“The Delphic Flame”
Museum of the Delphic Festivals Performance Evening
Tuesday, May 24th, 2022
Program
DANCE | “Pilgrimage to Delphi” - Sandra Voulgari & Andriana Papanicolaou
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DANCE | “Dance of the Cherubim” - Rosemary Cooper
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POETICS | “Liturgy Underneath the Acropolis” ΛΕΙΤΟΥΡΓΙΑ ΚΑΤΩ ΑΠΟ ΤΗΝ ΑΚΡΟΠΟΛΗ - Pr. Paris Katsivelos
Lyre & Pan Flute: Takis Tsatsoulas
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VISUALS | “The Nent” - Vince Gagliardi
Meet The Artists
Rosemary Cooper, I.D.M.A., Adv. Dipl. ID Studies, Assistant Director, Isadora Duncan International Institute, is a 3rd generation Duncan dancer from childhood under the sole tutelage of Jeanne Bresciani. In the legacy of the IDII, Rosemary has focused on cultivating “the highest intelligence in the freest body,” merging the artistic, physical, intellectual and soulful in all realms. She has flourished as the youngest candidate to complete both the IDII Certificate Programs I: The Training; and II: The Dances. Cooper is a principal dancer with Jeanne Bresciani and the Isadora Duncan International Institute Dancers, traveling extensively to develop international rapports and perform in historic Duncan sites. She has performed upon stages such as the Symphony Space, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, the United Nations, San Marco Square, Palazzo Pisani at Stra, Palazzo Contarini-Polignac, the Gritti Palace and Palazzo Pisani Moretta, to name a few.
Vince Gagliardi | THE NENT : Vince Gagliardi is a 3D artist and musician whose gradient dream-like aesthetic is rooted in a passion for broken ambient textures and eerie field recordings which he has gathered over the past fifteen years with the drive of documenting emotional stages of life. The contact with music rekindled with the start of his audiovisual project The Nent, in which live percussions are combined to trigger sound and image in synesthetic fashion. The mix of dark ritual rhythm and surreal visual imagery challenge abstract connections that may occur in the perceiver’s mind at the flash of the seen and the heard.
Paris (Paraskevas) Katsivelos is a Greek Actor, Director, and Professor of the Dramatic Arts. He comes from the island of Thassos, Greece. He studied Acting, Directing, Stage Design – Costume design, Monody - Melodramatics, Kinesiology - Choreography, and Scenic Art. For more than four decades, he has taught Acting, Education of Speech, Improvisation, Specialized Dramatic Art Workshops, Special Dramatic Art Retraining Seminars for professional Actors, in Higher Schools of Dramatic Art, Theatrical Workshops, and at Universities in Greece and abroad. He is a tenured professor at the European Institute of Communication (ECI), Austrian University D.U.K. and the NTUA (National Technical University of Athens), at the master's program “Quality Journalism and New Technologies,” where he teaches his own section “Education of Quality Communication – Dramatics for Communicators.” Learn More
Sandra Voulgari and Andriana Papanicolaou, 21st century dancers study, perform and teach Dances of Isadora Duncan and the Ruby Ginner method. Created a century ago by those two American and British dance pioneers who were inspired by the spirit of ancient Greece, Sandra and Andriana follow in their footsteps, keeping the legacy and the beauty of their dance alive. In the spirit of our pilgrimage, we join in a performance that will bring a message of joy and hope for a bright life as long as it lasts.
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SACRED MOTHER, HELLAS, UTERUS OF WORLDS!!!
Hellenic language, Mother of all languages, of the Gods and of the Heroes.
Philosophy is full of sentences of purest, joyous, creating a lifelong passage, anthropocentric and always according “to the Law”
However, everything that Philosophy renders, we treasure, understand, evaluate, and avail through Thinking and Speech, initially in the grounds of conceivable “formation”, followed by their articulation and “dissipation” in whatever structure.
Ladies and gentlemen, Logos and therefore the Language is the golden catalyst for all and every people. For us, this language is the Hellenic one. The language of Gods, Angels, the language of Heroes, of Alexander the Great and of the Gospels, the language of Philosophy and of the Sciences, of the Mathematical thinking, the language of Astronomy, of Harmony and the Aesthetics, the musical language, the therapeutic language, the only language in the world that provides “essence” to every “essential” meaning!!!
