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Welcome to The Gallerist

Welcome to a place where art, philosophy and mythology come together.

Beautiful Thoughts :

“Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu
Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion
or cultural system. I am not from the East
or the West, not out of the ocean or up
from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all. I do not exist,
am not an entity in this world or in the next,
did not descend from Adam and Eve or any
origin story. My place is placeless, a trace
of the traceless. Neither body or soul.
I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and know,
first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.”

― Rumi

Featured Artist:

Plato on Equality

Until the eighteenth century, it was assumed that human beings are unequal by nature — i.e., that there was a natural human hierarchy. This postulate collapsed with the advent of the idea of natural right and its assumption of an equality of natural order among all human beings.

The classical formula for justice according to which an action is just when it offers each individual his or her due took on a substantively egalitarian meaning in the course of time, viz. everyone deserved the same dignity and the same respect.

This is now the widely held conception of substantive, universal, moral equality. It developed among the Stoics, who emphasized the natural equality of all rational beings, and in early New Testament Christianity, which elevated the equality of human beings before God to a principle: one to be sure not always adhered to later by the Christian church.

This important idea was also taken up both in the Talmud and in Islam, where it was grounded in both Greek and Hebraic elements in both systems. In the modern period, starting in the seventeenth century, the dominant idea was of natural equality in the tradition of natural law and social contract theory.

Plato cautions us against building two parallel cities, “the city of the poor and that of the rich,” where the poor struggle to be productive citizens and plot against the rich — while the rich become luxurious, idle and plot against the poor.

In his later, but less familiar dialogue, “The Laws,” he more thoroughly develops his thoughts on inequality. “It is impossible that those who become very rich become also good,” he stresses repeatedly. He said he believes that wealthy citizens start to feel that their wealth is more valuable and important than their virtue — so they don’t need to follow the laws or other norms that create social harmony. This makes inequality, to his mind, “the greatest of all plagues.” Read More

The Origin of Witches

The word “witch” comes from the Anglo-Saxon word “Wicca,” which comes from the word “wicce,” meaning “wise.” The origin of the word dates back to thousands of years when people widely worshiped Mother Earth or Nature as goddesses.

Good Witch
Witches are today most traditional as well as mysterious entities we associate with Halloween. When you think of a Witch, it’s easy to conjure up an image of an old, ugly, hook-nosed woman, stirring up a steaming potion that is brewing away inside a cauldron. Have you ever wondered where this sordid image of a witch actually started? Did such vile beings really ever exist, or is this whole business of a hideous, green-faced, evil sorcerer just one fabricated myth?

Carole Fontaine, an internationally recognized American biblical scholar, argues in an interview that the idea of the witch has been around as long as humanity has tried to deal with disease and avert disaster. In the earliest centuries of human civilization, witches were the women who served the goddesses and therefore were revered throughout their communities. In the Middle East, ancient civilizations not only worshiped powerful female deities, but it was often women who practiced the holiest of rituals. Trained in the sacred arts, these priestesses became known as wise women, and may have been some of the earliest manifestations of what we now recognize as the witch. These wise women made house calls, delivered babies, dealt with infertility, and cured impotence.

What’s interesting about them is that they are so clearly understood to be positive figures in their society. No king could be without their counsel, no army could recover from a defeat without their ritual activity, no baby could be born without their presence.

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