013
 Towards the Essential: Letters of a Spiritual Master, edited by Thierry Béguelin, The Matheson Trust, 2021
 Letters of Frithjof Schuon: Reflections on the Perennial Philosophy, edited by Michael Oren Fitzgerald, introduction by Catherine Schuon, World Wisdom, 2022

Schuon was a frequent contributor to the quarterly journal Studies in Comparative Religion (along with Guénon, Coomaraswamy, Burckhardt, Nasr, Lings, and many others) which dealt with religious symbolism and the Traditionalist perspective.

Further reading

Books
 Amugen, Martyn (2016). The Transcendent Unity of Religions and the Decline of the Sacred, Bangkok: Lap Lambert Academic Publishing
 Aymard, Jean-Baptiste & Laude, Patrick (2004). Frithjof Schuon: Life and Teachings, Albany/NY: State University of New York Press
 Cutsinger, James S. (1997). Advice to the Serious Seeker: Meditations on the Teaching of Frithjof Schuon, Albany/NY: State University of New York Press
 Fitzgerald, Michael O. (2010). Frithjof Schuon Messenger of the Perennial Philosophy, Bloomington/IN: World Wisdom
 Laude, Patrick (2010). Pathways to an Inner Islam: Massignon, Corbin, Guénon, and Schuon, Albany/NY: State University of New York Press
 Laude, Patrick (2020). Keys to the Beyond: Frithjof Schuon's Cross-Traditional Language of Transcendence, Albany/NY: State University of New York Press, presentation:
 Oldmeadow, Harry (2010). Frithjof Schuon and the Perennial Philosophy, Bloomington/IN: World Wisdom
 Religion of the Heart: Essays presented to Frithjof Schuon on his eightieth birthday, ed. Seyyed Hossein Nasr & William Stoddart, Washington D.C.: Foundation for Traditional Studies (1991). Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Biography of Frithjof Schuon ♦ Bernard P. Kelly, Notes on the Light of the Eastern Religions, with Special Reference to the Writings of Ananda Coomaraswamy, René Guénon, and Frithjof Schuon ♦ et al.

Chapters in books
 Nasr, Seyyed Hossein (2005). "Introduction" in The Essential Frithjof Schuon, Bloomington/IN: World Wisdom, 2005
 Oldmeadow, Harry (2004). "The Heart of the Religio Perennis: Frithjof Schuon on Esotericism" in Esotericism and the Control of Knowledge, The University of Sydney
 Oldmeadow, Harry (2012). "Frithjof Schuon on Culturism + Frithjof Schuon on Eastern Traditions", in Touchstones of the Spirit, Bloomington/IN: World Wisdom,
 Oldmeadow, Harry (2019). "Gnosis: A Perennialist Perspective", in The Gnostic World, London & New York: Routledge
 Scott, Timothy (2004). "The Elect and the Predestination of Knowledge: 'Esoterism' and 'Exclusivism': A Schuonian Perspective" in Esotericism and the Control of Knowledge, The University of Sydney
 Stoddart, William (2008). "Frithjof Schuon and the Perennialist School" in Remembering in a World of Forgetting: Thoughts on Tradition and Postmodernism, Bloomington/IN: World Wisdom
 Versluis, Arthur (2014). "From Europe to America" in American Gurus: From American Transcendentalism to New Age Religion, Oxford/UK: Oxford University Press

Articles in journals
Sacred Web (Vancouver, Canada)
 Vol. 1 (1998). Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Frithjof Schuon (1907-1998)
 Vol. 4 (1999). Patrick Laude, Remarks on Esoterism in the works of Frithjof Schuon
 Vol. 5 (2000). Harry Oldmeadow, Formal Diversity, Essential Unity: Frithjof Schuon on the Convergence of Religions
 Vol. 6 (2000). Harry Oldmeadow, "Signposts to the suprasensible": Notes on Frithjof Schuon's understanding of "Nature"  ♦ William Stoddart, Lossky's Palamitism in the Light of Schuon
 Vol. 8 (2001). Catherine Schuon, Frithjof Schuon: Memories and Anecdotes
 Vol. 10 (2002). Mateus Soares de Azevedo, Frithjof Schuon and Sri Ramana Maharshi: A survey of the spiritual masters of the 20th century
 Vol. 19 (2007). Patrick Laude, "Nigra sum sed Formosa (I am Black but Beautiful)": Death and the Spiritual Life in Frithjof Schuon
 Vol. 20 (2007) dedicated to Frithjof Schuon (1907-1998) on the Occasion of his Birth Centenary . Ali Lakhani, "Standing Unshakably in the True": A Commentary on the Teachings of Frithjof Schuon  ♦ Michael O. Fitzgerald, Beauty and the Sense of the Sacred: Schuon's Antidote to the Modern World ♦ Patrick Laude, Quintessential Esoterism and the Wisdom of Forms: Reflections on Frithjof Schuon's Intellectual and Spiritual Legacy ♦ Timothy Scott, "Made in the Image": Schuon's theomorphic anthropology  ♦ et al.
 Vol. 30 (2012) & 31 (2013). Bradshaw, Magnus. Conforming to the Real: Frithjof Schuon on Morality

Sophia (Oakton/VA, U.S.A.)
 Vol. 4, N° 1 (1998). Jean Biès, Frithjof Schuon: A Face of Eternal Wisdom
 Vol. 4, N° 2 (1998) In Memory: Frithjof Schuon. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, In Memoriam: Frithjof Schuon - A Prelude ♦ Martin Lings, Frithjof Schuon: An Autobiographical Approach ♦ Huston Smith, Providence Perceived: In Memory of Frithjof Schuon ♦ Tage Lindbom, Frithjof Schuon and Our Times  ♦ Harry Oldmeadow, A Sage for the Times: The Role and the Oeuvre of Frithjof Schuon  ♦ Reza Shah-Kazemi, Frithjof Schuon and Prayer  ♦ Michael O. Fitzgerald, Frithjof Schuon's Role in Preserving the Red Indian Spirit  ♦ William Stoddart, The German Poems of Frithjof Schuon  ♦ Brian Keeble, Some Thoughts on Reading Frithjof Schuon's Writings on Art
 Vol. 5, N° 2 (1999). Martin Lings, Frithjof Schuon and René Guénon
 Vol. 6, N° 1 (2000). Mark Perry, Frithjof Schuon Seen through his Handwritting
 Vol. 6, N° 2 (2000). James S. Cutsinger, Colorless Light and Pure Air: The Virgin in the Thought of Frithjof Schuon

