Système universitaire de documentation
The système universitaire de documentation or SUDOC is a system used by the libraries of French universities and higher education establishments to identify and manage the documents in their possession. The catalog, which contains more than 10 million references, allows students and researcher to search for bibliographical and location information in over 3,400 documentation centers, it is maintained by the Bibliographic Agency for Higher Education. Official website
90482 Orcus
90482 Orcus, provisional designation 2004 DW, is a trans-Neptunian object with a large moon, Vanth. With a diameter of 917 km, it is a possible dwarf planet, it was discovered on 17 February 2004, by American astronomers Michael Brown of Caltech, Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory, David Rabinowitz of Yale University. Precovery images taken by the Palomar Observatory as early as 8 November 1951 were obtained from the Digitized Sky Survey. Orcus is a plutino, a trans-Neptunian object, locked in a 2:3 resonance with the ice giant Neptune, making two revolutions around the Sun to every three of Neptune's; this is much like Pluto, except that it is constrained to always be in the opposite phase of its orbit from Pluto: Orcus is at aphelion when Pluto is at perihelion and vice versa. Moreover, the aphelion of Orcus's orbit points in nearly the opposite direction from Pluto's, although the eccentricities and inclinations are similar; because of these similarities and contrasts, along with its large moon Vanth that recalls Pluto's large moon Charon, Orcus has been regarded as the anti-Pluto.
This was a major consideration in selecting its name, as the deity Orcus was the Etruscan equivalent of the Roman Pluto, became an alternate name for Pluto. The surface of Orcus is bright with albedo reaching 23 percent, neutral in color and water-rich; the ice is predominantly in crystalline form. Other compounds like methane or ammonia may be present; the existence of a satellite allowed astronomers to determine the mass of the system, equal to that of the Saturnian moon Tethys. The ratio of masses of Orcus and Vanth is uncertain anywhere from 1:33 to 1:12; the diameter of Orcus is estimated to be about 920 km and the diameter of Vanth about 276 km assuming similar albedo values for the primary and the satellite. A spatially resolved submillimeter imaging of Orcus–Vanth system in 2016 showed that Vanth has a large size of 920 km, with an uncertainty of 75 km; the size of the primary becomes smaller at 910 km. That estimate for Vanth is in good agreement with the size of about 442.5 km derived from a stellar occultation in 2017.
The minor planet Orcus was named after one of the Roman gods of Orcus. While Pluto was the ruler of the underworld, Orcus was a punisher of the condemned; the approved naming citation was published by the Minor Planet Center on 26 November 2004. Under the guidelines of the International Astronomical Union's naming conventions, objects with a similar size and orbit to that of Pluto are named after underworld deities. Accordingly, the discoverers suggested naming the object after Orcus, the Etruscan god of the underworld and punisher of broken oaths, he was portrayed in paintings in Etruscan tombs as a bearded giant. The name was a private reference to the homonymous Orcas Island, where Brown's wife Diane had lived as a child and that they visit frequently. On 30 March 2005, Orcus's moon, was named after a winged female demon of the Etruscan underworld, she could be present at the moment of death, acted as a guide of the deceased to the underworld. The absolute magnitude of Orcus is 2.3. The detection of Orcus by the Spitzer Space Telescope in the far infrared and by Herschel Space Telescope in submillimeter constrains its diameter to 958.4 kilometres, with an uncertainty of 22.9 kilometres.
Orcus appears to have an albedo of about 21 percent to 25 percent, which may be typical of trans-Neptunian objects approaching the 1,000 km diameter range. The magnitude and size estimates were made under the assumption; the presence of a large satellite, may change them considerably. The absolute magnitude of Vanth is estimated at 4.88, which means that it is about 11 times fainter than Orcus itself. If the albedos of both bodies are the same at 23 percent, the estimated size of Orcus is about 917 km, the size of Vanth is about 276 km; the ALMA submillimeter measurements taken in 2016 showed that Vanth has a large size of 475 km with albedo of about 8 percent while Orcus's has a smaller size of 910 km. Using a stellar occultation by Vanth in 2017, Vanth's diameter has been determined to be 442.5 km, with an uncertainty of 10.2 km. Mike Brown's website lists Orcus as a dwarf planet with "near certainty", Tancredi concludes that it is one, is massive enough to be considered one under the 2006 draft proposal of the IAU, but the IAU has not formally recognized it as such.
