All new picture thread, new faces to names...

TonyM said:
I don’t understand. Where’s the stork?
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It's pleasing to see a chap thinking outside the box eveluating unconventionally and from a new perspective so take a deserved bow lad.The stork and new birth remain urban legends to this day although the heron and crane have also to take some credit in this intriguing piece of subterfuge.Like any myth Mike its origins are hard to trace especially since this one spans the globe appearing in folklore from Europe the Americas Africa and the Middle East. The array of similar myths suggests that they all draw common inspiration from the birds most noticeable features.The birds are big and white linked to purity and their nests are large promenent and close to where people live so there good parenting behavior is evident and visual.We have a short while before the game to kill so lets delve a little deeper into this Moon Mystique:


Many accounts trace the myth back to ancient Greece and the story of a vengeful goddess named Hera. According to this story, Hera grew jealous of a beautiful queen named Gerana and transformed her into a stork. The heartbroken Gerana then sought to get her kid back from Hera's clutches and the Greeks depicted the transformed bird with a baby dangling from its beak. the original myth actually describes the baby-snatching bird as a crane, not a stork. It can be difficult to verify that one species is associated with an ancient myth as,for instance, storks, cranes and herons were often confused. Similarly in Egyptian mythology, storks are associated with the birth of the world. But historically, that legendary creature was actually a heron: "A small stretch of imagination might make that into a stork.Paul Quinn, a lecturer in English literature at the University of Chichester in the United Kingdom speculated that the link between storks and babies may boil down to this species confusion. "I think the connection of the stork with infants, particularly maternal care of children, is the result of the conflation of the stork with the pelican," European medieval literature associates the stately white pelican with Catholicism rebirth and the rearing of young he said. Somewhere along the way, storks may have become a substitute for this bird.

Whatever the origins of the myth, historians tend to agree that the idea of the baby-bringing stork was most firmly established in northern Europe, particularly Germany and Norway. During the Pagan era, which can be traced back at least to medieval times more than 600 years ago, it was common for couples to wed during the annual solstice, because summer was associated with fertility. At the same time, storks would commence their annual migration, flying all the way from Europe to Africa. The birds would then come back the following spring 9 months later.Storks would migrate and then return to have their chicks in spring around the same time that a lot of babies were born.Thus storks became the heralds of new life spawning the fanciful idea that they had delivered the human babies.

As the story evolved over time, its complexity grew. In Norse mythology, storks came to symbolize family values and purity (based largely on the inaccurate belief that these birds were monogamous). In the Netherlands, Germany and eastern Europe, storks nesting on the roof of a household were believed to bring good luck — and the possibility of new birth — to the family below.Although Europe was the epicenter of the myth, it took shape in the Americas too "It is interesting that the same story occurs in Sioux legend with a different stork the wood stork [Mycteria americana] as opposed to the white stork [Ciconia ciconia] They all arise from different people's observation of behavior wherever storks particularly white storks can be found.Then, in the 19th century, the myth gained new traction as a symbol of birth, when it was popularized by Hans Christian Andersen in his version of the fable, called The storks.In this tale, these birds plucked dreaming babies from ponds and lakes, and delivered them to deserving families. The story had a dark underside: Families with ill-behaved children would receive a dead baby as punishment from the stork.The tale sought to teach children a moral lesson and also kept with the new tradition of infantilizing fairy tales that were frequently didactic and religious in intent.


In Victorian England the story became valuable as a way of obscuring the reality of sex and birth.For Victorians embarrassed about explaining facts of life the stork bringing a baby was a useful image.Views on childbirth may be less prudish today but we still hang on to the stork myth celebrating the graceful bird and its central role in family life.Our tendency to humanize animals has made the baby-delivering stork one of our most enduring myths loosely based on the birds behavior but also rooted in human hopes and fears.I have taken the liberty of removing the Mermaid Maternity clip as live birthing footage on a football forum is not everyone's cup of tea and also it could have caused alarm harassment and distress.Up the blues and have a tip top day : )
 
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StrangewaysHereWeCome said:
30a5bat.jpg
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SWP's back said:
2wmqibl.jpg
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Hmmm?
 
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