DVDs and online videos
 Casey, Jennifer (2012). DVD: Frithjof Schuon Messenger of the Perennial Philosophy, Bloomington/IN: World Wisdom
 Coomaraswamy R., Cutsinger J., Laude P., Lings M., Nasr S.H., Oldmeadow H., Perry M., Smith H., Stoddart W. Video: Origins of the Perennial Philosophy School of Thought
 Laude, Patrick. Video: Who Was Frithjof Schuon?
 Lings, Martin. Guénon and Schuon. Videos:
 Schuon, Catherine. Video: Early influences on Frithjof Schuon's understanding of the transcendent unity of religions

Notes

References

See also

External links

Frithjof Schuon Archive
Frithjof Schuon's life and work
Frithjof Schuon and the message of the Perennial Philosophy
Frithjof Schuon: Collection of excerpts on philosophers and philosophy
Perennialist/Traditionalist School
Frithjof Schuon Swiss metaphysician, theologian and philosopher Oxford University Press
Publications by and about Frithjof Schuon  in the catalogue Helveticat of the Swiss National Library

1907 births
1998 deaths
Traditionalist School
People from Basel-Stadt
Metaphysicians
Philosophers of religion
20th-century Swiss philosophers
Swiss male poets
Swiss painters
Swiss Sufis
20th-century Swiss poets
20th-century male writers
Neo-Vedanta
Converts to Islam
Esotericists

Frithjof Schuon


Heskestad Station (Heskestad stasjon) er en tidligere jernbanestation på Sørlandsbanen, der ligger ved Eide i Lund kommune i Norge. Den er udstyret med en stationsbygning i rødmalet træ.

Stationen åbnede 1. november 1904 som en del af Flekkefjordbanen, der var taget i brug en måned før mellem Egersund og Flekkefjord. I 1944 indgik strækningen mellem Egersund og Sira, hvor Heskestad ligger, i Sørlandsbanen. Oprindeligt havde Heskestad status som holdeplads, men den blev opgraderet til station omkring 1913. Omkring 1957 blev den atter nedgraderet til holdeplads og 1. juni 1966 til trinbræt. 2. juni 1991 fik den status som fjernstyret krydsningsspor.

Eksterne henvisninger

Stationer på Sørlandsbanen
Jernbanestationer i Norge uden persontrafik
Etableret i 1904
Jernbanestationer i Rogaland

Heskestad Station


I Am the Night treći je studijski album američkog heavy metal sastava Pantera. Panterina diskografska kuća Metal Magic Records objavila ga je 1985.

O albumu
I Am the Night zadnji je Panterin album s pjevačem Terryjem Glazeom. Objavljen je 1985. na kaseti i gramofonskoj ploči, kao što je to bio slučaj s prvim dvama albumima, Metal Magic i Projects in the Jungle. I Am the Night žanrovski pripada glam/heavy metalu, stilu koji je grupa svirala pod utjecajem Kissa i Van Halena; skupina se objavom albuma Cowboys from Hell 1990. okrenula groove metalu kojim je stekla popularnost. Za pjesmu "Hot and Heavy" snimljen je i spot.

Popis pjesama

Osoblje
 Pantera
 Terrence Lee – vokal
 "Diamond" Darrell – gitara, vokal (pjesma 10.)
 Rex Rocker – bas-gitara
 Vinnie Paul – bubnjevi

Izvori

Albumi iz 1985.
Albumi sastava Pantera

I Am the Night


Mary Somerville (; , formerly Greig; 26 December 1780 – 29 November 1872) was a Scottish scientist, writer, and polymath. She studied mathematics and astronomy, and in 1835 she and Caroline Herschel were elected as the first female Honorary Members of the Royal Astronomical Society.

When John Stuart Mill organized a massive petition to Parliament to give women the right to vote, he made sure that the first signature on the petition would be Somerville's.

When she died in 1872, The Morning Post declared in her obituary that "Whatever difficulty we might experience in the middle of the nineteenth century in choosing a king of science, there could be no question whatever as to the queen of science". One of the earliest uses of the word scientist was in a review by William Whewell of Somerville's second book On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. However, the word was not used to describe Somerville herself; she was known and celebrated as a mathematician or a philosopher.

Somerville College, a college of the University of Oxford, is named after her, reflecting the virtues of liberalism and academic success which the college wished to embody. She is featured on the front of the Royal Bank of Scotland polymer £10 note launched in 2017 along with a quotation from her work On the Connection of the Physical Sciences.

Early life and education

Somerville, the daughter of Vice-Admiral Sir William George Fairfax, was related to several prominent Scottish houses through her mother, Margaret Charters. She was born at the manse of Jedburgh, the home of her maternal aunt and the Rev. Dr. Thomas Somerville (1741–1830) (author of My Own Life and Times). Her childhood home was at Burntisland, Fife, where her mother was from.

Somerville was the second of four surviving children (three of her siblings had died in infancy). She was particularly close to her oldest brother Sam. The family lived in genteel poverty as her father's naval pay remained meagre, despite his rise through the ranks. Her mother supplemented the household's income by growing vegetables, maintaining an orchard and keeping cows for milk. Her mother taught her to read the Bible and Calvinist catechisms.  When her household chores were done Mary was free to roam among the birds and flowers in the garden.

In her autobiography Somerville recollects that on her father's return from the sea he said to his wife, "This kind of life will never do, Mary must at least know how to write and keep accounts". Ten-year-old Mary was then sent to an expensive boarding school in Musselburgh, where she learned the first principles of writing, rudimentary French and English grammar. Upon returning home, she:

...was no longer amused in the gardens, but wandered about the country. When the tide was out I spent hours on the sands, looking at the star-fish and sea-urchins, or watching the children digging for sand-eels, cockles, and the spouting razor-fish. I made collections of shells, such as were cast ashore, some so small that they appeared like white specks in patches of black sand. There was a small pier on the sands for shipping limestone brought from the coal mines inland. I was astonished to see the surface of these blocks of stone covered with beautiful impressions of what seemed to be leaves; how they got there I could not imagine, but I picked up the broken bits, and even large pieces, and brought them to my repository.

