Word: witchcrafts
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After two years of failure, Griffith finally found an answer. Using a delicate technique that he describes as "more witchcraft than science," he began spraying his DNA samples with a thin coating of tungsten atoms. The tungsten film enhanced the outline of the complex molecule and was heavy enough to shield it from the electron beam. But it was not so thick as to obscure the molecular structure. The resulting pictures, which Biophysicist Griffith painstakingly developed himself to bring out maximum detail, show a blurred image that has been magnified 7,300,000 times. Fuzzy as they are, the pictures...
...describes her dream: "I was watching a wall with a rose--then an airplane came and set fire to the rose. But it wasn't awful because it was so beautiful." According to medieval legend, the first roses appeared miraculously at Bethlehem, when a "fayre Mayden" falsely accused of witchcraft was about to be burnt; the burning brands changed to roses and she was saved. If Bergman consciously used such a literary device to end his film, we must conclude he finds some hope in the middle of hell. The burning rose is not just destruction but purgation--sacrifice...
...fascinated only by reality is misleading. The young, in fact, have made a new cult of the occult. The cause, Psychologist Rollo May believes, lies in the disintegration of familiar myths that leaves individuals alienated and adrift. When the medieval myths broke down, he argues, people turned to "witchcraft, sorcery and, in painting, the wild surrealism of a man like Bosch. In our day it is LSD, hippies and touch therapy...
...Middle Ages, for instance, the left-hander lived in danger of being accused of practicing witchcraft. The Devil himself was considered a southpaw, and he and other evil spirits were always conjured up by left-handed gestures. Even today, language expresses the general prejudice against lefthanders. A lefthanded compliment is actually an insult, the Latin word sinister (left) has taken on a, well, sinister cast, and the French word gauche, which means left, is used to describe a socially awkward person. In Moslem societies, the left hand is considered unclean...
...Ching or shuffle tarot cards before setting dates for dinner parties. Hippies, with their drug-sensitized yen for magic, are perhaps the prime movers behind the phenomenon. Not only do they sport beads and amulets that have supposed magical powers; they also believe firmly and frighteningly in witchcraft. Some of the hippie mysticism is a calculated put-on-as when Abbie Hoffman and his crew attempted to levitate the Pentagon last October-but much of the new concern with the arcane is a genuine attempt to find enrichment for arid lives...