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Talk:Magical thinking

Outdates sources feed the racism
It's telling that the "anthropology" section is primarily citing early 20th century research. I see I'm not the only one to point out the obvious racism of cited works, too. ("The Savage Mind"? Yikes) That doesn't reflect current anthropological attitudes or research in any meaningful way and should at least be flagged until it's fixed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by HawthornePaws (talk • contribs) 02:46, 3 November 2018 (UTC)

Nomination of Superstitions in Muslim societies for deletion
A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Superstitions in Muslim societies is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Articles for deletion/Superstitions in Muslim societies until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. Bookku (talk) 05:29, 24 November 2020 (UTC)

Possible POV issue?
This seems to be biased on the assumption that thoughts can't affect reality in this way. Isn't this biased, in the same way that it would be biased for an article to definitively state that God doesn't exist? Sparkette (talk) 00:25, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

 * If you would like to make a specific edit to the article, you can ask about it here. Be sure to back it up with reliable secondary sources! OverzealousAutocorrect (talk) 18:35, 9 February 2024 (UTC)
 * I agree with this, I’m going to add a bit of framing Alexanderkowal (talk) 16:48, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Please note the necessity of reliable secondary sources before adding anything major. Otherwise feel free to frame things a bit differently. OverzealousAutocorrect (talk) 17:39, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Is that addition okay? Alexanderkowal (talk) 17:40, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I saw the talk page discussion after I'd already reverted the edit. It wasn't okay because none of the sources cited in that paragraph supported the new framing that you gave the lead. Schazjmd   (talk)  19:12, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
 * That’s okay I’ll look at the sources properly Alexanderkowal (talk) 19:16, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I've just read through the article and I'm not seeing a POV issue. The editors who've worked on it seemed to have been very even-handed. It doesn't say is the mistaken belief or is the incorrect belief...just that it's a belief. Then how anthropologists view it, and psychologists, and so forth. @Sparkette, what significant viewpoints do you think aren't included? Schazjmd   (talk)  19:30, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I think it heavily implies that belief is incorrect and makes the mistake of applying logic where it is not commonly used, such as in metaphysics or cosmology, in an effort to characterise religion as irrational. For an individual, religious beliefs can be rational in that they improve their well-being or attitude towards others. This article currently adheres to the belief that the goal of life or human existence is to build knowledge or understanding of our world, which is a perfectly reasonable belief, but it is given undue weight. Alexanderkowal (talk) 19:44, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
 * This might be more productive if you or Sparkette (or other editors of the view that significant views are not reflected in the article) provided sources and suggested content that you think would address the issue. Schazjmd   (talk)  19:54, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
 * See Superstition
 * Survey of sources on Google Scholar's first two pages when searching religious beliefs and well-being:
 * Improves performance, implies improvement in well-being
 * Positive correlation between religious beliefs and well-being    (previous states "There is a well-known association between religion and happiness")
 * Finds little correlation between religious belief and well-being but states this question has hardly been examined
 * Finds negative correlation between religion and well-being
 * Alexanderkowal (talk) 20:25, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
 * That still doesn't tell me what you think needs to change in this article about "magical thinking". Schazjmd   (talk)  20:34, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I suppose I'd be satisfied with a clause saying "religious beliefs have been linked to increased well-being" in the second paragraph. Alexanderkowal (talk) 20:39, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
 * And improves performance which I can find more sources for Alexanderkowal (talk) 20:40, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Magical thinking isn't a synonym for religious beliefs. Schazjmd   (talk)  20:46, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Magical thinking refers to the thought process that produces superstitious or religious beliefs
 * Discusses magic and religion and the contradictions in differentiation
 * mentions magical thinking and uses religion and magic synonymously
 * states magic is early or primitive religion
 * Alexanderkowal (talk) 21:16, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
 * pgs 52-53 discusses strong similarities between religious and magical thinking, but also differentiates them later by stating religion is coherent magic Alexanderkowal (talk) 21:22, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
 * The Cholewa-Gilski paper starts out saying: Magical thinking and religious thinking are two qualitatively different processes which one can attempt to typologise. Distinguishing between magical thinking and religious thinking is important from a cognitive standpoint, since it allows to shed some light on all reality experienced, because our way of thinking constitutes the basis for our interpretation of the world. And the whole rest of the paper is about how to differentiate magical thinking and religious thinking.I'm not arguing that there is no overlap. I'm saying that this is a faulty argument, and a form of WP:SYNTH:
 * Some forms of magical thinking are some religious beliefs;
 * Some religious beliefs have been linked to increased well-being;
 * Therefore magical thinking is linked to increased well-being.
