United States or Singapore ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Around the couch where the body lay were assembled priests dressed as gods. These were Isis naked with a crown of the pharaohs, the youthful Horns, Anubis with a jackal head, bird-headed Tot with tablets in his hands, and many others.
The esoteric or secret religion known to the high priests and the instructed ones was different from the animal-worship and adoration of bird-headed deities, which gave the common people such interest in daily life. They would have been lost without their monsters; and the priests would have been lost without the temples necessary for the worship of such a menagerie.
Their architecture forms a sort of border-land between the Byzantine of Venice and the Lombardic of Verona. The superb domes of St. Anthony's emulate those of St. Mark's; and the porticos of other Paduan churches rest upon the backs of bird-headed lions and leopards that fascinate with their mystery and beauty.
In this hall was the malachite statue of the bird-headed Horus, adorned with gold and jewels. In front of the statue was an altar shaped as a truncated pyramid, the king's armor, costly armchairs and stools, also tables covered with trifles and small objects.
Corkran was unctuously sipping his, and had not expected me to receive mine till after the battle. But I got it in spite of him, and mapped out a programme as I drank. Then I ceased to tremble before the confused assemblage or bird-headed gods, cat-faced goddesses, and sacred vultures that danced or flapped in my brain.
If even we admit that some illusion may have suggested the belief in a creature half man, half fish, we cannot thus explain the prevalence among Eastern races of idols representing bird-headed men, and men having their legs replaced by the legs of a cock, and men with the heads of elephants.
He looked like a bird-headed god, such as are seen on funeral frescoes, who had transmigrated into the body of a scholar.
He was turned out of his nice cabin, and packed in with his belongings to share that of Lieutenant Kurt, whose luck it was to be junior, and the bird-headed officer, still swearing slightly, and carrying strops and aluminium boot-trees and weightless hair-brushes and hand-mirrors and pomade in his hands, resumed possession.
Such mixed forms were, indeed, frequently borrowed by early decorative art, and on "Orientalising" vases we constantly find human-headed and bird-headed quadrupeds, usually winged, and human-headed birds. The delight in winged figures generally, which was mainly decorative in early times, also finds its origin in Oriental woven stuffs.
Word Of The Day