Since Orcus is known to be a binary system, the mass of the system has been estimated to be ×1020 kg, or about 3.8 percent the mass of the most massive known dwarf planet, Eris. How this mass is partitioned between Orcus and Vanth depends of their relative sizes. If Vanth's diameter is about one third that of Orcus, its mass is only 3 percent of the system mass. On the other hand, if the size of Vanth is about half that of Orcus its mass could be as high as 1/12 of the system mass, or about 8 percent of the mass of Orcus; the density of the Orcus is about 1.53 g/cm3. The first spectroscopic observations in 2004 showed that the visible spectrum of Orcus is flat and featureless, whereas in the near-infrared there were moderately strong water absorption bands at 1.5 and 2.0 μm. The neutral visible spectrum and strong water absorption bands of Orcus showed that Orcus appeared different from other trans-Neptunian objects, which have a red visible spectrum and featureless
Integrated Authority File
The Integrated Authority File or GND is an international authority file for the organisation of personal names, subject headings and corporate bodies from catalogues. It is used for documentation in libraries and also by archives and museums; the GND is managed by the German National Library in cooperation with various regional library networks in German-speaking Europe and other partners. The GND falls under the Creative Commons Zero licence; the GND specification provides a hierarchy of high-level entities and sub-classes, useful in library classification, an approach to unambiguous identification of single elements. It comprises an ontology intended for knowledge representation in the semantic web, available in the RDF format; the Integrated Authority File became operational in April 2012 and integrates the content of the following authority files, which have since been discontinued: Name Authority File Corporate Bodies Authority File Subject Headings Authority File Uniform Title File of the Deutsches Musikarchiv At the time of its introduction on 5 April 2012, the GND held 9,493,860 files, including 2,650,000 personalised names.
There are seven main types of GND entities: LIBRIS Virtual International Authority File Information pages about the GND from the German National Library Search via OGND Bereitstellung des ersten GND-Grundbestandes DNB, 19 April 2012 From Authority Control to Linked Authority Data Presentation given by Reinhold Heuvelmann to the ALA MARC Formats Interest Group, June 2012
Erinyes
In ancient Greek religion and mythology, the Erinyes known as the Furies, were female chthonic deities of vengeance, sometimes referred to as "infernal goddesses". A formulaic oath in the Iliad invokes them as "the Erinyes, that under earth take vengeance on men, whosoever hath sworn a false oath." Walter Burkert suggests they are "an embodiment of the act of self-cursing contained in the oath." They correspond to the Dirae in Roman mythology. The Roman writer Maurus Servius Honoratus wrote that they are called "Eumenides" in hell, "Furiae" on earth, "Dirae" in heaven. According to Hesiod's Theogony, when the Titan Cronus castrated his father and threw his genitalia into the sea, the Erinyes emerged from the drops of blood which fell on the earth, while Aphrodite was born from the crests of sea foam. According to variant accounts, they emerged from an more primordial level—from Nyx, or from a union between air and mother earth, their number is left indeterminate. Virgil working from an Alexandrian source, recognized three: Alecto or Alekto and Tisiphone or Tilphousia, all of whom appear in the Aeneid.
Dante Alighieri followed Virgil in depicting the same three-character triptych of Erinyes. Whilst the Erinyes were described as three maiden goddesses, the Erinys Telphousia was a by-name for the wrathful goddess Demeter, worshipped under the title of Erinys in the Arkadian town of Thelpousa; the word Erinyes is of uncertain etymology. The word Erinys in the singular and as a theonym is first attested in Mycenaean Greek, written in Linear B, in the following forms:, e-ri-nu, and, e-ri-nu-we; these words are found on the KN Fp 1, KN V 52, KN Fh 390 tablets. The Erinyes are more ancient than any of the Olympians deities, their task is to hear complaints brought by mortals against the insolence of the young to the aged, of children to parents, of hosts to guests, of householders or city councils to suppliants—and to punish such crimes by hounding culprits relentlessly. The Erinyes are crones and, depending upon authors, described as having snakes for hair, dog's heads, coal black bodies, bat's wings, blood-shot eyes.