 * Schazjmd  (talk)  22:00, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
 * There is disagreement in academia, however there’s agreement on strong overlap between magic and religion. My impression is that religious thinking is about multiple instances of magic and is doctrinal whilst magic refers to the singular and is not doctrinal. I agree it is WP:Synth in this case however WP:Common sense also applies. Magical thinking is often used by new atheists such as Richard Dawkins to refute religious beliefs, and this will be where a significant number of readers will have heard of it Alexanderkowal (talk) 22:14, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
 * The first definition serves as a critique of religious thinking/belief, and a well-cited positive is necessary to maintain NPOV Alexanderkowal (talk) 22:15, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I do think the three sources supported my edit, two are academic sources whose function is to build propositional knowledge. Alexanderkowal (talk) 19:51, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
 * The three refs cited:
 * Logically Fallacious: no mention of "knowledge", much less "propositional knowledge".
 * The Skeptic's Dictionary: no mention of "knowledge", much less "propositional knowledge".
 * Critical Thinking in Psychology: has two paragraphs on magical thinking. Neither support In the context of building propositional knowledge.
 * You wikilink to Knowledge, which says Knowledge of facts, also called propositional knowledge, is often characterized as true belief that is distinct from opinion or guesswork by virtue of justification. I don't see how that clarifies the lead for readers. Nor does it appear to accurately reflect the body of the article. Schazjmd   (talk)  20:04, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
 * The lede includes three definitions, with the final two being contextualised. The first one isn't, it is the nature of the sources that I think supported my edit not their content, idk what wikipedia's policy on that is Alexanderkowal (talk) 20:28, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I think the knowledge article does well to differentiate between propositional knowledge and perceptual/subjective knowledge in its lede, which is very relevant to this Alexanderkowal (talk) 20:33, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
 * @Schazjmd can you please respond to these points then Alexanderkowal (talk) 22:21, 14 May 2024 (UTC)
 * You think refs #2 and #3 support limiting the this article to a context of "building propositional knowledge". I don't agree that the refs or the body of the article support that limitation or that framing in the lead. Schazjmd   (talk)  22:28, 14 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Not limiting the whole article, just framing the first paragraph. How about:
 * ”Magical or superstitious thinking, in the context of building propositional knowledge, is the belief that unrelated events are causally connected despite the absence of any plausible causal link between them, particularly as a result of supernatural effects.”
 * Alexanderkowal (talk) 07:14, 15 May 2024 (UTC)
 * The lead is supposed to summarize the key points of the article. None of the refs used there in the lead establish that framing. The body does not expand on that framing. All it does is add academic jargon that will confuse readers. Schazjmd   (talk)  13:56, 15 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Doing an RfC, please summarise your position there Alexanderkowal (talk) 14:40, 15 May 2024 (UTC)
 * The RfC needs to be properly worded first. Just pasting in the current lead and saying "See the article for refs and the below arguments" isn't a useful presentation. Please see WP:RFCNEUTRAL for tips. Schazjmd   (talk)  16:39, 15 May 2024 (UTC)
 * That is neutral? I've refrained from outlining the argument in order to not be biased, and then put my argument in a separate post. What would you change? Alexanderkowal (talk) 16:49, 15 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Ask a question or state the wording that you want editors' input on. Don't expect other editors to read through the whole talk page to figure out what the Rfc is about. (I didn't say it wasn't neutral, that's just the shortcut for that portion of the WP:RFC page. The RfC statement you put is incomplete.) Schazjmd   (talk)  16:56, 15 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Thanks, I changed it to a question. I was expecting you to summarise your points next to mine so people can read the two posts and not have to read our previous discussion Alexanderkowal (talk) 17:09, 15 May 2024 (UTC)
 * You might be thinking of WP:3O, a different form of dispute resolution. Schazjmd   (talk)  17:10, 15 May 2024 (UTC)
 * For the RfC, you could put it as a choice: Should the opening sentence be:
 * Magical thinking, or superstitious thinking, is the belief that unrelated events are causally connected despite the absence of any plausible causal link between them, particularly as a result of supernatural effects.
 * In the context of building propositional knowledge, magical thinking, or superstitious thinking, is the belief that unrelated events are causally connected despite the absence of any plausible causal link between them, particularly as a result of supernatural effects.
 * And then in your comment to it, you could put forth your argument for #2. Since I've already expressed my views on your argument, I would prefer that other editors who haven't been involved in the discussion offer their opinions. Schazjmd   (talk)  17:29, 15 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I think third opinion suits this best as there are other options that I haven't thought of and a third opinion may be able to find a compromise, and there's going to be little consensus building in an RfC because people will just say yes there should, no there shouldn't, people have quite polarising views on this I think Alexanderkowal (talk) 17:57, 15 May 2024 (UTC)
 * If I was American I'd not be arguing for this tbh Alexanderkowal (talk) 17:57, 15 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I added it to the 3O page, if that isn't productive then maybe an RfC Alexanderkowal (talk) 18:08, 15 May 2024 (UTC)

