Ancient “Cloth of the World" - Hereford Mappa Mundi - Tales of Cities, Beasts and Stories

Secreted away beneath the floor of an English cathedral was a large calfskin canvas featuring what, at first glance, appeared to be a map of the world. Once recovered and repaired, the map was found to date to 1285. While a myriad of cities and towns are depicted on the medieval Mappa Mundi, more than 500 ink drawings illustrate biblical events, exotic plants and animals, wild and strange creatures, and classical myths. More than just a map, the “Cloth of the World” remains one of the greatest surviving artworks of the Middle Ages.

Known as the Hereford Mappa Mundi, medieval artwork showcasing history, religion, and mythology is depicted in intricate detail on a single sheet of vellum, or preserved calfskin. The skin stretches five feet high by four feet across, and is attached to an oak frame. The remarkable artifact remains the largest medieval map still known to exist.

The tangled ink illustrations of black, gold, green and blue, reflect a medieval European understanding of the known world at the time—and also the unknown world of the supernatural— highlighting not just the human world of men, cities and seas, but entire bestiaries of horrifying mythical creatures and the strange cultures of distant lands. It was not for use as a navigational tool, but instead was an artistic compendium of people, parables, and places.

Towns and Cities

Most obvious is the cartography of the Mappa Mundi. East is found at the top of the map, as this orientation represented the rising of the sun and the second coming of the Christ. The world is laid out in a circle, and because of its Christian framework, Jerusalem sits at its center, a common theme in medieval mapmaking.  At the very middle of the map a small hole has been pierced where a compass-like instrument was used to create a perfect circle which became an image of a fortified wall with eight towers.

Continents included are Asia, Africa, Europe and the Mediterranean.

Approximately 420 towns and cities of the day are represented on the map, such as Rome and Paris (and Hereford), as well as oceans and important landmarks. 

Myths and Legends

Eight classical legends are included on the elaborate map.

The Golden Fleece as quested for by Jason and the Argonauts is found drawn on the coast of the Black Sea.

The Cretan Labyrinth which bound the mythical Minotaur is depicted on the vellum. It was a recognizable symbol in the Middle Ages, as labyrinths were laid out on floor paving of cathedrals. These winding pathways acted as spiritual pilgrimages for the faithful.

In classical myth, the Columns of Hercules represented the western edge of the known inhabited world. This is marked on the Mappa Mundi at the Strait of Gibraltar.

Even the camp of Alexander the Great is illustrated on the map. Legends of the deeds and successes of the heroic leader were popular with scholars at the time. Alexander’s camp is shown as many tall tents, and a strong wall runs along his camp, which Alexander was thought to have built to repel and imprison the “destructive evil of the Sons of Cain.” The area below this is attributed to the “Scythian races”, and as knowledge of this region was limited, the area is decorated with dramatic and wild images.

Bible Stories

Jesus is found at the very top of the map, highlighting his significance and importance in the Christian faith. Along his right, people travel from death into heaven, and on his left, the damned are chained and dragged off to Hell, represented by a beast’s gaping maw, including sharp teeth and glaring eyes.

15 bible stories are illustrated on the Mappa Mundi. The Garden of Eden, including Adam, a serpent, and Eve, is found near the top. Eden is surrounded by a ring of fire, signifying that it is off limits to humanity.

A boat filled with creatures and a bearded man represents the tale of Noah’s Ark.

The largest building on the map is the five-story city of Babylon. The topmost structure is labelled the “Tower of Babel.” The sheer size of the elaborate drawing, as well as the details of the text on the map, emphasize the arrogance and pride of the people who were said to build a tower so high that it might challenge god. In the biblical legend, God’s punishment ultimately caused humanity to speak in different languages.

On the map a long, curving line cuts a path through a red-ink Red Sea, depicting the travel route of the Israelites in the story of Exodus.

Bestiary

Many natural and unnatural creatures abound on the Hereford Mappa Mundi. Animals less well-known to medieval Europeans, such as camels or elephants, were drawn with some success on the map. A camel with two humps is located south of the Memarnau Mountains. Bestiaries (books of beasts) of the time described camels as living for one hundred years, and being only able to drink muddy water.

Elephants are drawn wearing constructed wooden towers, as the large animals were fitted with these fighting platforms for use in warfare by Indian and Persian soldiers. It was believed even then that elephants fear mice

A winged salamander seems to fly its way across the Hereford Mappa Mundi. Gianni D'Anna/Flickr

The legendary unicorn is depicted on the map, with a single, long horn. Named Monoceros, the unicorn was often linked to Jesus. It was reputed to be strong enough to battle elephants, but could be tamed by innocent and virtuous young women.

33 different animals, exotic plants and birds are described in ink on the Mappa Mundi.

Monstrous Strangers

Various strange and wonderful people are represented on the map, both real and unreal. Likely due to exaggerated traveler tales of dangerous foreign cultures, 32 images include outrageous people, such as the Blemmye; a war-like race of people with no heads, and with facial features in their chests.

http://www.ancient-origins.net/artifacts-other-artifacts/hereford-mappa-mundi-legendary-cities-monstrous-races-beasts020328

Baltimore Protest Heard Around the World Sparks American Outcry Demonstrations in Cities Nation Wide

""Thousands of protesters took to the streets in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Thursday evening, pushing their way through police lines and blocking access to a major highway.

