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Sally Jacques and Blue Lapis Light—her site-specific aerial dance company— have been performing for two decades in various places across Austin, Texas. Since the sites in which her performances are held range from the abstract to those with political undertones, her work drives audiences to look into and appreciate the surroundings' beauty and resolve local and global injustice. Site-specific dance focuses on beauty in an attempt to merge the environment, its elements, and the space's emotional language. A theatrical environment is not restricted to a landscape and instead utilizes the space's inherent features. The environment of the site serves as the collaborator, compared to how perceptions become limited within a boxed frame. Jacques expresses that she enjoys the challenge brought about by site work creation as this entails a spiritual journey.

This chapter provides a discussion on the beginning of the Roman Republic. It is shown that the Roman chronology is basically accurate for the beginning of the republic and the Gallic occupation of Rome. The difference between patricians and plebeians within the Roman ruling class is discussed. Various aspects of the plebeian tribunate indicate that the office was urban and civilian, whereas the original nature of the consulship seems to have been extra-urban and military. It is noted that in later times there existed in popular tradition the recollection of a Roman military reversal at the Cremera during the early years of the republic, but apart from this single fact nothing was securely known about it. Even before the discovery of the Lapis Satricanus, the Fabian defeat at the Cremera was regarded by many scholars as belonging to an early stage in Roman social development.

Yeats’s ‘Lapis Lazuli’ responds to a Chinese stone etched with a poem attributed to the Qianlong Emperor. Yeats describes the stone in Keatsian ekphrasis. He demonstrates the influence of Daoism, particularly Zhuangzi, as he interprets the stone philosophically. To Yeats the lapis offers consolation amidst upheaval. The object appears prophetic of the fall of the Qing Dynasty, and Yeats finds its optimism pertinent as the Second World War approaches. The stone’s portrayal of sages on mountains prompts Yeats to invoke Daoism to correct the pessimism of Matthew Arnold’s Empedocles on Etna. The lapis expresses a universal wisdom that Yeats finds alike in Lucretius and in his Nietzschean reading of tragedy. As in his enthusiasm for ‘half-Asiatic Greece’—exemplified by the sculptor Callimachus—Yeats urges a fusion of classical and Asian values.

The Hindu Kush Mountains run along the Afghan border with the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan. Following the First Anglo-Afghan war of 1839– 42 the British government in Simla decided that the North-West Frontier of British India had to have an accurate delineation. Sir Mortimer Durand mapped the border between what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan in 1893 and this frontier is known as the Durand Line. Unfortunately it is a political frontier and one that splits the Pathan or Pushtun-speaking lands into two, with the North-West Frontier Province and Waziristan in Pakistan to the east and the Afghan provinces of Kunar, Nangahar, Khost, Paktiya, and Kandahar to the west. The border regions north of Baluchistan in Quetta and Waziristan are strong tribal areas and ones that have never come under the direct rule of the Pakistani government. Warlords run their drug and arms businesses from well-fortified mud-walled hilltop fortresses. During the period that Lord Curzon was Viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905 the entire border regions of British India were mapped out along the Karakoram, Kashmir, Ladakh, and south Tibetan Ranges. During Partition, in 1947, once again an artificial border was established separating mostly Muslim Pakistan from India. Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy, gave Sir Cyril Radcliffe the invidious task of delineating the border in haste to avoid a civil war that would surely have come, and on 17 August 1947 Pakistan inherited all the territory between the Durand Line and the new Indian frontier, the Radcliffe Line. In the north, the disputed Kashmir region still remained unresolved and the northern boundary of Pakistan ran north to the main watershed along the Hindu Kush, Hindu Raj, and Karakoram Ranges. To the west, Afghanistan was a completely artificial country created by the amalgamation of the Pathans of the east, Hazaras of the central region, the Uzbeks in the Mazar-i-Sharif area, and the Tadjiks of the Panjshir Valley along the border with Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. The British lost three wars trying to invade this mountainous land between 1839 and 1919, and the Soviet Union which occupied Afghanistan for ten years from 1979 also withdrew across the Oxus River in failure in February 1989.

This chapter begins by establishing how W. B. Yeats’s complex sense of religion began to take its final form in 1931, when he met Shri Purohit Swami and began a series of studies in Indic traditions and collaborative translations of Hindu texts. After establishing the background, the chapter addresses the impact of Yeats’s studies with Purohit on his late writings. Citing selected essays, poems, letters, both editions of A Vision, and several late poems, it traces Yeats’s explorations of both the Yoga philosophy of Patanjali and Tantric traditions, establishing how the poet’s Theosophically derived notions of self and divinity informed his perspective on Indic thought. The chapter ends with close readings of a series of poems including ‘Supernatural Songs’, ‘The Gyres’, and ‘Lapis Lazuli’, arguing that they develop from a constellation of images a map of the relation between history and eternity, conceived more in Indic than in Nietzschean terms.