 * Thanks, tbh I think it is probably best not to have it in the first sentence but as a clause at the end of that paragraph. MOS:FIRST doesn't seem to mention framing so maybe it's not supposed to be done. My issue is with WP:NPOV rather than the MOS. Maybe if the first paragraph linked to an article on the science vs religion debate, the only one seems to be Relationship between religion and science. Perhaps an excerpt from that article from Relationship between religion and science Alexanderkowal (talk) 18:32, 15 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Framing can definitely be done within the opening paragraph—see MOS:OPEN: How would linking to Relationship between religion and science help that, ? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 20:28, 15 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Magical thinking is often cited when talking about religion in efforts to portray religious belief as incorrect, and I can find sources for this. I now don't think the scope of the article should be limited or framed, but for balance there needs to be a short, concise counter-argument against the above, however I'm not sure how to lead into this. I can find a quote saying why religious belief isn't simply incorrect, or a critique of applying absolutism and the scientific method to religious belief. This seems to comply with MOS? Obviously any argument would have to be intellectually valid rather than propped up for balance. Alexanderkowal (talk) 20:53, 15 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Maybe another paragraph after the first discussing the debate around magical thinking, magic, and religion. Alexanderkowal (talk) 20:56, 15 May 2024 (UTC)
 * That needs to be part of the body before it can be summarized in the lead. Schazjmd   (talk)  21:11, 15 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Lol I guess that’s one for the to do list Alexanderkowal (talk) 21:18, 15 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Is there anything we can put in the first paragraph that alludes to this concept’s role in the science vs religion debate? Alexanderkowal (talk) 21:20, 15 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Not if it isn't discussed in the body. Maybe you should focus on sourcing and writing a section about what you're seeing as a gap in the article, and then after that it can be included in the lead? Schazjmd   (talk)  21:27, 15 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Okay I’ll do that Alexanderkowal (talk) 21:29, 15 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Thanks for stepping in, @AirshipJungleman29. Schazjmd   (talk)  21:45, 15 May 2024 (UTC)
 * You're welcome. I think this is going in a productive direction, so I'll unwatch this page; feel free to ping if either of you you want my opinion again. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 22:23, 15 May 2024 (UTC)

Responding to the request posted on my talk page - there are several issues with the lead which include the assumption of a dichotomy between religion and science and the extensive use of 'causality'. Given that Complexity science now deals with systems with no material causality and the concept of emergence is significant in modern theories of consiousness, this is unfortunate to the say the least. I have added to my watch list -Snowded TALK 06:54, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

 * Would you be okay editing it? I’m not familiar with the topic at all Alexanderkowal (talk) 07:47, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

Framing of the lede
Should the first two paragraphs of the lede be framed? The lede currently reads:
 * "Magical thinking, or superstitious thinking, is the belief that unrelated events are causally connected despite the absence of any plausible causal link between them, particularly as a result of supernatural effects.

 * Examples include the idea that personal thoughts can influence the external world without acting on them, or that objects must be causally connected if they resemble each other or have come into contact with each other in the past. Magical thinking is a type of fallacious thinking and is a common source of invalid causal inferences. Unlike the confusion of correlation with causation, magical thinking does not require the events to be correlated.

 * The precise definition of magical thinking may vary subtly when used by different theorists or among different fields of study. In anthropology, the posited causality is between religious ritual, prayer, sacrifice, or the observance of a taboo, and an expected benefit or recompense.

