E. C. (Gene) Ayres Blogspot

There's an old children's taunt--the kind most of my generation got to hear at least once growing up in the streets and schoolyards of America. It goes like this: "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me." Followed by the usual body language: pointing, thumb on nose, wrinkled face, and whatever. It's possible girls heard this kind of nonsense more often than boys, because girls pretty much had to rely on words for both attack and defense, whereas boys had all sorts of weapons at their disposal: fists, elbows, knees, shoulders, and yes, sticks and stones, or baseball bats, knives, and guns, in more recent times. Maybe that's why women read more than men. They are more comfortable with the power of words, because for much of history it was the only power they had. The absurdity of that childish claim should be obvious to anyone who's ever lived in a civilized society governed by laws, or religious doctrine, or as in Christian and ...

This image represents perhaps the oldest, if not most powerful symbol in the world: the so-called 'All-Seeing Eye.' Whose eye, exactly, is this, and what is it they see? The most obvious and common assumption, of course, is that it sees all and therefore, presumably, it is the eye of God. But which God? The earliest representations of this symbol were the seven manifestations of the Eye of Horus, in ancient Egypt. Sometimes depicted as a falcon, Horus could literally see all and was considered by his Rosicrucian and Masonic descendants as probably the original named God in the human panoply. Later versions, adopting the pyramid, and later on a simple representational triangle, all have their historical basis in this original Eye. Christians converted this triangle as to represent the Trinity. In 1782, the Eye of Providence was adopted as part of the symbolism on the reverse side of the Great Seal of the United States. It was first suggested as an element of the Great Se...