Tuesday, 17 March 2020
Panicdemic.
The god Pan was the god of extreme behaviour,
and is celebrated in the word panic.
But the pan in pandemic
as in pandemonium
comes from the Greek word for all.
Heraclitus is famous for his dictum
πάντα ῥεῖ (panta rhei): All is flow.
Life is tide and undertow.
A misanthrope like me,
Heraclitus reportedly did not like Pythagoras.
Some of his declarations
are cryptic or vague.
My village of Caylus,
during the continuing emergencies
of the Hundred Years War
and another hundred years
of religious, town-burning hostilities,
was visited five times by Plague.
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2 comments:
Are there any indications of the plague in Caylus? Dedicated chapels? An ossarium?
M.
Not so far as I know. During most plagues most (apart, of course, for the rich) were thrown into Plague Pits which were covered with lime. Some of these have been found, especially during the urban growth years of the 19th century, but I don't know much about them.
The symptoms of plague are indeed dramatic. The most common of the three types of plague was the pneumonic kind.
https://www.medicinenet.com/plague_facts/article.htm
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