 * In psychology, magical thinking is the belief that one's thoughts by themselves can bring about effects in the world or that thinking something corresponds with doing it. These beliefs can cause a person to experience an irrational fear of performing certain acts or having certain thoughts because of an assumed correlation between doing so and threatening calamities.

 * In psychiatry, magical thinking defines false beliefs about the capability of thoughts, actions or words to cause or prevent undesirable events. It is a commonly observed symptom in thought disorder, schizotypal personality disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder"

See the article for refs and the below arguments. Alexanderkowal (talk) 14:45, 15 May 2024 (UTC)

 * What question is this RfC asking? If you're asking if the introduction of the clause "in the context of building propositional knowledge," to the first sentence would be an improvement, I say it would be over-technical and unhelpful. MartinPoulter (talk) 14:50, 15 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Please see my argument below Alexanderkowal (talk) 14:52, 15 May 2024 (UTC)
 * My argument is that the lede includes three definitions, the final two being framed, whilst the first is not. Note that the sources don't explicitly establish the framing and it is their nature that is used to establish the framing. The sources used in the first two paragraphs are academic sources whose purpose is to build propositional knowledge. I think either the first paragraph or the second should include:
 * "...in the context of building propositional knowledge"
 * The page linked to discusses the difference between propositional knowledge and perceptual knowledge which is very relevant here. Note that magical thinking has been used as a synonym for religious thinking, although there some differentiate between the two, and religion is considered to be doctrinal magic that has developed by academics. Alexanderkowal (talk) 14:52, 15 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I'd be fine with dropping the propositional if that is what people take issue with Alexanderkowal (talk) 14:58, 15 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I think this article suffers tremendously from New atheist and secular fundamentalist bias and that this violates WP:NPOV. Alexanderkowal (talk) 15:08, 15 May 2024 (UTC)

 * I agree the lede absolutely violates WP:NPOV as it contains zero sources from academics of magic. Also why is the Bennett reference even included as it is a blog? There are a ton of academic sources that should be used instead. Likewise the skeptics' dictionary. It isn't peer reviewed, why are we citing it?

 * "...unrelated events are causally connected despite the absence of any plausible causal link between them" in the lede is inherently biased. There is academic work on this that can be cited. This could just as well be a definition of quantum entanglement. We don't know why it happens but it does. Something like "Magical thinking is the belief that apparently unrelated events are causally connected despite the absence of any obvious causal link between them, possibly as a result of supernatural effects." would be more neutral.

 * While there are sections in the article from many perspectives e.g. psychology, anthropology and philosophy, there is very little at all from scholars of magic or religion. Tambiah is there, which is great, but so are Freud and Malinowski, can you say obsolete sources? So much work has been done on this in the last 20 years that the only place for Freud and Malinowski would be a section on the history of thinking about magical thinking.

 * To establish NPOV this article needs, at the least, a section on the work of academics of magic and religion and needs some sources from academics of magic and religion in the lede.
 * Morgan Leigh | Talk 00:33, 16 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Would you be okay editing this article? I’m really unfamiliar with the topic however I’m happy to help. I’ve got too much stuff on my to do list atm Alexanderkowal (talk) 09:46, 16 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I do not have the time to add another page to those I am already actively involved in at this time. Especially one like this which is going to be, shall we say, difficult to achieve meaningful change with as most of the people who write the best stuff about magical thinking from the point of view of magic and/or religion are not going to be allowed to be cited here because they publish in places that are persona non grata here. But I can give you some names of academics who you might be able to get cited.
 * Graham Harvey
 * Lynne_Hume
 * Ronald_Hutton
 * Sabina_Magliocco
 * Carole_M._Cusack
 * Chas_S._Clifton
 * Good luck. I will follow this page and help as I can. Please feel free to post to my talk page if you have specific questions I might be able to help with. Morgan Leigh | Talk 06:03, 19 May 2024 (UTC)

title: Talk:Magical thinking


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Freeganism

Freeganism is an ideology of limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources, particularly through recovering wasted goods like food. The word "freegan" is a portmanteau of "free" and "vegan". While vegans avoid buying, consuming, using, and wearing animal products as an act of protest against animal exploitation, freegans—at least in theory—avoid buying anything as an act of protest against the food system in general.

Freeganism is often presented as synonymous with "dumpster diving" for discarded food, although freegans are distinguished by their association with an anti-consumerist and anti-capitalist ideology and their engagement in a wider range of alternative living strategies, such as voluntary unemployment, squatting in abandoned buildings, and "guerrilla gardening" in unoccupied city parks.