Philly joined a growing list of cities on edge after 100 cops were injured, businesses looted and burned, cars destroyed and bystanders were pummeled in Baltimore Tuesday night, resulting in Maryland calling out the National Guard to restore a degree of calm.

Earlier in the day, crowds gathered for a “Philly is Baltimore” rally outside city hall and moved toward Rittenhouse Square. Protesters later surrounded a police car and stopped a bus, according to Philly.com.

A video of the protest showed crowds standing in the road near a major highway, shouting, “Shut it down!”

The march was organized to show solidarity with Freddie Gray, his family and Baltimore residents. Family members of Gray allege he was injured at the hands of police, and those injuries led to his death at a hospital several days later.

A woman named Angela told CNN, “This is about police ignoring the cry for treating everyone equally. We want answers, and we want them now.”

Another man said, “Police can get away with anything when it comes to a black person.”

Before the crowds broke through police lines, Philadelphia Police Chief Inspector Joe Sullivan told CNN, “Protesters are citizens, not suspects. Our job as police it to keep them safe while they exercise their First Amendment rights.”

Sullivan said he’s not worried about violence in the city, according to the report.

Film footage of the scene showed crowds dancing in the streets and chanting, “Hey, hey! Ho, ho! These racist cops have got to go!”

In Cincinnati, Ohio, at least 300 people gathered outside the Hamilton County Courthouse and began marching to police headquarters. Protesters chanted, “No justice, no peace. Let’s take back our streets!” Police threatened arrests of protesters who didn’t stay on the sidewalks.

According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, protesters attempted to enter an I-71 ramp, but police said they had the situation under control.

Downtown Baltimore was unusually quiet Thursday, with some major tourist attractions closed.

Thursday night was a cakewalk compared to the mayhem in cities the night before all sparked by the earlier mayhem in Baltimore where a 10 p.m.-to-5 a.m. curfew was instituted the day after the uprising.

The Baltimore riots were triggered by the death of a young black man, Freddie Gray, who died while in police custody. Police gave their findings on the death of Gray to the state prosecutor Thursday. The results of the police investigation were sent to State Attorney Marilyn Mosby, who will decide whether to bring charges against any of the six officers who were involved in arresting and transporting Gray April 12. Gray died a week later of a severed spine, touching off days of protests, violence and mass arrests.

Some 12 cops were seriously injured – enough to be placed on medical leave and 15 on light duty. In addition, 106 people who had been arrested during the disturbances have been released because police have been unable to charge them during the 48-hour period after their arrest.

According to the Washington Post, the prisoner sharing the police van told investigators he could hear Gray “banging against the walls” of the vehicle and believed he “was intentionally trying to injure himself.”

However, a man identifying himself as that prisoner has come forward to say the police report is inaccurate.

“All I did was go straight to the station, but I heard a little banging like he was banging his head,” the man, Donta Allen, told WJZ-TV, which reported Allen had been arrested on suspicion of stealing cigarettes.

In Baltimore, gun violence has reportedly surged, with at least five people shot in three separate incidents, according to the Baltimore Sun.

“Since the National Guard and outside law enforcement agencies were deployed to certain areas of the city in response to Monday’s unrest, the city has seen six homicides,” stated the Sun report. “Protests have been peaceful, but unrelated gun violence has spiked.”

Protests in Seattle, Washington; Portland, Oregon; and Oakland, California, are scheduled for Friday, which is also May Day.""

http://www.wnd.com/2015/04/round-2-protests-spread-to-more-u-s-cities/

Muslim Immigrants at an All Time High and U.S. Cities are Secretly Selected Nesting Grounds

""With Muslim immigrants streaming into the United States at a rate of 100,000 per year, some of the communities targeted for new arrivals are seeking information on their new neighbors, only to be frustrated by federal bureaucrats and their hired contractors.

How does a city get on the U.S. State Department’s list of 190 communities selected for refugee resettlement? How can cities find out who will be coming and when? What services will they use, and what will be the cost to taxpayers?

And, the granddaddy of all questions: Can the communities be assured that foreign nationals with ties to ISIS, al-Shabab and other Islamic terrorist groups won’t slip through the government’s porous screening process posing as “refugees”?

The answers to these questions are simple. Very little information is available. And there are no guarantees that some very bad apples won’t arrive in your town, says a leading expert on the refugee resettlement program.

One community that is trying to get information right now is Spartanburg, South Carolina.

On March 16, Ann Corcoran, author of the Refugee Resettlement Watch blog, spoke at a national security summit in Columbia, South Carolina, hosted by former Defense Department analyst Frank Gaffney. A few days before that conference, on March 9, a story broke in the local Spartanburg newspaper that World Relief, one of the nine resettlement agencies that works under contract with the federal government, was planning to open an office in Spartanburg.