During bad weather Somerville occupied herself with reading the books in her father's library, including Shakespeare, as well as with "domestic duties." Such duties "occupied a great part of my time; besides, I had to shew my sampler, working the alphabet from A to Z, as well as the ten numbers, on canvas". Her aunt Janet came to live with the family and reportedly said to her mother "I wonder you let Mary waste her time in reading, she never shews [sews] more than if she were a man." Somerville was then sent to the village school to learn plain needlework, where she found herself annoyed that her "turn for reading was so much disapproved of, and thought it unjust that women should have been given a desire for knowledge if it were wrong to acquire it." Several times each week the village school master came to teach Mary at home. In her Personal Recollections Somerville notes that the boys learned Latin at the village school, while "it was thought sufficient for the girls to be able to read the Bible; very few even learnt writing."

At age 13 her mother sent her to writing school in Edinburgh, where she improved her writing skills and studied arithmetic. Back in Burntisland she taught herself sufficient Latin to read the books in the home library. While visiting her aunt in Jedburgh she met her uncle Dr. Thomas Somerville. She gathered her courage to tell him that she had been learning Latin. Dr. Somerville assured her that in earlier times many women had become elegant scholars. He then proceeded to enable her to improve her Latin by reading Virgil with her. While staying with another uncle, William Charters, in Edinburgh, Somerville was sent to a dancing school, where she learned manners and how to curtsey. She also accompanied her uncle and aunt on their visits to the Lyell family in Kinnordy; Charles Lyell later became a celebrated geologist and Somerville's friend.

Somerville's father was a Tory, but she was a Liberal, made so by the "unjust and exaggerated abuse of the Liberal party. From my earliest years my mind revolved against oppression and tyranny, and I resented the injustice of the world in denying all those privileges of education to my sex which were so lavishly bestowed on men." At the time, slaves still worked to harvest sugar in the West Indies and in protest Somerville and her oldest brother Sam would refuse to take sugar in their tea.

At Burntisland, where she stayed the summer with her uncle and aunt, Somerville had access to elementary books on algebra and geometry. She spent the summer learning to play the piano. In addition to the piano she learned Greek so she could read Xenophon and Herodotus in their original versions. On her return to Edinburgh she was allowed to attend the academy of painter Alexander Nasmyth, which had opened for ladies. When Nasmyth advised another student to study Euclid's Elements to gain a foundation in perspective, astronomy and mechanical science, Somerville spotted an opportunity. She thought the book would help her understand Navigations by John Robertson.

She continued in the traditional role of a daughter in a well-connected family, attending social events and maintaining a sweet and polite manner, which led to her nickname as "the Rose of Jedburgh" among Edinburgh socialites. Meanwhile, a young tutor came to stay with the family in Burntisland to educate her younger brother Henry. The tutor, Mr. Craw, was a Greek and Latin scholar, and Somerville asked him to purchase elementary books on algebra and geometry for her. He presented Somerville with Euclid's Elements and Algebra by John Bonnycastle. Somerville would rise early to play the piano, painted during the day, and stayed up late to study Euclid and algebra. When Lord Balmuto, a family friend, invited her to visit his family Somerville saw her first laboratory. She also spent some time with the Oswalds family in Dunnikeir, whose daughter, a bold horsewoman who impressed Somerville, became a Greek and Latin scholar and married Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin.

Winters were usually spent in Edinburgh. In the winter of 1796  Somerville made her first appearance at a ball under the care of Lady Burchan. Her first dancing partner was the Earl of Minto.

In the autumn of 1797 her father was caught up in a mutiny while serving as flag-captain under Admiral Duncan on . Despite the mutiny the Battle of Camperdown was won by the British. Her father was knighted and made Colonel of Marines. Her eldest brother died at the age of 21 in Calcutta while serving in the East India Company's military service. The family had hoped he would make a sufficient fortune in a few years to enable him to return home.

Marriage and studies
In 1804 Somerville met her first husband, Lieutenant Samuel Greig. Her distant cousin, and a son of Admiral Samuel Greig, he was commissioner of the Russian navy and Russian consul for Britain. They married and had two children, one of whom, Woronzow Greig, would become a barrister and scientist. They lived in London, but it was not a happy time for Somerville. Her husband did not think much of women's intellectual capacity. Indeed, Greig "possessed in full the prejudice against learned women which was common at that time." Instead, Somerville took lessons in French, which was considered more appropriate. When her husband died in 1807 she was still nursing their youngest child and she returned to Scotland.

Her inheritance from Greig gave her the freedom to pursue intellectual interests. By that time she had studied plane and spherical trigonometry, conic sections and James Ferguson's Astronomy. Somerville also read Isaac Newton's Principia. John Playfair, professor of natural philosophy at University of Edinburgh, encouraged her studies and through him she began a correspondence with William Wallace, with whom she discussed mathematical problems.

Somerville began solving mathematical problems posed in the mathematical journal of the Military College at Marlow and eventually made a name for herself after solving a diophantine problem, for which she was awarded a silver medal in 1811. Somerville published five solutions in Volumes 3 and 4 of the Mathematical Repository under the pseudonym 'A Lady'. Two of her solutions demonstrated her early adoption of differential calculus—her contribution to the circulation and visibility of calculus in early 19th-century Britain.

Wallace suggested that she study the writings of French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace, which summarised the theory of gravity and collected the mathematical results established in the 50 years since Principia had been published. Somerville said that studying Laplace's work gave her the confidence to persevere in her mathematical studies. She extended her studies to astronomy, chemistry, geography, microscopy, electricity and magnetism. At the age of 33 she bought herself a library of scientific books. These included Louis-Benjamin Francœur's Elements of Mechanics, Sylvestre François Lacroix' Algebra and Calculus Treatise, Jean-Baptiste Biot's Analytical Geometry and Astronomy, Siméon Denis Poisson's Treatise on Mechanics, Joseph-Louis Lagrange's Theory of Analytical Functions, Leonhard Euler's Elements of Algebra and Isoperimetrical Problems, Alexis Clairaut's Figure of the Earth, Gaspard Monge's Application of Analysis to Geometry, and François Callet's Logarithmus.