The Greek word for voice during ancient times was: “audi”. This is not a random choice of wording, as it derives from the verb: “ado”, which means to “to sing”. Nikiforos Vrettakos, a great poet and scholar, and a personally favorite of mine, in a very special and poetic diction comments on the Hellenic language:
“And then one day, it is through this light I will upwards meander like a water rill that whispers. And if so happens that within in those teal halls I meet with angels, I will speak to them in Greek, for they know of no languages. Among them, they only speak through music.”
I could tirelessly lecture about the Hellenic language, with fiery, passionate and documented words, but I prefer to leave this task to a small portion of the plethora of scientists, researchers and scholars of all times, across the world to do this for me, for us.
Cicero, a Roman Philosopher, Politician, Orator, Consul, Lawyer – a Constitutionalist to be more precise, and prose stylist, known across the world as one of the greatest philosopher and orator of the ancient times, commented about the Hellenic language: “If the Gods were to speak, they would use the Hellenic language”!!! . Upon his return to Rome, he took with him a few thousands of civilization denoting Greek words and a “key” by which he augmented their significance and meaning, thus expanding the Latin language. That “key” was the prepositions. Referring to this historic event the famous French linguist Meillet, says: “Latin, as a literary language is an portrait of the Greek language.”
Ancient Roman army tribunes and their sages, actually savored the Greek orators at the Agora and in the Ecclesia Assembly, often acclaiming their rhetoric speeches sounding like “a nightingale’s song”. Such was and still is our language’s harmonious texture, the mother of all languages. In the writings of Horatius the Roman, “The Hellenic race was born blessed with a euphonic language full of musicality”. And as the Romans quoted, the Hellenic language will remain “the most majestic of all languages and the sweetest in musicality”.
One of the scholars that followed Alexander the Great, Aristides of Andrianopolis, among other things commented on our language:
“And through us, the world became homophonous”
The forefather of Modern Historiography, Edward Gibbon, spoke of the most musical and fertile language that provides body to the philosophical cogitation and soul to the articles of the senses.
Let us not forget that Ancient Hellenes did not use symbols for notes, but the letters of the alphabet instead. “Pitches in the Hellenic language are musical notes that along with the rest of the rules prevent disharmony to a par musical language, much like the counterpoint that is being taught in conservatories does, or as the sharp and flat keynotes do amend the inharmonious chords”, remarks the philologist and author, Ms Anna Tziropoulou-Eustathiou.
The renowned French author and Journalist Jacques Lacarrière highlights on the Hellenic language: “I used to listen to these people confer in a language that was harmonious to me but also inconceivably musical”
Stephen Deutsch, a professor in the University of New York, finds out that through the lyrics of Homer music is emitted “They are so artistically composed, that by enjoying the reading, you also enjoy the music”.
Jacques Bouchard, Professor in Modern Greek Philology in the University of Montreal in Canada writes: “The narration respects the long and short vowels, the hexameter form that can be found in the epics, the diacritical accenting grammar marks, the accentuation of the last syllable and the short vowels… become notes, the theories of prosody and Music (metre) allow us to recite Homer’s epics and to be read with their music.”
Famous and world-acclaimed Greek musician Yiannis Xenakis in multiple occasions has stressed out that the musicality of the Hellenic language is equivalent to that of the universe.
Goethe wrote: “I heard in the St Peter’s Cathedral in Rome, the Gospel being recited in all languages. And it was the Hellenic language that resonated bright as a shining star in the night”. I now quote a part of dialogue between him and his students:
“-Professor, what should we study in order to become wise as you?”
“-The classic Hellene scholars.”
“-And after we finish with the Hellene classics, what should we study?”
“-Study the Hellenes again”.
German physics scientist Max Von Laye (Nobel Prize in Physics) has come to realize that the Hellenic language is a perfectly mathematical creation, while he has commented on its mathematical structure: “I owe a grand debt to the Divine Providence, allowing me to be taught the ancient Hellenic language, helping me penetrate deeper into the meaning of natural sciences.”
The oldest, structured, written text found in the European lands, dating back 7,254 years, was discovered in the lake of Kastoria, specifically in the prehistoric settlement of Dispilio of Kastoria, has been written two thousand years aforetime of the written findings of Sumerians and four thousand years ahead the Cretan and Mycenaean clay tablets of linear script.
This shocking announcement was made during an archaeological conference for this particular excavation in Northern Greece, by Mr. George Chourmouziadis, professor in pre-historic Archaeology in the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, who has discovered this evidence during his excavation works.
