Coward comes from couard, cowardice from couardise...but it is all about the hindmost part of an animal. In other words, fear should be overcome; better, it should be brushed aside. Simply because something related to the hindmost part of an animal should be no guide to us when it comes to what we know is our ‘call of duty’.
A comment a friend made to me as part of an email exchange regarding an entry I had written about Syria and the Lügenpress put me off from writing further entries for this blog for close to two years. Simply because he had advised me not to write about such topics, for fear that otherwise I might create ‘invisible enemies’ for myself... I have no doubt that this friend of mine for many years warned me out of concern for me. Yet his advice has had a debilitating effect on me, in that it has discouraged me from writing about anything a tad controversial. My intellectual interests are mainly focused on current affairs, history plus the paranormal, esotericism, spirituality, etc., so that geopolitics, domestic and international politics as well as the coronavirus scam would have figured prominently in the posts I would have written had I been less pusillanimous (which is of Latin origin: from pusillus very small, weak and animus mind). The compromise I found, which is to write about topics that are loosely related to the ‘invisible world’ (because for me there is not even a shadow of a doubt that the forces of light and the forces of darkness are battling it out right now), is nevertheless one that I find deeply frustrating.
The reason is that I know that the English noun coward comes from the French word couard and that cowardice (surprise, surprise) comes from the French noun couardise. Both are derived from mediæval French variants of the Latin word cauda (tail): cüe, cöe, coue, with couard apparently meaning ‘bearing one’s tail low’ [‘qui porte la queue basse’, see https://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/couard], an expression that also exists in English (https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/with-your-tail-between-your-legs), probably because of the code of chivalry which was in force in most of Western Europe for several centuries (by the way, duels, a true offshoot of this code, lasted much longer than the feudal world).
Having undergone the first step in my little exercise of catharsis by calling out my cowardice in the open, I now have to put my money where my mouth is, as it were, and write about topics which it would be better to avoid being associated with on a platform visible to all – even to the ‘bots’ which, I am sure, scour the Internet to collect written, visual and probably also audio material on subjects that are not deemed ‘politically correct’ with a view to identifying their authors and then black-listing them in one form or another.
As the grand finale to an extraordinary year (2020 = 2 + 2 = 4; for some, a number which is synonymous with ‘realisation’, ‘accomplishment’, etc.), I fear that a terrible event might take place in December. As the year almost started with the murder of an Iranian general and as there was another such assassination of a top Iranian nuclear research scientist towards the end of November, a synthetic event (also known as a ‘false flag’) which would be blamed on Iran and serve as a casus belli would not seem too far-fetched to anybody aware that such operations have been carried out many a time over the past twenty years and increasingly so since 2015 – with apparently a marked pickup in the pace in October of this year.
What is more, the 19-year long cycle of Meton ends (or ended) this year [so far, I have not dared to write about this topic; I told you that I was a coward, did I not?] and the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn at 0° Aquarius is expected to fall on 21st December. Even if history shows that sometimes such an astrological conjunction does fall short of (dire) expectations (e.g. in 1484, at a time when it was associated with ‘epidemics and widespread death’), the French Revolution was predicted more than two hundred years before it took place (by Pierre d’Ailly in his De concordia astronomiae) based on this astrological pattern (devised by the Arab astrologer Abu Ma’shar, better known as Albumasar in mediæval Europe). Had it not been for the twenty-first of this month, I would have expected major evil to be unleashed on the eleventh or even on the twenty-second of December given the unhealthy fascination some harbour for the number eleven.
Hopefully, more on these three topics in future posts on this blog.