In her Personal Recollections Somerville expressed the opinion that mathematical science was at a low ebb in Britain, due to a reverence for Newton that prevented scientists from adopting the calculus. On the Continent astronomical and mechanical science had reached a high degree of perfection. In her opinion this deadlock was not broken until 1816, when Charles Babbage, John Herschel and George Peacock published a translation of the  lectures of Sylvestre Lacroix, then a state-of-the-art calculus textbook.

While staying with her family in Scotland, Somerville became acquainted with several leading intellectual lights, such as Henry Brougham. In 1812 she married another cousin, Dr William Somerville (1771–1860), inspector of the Army Medical Board, with whom she had four children. He encouraged and aided her in the study of the physical sciences. In 1817 her husband was elected to the Royal Society and together they moved in the leading social circles of the day. Somerville was well known to scientists, as well as to leading writers and artists. Painter J. M. W. Turner knew Somerville and her husband's family were neighbors of the writer Walter Scott. She wrote, "I shall never forget the charm of this little society, especially the supper-parties at Abbotsford, when Scott was in the highest glee, telling amusing tales, ancient legends, ghost and witch stories."

In 1819 Somerville's husband was appointed physician to Chelsea Hospital and the family moved into a government house at Hanover Square, Chelsea. Somerville was a friend of Anne Isabella Milbanke, Baroness Wentworth, and was mathematics tutor to her daughter, Ada Lovelace. With Somerville, Lovelace attended scientific gatherings where she met Charles Babbage. Somerville College owns a letter from Babbage to Somerville inviting her to view his 'Calculating Engine'. Somerville frequently visited Babbage while he was "making his Calculating-machines". Somerville and Lovelace maintained a close friendship and when Lovelace encountered difficulties with a mathematical calculation she would walk to Somerville's house and discuss the matter over a cup of tea.

In 1823 the Somervilles' youngest daughter died after an illness.

While living in Chelsea the Somervilles travelled through Europe on a number of occasions, leaving their children with their German governess. Among their travel companions was the jurist and politician Sir James Mackintosh. Before leaving London the Somervilles contacted the people they wanted to meet, which included numerous celebrated intellectuals. The Somervilles also received frequent visitors; writer Maria Edgeworth would visit them when in England.

Science practice and writing

Somerville conducted experiments to explore the relationship between light and magnetism. Her first paper, "The magnetic properties of the violet rays of the solar spectrum", was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in 1826. Although her conclusions were faulty, the topic was of popular interest at the time and the paper brought her to notice in scientific circles. Using a sample of silver nitrate supplied by  Michael Faraday, Somerville conducted experiments on the blackening effect of sunlight, the reaction used in early experiments in photography. She later developed her technique by using an optical prism and vegetable dyes, producing an early version of the optical spectrometer. Sir David Brewster, inventor of the kaleidoscope, wrote in 1829 that Mary Somerville was "certainly the most extraordinary woman in Europe – a mathematician of the very first rank with all the gentleness of a woman".

Lord Brougham asked Somerville to translate the Mécanique Céleste of Pierre-Simon Laplace for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Laplace had, in five exhaustive volumes, summed up the current state of gravitational mathematics. Mécanique Céleste was acclaimed as the greatest intellectual achievement since the Principia. Somerville produced not just a translation, but also an expanded version of the first two volumes. She wrote a standalone exposition of the mathematics behind the workings of the Solar System, of which she said "I translated Laplace's work from algebra into common language". It was published in 1831, under the title of The Mechanism of the Heavens, and it immediately made her famous. Until the 1880s Mechanism was set as a textbook for undergraduates at University of Cambridge.

After receiving a copy of Mechanism Joanna Baillie wrote to Somerville, "I feel myself greatly honoured by receiving such a mark of regard from one who has done more to remove the light estimation in which the capacity of women is too often held than all that has been accomplished by the whole Sisterhood of Poetical Damsels & novel-writing Authors." The book was praised by George Peacock, Professor of the University of Cambridge, thus many of the 750 copies printed were bought in Cambridge. Reviews were favourable and Somerville received letters of congratulation from "many men of science". She was elected honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy, the Bristol Philosophical Institution, and the Société de Physique et d'Histoire Naturelle de Genève in 1834. The British Crown granted her a civil pension of £200 a year in recognition of her eminence in science and literature.

Somerville was passionate about astronomy and believed it to be the most extensive example of the connection of the physical sciences in that it combined the sciences of number and quantity, of rest and motion.

In [astronomy] we perceive the operation of a force which is mixed up with everything that exists in the heavens or on earth; which pervades every atom, rules the motions of animate and inanimate beings, and is as sensible in the descent of a rain-drop as in the falls of Niagara; in the weight of the air, as in the periods of the moon.

In Somerville's time the value of scientific publications depended on the currency of the information, therefore frequent editions had to be produced. Her subsequent books reflect the time she could free in her domestic life as her children became more independent. They also reflect the need to earn money, as the Somervilles suffered through a number of financial crises that peaked in 1835. She publicly and plausibly maintained that she wrote only for pleasure. Privately she paid considerable attention to the profitability of her books. Through personal connections she could secure John Murray as the publisher of her first book, Mechanism, and he remained her publisher throughout her long career. Murray later commented that despite having made little profit he was very pleased to have had the honour of publishing the works of such an extraordinary person. Her second book, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, sold 15,000 copies and established her reputation in elite science.She was among those who discussed a hypothetical planet perturbing Uranus. In the 6th edition of Connexion (1842) she wrote, "If after the lapse of years the tables formed from a combination of numerous observations should be still inadequate to represent the motions of Uranus, the discrepancies may reveal the existence, nay, even the mass and orbit of a body placed for ever beyond the sphere of vision". Predictions were fulfilled in 1846 with the discovery of Neptune revolving at a distance of 3,000,000,000 miles from the Sun. "The mass of Neptune, the size and position of his orbit in space, and his periodic time, were determined from his disturbing action on Uranus before the planet itself had been seen." Connexion ran to 10 editions, more than 9,000 copies and was its publisher's most successful science book until The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. It was translated into German and Italian and went through various editions in the United States.

Her book Physical Geography was published in 1848 and was the first English textbook on the subject. It remained in use until the early 20th century. Physical Geography was financially successful and brought her the Victoria Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society. Somerville followed, as she said, "the noble example of Baron Humboldt, the patriarch of physical geography", and she took an extended view of geography that included the Earth, its animal, "vegetable inhabitants", as well as "the past and present condition of man, the origin, manners, and languages of existing nations, and the monuments of those that have been".