A number of foreign centers, of course, had tried to bury this discovery, because the historical stage would be overturned by any official public disclosure about these findings of man’s articulated speech that have been written and engraved with letters (instead of ideograms) within the territorial Greek lands, within the European land. It would overthrow the well-staged theory that Hellenes had also received, the light from the People of the East, the Babylonians, Sumerians, Phoenicians, compelling all the archaeologists to justify for these four millennia proving that while the Peoples of the East were expressing themselves with ideograms, the Hellenes were using syllables as they are still do. This obviously and clearly denotes an early stage of thinking and of civilization.
Arthur Evans, the distinguished English archaeologist supports and provides evidences that “the Cretan writing is the mother of the Phoenician script”. That is, the Phoenicians received the script by Cretan settlers who during 13th century BC had migrated as Philistines to the coastline of Palestine, as they refer to in the Old Testament. Arthur Evans supported that the syllabic depiction of the Linear B script does not indicate a language of Eastern origin, but instead a purely Hellenic one and through his studies in the evolution of these syllabic expressions, has proven that the Phoenicians had received this script by the Cretan settlers who had colonized the Palestinian coastal shores as Philistines.
English architect Michael Ventris, after the decipherment of the Creto-Mycenaean Linear B script, used in writing many tablets found in Crete, Mycenae, and Pylos among other places too, certifies that the language used on those tablet is Hellenic. The scientific importance of Ventris’ announcement, on the Hellenic civilization whose written heritage shifts seven centuries back (from the 8th century B.C. to the 15th), was invaluable.
The Hellenic and primal-Hellenic tribes were maintaining various writing systems. This, was made clear from the discovery of stone tablets, preserved safely within the grounds of the Hellenic land and were unearthed during the 20th century. These written monuments display the proper evolution stage: a primal iconography stage (hieroglyphics), a syllabic writing system and finally a phoneme graphic stage. Two of these systems, the Cypriot syllabic and the Linear B have already been decrypted and express, in an uninterrupted manner, the Hellenic language to this day.
Let us put an end to the myth that the Greeks allegedly had received the script system from the Phoenicians. As I have previously mentioned, this myth was formulated, augmented and was publically distributed, by anti-Hellenic centers, and had also be maintained for all the obvious reasons by scientific groups around the world.
All languages are considered and indeed are crypto-Hellenic, borrowing in abundance from the Hellenic language, the mother of all languages, as Francisco Rodriguez Adrados, the Spanish linguist and translator from the Complutense University of Madrid, and member of the Royal Spanish Academy, of the Royal Academy of History and the Academy of Athens, stresses in every occasion.
G. Murray, Professor in the University of Oxford and great Hellenist, writes: “The Hellenic language is the perfect of all languages. In Greek, a thought can be expressed comfortably and gracefully, while in Latin, English, French, German, etc. it grows difficult and heavy. Hellenic language is the most perfect language, as it expresses thoughts made by the most perfect people.”
European linguistics experts, in their whole, support that “the Hellenic language holds a highly educational capability in forming a person’s thinking, thus helping students having knowledge of the ancient Hellenic language to excel in science studies”.
In a language there is the signifying (the word) and the signified (the meaning or the definition). In the Hellenic language, these two are related in a primary manner, as, contrary to the other languages, the signifying is not a random series of letters. This is the particular reason why many isolate Hellenics as a “conceptual” language apart from the rest “semantic” languages.
Wener Heisenberg, great philosopher and mathematician, had noticed this distinctive factor, on which he commented: “My time in learning the ancient Hellenic language has been my greatest spiritual exercise. In this language the most complete relationship between a word and its conceptual meaning” materializes.
In the words of Antisthenes, “Analyzing of the words is the beginning to the path to wisdom”.
The relationship between the language and the thinking of man is obvious. As George Orwell states, in his epic book “1984”,: “Simple language means simple thinking”. In this novel, the regime was attempting to limit the language by constantly abolishing words and phrases, aiming to confine the thinking of the people.
“The language and its grammatical rules breeds a critical thinking”, said Mihai Eminescu, Romania’s national poet. A complex language is evidence of a spiritually advanced civilization. Being able to speak properly also means being able to think properly, to constantly generate logos, instead of mindlessly just repeating words and phrases.
To the words of the late former Minister, former President of the Hellenic Republic and writer Konstantinos Tsatsos: “The more advance a nation’s level of civilization is, the richer therefore are the words of its language in existence, and consequently in meaning”….
