This paper sets out to answer four apparently unconnected questions, which, however, I hope to show to be parts of one question: Why did Haimon kill himself over the body of Antigone? Why did Philinnion return for three nights to her father's house? Why is it unlawful to leave a story unfinished? Why is a magician sometimes torn in pieces by his own devils, or otherwise destroyed by his own magic?

The traditional view in Theravada Buddhism of the heart (hadaya) as the 'seat of consciousness' is explored. Evidence is sought in the Nikayas, the Abhidhamma and commentaries, Buddhaghosa's "Visuddhimagga" (5th century), and Kassapa's "Mohavicchedani" (12th century). Some possible sources of error are identified. The view is challenged on the basis of the early teachings of the Buddha and the alternative view, that it is the whole body that is the seat of consciousness, is reconstructed. Some possible future comparative research and (...) applications are suggested. (shrink)

I. It has long been a standing puzzle why the women at the festival of Mater Matuta prayed, not for their own children, but for their sisters' offspring. The attempts to connect it with any sociological phenomenon are purely absurd, and would not have been noticed but for their association with one or two famous names and the complete ignorance of non-European systems of relationship prevailing among the scholars of an older generation. There is no system under which a woman (...) is closer akin to her sister's children than to her own; for under father-right a nephew or niece is further off than an own child, and if the system be pushed to the most logical and most absurd extremity, so as to make a child kin to his father only, not his mother, then he is also no kin to his mother's sister; under mother-right, which Rome never had in any form whatsoever, the mother is still nearer kin than the maternal aunt; while if ever there was, anywhere in the world, a classificatory system so pure and rigorous as to make no distinction between the actual mother and any other woman of the same age-class, then mother and aunt were in the same degree of kinship to every member of the younger generation. No ritual explanation I know will bear investigating. Yet the fact is handed down to us on good authority, probably that of Verrius Flaccus, the most likely common source for Ovid and Plutarch. (shrink)