Physical Geography starts with describing the overall structure of planet Earth, along with a brief allusion to the location of the Earth within the Solar System. Subsequently, the book focuses on terrestrial topics, such as the most basic features of land and water, and formations such as mountains, volcanoes, oceans, rivers and lakes. Somerville goes on to discuss the elements that govern temperature, such as light, electricity, storms, the aurora and magnetism. Eventually the book turns to vegetation, birds and mammals, and their geographical distribution in the Arctic, Europe, Asia, Africa, America and the Antarctic. Somerville ends the book with a discussion of "the distribution, condition, and future prospects of the human race". She emphasises the reciprocal dependencies in physical geography and the relationship between human beings and nature. In line with Victorian thinking, Somerville asserts the superiority of human beings, but maintains the interdependencies and interconnectedness of creation. Physical Geography sold more copies than any of her other books and earned Humboldt's admiration. After receiving a copy of the book he wrote to her: "You alone could provide your literature with an original cosmological work".

Her fourth book, Molecular and Microscopic Science, took 10 years to write. Published in 1869, she soon had doubts about devoting herself to popularising science, instead of concentrating on mathematics alone. Of the book she said: "In writing this book I made a great mistake, and repent it - Mathematics are the natural bent of my mind. If I had devoted myself exclusively to that study, I might probably have written something useful, as a new era had begun in that science." Regardless, the book was another success. It gave an up-to-date description of the latest discoveries revealed through the microscope and was published in two volumes and three parts. In the first part Somerville explained the latest thinking on atoms and molecules, the second covered plant life, while the third explored animal life. The book included 180 illustrations, which caused her publisher great expense.

She was elected to the American Geographical and Statistical Society in 1857 and the Italian Geographical Society in 1870, and was made a member of the American Philosophical Society.

Death

From 1833 onwards Somerville and her husband spent most of their time in Italy. Somerville maintained correspondence with a large number of leading scientists and remained engaged in current debates on facts and theories.

In 1868, four years before her death at 91, she was the first person to sign John Stuart Mill's unsuccessful petition for female suffrage. In her autobiography Somerville wrote that "British laws are adverse to women". She detailed the obstacles she had faced in obtaining an education as a young girl, though she did not speculate on the nature of the problem. During her lifetime agitation had grown for women's access to higher education. In 1875  astronomer Maria Mitchell was told by a college president that he "would hire a woman scientist if she was as good as Mary Somerville".

Somerville died at Naples on 29 November 1872, and was buried there in the English Cemetery.

Legacy
In the year following Somerville's death, her autobiographical Personal Recollections was published, consisting of reminiscences written during her old age. Over 10,000 pages are in the Somerville Collection of the Bodleian Library and Somerville College, Oxford. The collection includes papers relating to her writing and published work, and correspondence with family members, scientists and writers, as well as other figures in public life. Also included is substantial correspondence with the Byron and Lovelace families.

Her shell collection was given to Somerville College, Oxford by her descendants.

Somerville Square in Burntisland is named after her family and marks the site of their home.

Somerville College, Oxford, was named after Somerville, as are Somerville House, Burntisland, where she lived for a time,  and Somerville House, a high school for girls in Brisbane, Australia. One of the Committee Rooms of the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh has been named after her.

Somerville Island (), a small island in Barrow Strait, Nunavut, was named after her by Sir William Edward Parry in 1819.

The Somerville Club was founded in 1878 in London, by 1887 it was re-established as the New Somerville Club, and it disappeared by 1908.

The vessel  was launched in 1835 at Liverpool. She traded with India for Taylor, Potter & Co., of Liverpool, and disappeared with the loss of all aboard in late 1852 or early 1853.

Mary Somerville is featured in miniature in The English Bijou Almanack, 1837, with poetry by Letitia Elizabeth Landon.

5771 Somerville (1987 ST1) is a main-belt asteroid discovered on 21 September 1987 by E. Bowell at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and named after her. Somerville crater is a small lunar crater in the eastern part of the Moon. It lies to the east of the prominent crater Langrenus. It is one of a handful of lunar craters named after women.

In February 2016 Somerville was shortlisted, along with Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell and civil engineer Thomas Telford, in a public competition run by the Royal Bank of Scotland to decide whose face should appear on the bank's new £10 notes, to be issued in 2017. Later that month RBS announced that she had won the public vote, held on Facebook. The banknotes, bearing her image, were issued in the second half of 2017.

On 2 February 2020, Google celebrated her with a Google Doodle.

On 1 April 2022, a satellite named after Somerville (ÑuSat 26, COSPAR 2022-033) was launched into space as part of the Satellogic Aleph-1 satellite constellation.

Children
From her first marriage she had a son, Woronzow Greig (1805–1865), named after Count Semyon Vorontsov, the Russian ambassador in London who had appointed Samuel Greig as his Consul General. Woronzow married Agnes Graham but all their children died at birth or in infancy.

From her second marriage she had three daughters and one son: Margaret Farquhar Somerville (1813–1823; died in childhood), Thomas Somerville (1814–1815; died in infancy), Martha Charters Somerville (1815–1879) and Mary Charlotte Somerville (1817–1875). Her two surviving daughters spent most of their lives caring for Mary.

Bibliography
 1826 "On the magnetizing power of the more refrangible solar rays"
 1831 Mechanism of the Heavens
 1832 "A Preliminary Dissertation on the Mechanisms of the Heavens"
 1834 On the Connection of the Physical Sciences
 1848 Physical Geography
 1869 Molecular and Microscopic Science
 1874  Personal recollections, from early life to old age, of Mary Somerville

See also
 People on Scottish banknotes
 Timeline of women in science
  – ship launched at Liverpool in 1835 and named for Mary Somerville

Notes

References

 .  Digitised 2007, original in Harvard University. Reprinted by AMS Press (January 1996), . Written by her daughter.
 Neeley, Kathryn A. Mary Somerville: Science, Illumination, and the Female Mind, Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

External links

 "Mary Fairfax Somerville", Biographies of Women Mathematicians, Agnes Scott College
 Mary Somerville, an article by Maria Mitchell, Atlantic Monthly 5 (May 1860), 568–571.
 Bibliography from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific

 Catalogue of correspondence and papers of Mary Somerville and of the Somerville and related families, c.1700–1972, held at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford

Scottish astronomers
Scottish mathematicians
Scottish science writers
1780 births
1872 deaths
Scottish suffragists
British women mathematicians
Scottish women scientists
Scottish translators
Fairfax family
Women astronomers
Royal Astronomical Society
Members of the American Philosophical Society
People from Burntisland
People from Jedburgh
Scottish expatriates in Italy
19th-century British astronomers
19th-century Scottish mathematicians
19th-century Scottish writers
19th-century British women writers
19th-century British women scientists

Mary Somerville


Ivan I., (port. João I, poznat i kao  "Ivan veliki", port. João o Grande, 11. travnja 1357. — 14. kolovoza 1433.), kralj Portugala od 1385.

