Category Archives: fourteen forms of melancholy

“This doctrine taught that there were two original principles of the universe: Light, the good one; and Darkness, the evil one. These two had been mixed by a cosmic accident, tainting everything except God. Light is characterized by knowledge and feeling, and acts by design and free will, whereas Darkness is ignorant and blind, and acts at random. Mankind’s role in this life was, through good conduct, to release the parts of himself that belonged to Light back to the place of Light and to release the parts of himself that belonged to Darkness back to the place of Darkness.”

“Tarrare, sometimes spelled Tarar, was a French showman and soldier, noted for his unusual appetite and eating habits. Able to eat vast amounts of meat, he was constantly hungry; his parents could not provide for him and he was turned out of the family home as a teenager. He travelled France in the company of a band of prostitutes and thieves before becoming the warm-up act for a travelling charlatan. In this act, he would swallow corks, stones, live animals, and a whole basketful of apples. He then took this act to Paris where he worked as a street performer.

At the start of the War of the First Coalition, Tarrare joined the French Revolutionary Army, where even quadruple the standard military ration was unable to satisfy his large appetite. He would eat any available food from gutters and refuse heaps but his condition still deteriorated through hunger. He was hospitalised due to exhaustion and became the subject of a series of medical experiments to test his eating capacity, in which, among other things, he ate a meal intended for 15 people in a single sitting, ate live cats, snakes, lizards, and puppies, and swallowed eels whole without chewing. Despite his unusual diet, he was underweight and, with the exception of his eating habits, he showed no signs of mental illness other than what was described as an apathetic temperament.

Chastened by this experience, he agreed to submit to any procedure that might cure his appetite, and was treated with laudanum, tobacco-pills, wine-vinegar, and soft-boiled eggs. The procedures failed, and doctors could not keep him on a controlled diet; he would sneak out of the hospital to scavenge for offal in gutters, rubbish heaps and outside butchers’ shops, and attempted to drink the blood of other patients in the hospital and to eat the corpses in the hospital’s morgue. After being suspected of eating a toddler, he was ejected from the hospital…”

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/05/a-17th-century-russian-community-living-in-21st-century-alaska/275440/

https://web.archive.org/web/20091027112545/http://www.geocities.com/mnsocialist/fagen.html

https://drawdown.org/solutions/table-of-solutions?fbclid=IwAR0Rw3Vss-TW4X5S5WY1tu0xptMK551nhmnzeoZa_eaa5FRVhtKz4wTaRL8

https://www.necn.com/news/local/police-in-new-hampshire-warn-of-aggresive-coyote/2220780/?fbclid=IwAR1k5NTFbwOuD8PizvqdNmamrNu2lUSu4pGBTVlI7_qfVZmoFStJRilQ_8k

https://www.lakotatimes.com/articles/metal-show-a-big-hit-in-lakota-country/