[VERIFIED] Euro Fest Pageant Parts 1 And 2
Alyson Hoffses
"It's a nod to the year, 2023, but also to genealogy and ancestry, as those are both popular things right now," said festival organizer Honor Schauland. "The committee got to joking around about the St. Urho family and a bunch of fun ways to incorporate that."
One such way is by creating a St. Urho family tree out of papier-mache. On it, Schauland said they placed photos of prominent people in Finland and/or those who have helped out with the festival. Most of those listed have passed away.
But who is this St. Urho, anyway? He's the fictitious saint of Finland who is claimed to have driven the grasshoppers out of the European nation. The holiday originated on the Iron Range in the 1950s and has spread across the state and parts of the country. The town in Lake County has been holding a celebration of the saint for almost as long and has built up its own traditions.
One such tradition is the crowning of Miss Helmi, who Schauland explained is "kind of St. Urho's girlfriend." The festival kicks off 6 p.m. Friday with the Miss Helmi talent show and beauty pageant. The event travels to locations throughout town and at the last stop, the winner of the pageant is crowned Miss Helmi and will be included in the parade the following morning.
Events start up again Saturday morning with live music, craft vendors and the Finland Minnesota Historical Society's pancake breakfast at the Clair Nelson Center. Outdoor music will run from 11 a.m.-noon, when the parade begins.
"A lot of people have driven through town and found themselves there by accident," Schauland said. "They'd be like, 'Why is the highway shut down?' and end up watching the parade. And then they find themselves coming back every year. Because there's just a little something for everyone."
From a 21st-century perspective, looking to our medieval ancestors for help in understanding the mind would seem to be a backward step. Those were the days, we think, of supernatural forces intervening in human affairs, and with views of medicine, biology and psychology that strike the modern reader as primitive and unsatisfyingly pre-scientific. A progressive view of human knowledge that sees it as inexorably proceeding towards greater understanding would suggest that we have little to learn from a psychology dating from the days before science.
Yet ideas about the mind in the medieval period, itself a huge span of time (from the late classical period to the 15th century) that saw many shifts in thought, were much more sophisticated than that caricature would allow. Here, we set out some prominent medieval models of mind and their implications for understanding memory, imagination, emotion and the relations between mind and body.
But hazards are also opportunities: medieval piety foregrounded affective experience, meditation and prayer, and the need to shun distractions in order to stay focused on those tasks. We can also look to imaginative fiction, which offers especially valuable insights into cultural attitudes and experience, of both men and women, and which suggests how ideas of mind, body and affect carried over into secular culture.
Something like a recognisable scientific psychology came into focus towards the end of the 13th century, following the 12th-century rediscovery of Aristotle and the translation of many Arabic medical texts into Latin. Thinkers of this period such as Avicenna, Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon developed complex theories of mind. Observations of the effects of head injuries had confirmed Galen's view that the rational aspects of the psyche were located in the brain (although popular notions persisted through the Middle Ages and beyond of the heart as the site of understanding and feeling). What we would now call cognition was understood as a two-part process, with physiological mechanisms in the brain mirrored by processes within the rational soul/mind, and with neither reducible to the other. The brain was instrumental in transforming the 'vital spirit' (one element of a three-part system of spirits deriving from Arabic philosophy) into the 'animal spirit', which controlled sensation, movement, imagination, cognition and memory. The main work was done by the cerebral ventricles, which housed the 'inner senses', responsible for integrating data from the external senses and constructing thoughts from their component concepts or 'forms' (imagines or phantasmata). Perception worked by the reception of sensory impressions in the anterior part of the brain (the sensus communis or 'common sense') and their temporary storage in the imaginatio (an early version of working memory). Those impressions were then passed on for creative shaping in the middle part of the brain, the imaginativa (later termed 'phantasy'), where another area known as the estimativa could get to work with its making of memory-based and affectively-coloured judgements. Finally, in the back part of the brain, the cellula memorialis was the storehouse of memory.