Ivan je bio vanbračni sin Petra I., kralja Portugala. Bio je veliki majstor reda Avizo skinuvši s trona kraljicu Leonor Telles, koja je kraljevstvo željela predati Kastilji. Postaje regent 1383. godine a kralj 1385. Poslije dugog rata protiv Kastilje, Ivan se okrenuo protiv Maura i osvaja Ceutu 1415. godine.

Ivan je u Portu 11. veljače 1387. oženio Filipu Lankastersku (1360. – 1415.), kćerku vojvode Ivana Lankasterskog i Blanke Lankasterske.

Djeca:
 Blanche (1388. – 1389.)
 Afonso (1390. – 1400.)
 Edvard I. (1391. – 1438.)
 Pedro, vojvoda Coimbre (1392. – 1449.)
 Henrik "Morepolovac", vojvoda Viseua (1394. – 1460.)
 Izabela (1397. – 1472.), udata za Filipa III. Burgundskog
 Blanche (1398.)
 João, vojvoda od Aveira (1400. – 1442.) djed Manuela I.
 Ferdinand "Sveti" (1402. – 1443.)
 Charoll (1409. – 1442.)
 Blancis

Portugalski vladari

Ivan I., portugalski kralj


Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte (25 Kasım 1915 - 10 Aralık 2006), 1973 yılından 1990 yılına kadar Şili'yi dikta rejimi ile yöneten general. 1973'ten 1998'e kadar Şili ordusunun başkomutanı ve 1973'ten 1981'e kadar Şili Cunta Hükûmeti'nin başkanı.

11 Eylül 1973 tarihinde Amerika Birleşik Devletleri (ABD) destekli bir askeri darbeyle sosyalist Salvador Allende'nin Unidad Popular hükûmetini devirmiş ve ülkedeki sivil yönetimi kuruluşunun 48. yıldönümüne bir hafta kala sona erdirerek iktidara gelmiştir.

Pinochet dönemi çok sayıda insan hakları ihlalerinin yaşandığı bir dönem olarak kabul edilmesine karşın Pinochet taraftarlarına göre, Pinochet sayesinde ülkede büyük bir ekonomik kalkınma sağlanmıştır. 10 Aralık 2006'da, ev hapsinde tutulurken 91 yaşında kalp krizi geçirerek ölmüştür.

Yaşamı
1915'te Valparaíso'da dünyaya geldi. Baba tarafı 18. yüzyılda Şili'ye göç etmiş Fransız Breton asıllı bir ailedir. Annesi Avelina Ugarte Martínez ise Bask asıllıdır. 1933'te girdiği Santiago'daki askeri akademiyi 1936'da bitirdi. Bir Şili heyetiyle ABD'de kaldıktan sonra 1970'te tümgeneral oldu.

1973 Darbesi ve Başkanlığı

1973'ün Ağustos ayında, darbeden 18 gün önce, bakan olan general Carlos Prats'ın yerine Salvador Allende tarafından Şili silahlı kuvvetler başkomutanlığına getirildi. Bunun üzerine askerî cuntanın başına geçti ve 11 Eylül 1973'te Başkan Allende'yi devirdi. Allende darbe sırasında askerlerin başkanlık sarayına düzenledikleri saldırı sırasında yaşamını kaybetti (Allende'nin ölüm nedeni kesinlik kazanamamıştır).

Yönetimi ele geçiren başında Pinochet'nin bulunduğu dört kişilik cunta bütün siyasi partilerin etkinliği durdurdu. Sosyalist muhalefete karşı acımasız ve kanlı bir kıyıma girişildi; darbenin ilk üç yılı içinde yaklaşık 130 bin kişi tutuklanırken, Pinochet'nin iktidarda kaldığı 17 yıllık dönemde yaklaşık 2.279 kişi siyasi nedenlerle öldürüldü, 1.000'den fazla insan "kayboldu", 30.000 civarında kişi işkence gördü ve sayısı birkaç bini bulan kişi sürgün edildi.

Mart 1974'te anayasayı yürürlükten kaldıran cunta, belirsiz bir süre iktidarda kalacağını açıkladı. Haziran 1974'te cuntanın öteki üyelerini birer danışman konumuna indirerek bütün iktidarı kendi elinde topladı. Aralıkta da devlet başkanlığını üstlendi. Bir geçiş döneminin ardından 1970 öncesindeki statükoya dönüleceğini düşünerek darbeye destek veren ılımlı ve liberal çevrelerin beklentisi boşa çıkarıldı. Bu arada muhalefete yönelttiği sert baskı uygulamaları uluslararası kamuoyunda yoğun tepkilere yol açtı. Allende yönetiminin son savunma bakanı olan Orlando Letelier ise büyük olasılıkla onun emriyle Eylül 1976'da Washington'da öldürüldü.

Pinochet, Allende hükûmetinin ekonomi politikalarına son vererek ekonomik alanda liberal bir çizgi izlemeye başladı. 1975 yılının ortalarından itibaren Pinochet kimi zaman "neo-liberal" kimi zaman "serbest piyasacı" olarak adlandırılan iktisadî
reformları uygulamaya koydu. Bu amaçla, "Chicago'lu çocuklar" olarak bilinen ve Chicago Üniversitesi'nde Milton Friedman'ın fikirlerinin etkisi altında yetişmiş iktisatçılara danıştı. Ülke ekonomisini uluslararası rekabete açtı. Serbest girişime ve hür teşebbüse dayalı yeni ekonomik politikaların uygulandığı bu dönemde, çalışanların yanı sıra orta sınıfın ve alt kesimin yaşam düzeyi hızla iyileşmeye yüz tuttu. Kişi başına düşen milli gelir süratle yükseldi. Ağır dış borç yükünden kurtulan Şili, dünya ekonomi tarihi için örnek oluşturacak şekilde  enflasyonu sıfıra yaklaştırdı ve işsizlik sorununu çok büyük ölçüde çözdü. Ekonomik ultra-liberalizmin uygulandığı Pinochet dönemi, başka yönleri yanında siyasi liberalizm ve demokrasinin ekonomik liberalizmin doğal bir parçası ve uzantısı olduğu tezinin doğrulanması olarak da dünya literatürüne girdi.