In their hands they carry brass-studded scourges, their victims die in torment. According to some sources, the three classic Furies sprang forth from the spilled blood of Uranus when he was castrated by his son Cronus; the sisters are: Alecto – Punisher of moral crimes Megaera – Punisher of infidelity, oath breakers, theft Tisiphone – Punisher of murderers Pausanias describe a sanctuary in Athens dedicated to the Erinyes under the name Semnai: "Hard by is a sanctuary of the goddesses which the Athenians call the August, but Hesiod in the Theogony calls them Erinyes. It was Aeschylus, but on the images neither of these nor of any of the under-world deities is there anything terrible. There are images of Pluto and Earth, by which sacrifice those who have received an acquittal on the Hill of Ares. Tantalizing myth fragments dealing with the Erinyes are found among the earliest extant records of ancient Greek culture; the Erinyes are featured prominently in the myth of Orestes, which recurs throughout many works of ancient Greek literature.
Featured in ancient Greek literature, from poems to plays, the Erinyes form the Chorus and play a major role in the conclusion of Aeschylus's dramatic trilogy the Oresteia. In the first play, King Agamemnon returns home from the Trojan War, where he is slain by his wife, who wants vengeance for her daughter Iphigenia, sacrificed by Agamemnon in order to obtain favorable winds to sail to Troy. In the second play, The Libation Bearers, their son Orestes has reached manhood and has been commanded by Apollo's oracle to avenge his father's murder at his mother’s hand. Returning home and revealing himself to his sister Electra, Orestes pretends to be a messenger bringing the news of his own death to Clytemnestra, he slays his mother and her lover Aegisthus. Although Orestes’ actions were what Apollo had commanded him to do, Orestes has still committed matricide, a grave sacrilege; because of this, he is pursued and tormented by the terrible Erinyes, who demand yet further blood vengeance. In The Eumenides, Orestes is told by Apollo at Delphi that he should go to Athens to seek the aid of the goddess Athena.
In Athens, Athena arranges for Orestes to be tried by a jury of Athenian citizens, with her presiding. The Erinyes appear as Orestes' accusers; the trial becomes a debate about the necessity of blood vengeance, the honor, due to a mother compared to that due to a father, the respect that must be paid to ancient deities such as the Erinyes compared to the newer generation of Apollo and Athena. The jury vote is evenly split. Athena chooses for acquittal. Athena declares Orestes acquitted. Despite the verdict, the Erinyes threaten to torment all inhabitants of Athens and to poison the surrounding countryside. Athena, offers the ancient goddesses a new role, as protectors of justice, rather than vengeance, o
Psychopomp
Psychopomps are creatures, angels, or deities in many religions whose responsibility is to escort newly deceased souls from Earth to the afterlife. Their role is not to judge the deceased, but to guide them. Appearing on funerary art, psychopomps have been depicted at different times and in different cultures as anthropomorphic entities, deer, whip-poor-wills, crows, owls and cuckoos; when seen as birds, they are seen in huge masses, waiting outside the home of the dying. Classical examples of a psychopomp are the ancient Egyptian god Anubis, the Greek ferryman Charon and deities Hermes and Hecate, the Roman god Mercury, the Etruscan deity Vanth; the form of Shiva as Tarakeshwara in Hinduism performs a similar role, although leading the soul to moksha rather than an afterlife. Additionally, in the Bhagavata Purana, the Visnudutas and Yamadutas are messengers for their respective masters and Yama, their role is illustrated vividly in the story of Ajamila. In many beliefs, a spirit being taken to the underworld is violently ripped from its body.
In the Persian tradition, the Zoroastrian Self-guide, appears as a beautiful young maiden to those who deserve to cross the Chinvat Bridge or a hideous old hag to those who do not. In Judaism and Islam, Azrael plays the role of the angel of death who carries the soul up to the heavens. In many cultures, the shaman fulfills the role of the psychopomp; this may include not only accompanying the soul of the dead, but to help at birth, to introduce the newborn child's soul to the world. This accounts for the contemporary title of "midwife to the dying", or "End of Life Doula", another form of psychopomp work. In Filipino culture, ancestral spirits function as psychopomps; when the dying call out to specific dead persons, the spirits of the latter are visible to the former. The spirits, who traditionally wait at the foot of the deathbed, retrieve the soul soon after death and escort it into the afterlife; the banshee of Irish and Scottish folklore fits the role of a psychopomp. In Jungian psychology, the psychopomp is a mediator between the conscious realms.