The faculty of memory had a special status in medieval thinking about the mind. The historian of ideas Mary Carruthers has argued that the medieval conception of memoria embodied something much richer than modern notions of memory as a passive store of information. For thinkers of the Middle Ages, remembering was an active, reconstructive process involving the recombination of different forms of information into new cognitive representations. In its generation of alternative non-real scenarios, this model of remembering presaged modern approaches that see memory as a process of imagination as much as information storage. For the clerics who wrote many of the texts that have come down to us, memoria was a 'a universal thinking machine' (Carruthers, 1998), a technology for meditation and the means for creating new thoughts about God. In Carruthers' analysis, a memory representation formed a complectio, incorporating emotional and motivational elements as well as cognitive, prefiguring modern ideas about memories as inherently emotionally coloured. Medieval scholars' emphasis on the spatial nature of memory reconstruction, as evidenced by their enthusiasm for mnemonic techniques such as the method of loci, also prefigures the cognitive neuroscience of scene construction (Hassabis et al., 2007), with its emphasis on the spatial rather than temporal properties of memory representations (Fernyhough, 2012).
The mysticism of the later Middle Ages, in particular, stressed the individual humanity of Christ and the power of affect and sensory experience to move the individual to spiritual understanding and vision. The extraordinary voices and unusual perceptions of two celebrated English religious writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, further open out the intertwined notions of mind, body and affect in the medieval world.
What we can learn from these ideas and examples that can inform our work as psychologists now? As we have suggested, medieval writings have important implications for current thinking about the relation between brain and mind. The ideas on melancholia and mania that influenced Chaucer, for example, are reminiscent of contemporary views of rumination in depression along with neurobiological accounts of mood disorders as resulting from neurotransmitter imbalances. This has included research linking serotonin levels to obsessive rumination resulting from falling in love (Marazziti et al., 1999), and discussion about possible chemical 'cures' for love-sickness (Earp et al., 2013).
But while modern approaches to the science of love slip easily into the trap of reductionism, medieval accounts show us ways of avoiding the automatic identification of the psychological with the neural. Medieval thinkers resisted reducing the soul/mind to the brain while at the same time avoiding dualism. St Thomas Aquinas, for example, writing in the 13th century, conceived of the human as a compound of body and soul/mind. As we have seen, such ideas illuminate modern notions of the embodied mind. Though we may replace ideas of soul with those of mind, medieval notions of the relation between the non-material faculties of the soul and brain/bodily processes are powerfully suggestive: they bring to mind co-dependence but not identity. While inevitably not representing developed models and theories, these writings offer sophisticated and complex ways of understanding the relation between brain and mind in the era of neuroscience.
In a planned follow-up to this essay, we will turn our attention to medieval preconceptions about mental control, intrusions, and anomalous experiences such as hallucinations. In this area in particular, medieval ideas about the mind are guiding modern scholars towards non-reductive understandings of mental phenomena that can do justice to the richness and variety of human experience.
Hallowe'en finds its origins in rituals surrounding All Hallows' Eve, the night before All Hallows' Day (now generally referred to as All Saints' Day), which is followed the next day by All Souls' Day, the religious festival honouring the souls of the dead. Hallowe'en may use some of the rituals that marked the Celtic harvest festival of Samhain, and is thought, like other feasts, to have been established in order to Christianise a popular pagan festival. It may, however, simply be the case that both pagan (including Roman and Celtic) and Christian religion developed similar rituals to honour the dead at the time in which autumn was moving into winter, and death marked the natural world. This night was also believed to be the night on which spirits walked: revenants from the dead. All Hallows' Eve was associated across Europe with visions or pageants of the danse macabre, a dance of skeletal figures, returning spirits reminding spectators of their own mortality.
Brief descriptions of each Registry title can be found here, and expanded essays are available for select titles.The authors of these essays are experts in film history, and their works appear in books, newspapers, magazinesand online. Some of these essays originated in other publications and are reprinted here by permission of theauthor. Other essays have been written specifically for this website. The views expressed in these essays arethose of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Library of Congress.
7fc3f7cf58