Yeni anayasanın 1980'de, askeri rejimin sıkı denetimi altında düzenlenen halkoylamasında onaylanarak Mart 1981'de yürürlüğe girmesinin ardından da sekiz yıllık bir dönem için devlet başkanlığını üstlendi. Ayrıca ikinci kez seçilebilme hakkını saklı tuttu.

Pinochet yönetimine karşı zamanla güçlenen muhalefet, özellikle 1982-83 yıllarındaki ekonomik gerilemenin ardından açık eylemler düzenlemeye başladı. Demokrasiye daha kısa sürede dönmek istemiyle gerçekleştirilen bir dizi kitle gösterisi Pinochet'nin konumunu sarstı. Pinochet gittikçe genişleyen protesto eylemleri ve 1984'teki gerilla saldırılarının ardından sıkıyönetim ilan etti. Eylül 1986'daki bir suikast girişiminden ise yara almadan kurtuldu. Ocak 1987'de sıkıyönetimi kaldırarak siyasi partilerin kurulmasına izin verdi. Bir dönem daha iktidarda kalabilmek için halkoylamasına başvurduysa da seçmenlerin yüzde 54,6'sının hayır oyu vermesinin ardından iktidarı 1990'da sivillere devredeceğini duyurdu. 14 Aralık 1989'da yapılan seçimleri 17 siyasi partinin oluşturduğu Demokratik İttifak'ın adayı Hristiyan Demokrat Patricio Aylwin, oyların yüzde 56'sını elde ederek kazandı. Pinochet, Alywin'in göreve başladığı 11 Mart 1990'da değin görevi sürdürdü. Genelkurmay başkanlığını ise 1998 yılına kadar sürdürdü. Ayrıca anayasaya yeni bir madde ekleterek, kendisine "hayat boyu senatör" olma hakkını tanıdı.

Başkanlık sonrası
1991 başında, Pinochet döneminde yolsuzluk yapıldığı iddiasıyla silahlı kuvvetler hakkında soruşturma açıldı. Soruşturma sonuçları bazı yolsuzluklara Pinochet'nin aile üyelerinin de karıştığını gösteriyordu. Aynı yıl, Pinochet dönemindeki insan hakları ihlallerini soruşturmak için kurulan komisyon Başkan Aylwin'e kapsamlı bir reform sundu.

Ekim 1998'de bel fıtığı tedavisi için bulunduğu Londra'da, iktidarda olduğu dönemde İspanyol vatandaşlarının öldürülmesinden sorumlu tutularak, İspanya'nın suç duyurusunda bulunması üzerine tutuklandı. İspanya ayrıca Pinochet'nin iadesi için İngiliz hükûmetine resmen başvuruda bulundu. Yaklaşık 16 ay Londra'da ev hapsinde tutulduktan sonra Mart 2000'de, Britanya İçişleri Bakanı Jack Straw'un Pinochet'nin sağlık durumunun yargılanmaya elverişli olmadığı yolundaki raporu temel alarak ülkesine dönmesine izin vermesiyle Şili'ye döndü.

10 Aralık 2006'da Şili saatiyle 14:15'te askerî hastanede yaşamını kaybetti. Şili hükûmetinin Pinochet için devlet töreni yapılmayacağına karar vermesi nedeniyle yalnızca askeri tören düzenlendi. Hükûmet ayrıca ulusal yas ilan edilmesi yönündeki talepleri de reddetti. Naaşı vasiyeti üzerine yakılarak ailesine teslim edildi. Ailesi, saldırı ihtimali nedeniyle kendisi için mezar yaptırmadı. Silahlı kuvvetler de küllerinin herhangi bir askeri tesiste bulundurulmasına izin vermedi.

Dış bağlantılar
 Pinochet yargılanmadan öldü - soL
 Eski Şili Diktatörü Pinochet öldü - Prensa Latina Türkçe
 Resimlerle Pinochet (BBC)

Kaynakça

1915 doğumlular
Valparaíso doğumlular
2006 yılında ölenler
Şili cumhurbaşkanları
Şilili generaller
Şilili antikomünistler
Soğuk Savaş'ta liderler
Darbe ile iktidara gelenler
Condor Planı
İspanya-Şili ilişkileri
Kalp krizinden ölenler
Soykırım failleri
Cenazesi yakılarak icra olunan kişiler

Augusto Pinochet


O iluzie este o denaturare a simțurilor, dezvăluind modul în care creierul uman organizează în mod normal și interpretează stimuli senzoriali. Deși iluziile denaturează realitatea, ele sunt, în general împărtășite de majoritatea oamenilor.

Iluziile pot să apară pentru oricare dintre simțurile umane, dar iluziile vizuale (iluzii optice) sunt cele mai cunoscute și înțelese. Accentul pus pe iluziile vizuale apare deoarece văzul domină de multe ori celelalte simțuri. De exemplu, persoanele care urmăresc un ventriloc vor percepe vocea ca venind de la marionetă, deoarece pot să vadă gura marionetei rostind cuvintele.

Unele iluzii sunt bazate pe presupuneri de ordin general pe care le face creierul în timpul percepției. Aceste presupuneri sunt generate de principiile de organizare (de exemplu, gestaltismul), de capacitatea unui individ de percepție în adâncime și de percepție a mișcării și de mișcare și percepție, și de constanța perceptivă. Alte iluzii sunt cauzate de structurile senzoriale biologice din corpul uman sau de condiții din afara corpului într-un anumit mediu fizic.

Termenul iluzie se referă la o formă specifică de distorsiune senzorială. Spre deosebire de o halucinație, care este o denaturare în absența unui stimul, o iluzie reprezintă o percepție greșită a unei senzații existente. De exemplu, auzirea unor voci, indiferent de mediu, este o halucinație, dar auzirea unor voci în sunetul apei care curge (sau al altei surse de zgomot) este o iluzie.