The President of the International Academy for the preservation of Civilization Mr. Frangisco Ligora, on March 1997 had made this educational incitement at the Panteion University: “Greeks, be proud that you speak the Hellenic language, living mother of all languages. Do not neglect it, as it is one of the very few good things we have left, wherefore this holds your passport towards the global civilization. Revitalize your ancient writers, make their thoughts known […]”.
The American professor of the Classical Studies, Mrs. Marian McDonald is the most important Hellenist alive. In 1972, Mrs. McDonald, as an ancient Hellenic literature devotee, came up with the idea of its digitalization. She donated $ 1,000,000 to the Irvine University of California for the initiation of the program to record the ancient Hellenic literature in a digital database. To this day, the TLG program hosts Hellenic texts even that of the 20th century, while the research, collection and digitalization process still continues uninterruptedly. This remarkable woman, a professor in Classical Studies and Drama in the San Diego University of California, has written a plethora of books and essays on the ancient Hellenic drama theater, and has been awarded with the Order of the Phoenix by the Hellenic Republic.
Mrs. McDonald, among other commendations has said about the Hellenic language: “[…] The history of the Hellenic language comprises all the history of the philosophical and cultural evolution of the Western civilization. Of all humanity-made creations, the Greek language is the most astonishing. The knowledge of the Hellenic language, of the life and of the relationships in which the Hellenes were expressing their thoughts and feelings, compose the essential analogous evidences for a high form of civilization. There is no language more beautiful than that of the Hellenic. It has retained its beauty throughout the centuries, not just with its form and sounds, but by the moral values it reflects. […] Hellenes have given us the golden ratio and their golden language. The Hellenic language has to be preserved as an invaluable and beautiful treasure. We need to embark on a new crusade to preserve the Hellenic language and the recollection of history in the past. The Hellenic language is a structure solid as the Parthenon. Let us all work together to glorify the treasure of the Hellenic Language and render it accessible to the entire world. The most perfectly ever invented tool of the human brain is the Hellenic Language!”
Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft has also restated: “The Hellenic language with its mathematical structure is the language of informatics and of the new generation of advanced computers, as it is the only language that bears no boundaries”
CNN, in cooperation with the Apple computer company have designed an easy program to teach the English and Spanish speaking residents of the USA the Hellenic language. The concept behind this initiative was that the knowledge of the Hellenic language intensifies rationalistic thinking, augments the business initiative and exhorts citizens to be creative.
Apple CEO, Mr. John Scully, comments: “We have decided to promote the program of the Hellenic language teaching, because our society is in need of a tool that will aid to develop its creativity, introduce new ideas and will offer more knowledge than man could be able to discover up till now.
British entrepreneurs encourage their CEOs to learn the ancient Hellenic language “because it carries a special importance in the fields of organizing and managing a company” and due to the ascertainments made by British experts’: “The Hellenic language reinforces logical thinking and assists in the development of leadership skills. That is why its role is invaluable, not only in informatics and advanced technologies, but also in the field of management and organizing.”
The Spanish Euro-parliament members have requested for the Hellenic language to be declared as the European Union’s official language, on account that, when someone talks about an Unified Europe without the Hellenic language is like talking to a blind man about colors.
It is the conscious and expressed intention for the return of the global civilization to the spirit and the language of the Greeks!!!
The English language exists for 1,600 years, counting a total of 240,000 entries, possesses 490,000 words out of which 41,615 words borrowed from the Hellenic language, according to the Guinness Book of Records. The German language is 1,700 years old, with 250,000 entries with 46% of its words being borrowed from the Hellenic language.
Out of the Ibycus computer, 6 million word types of our language have emerged .
The Hellenic language contains for 800,000 entries, the highest-ranked language globally, when the secondly ranked language accounts for 250,000 entries. “Entry”, it is the definition of a word’s basic form. According to an official American essay in linguistics, for a language with several thousands of entries to be created, a linguistic history of at least 10,000 years is required.
At the Irvine University of California, inside the “Ibycus” computer, a thesaurus of 6 million words of our language has been indentified, whereas, as mentioned before, the English language comprises of 490,000 words and 300,000 technical terms, meaning that, English as a language, is only the 1/100 of our language. Inside the “Ibycus”, 8,000 texts of 4,000 ancient Hellenes have been recorded while this work is still in progress. The people in charge of this program estimate that the Hellenic entries will reach 90 million, compared to the 9 million of the Latin language.