History
Freegans' goal of reduced participation in capitalism and tactics of recovering wasted goods shares elements with the Diggers, an anarchist street theater group based in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco in the 1960s that organized free housing and clinics and gave away rescued food. The word "freegan" itself was allegedly invented in 1994 by Keith McHenry, the co-founder of Food Not Bombs—an anarchist group that distributes free vegetarian meals as a protest against militarism and as a way of providing "solidarity not charity"—to refer to non-vegans who never pay for animal products. McHenry's account is consistent with other published accounts of freeganism that show the word as beginning to be used in the mid-1990s by participants in the antiglobalization and radical environmental movements.

The pamphlet "Why Freegan?"—written by former Against Me! drummer Warren Oakes in Gainesville, Florida, in 1999 —defines freeganism as "an anti-consumeristic ethic about eating" and goes on to describe practices including dumpster diving, plate scraping, wild foraging, gardening, theft, employee scams, and barter as alternatives to paying for food. The pamphlet also expanded the activities associated with "freeganism" with a long section on non-alimentary practices, including conserving water, pre-cycling, reusing goods, and using solar energy. More than just a set of behaviors, though, the pamphlet presents freeganism as having an overarching political goal: an "ultimate boycott" of "all the corporations, all the stores, all the pesticides, all the land and resources wasted, the capitalist system, the all-oppressive dollar, the wage slavery, the whole burrito" in favor of "liv[ing] a full satisfying life...while treading lightly on the earth".

The first organized group of self-described "freegans" formed in 2003 as an offshoot of the Wetlands Preserve nightclub and associated Activism Center in New York City. According to the group freegan.info, "After years of trying to boycott products from unethical corporations responsible for human rights violations, environmental destruction, and animal abuse, many of us found that no matter what we bought we ended up supporting something deplorable. We came to realize that the problem isn't just a few bad corporations but the entire system itself." From 2005, freegan.info organized regular events including sewing and bicycle workshops, wild food foraging expeditions, and "trash tours"—public dumpster dives open to the public and to media.

Motivations and ideology
Studies usually find that most people that participate in practices associated with freeganism, such as dumpster diving for food, do so for economic reasons. Freegans are usually distinguished as being a subset of this population which has an ideological or political motivation for recovering waste or avoiding consumption, although some freegans also say that they do so for amusement, to acquire free goods, or out of religious conviction. Anthropologist Loretta Lou has demonstrated how freeganism is closely related to notions of freedom, especially "ethical freedom", among some freegan practitioners in Asia.

Anarchism and anti-capitalism
Freeganism's initial practitioners and forerunners like Food Not Bombs were explicitly anti-capitalist, arguing that capitalism is responsible for excessive consumption, the abuse of human laborers and non-human animals, and the waste of resources. Freegans' approach to anti-capitalism is broadly anarchist in orientation: rather than seeking to seize state power, freegans claim to be engaged in "prefigurative politics", using wasted resources to build a new society "in the shell of the old" based on values of "community, generosity, social concern, freedom, cooperation, and sharing". Freegan practices in theory reject the commoditization of basic necessities, the imperative of economic growth, and an economy based on money exchange rather than free gifting or sharing. Freegan organizations also often use consensus-based decision-making, popularized by the anti-globalization movement and later visible in anarchist-inspired mobilizations like Occupy Wall Street.

Veganism and food waste
The word "freegan" originated as a play on the label "veganism" and research on freegan.info in New York found that most participants were vegetarian or vegan prior to becoming freegan. In many cases, though, freegans critique vegans by arguing that vegans ignore the environmental and labor impacts of the products they buy and corporate ownership of many vegan product lines.

Freegans' rejection of veganism is often tied to their discovery of food waste, estimated as up to 40% of the food supply in the United States and other Western countries. For many, statistics about the ecological impacts of food waste—up to 12% of global cropland and 23% of global freshwater goes to produce food which is never consumed —serve as justification for a complete rejection of the capitalist food system. Moreover, the presence of food in supermarket dumpsters shows, according to some freegans, that the vegan theory of social change is flawed, because markets do not efficiently translate consumer preferences into changes in production.

Back-to-nature
Some freegans associate themselves with "back-to-the-landers" or "anarcho-primitivism", the latter of which asserts that human beings should reject not only capitalism but civilization itself. With some exceptions, though, freeganism is a largely urban or suburban phenomenon. Some research suggests that freegans overcome this apparent contradiction by attempting to re-naturalize the city, treating urban waste as a "natural" resource and approach dumpster diving as a practice analogous to hunting or gathering.