Iluzie optică

O iluzie optică se caracterizează prin perceperea vizuală de imagini, care sunt înșelătoare sau care induc în eroare. Prin urmare, informațiile aduse de ochi sunt procesate de către creier pentru a crea aparent o percepție care nu corespunde cu măsurarea fizică a sursei stimul. O presupunere convențională este că există iluzii fiziologice care apar în mod natural și iluzii cognitive care pot fi demonstrate prin anumite trucuri vizuale care dezvăluie modul cum funcționează sistemele de percepție umană.
Creierul uman construiește în mintea noastră o lume bazată pe informațiile pe care le obține din mediul înconjurător. Cu toate acestea, uneori, el încearcă să organizeze aceste informații într-un mod pe care-l consideră cel mai bun, în timp ce alteori încearcă să umple golurile. Acest mod în care creierul nostru funcționează constituie baza unei iluzii.

Iluzie auditivă
O iluzie auditivă este o iluzie legată de auz asemănătoare cu o iluzie optică: ascultătorul aude sunete care nu sunt generate de stimuli sau sunete "imposibile". Pe scurt, iluziile audio evidențiază zonele în care urechea umană și creierul, ca instrumente organice temporare, diferă de receptorii audio perfecți (în mai bine sau în mai rău). Un exemplu de iluzie auditivă este tonul lui Shepard.

Iluzie tactilă
Exemple de iluzii tactile sunt iluzia de percepție a unui membru amputat, iluzia termică a grătarului, iluzia iepurelui care sare și o curioasă iluzie care apare atunci când degetul arătător și degetul mijlociu sunt deplasate de-a lungul podului nasului cu un deget pe fiecare parte, determinând percepția a două nasuri separate. În mod interesant, zonele cerebrale activate în timpul percepției tactile iluzorii sunt similare cu cele activate în timpul stimulării tactile reale. Iluziile tactile pot fi obținute, de asemenea, prin tehnologia haptică. Aceste obiecte tactile "iluzorii" pot fi folosite pentru a crea "obiecte virtuale".

Iluzie temporală
O iluzie temporală este o distorsiune în percepția timpului, care apare atunci când intervalul de timp dintre două sau mai multe evenimente este foarte îngust (de obicei mai puțin de o secundă). În astfel de cazuri, o persoană poate percepe momentan timpul ca încetinind, oprindu-se, accelerând sau mergând înapoi.

Alte simțuri
Iluziile pot apărea și în cazul altor simțuri, inclusiv pentru cei implicați în perceperea alimentelor. S-a demonstrat că atât sunetul, cât și pipăitul influențează percepția prospețimii produselor alimentare. S-a descoperit, de asemenea, că, chiar dacă o parte a receptorilor de gust de pe limbă s-au deteriorat, iluzia gustului ar putea fi produsă prin stimularea tactilă. Iluziile olfactive (miros) se produc atunci când sunt sunt puse etichete verbale pozitive sau negative înainte de stimularea olfactivă.

Tulburări
Unele iluzii apar ca rezultat al unei boli sau al unei tulburări. Deși aceste tipuri de iluzii nu sunt împărtășite de toată lumea, ele sunt tipice pentru fiecare stare de sănătate. De exemplu, cei care suferă de migrene raportează deseori iluzii scintilante.

Neuroștiințe
Percepția este legată de activitatea specifică a creierului și poate fi provocată astfel de stimularea creierului.  Iluziile perceptive care pot fi evocate variază de la simple fosfene (detectarea de lumini în câmpul vizual) până la percepții de nivel înalt. În studiul cazului singular al unui pacient, care se afla într-o evaluare prechirurgicală pentru tratamentul epilepsiei, stimularea electrică a joncțiunii temporoparietale stângi a generat percepția unei persoane aflate în apropiere (iluzorii)  care "ascundea atent schimbările în poziția și postura corpului pacientului".

Referințe

Legături externe

 Universal Veiling Techniques
 What is an Illusion? by J.R. Block.
 Optical illusions and visual phenomena by Michael Bach
 Auditory illusions
 Haptic Perception of Shape  - touch illusions, forces and the geometry of objects, by Gabriel Robles-De-La-Torre.
 Silencing awareness of visual change by motion

Percepție
Realitate
Sistem senzorial

Iluzie


Henry Crosby Allen (* 13. Mai 1872 in Paterson, New Jersey; † 7. März 1942 in Mystic, Connecticut) war ein US-amerikanischer Politiker. Zwischen 1905 und 1907 vertrat er den Bundesstaat New Jersey im US-Repräsentantenhaus.

Werdegang
Henry Allen besuchte sowohl private als auch öffentliche Schulen in seiner Heimat. Danach war er bis 1889 an der St. Paul's School in Garden City auf Long Island.  Anschließend studierte er bis 1893 an der Yale University. Nach einem Jurastudium an der New York Law School und seiner 1895 erfolgten Zulassung als Rechtsanwalt begann er in Paterson in diesem Beruf zu arbeiten. Gleichzeitig schlug er als Mitglied der Republikanischen Partei eine politische Laufbahn ein.

Bei den Kongresswahlen des Jahres 1904 wurde Allen im sechsten Wahlbezirk von New Jersey in das US-Repräsentantenhaus in Washington, D.C. gewählt, wo er am 4. März 1905 die Nachfolge von William Hughes antrat. Da er im Jahr 1906 auf eine weitere Kandidatur verzichtete, konnte er bis zum 3. März 1907 nur eine Legislaturperiode im Kongress absolvieren. Nach dem Ende seiner Zeit im US-Repräsentantenhaus praktizierte Allen wieder als Anwalt in Paterson. Zwischen 1926 und 1935 war er dort Posthalter. Er starb am 7. März 1942 während eines Besuchs bei seiner Tochter in Connecticut. Henry Allen fand seine letzte Ruhestätte auf dem Cedar Lawn Cemetery in Paterson.

Weblinks

Absolvent der Yale University
Mitglied des Repräsentantenhauses der Vereinigten Staaten für New Jersey
Mitglied der Republikanischen Partei
Rechtsanwalt (Vereinigte Staaten)
US-Amerikaner
Geboren 1872
Gestorben 1942
Mann

Henry C. Allen (Politiker, 1872)