Word: goddess
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Year's Eve, the white-clad throngs gather on Brazil's beaches after dark, more than a million people in Rio alone. They bear worldly offerings-lipstick, combs, jewelry, perfume, mirrors, flowers-to give to a vain, beauteous sea goddess. Called lemanjá, she is one of the pantheon worshiped by the various devotees of the pagan cults known as Umbanda, Quimbanda, Candomble, or-to its detractors-as Macumba...
Spiritist rites run the gamut from sanitized middle-class meetings with benches set out for tourists, to clandestine nightlong orgies in forest grottos. Whatever the style, all groups believe in a family of "spirits" or orixas, who usually resemble Christian saints. Thus lemanjá, the sea goddess, is identified with the Virgin Mary and Oxóssi with St. Sebastian...
India's triumph is in large measure a stunning personal one for Mrs. Gandhi. Throughout the crisis Indians have been united behind her as never before, and she is even being compared with the Hindu goddess Durga, who rid the world of the demon Mahasura. Quite apart from the war, India seems to be feeling a new self-assurance. The land that for centuries was synonymous with famine now enjoys a wheat surplus and will soon become self-sufficient in rice, thanks to the Green Revolution. Mrs. Gandhi, backed by an overwhelming mandate in last March's elections...
Librettist John Gay (of Beggar's Opera fame) drew upon an ancient Neapolitan myth: in the jealousy of the evil giant Polyphemus drives him to kill Acts, beloved shepherd of the goddess Galatea. Handel's occasionally inspired setting of the text reaches a high-point in the opening of Act Two. This chorus is beautiful and clever, true baroque artifice in a humorous double fugue...
...portions. To be loved by someone who knows his polymorphous pleasures. To be praised by someone who appreciates wit and brains and who is willing to hang in there night after night repeating the whole litany. To be a poet. To tap-dance beautifully. In short, to be a goddess with an indeterminate number of arms dipping ravenously into life's possibilities...