KEYS

"Of our greatest acts we are ignorant – " (Emily Dickinson Letter 330, June 1869)

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What Happened to Herman Hallen?

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What Happened to Herman Hallen? Herman Hallen was born in 1844 in Spellen, Westfalen, Germany. He was the youngest child of Hermann Hallen and Elisabetha Wink. Hermann and Elisabeth had five other children: Joanna, Theodore, Christina, Godfrey, and Anna. Immigration records show that they all traveled from Spellen to Waterford, Racine, Wisconsin, in 1856. They all show up on the 1860 United States Census. Herman was sixteen years old at the time of the census. The 1860 census is the last record of Herman. In the 1870 census, his name is missing. The names of his parents and siblings appear in the 1870 census. They show up in various church books and civic records thereafter for marriages, christenings, and deaths. The other Hallen relatives have gravestones with dates in the cemeteries of Waterford, Burlington, Lyons, Phillips, or Marinette. Although stoic German parents would refrain from verbal expressions of grief, Herman’s death would certainly ha...
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PORTRAIT of a PRIESTESS by Joan Breton Connelly

Connelly, Joan Breton. Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007. "Priestesses serving the cult were forbidden to wear fancy dress, anything of the color purple, gold ornaments, or face powder . . . Sanctuary laws thus served to level distinctions among worshippers and to promote an atmosphere of communality in which devotion to the deity came first" (90). "White has long been associated with a state of purity and was the required color for priestly dress at many sanctuaries. It was worn by all incubants and visitors at healing sanctuaries of Asklepios, such as at Pergamon. Indeed, Asklepios was understood to be a divinity who himself always dressed in white. On Delos, those who entered the sanctuary of Zeus Kynthios and Athena Kynthia were required to be 'pure of hand and soul' and to dress in white garments. All persons entering an unnamed sanctuary at Priene were required to wear wh...
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Ralph Waldo Emerson

"In different hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man’s skin — seven or eight ancestors at least — and they constitute the variety of notes for that new piece of music which his life is." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
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