It is symbolically personified in dreams as a wise woman, or sometimes as a helpful animal. The most common contemporary example of a psychopomp appearing in popular culture is the Grim Reaper, which dates from 15th-century England and has been adopted into many other cultures around the world over the years. Geoffrey Dennis, "Abraham", "Elijah", "Lailah", "Sandalphon", Encyclopedia of Jewish Myth and Mysticism, Llewellyn, 2007. Eliade, Mircea, "Shamanism", 1964, Chapters 6 and 7, "Magical Cures: the Shaman as Psychopomp"
Charun
In Etruscan mythology, Charun acted as one of the psychopompoi of the underworld. He is portrayed with Vanth, a winged goddess associated with the underworld, his name was imported from Greek Charon, although it is uncertain whether Etruscans had a native name for a god of the underworld before this. As suggested by alternations in the Etruscan language such as θu "one" changing to θunśna "first", lev "lion" and Apulu, words ending in -n after u were disappearing from the language, why we see his name spelled Xarun and Xaru; the Etruscan Charun was fundamentally different from his Greek counterpart. Guarding the entry to the underworld he is depicted with a hammer and is shown with pointed ears, snakes around his arms, a blueish coloration symbolizing the decay of death. In some images he has enormous wings, he is depicted as a large creature with snake-like hair, a vulture's hooked nose, large tusks like a boar, heavy brow ridges, large lips, fiery eyes, pointed ears a black beard, enormous wings, discolored skin, snakes around his arm.
Larissa Bonfante and Judith Swaddling have this to say about Charun: "Many scenes feature the two purely Etruscan underworld demons and Charu, whose job is not to punish the dead but rather to escort them to their final destination." However, there are at least two examples, on the sarcophagus of Laris Pulenas as well as a red figure stamnos from Orbetello, that do illustrate Charun in a menacing fashion. Each depicts Charun threatening a male figure with his hammer; the grotesque nature of the depiction of Charun appears to have been at least apotropaic in nature. Apotropaic art was the practice of the neighboring Greeks at this time, as represented by the exaggerated eyes painted on drinking vessels in the 6th century BC to ward away spirits while drinking or the monstrous depiction of Medusa whose image was said to turn men to stone. Through these images of the grotesque and blood-letting, the Etruscans may have believed that they helped to fend off evil spirits from the tomb as well as sanctify the tomb in place of the actual ritual sacrifice of an animal performed in funerary rites.
Nancy de Grummond offers a different view. The relief on the sarcophagus of Laris Pulenas at Tarquinia, shows two Charuns swinging their hammers at a person's head, though the head no longer survives in the relief due to an accident of preservation. Years in the Colosseum, a Charun-like figure called Dispater would hit the loser with a hammer to make sure he was dead in reflection of Charun; the hammer might be used to protect the dead. Most it is held, or the handle planted on the ground and the mallet head leaned upon. De Grummond notes that the ferry of Charon appears only once in surviving Etruscan art, that some Etruscan demons are equipped with oars, but they use them as weapons rather than in their maritime function. Many authors tend to take a more sensationalist view of Charun, speaking of him as a "death-demon"; such authors may be inspired by Christian views of moral punishment. For the Etruscans, as with the Greeks, Hades was a morally neutral place of the dead. Neither the "good" nor the "bad" could escape the clutches of death and both were assembled there together.
Ron Terpening, a professor of Italian literature at the University of Arizona, cites Franz de Ruyt, who claims Charun is similar to Chaldean demons or the Hindu divinities Shiva and Kali. He is presumed to be the servant of Mantus and Mania, like Charon, is comparable to the Greeks' Thanatos, the Erinyes, the Keres; the author, like de Grummond, feels that some Renaissance paintings of Greek Charon may show the continuity of pre-Christian Etruscan beliefs. On when the deity had evolved into the Greek Charon, or Caronte in Italian, Terpening notes that Charun's hammer or mallet is sometimes replaced with an oar, although it does not fit with his duties. According to Jeff Rovin, Charun guided souls on horseback to the underworld and "brings horses to the newly-dead", but this is idle speculation, he claims that Charun appears to love violence and participates in warfare adding that Charun enjoys natural disasters as well. An Etruscan krater from François Tomb depicts Charun with Ajax or Achilles slaughtering Trojan prisoners.