This interest on the Hellenic language have appeared after the realization of informatics and computer scientists that the technologically advanced computers can accept the Hellenic language exclusively as the only “conceptual” language, categorizing all others as “semantic” ones.
Commenting on this, one of the head executives in this program, Professor Brunner, said: “To whomever wonders why we have dedicate millions of dollars in order to create a thesaurus of the Hellenic language, we respond: It is the language of our ancestors. And our connection with them will only improve our civilization”.
The Hellenic language did not emerged by chance. It was built upon mathematics where every single word in Greek has a mathematical background. The letters of the Hellenic language are not just plain symbols. Placed either straight up, inverted, or with special markings, they comprised a total of 1,620 symbols that were used in Harmony (in Modern Greek, music).
Their most important property is that every letter corresponds to a numerical value, every letter is a number, therefore, every word is also a number. There is a huge amount of knowledge locked and encrypted inside the words through their mathematical value. One of the pioneers on this subject was the great Pythagoras. “None that have not measured his boundaries may enter” was written over the entrance of his academy in the island of Samos. Plato, would later quote the same phrase over the entrance of his own Academy, to emphasize the importance of mathematics and geometry as an essential and vital exercise of the mind, ahead of the dialectic method. This is yet another evidence of the close connection that exists between our language and the science of mathematics.
Therefore, it is only natural, that today, the advanced systems of modern computer science have met with the sophisticated minds of ancient Greeks.
Geology professor Stavros Papamarinopoulos shed light on the unique, but also mystical in a sense, effect that the Hellenic alphabet and the Hellenic language has on certain areas of the brain.
This multi-dimensional mystical relationship of the language, the numbers, the music and also of the human thinking process, was very well known to the Pythagoreans.
After his thorough research of the Platonic writings, the philologist Eric Havelock, came to understand the impact that the alphabet’s final form had on the brain of Athenians and on that of citizens of other Hellenic cities, which in return had resulted to the rising of the drama theater and the cultural explosion of the Golden 5th Century in Athens, the global scientific community, began studying in 1963, the effects that the Hellenic alphabet has on the human brain.
In 1975, neurophysiologist Joseph Bogan initially has joined in this effort, who confirmed that the Hellenic alphabet has activated, more than others, the left side of the brain, which houses the processing centers for the written language, the expressed speech and of the analytical thinking.
Derrick de Kerckhove, former executive of the McLuhan Civilization and Technology program in the University of Toronto and honorary professor in the Department of French Studies (1988) has also contributed with important evidence towards the study, in his attempt to interpret the effects of the Greek alphabet in the brain.
The Hellenic language possesses words for concepts that are incapable for interpretation in other languages.
Hundreds of scientists and scholars have praised the Hellenic language and have proven all of these things that some have made a decent effort to silence and conceal. I would require pages and hours to share with you only some of the praises written about it.
Time, however, mandates of me to be parsimonious. I will therefore, conclude my speech with quotations by just a few, of the countless people who has praised the mother of languages!!!
Murray Gilbert (Professor of the Hellenic Language in the University of Oxford):
"The Greek language is the perfect of all languages. In Greek, a thought can be expressed comfortably and gracefully, while in Latin, English, French, German, etc. it grows difficult and heavy. Hellenic language is the most perfect language, as it expresses thoughts made by the most perfect people".
Romigy Jacqueline De (French Scholar and writer)
“Greece offers us a language, which I dare refer to as ecumenical”. “The entire world has to learn Greek, because the Hellenic language helps us, above all, to understand our own language”.
Sagkredo Frederick (Basquiat Linguistics Professor – Chairman of the Hellenic Academy in Basque).
“The Hellenic language is the best heritage possessed by man to be used in his brain’s evolution. Compared to the Hellenic language, all, and I insist on this, all other languages are indeed inadequate.” “The ancient Hellenic language must become a second language for every European, especially for the cultivated people”. “The Hellenic language consists of a divine substance”
Voltaire (French philosopher):
“May the Hellenic language become common to all the peoples”.
Wandruska (Professor in Linguistics, University of Vienna):
“European languages appear as mere dialects of the Hellenic language”
Sagredo and Puhana (Basque Hellenists)
“The Hellenic language and culture constitute the basis of the Western civilization. Every European is indebted to Greece”