When an agency like World Relief opens an office in a city, it means refugees will be arriving soon. There are no public hearings or announcements in local media, Corcoran said. Typically a story will appear in the local newspaper just before or after the first arrivals appear in town.

Corcoran met some activists at Gaffney’s conference who wanted to find out more about the plans for resettling United Nations-certified refugees in their city.

“It is like pulling teeth to get any information,” Corcoran said. “And these are long-term grassroots activists who know how to get information.”

One of the activists is Christina Jeffrey, a political science professor and former U.S. House of Representatives historian who ran against Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., in last year’s Republican primary. Gowdy is now chairman of the House subcommittee on immigration and refugees.

“He is chair of this committee, and so they want to set up a refugee office in his home district, and we still can’t get any information,” Corcoran said.

Jeffrey has asked the federal government to prepare a comprehensive impact statement, detailing the impact the refugees will have on Spartanburg’s public services. Schools, health facilities, housing, the job market and public welfare programs will all be affected, but so far nobody is saying to what extent.

The mayor of Athens, Georgia, who asked for the same type of report last year, encountered the same blackout of information.

St. Cloud, Minnesota, residents have also inquired about how many more Somali refugees will be arriving in light of recent problems with Somali student protests at a local community college. Dozens of other Somalis have either left the country to fight for al-Shabab or ISIS while others have been charged and convicted with sending material support to overseas terrorist organizations.

“They’re trying to get information because residents have heard the rumor that there are 1,500 more Somalis getting ready to be resettled there in St. Cloud,” Corcoran said.

The resettlement agencies hold lots of meetings and place lots of phone calls with “stakeholders” in the targeted communities, but these collaborative efforts almost always occur outside of the public spotlight.

“The term ‘stakeholders’ does not apply to you, the taxpayer footing the bill for all of this,” Corcoran said.

According to a March 8 article in the Spartanburg Herald-Journal, “a partnership of faith leaders” called Come Closer Spartanburg issued an invitation more than a year ago to World Relief to open a refugee office in Spartanburg. The March 8 article was the first public revelation of this effort even though World Relief had been working behind the scenes with “stakeholders” for a year. An initial group of 65 refugees will arrive this year, starting in April or May, from Congo, Bhutan and Syria.

Jeffrey, in a March 30 op-ed in the local newspaper, shed more light on the group, Come Closer Spartanburg, and its goals:

“On its website, Come Closer Spartanburg describes the city of Spartanburg as ‘home to what has been identified as the fifth most dangerous neighborhood in the United States. We have extremely high rates of unemployment, poverty and domestic violence. Overall, we were recently listed as the fourth most ‘miserable’ city to live in our country. It does not take long to realize that we are a city in need of transformation.”

Jeffrey discovered that the objective is to plant a “seed community” in Spartanburg that will eventually blossom and transform the city. The federal government is creating communities within communities often pitted against each other economically and culturally.

It’s the same tactic that has been used for decades in Europe.

“Looking at other U.S. cities with new refugee communities, it appears that contractors often keep sending refugees to the same place until there is a community within a community. Unassimilated communities have created problems in Europe, and we are beginning to have similar problems here in the United States (witness Milwaukee, Wis., and Lewiston, Maine),” Jeffrey writes.

Corcoran said the word “assimilation” is no longer used by the resettlement agencies and their friends in the federal government. Rather, the new buzzword is “integration.” The goal of integration is to have a multitude of diverse cultures living side by side in “coexistence” but never assimilating.

President Obama issued an executive memorandum dated Nov. 21, 2014, to all federal agencies directing them on “Creating Welcoming Communities and Fully Integrated Immigrants and Refugees.”

This sort of backroom dealing between the federal government, its hired resettlement contractors and local officials is not designed to provide information to the people who live and work in the targeted refugee cities, Corcoran said.

“They don’t like this whole idea that their town is being secretly selected,” she said. “This has been going on for over a year now in Spartanburg, and the refugees are now due to start arriving in a month or so. And these people have no information until it’s actually upon them.”

The mayor of Athens, Nancy Denson, requested a plan. The city of Spartanburg is asking for the same consideration.

“That’s what these people in Spartanburg are asking for, and they are asking that when you have a plan that you present it publicly at a public hearing,” Corcoran said. “They don’t want to have to show any of that to the public. They’re saying it’s only 65; well, it’s only 65 for the first year. It will continue to be more every year afterward once you become a seed community.”

Of the more than 500 Syrian refugees brought to the U.S. so far this past year, 90 percent of them have been Muslim, Corcoran said.

Corcoran is pushing for reform of the refugee system in America.

She believes communities targeted for resettlement should be entitled to an economic and social impact study.

“And they should put it out for review at multiple public hearings, because once the public hears this, what we find is they don’t want it,” she said. “Because they say, ‘We are struggling with our own homeless, our own mentally ill and poorly educated. Why do we need to take in other countries’ problems?""

http://www.wnd.com/2015/04/u-s-cities-secretly-selected-for-muslim-immigration/