accumulate - to gather or pile up; amass - accumulation - accumulator.
archival - suggests that a material or product is permanent, durable, or chemically stable, and that it can therefore safely be used for preservation purposes.
archive - 1. often archives public records of historical interest. 2. a place for storing archives. 3. a. a storage are. usu. on magnetic tape, for files not in active use. b. a file containing data compressed for ease of storage or transfer.
asylum - the protection granted by a nation to someone who has left their native country as a political refugee.
autoimmune - of, relating to, or caused by autoantibodies or lymphocytes that attack molecules, cells, or tissues of the organism producing them.
contingency - an event that may occur; possibility.
contingent - 1. liable to occur but not certain; possible. 2. conditional. see syns at dependent. 1. a share or quota, as of troops. 2. a representative group.
diabetes mellitus - literally, honey-sweet diabetes: a variable disorder of carbohydrate metabolism caused by a combination of hereditary and environmental factors and usually characterized by inadequate secretion or utilization of insulin, by excessive urine production, by excessive amounts of sugar in the blood and urine, and by thirst, hunger, and loss of weight, resulting in diabetes, an autoimmune disease.
diaspora - any group that has been dispersed outside its traditional homeland, especially involuntarily.
intersectionality - a term coined in 1989 by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a civil rights activist and legal scholar. In a paper for the University of Chicago Legal Forum, Crenshaw wrote that traditional feminist ideas and antiracist policies exclude black women because they face overlapping discrimination unique to them. “Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated,” she wrote in the paper.
“Intersectionality” quickly caught on and made it into the Oxford English Dictionary in 2015, which calls it a sociological term meaning “The interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage; a theoretical approach based on such a premise.” Merriam-Webster’s definition is a little less academic: “the complex, cumulative way in which the effects of multiple forms of discrimination (such as racism, sexism, and classism) combine, overlap, or intersect especially in the experiences of marginalized individuals or groups.”
kali - Kali was the Ocean of Blood at the beginning and end of the world, and her ultimate destruction of the universe was prefigured by destruction of each individual, though her karmic wheel always brought reincarnation. After death came nothing-at-all, which Tantric sages called the third of the three states of being; to experience it was like the experience of Dreamless Sleep. This state was also called "the Generative Womb of All, the Beginning and End of Beings." Kali devoured Time itself. At the end of Time, she resumed her "dark formlessness," which appeared in all the myths of before-creation and after-doomsday as elemental Chaos (p. 493, Barbara G. Walker, The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, 1983).
palimpsest - derives from the Latin palimpsestus, which derives from the Ancient Greek παλίμψηστος (palímpsēstos, from παλίν + ψαω = 'again' + 'scrape'). In textual studies, a palimpsest (/ˈpælɪmpsɛst/) is a manuscript page - from a scroll or book - from which the text has been scraped or washed off in preparation for reuse, in the form of another document. The term is also used to denote an object made or worked upon for one purpose and later reused for another.
privilege - an unearned advantage given to an individual, simply based on the social-economic circumstances into which they were born, which provides them certain benefits over other individuals who were born into different social-economic circumstances.
recurring - occurring again periodically or repeatedly.
repetitious - filled esp. with needless repetition.
ritual - 1. the prescribed form of a ceremony. 2. a system of ceremonies or rites. 3. a ceremonial act or a series of such acts. 4. a customary or regular procedure.
somatic - of the body, esp. as distinguished from a body part, the mind, or the environment; physical.
somatophobia - fear of the body.
time - 1a. a nonspatial continuum in which events occur in apparently irreversible succession, b. an interval separating two points on this continuum; duration. c. a number, as of years, days, or minutes, representing such an interval. d. a similar number representing a specific point on this continuum, reckoned in hours and minutes. e. a system by which such interval are measured or such numbers are reckoned.
vesica piscis - “Vessel of the Fish,” a common yonic symbol, the pointed oval, named from the ancients’ claim that female genitals smelled like fish. Mother Kali herself appeared in a Hindu story as “a virgin named Fishy Smell, whose real name was Truth,” like Egypt’s Goddess Maat. Egyptians said Abtu, the Abyss, was “a fish who swallowed the penis of Osiris,” but this abyss was also “The Fish of Isis,” therefore a sexual metaphor. Aphrodite’s principal rites at Paphos took place under the sign of Pisces, the Fish. Aphrodite, Isis, Freya and other forms of the Goddess in sexual aspect appeared veiled in fish nets.
The vesica piscis was an unequivocally genital sign of sheila-na-gig figures of old Irish churches. The squatting naked Goddess displayed her vulva as a vesica, as did the temple-door images of Kali in India. One of the old pagan ideograms of sexual union was adopted by the church to represent the Feast of St. Nicholas on the runic calendar: a vesica piscis enveloping a male furka.
The pointed-oval fish sign was even used by early Christians to represent the mystery of God’s union with his mother-bride - which is why Jesus was called “the little Fish” in the Virgin’s fountain.
This female enclosure was much used in Christian art, especially as a superimposition on Mary’s belly, with her child within. Sometimes Christ at his ascension was shown rising into a heavenly vesica, as if returning to the Mother-symbol. The vesica was also shown as a frame for figures of Jesus, God, and Saints.
Another name for the same sign was mandorla, “almond,” which also represented a yoni. In the cult of the Magna Mater, an almond was the feminine conception-charm for the virgin birth of Attis (p. 1045-1046, Barbara G. Walker, The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, 1983).
weathering - Public health researcher Arline Geronimus from the University of Michigan says the traditional belief that the disparities are due to genetics, diet and exercise don't explain data that's accumulated over the years. Instead, she makes the case that marginalized people suffer nearly constant stress from living with poverty and discrimination, which damages their bodies at the cellular level and leads to increasingly serious health problems over time.
Geronimus coined a term for this chronic stress — she calls it "weathering," which, she says, "literally wears down your heart, your arteries, your neuroendocrine systems, ... all your body systems so that in effect, you become chronologically old at a young age." She writes about the phenomenon in her new book, Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society (Dave Davies, How Poverty and Racism 'Weather' the Body, Accelerating Aging and Disease, Fresh Air, March 28, 2023).
zoe - “Life,” a Gnostic name of Eve, comparable to the teutonic All-Mother Lif. Zoe was a daughter or emanation of the Gnostic Goddess, Sophia, who gave Adam his soul. She also threw down to the Abyss the unjust Creator, who had dared to curse her, and elevated the Lord of Hosts to the seventh heaven, where she undertook to instruct him about the eighth, the Great Mother’s dwelling place. Gnostic Gospels said Zoe’s power alone animated the first clay man, after various gods had tried and failed. Therefore the man called her Mother of All Living. The canonical Bible kept her title, but eliminated her giving of life to Adam (p. 1102, Barbara G. Walker, The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, 1983).