Urban foraging

Freegans are best known for recovering discarded food from commercial establishments, a practice known as "dumpster diving" or "urban foraging" in North America, "skipping", "bin raiding", or "skipitarianism" in the UK, "skip dipping" in Australia, "containern" in Germany, or "doing the duck" in New Zealand. Freegan diets are thus made possible by the range of practices that produce commercial food waste that is nonetheless still edible, such as conservative sell-by dates, the deliberate overstocking of certain perishable products (like baked goods), or aesthetic criteria for fruits and vegetables. However, dumpster diving is not limited to rummaging for food; freegans report recovering clothing, books, appliances, bicycles, and furniture from commercial dumpsters as well.

Although some freegans are reluctant to share their sites and strategies for "urban foraging", others—like those in freegan.info—have organized public events to raise awareness of food waste and recruit other practitioners. These events attracted significant media coverage, particularly between 2005 and 2009, from outlets such as The New York Times, Oprah, and MSNBC.

Wild foraging and urban gardens
Instead of buying conventionally grown foods, wild foragers find and harvest food and medicinal plants growing in their own communities. Some freegans participate in "guerrilla" or "community" gardens, with the stated aim of rebuilding community and reclaiming the capacity to grow one's own food. In order to fertilize those guerrilla gardens, food obtained from dumpster diving is sometimes also reused, and some use vermiculture instead of ordinary composting techniques in order to keep the required infrastructure small and adapted to urban areas. Some rural freegans are also "homesteaders" who grow their own food and employ alternative energy sources to provide energy for their homesteads, occasionally living "off the grid" entirely.

Sharing
"Sharing" is also presented as a common freegan practice, associated with the anarchist idea of a "gift economy". For example, Food Not Bombs recovers food that would otherwise go to waste to serve warm meals on the street to anyone who wants them. Really, Really Free Markets are free social events in which freegans can share goods instead of discarding them, share skills, give presents and eat food. A free store is a temporary market where people exchange goods and services outside of a money-based economy. In New York City, freegan.info often distributes recovered food items for free in an ad-hoc manner after trash tours.

Freegans also advocate sharing travel resources. Carpools and hitchhiking reduce, but do not eliminate, use of cars. Community bicycle programs and collectives facilitate community sharing of bicycles, restore found and broken bikes, and teach people how to do their own bicycle repairs. In the process, they aim to build a culture of skill and resource sharing, reuse wasted bikes and bike parts, and create greater access to green transport.

Squatting
Just as freegans argue food waste should be recovered and redistributed, many argue that unoccupied buildings are a form of "waste" to be reclaimed. Squatting was widespread in Western Europe as well as parts of the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, and activists used squatted buildings not only for housing but also to create community centers, pirate radio stations, or free schools. A widespread crackdown by municipalities closed many squats and legalized the remainder in the 1990s—the moment when freeganism was emerging—and so it is thus difficult to know how many people are involved in this activity. While research with freegans consistently shows that they endorse squatting, in practice, freegan living situations vary, ranging from trading work for rent to traditional home ownership.

Working less
Working less is another component of freeganism. Freegans oppose the notion of working for the sole purpose of accumulating material items. They argue that their need to work is reduced by only purchasing the basic necessities and acquiring the remainder for free from the garbage. According to freegans, not working frees up additional time for political action while avoiding tasks they see as sacrificing valuable time to "take orders from someone else, stress, boredom, monotony, and in many cases risks to physical and psychological well-being". As with squatting, however, the degree of concordance between freegan ideology and practices is variable. In surveys, self-described freegans vary from reporting working only irregularly, working consistently in social justice organizations, and being employed in more conventional, "capitalist" occupations.

Sanitation and stigma
Contact with waste is seen as a taboo and socially unacceptable in most developed countries, and freegans are often associated with stigmatized and racialized groups like the homeless or even compared to scavenging "pest" animals like raccoons. Some public health officials, like those in New York City, have explicitly discouraged dumpster diving for sanitation reasons and media coverage occasionally focuses on the "ick" factor of dumpster diving while (explicitly or implicitly) ignoring its political content. This discourse has been deployed more broadly to discredit anarchist movements by claiming they are unhygienic and thus dangerous. While some freegans argue that dumpster dived food is safe—noting it is usually thrown out because it cannot be profitably sold, not because it is no longer edible—others embrace the "dirtiness" of recovered food as a symbolic rejection of capitalist norms. The group freegan.info has made the disgust attached to wasted food part of its messaging, arguing that social disapprobation should instead fall on those who throw out food, rather than those who recover it.