This urn is held in Cabinet des Médailles 920, Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris. Rovin says that some accounts depict him with a sword, that he "slices" souls with it. At least one image shows him guiding a soul on horseback, equipped with both a hammer and a sword, though he is carrying it on his person; the Charon of Vergil in the Aeneid is cruel. F. Jackson Knight, "Vergil's Charon is not only the Greek ferryman of Aristophanes, but more than half his Etruscan self, the Etruscan torturing death-devil, no ferryman at all." Charun is believed to have worked with many assistants in the Underworld, although they could be independent deities in their own right. Most of their names are lost to us, but at least one, Tuchulcha, is identified in the Tomb of Orcus II, has hair and wings like a Gorgon. Tuchulcha, whose gender is debated among scholars, appears in a depiction of the story of Theseus visiting the underworld; these and his friend Peirithous are playing a board game, attended by Tuchulcha. There ar
Etruscan religion
Etruscan religion comprises a set of stories and religious practices of the Etruscan civilization, originating in the 7th century BC from the preceding Iron Age Villanovan culture influenced by the mythology of ancient Greece and Phoenicia, sharing similarities with concurrent Roman mythology and religion. As the Etruscan civilization was assimilated into the Roman Republic in the 4th century BC, the Etruscan religion and mythology were incorporated into classical Roman culture, following the Roman tendency to absorb some of the local gods and customs of conquered lands; the Etruscan system of belief was an immanent polytheism. Long after the assimilation of the Etruscans, Seneca the Younger said that the difference between the Romans and the Etruscans was thatWhereas we believe lightning to be released as a result of the collision of clouds, they believe that the clouds collide so as to release lightning: for as they attribute all to deity, they are led to believe not that things have a meaning insofar as they occur, but rather that they occur because they must have a meaning.
Around the mun or muni, or tombs, were the man or mani, the souls of the ancestors. In iconography after the 5th century BC, the deceased are shown traveling to the underworld. In several instances of Etruscan art, such as in the François Tomb in Vulci, a spirit of the dead is identified by the term hinthial " underneath". A god was called an ais; the abode of a god was a sacred place, such as a favi, a grave or temple. There, one would need to make a fler, or "offering". Three layers of deities are portrayed in Etruscan art. One appears to be lesser divinities of an indigenous origin: the sun. Ruling over them were higher deities that seem to reflect the Indo-European system: Tin or Tinia, the sky, Uni his wife, Cel, the earth goddess; as a third layer, the Greek gods were adopted by the Etruscan system during the Etruscan Orientalizing Period of 750/700-600 BC. Examples are Aritimi and Pacha, over time the primary trinity became Tinia and Menrva; the Etruscans believed their religion had been revealed to them by seers, the two main ones being Tages, a childlike figure born from tilled land, gifted with prescience, Vegoia, a female figure.
The Etruscans believed in intimate contact with divinity. They did nothing without proper consultation with the signs from them; these practices were taken over in total by the Romans. The Etruscan scriptures were a corpus of texts termed the Etrusca Disciplina; this name appears in Valerius Maximus, Marcus Tullius Cicero refers to a disciplina in his writings on the subject. Massimo Pallottino summarizes the known scriptures as the Libri Haruspicini, containing the theory and rules of divination from animal entrails; the last was composed of the Libri Fatales, detailing the religiously correct methods of founding cities and shrines, draining fields, formulating laws and ordinances, measuring space and dividing time. The revelations of the prophet Tages were given in the Libri Tagetici, which included the Libri Haruspicini and the Acherontici, those of the prophetess Vegoia in the Libri Vegoici, which included the Libri Fulgurales and part of the Libri Rituales; these works did not present prophecies or scriptures in the ordinary sense: the Etrusca Disciplina foretold nothing itself.
The Etruscans appear to have had religion and no great visions. Instead they concentrated on the problem of the will of the gods: questioning why, if the gods created the universe and humanity and have a will and a plan for everyone and everything in it, they did not devise a system for communicating that will in a clear manner; the Etruscans accepted the inscrutability of their gods' wills. They did not attempt to rationalize or explain divine actions or formulate any doctrines of the gods' intentions; as answer to the problem of ascertaining the divine will, they developed an elaborate system of divination. These revelations may not be otherwise understandable and may not be pleasant or easy, but are perilous to doubt; the Etrusca Disciplina therefore was a set of rules for the conduct of all sorts of divination. Cicero saidFor a hasty acceptance of an erroneous opinion is discreditable in any case, so in an inquiry as to how much weight should be given to auspices, to sacred rites, to religious observances.
He quipped, regarding d