Parasitism
Freeganism has also been critiqued both by other radical movements and by mainstream commentators for the fact that its signature practice—dumpster diving—depends on the capitalist food system that freegans claim to be rejecting. A typical response is that freegan practices are not limited to dumpster diving, but include also actions like guerilla gardening, wild food foraging, or sewing or bike repair "skill shares" that are more fully autonomous from the conventional economy.

Racial and class composition
Although activities like dumpster diving or gleaning are traditionally seen as subsistence strategies for the poor, most research on freegans finds that individuals come from middle-class and upper-class backgrounds and have high levels of education (even if their present lifestyles make them low-income). Freeganism has also been described as racially exclusive, because freeganism's voluntary association of waste would seem to confirm a "globally ubiquitous racial construction" that people of color are dirty and polluted. As one freegan of color wrote, "I am extremely embarrassed for people to see me diving, because I can tell that I'm not just me, I'm also a representation of black people in general...I got harassed by security several times while diving on my own campus, until my white friends pop their heads out of the dumpsters." In contrast, the portrait of the gender balance of freeganism is more mixed, with some accounts saying groups are majority men and others majority women.

Legality and commercial responses
The legality of freegan practices of reclaiming wasted food, space, or buildings varies depending on local laws around property, trespassing, and waste removal. In some places, like New York City, freegans dumpster dive publicly; in other locations, urban foraging is a secretive activity. In recent years, there have been arrests of people dumpster diving for political reasons in the United Kingdom, Belgium, and France, although in most locations charges have eventually been dropped. These actions could be seen as part of a broader criminalization of acts of survival—like sleeping in public places, sharing food without a permit, or recovering aluminum cans to re-sell—that has affected freegans as well as affiliated groups like Food Not Bombs and the homeless. Freegans report that stores have responded to waste recovery as well, including deliberately destroying products prior to disposing of them, locking dumpsters, or pouring bleach on food to make it inedible. In France, a new national law bans the practice of destroying food in this way.

Impacts
Media coverage of freeganism in the United States peaked around the financial crisis in 2007-2009 and dropped off subsequently. More recently, freeganism has been discussed in the context of increasing public interest in food waste. Tristram Stuart, a prominent food waste campaigner and founder of the organization "Feedback" claims that media attention to freeganism was crucial in attracting attention to the problem. Other analyses of the origins of contemporary public policy initiatives around food waste have also concluded that freeganism contributed to new initiatives, like the French law on food waste or the U.S. food waste reduction challenge.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Freeganism


text:
Brown Bess

"Brown Bess" is a nickname of uncertain origin for the British Army's muzzle-loading smoothbore flintlock Land Pattern Musket and its derivatives. The musket design remained in use for over a hundred years with many incremental changes in its design. These versions include the Long Land Pattern, the Short Land Pattern, the India Pattern, the New Land Pattern Musket, and the Sea Service Musket.

The Long Land Pattern musket and its derivatives, all 0.75 inches calibre flintlock muskets, were the standard long guns of the British Empire's land forces from 1722 until 1838, when they were superseded by a percussion cap smoothbore musket. The British Ordnance System converted many flintlocks into the new percussion system known as the Pattern 1839 Musket. A fire in 1841 at the Tower of London destroyed many muskets before they could be converted. Still, the Brown Bess saw service until the middle of the nineteenth century.

Most male citizens of the thirteen colonies of British America were required by law to own arms and ammunition for militia duty. The Long Land Pattern was a common firearm in use by both sides in the American War of Independence.

In 1808 during the Napoleonic Wars, the United Kingdom subsidised Sweden (during the period when Finland was under Swedish rule) in various ways as the British government anxiously wanted to keep an ally in the Baltic Sea region. These included deliveries of significant numbers of Brown Bess-muskets for use in the Finnish War of 1808 to 1809.

During the Musket Wars (1820s–30s), Māori warriors used Brown Besses purchased from European traders at the time. Some muskets were sold to the Mexican Army, which used them during the Texas Revolution of 1836 and the Mexican–American War of 1846 to 1848. Brown Besses saw service in the First Opium War and during the Indian rebellion of 1857. Zulu warriors, who had also purchased them from European traders, used them during the Anglo-Zulu War in 1879. One was even used in the Battle of Shiloh in 1862, during the American Civil War.

Origins of the name
One hypothesis is that the "Brown Bess" was named after Elizabeth I of England, but this lacks support. Jonathan Ferguson, Firearms Curator of the Royal Armouries, traces the name to at least the 1760s, and his research suggests the name was adopted from slang for a mistress, prostitute, or lowly woman who also appear in period sources referred to as "Brown Bess". He writes, Bess' was a generic and sometimes derogatory name, a bit like 'Sheila' in modern Australian English", and "brown" simply meant plain or drab. Ferguson discounts, with evidence, many of the other theories previously popular.

Early uses of the term include the newspaper, the Connecticut Courant in April 1771, which said: "... but if you are afraid of the sea, take Brown Bess on your shoulder and march." This familiar use indicates widespread use of the term by that time. The 1785 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, a contemporary work that defined vernacular and slang terms, contained this entry: "Brown Bess: A soldier's firelock. To hug Brown Bess; to carry a fire-lock, or serve as a private soldier." Military and government records of the time do not use this poetical name but refer to firelocks, flintlock, muskets or by the weapon's model designations.

Popular explanations of the use of the word "Brown" include that it was a reference to either the colour of the walnut stocks, or to the characteristic brown colour that was produced by russeting, an early form of metal treatment. However, in the case of russeting at least, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and Ferguson note that "browning" was only introduced in the early 19th century, well after the term had come into general use. Others argue that mass-produced weapons of the time were coated in brown varnish on metal parts as a rust-preventive and on wood as a sealer (or in the case of unscrupulous contractors, to disguise inferior or non-regulation types of wood), an entirely different thing from russeting.

Similarly, the word "Bess" is commonly held to either derive from the word arquebus or blunderbuss (predecessors of the musket) or to be a reference to Elizabeth I, possibly given to commemorate her death. The OED has citations for "brown musket" dating back to the early 18th century that refer to the same weapon. Another suggestion is that the name is simply the counterpart to the earlier Brown Bill. However, the origin of the name may be much simpler, if vulgar.

Kipling may have based his poem on an earlier but similar "Brown Bess" poem published in "Flights of Fancy" (No. 16) in 1792. Of course, the name could have been initially inspired by the older term of the "Brown Bill" and perhaps the barrels were originally varnished brown, but it is well known in literary circles that the name "Brown Bess" during the period in question in the 17th to early 19th centuries is not a reference to a colour or a weapon but to simply refer to a wanton prostitute (or harlot). Such a nickname would have been a delight to the soldiers of the era who were from the lower classes of English and then British society. So far, the earliest use noted of the term "Brown Bess" was in a 1631 publication, John Done's Polydoron: or A Mescellania of Morall, Philosophicall, and Theological Sentences, page 152:

"Things profferd and easie to come by, diminish themselves in reputation & price: for how full of pangs and dotage is a wayling lover, for it may be some browne bessie? But let a beautie fall a weeping, overpressed with the sicke passion; she favours in our thoughts, something Turnbull."

The Land Pattern muskets

From the seventeenth century to the early years of the eighteenth century, most nations did not specify standards for military firearms. Firearms were individually procured by officers or regiments as late as 1745, and were often custom-made to the tastes of the purchaser. As the firearm gained ascendancy on the battlefield, this lack of standardisation led to increasing difficulties in the supply of ammunition and repair materials. To address these difficulties, armies began to adopt standardised "patterns". A military service selected a "pattern musket" to be stored in a "pattern room". There it served as a reference for arms makers, who could make comparisons and take measurements to ensure that their products matched the standard.

Stress-bearing parts of the Brown Bess, such as the barrel, lockwork, and sling-swivels, were customarily made of iron, while other furniture pieces such as the butt plate, trigger guard and ramrod pipe were found in both iron and brass. It weighed around 10 lb and it could be fitted with a 17 in triangular cross-section bayonet. The weapon had a single fore-sight, but no rear sights. this doubled as a bayonet lock. This is often mistakenly referred to as a "bayonet lug" but this is a modern nomenclature - contemporary sources refer to this as a "sight" and cite its positioning to be intentional for aiming.

The earliest models had iron fittings, but these were replaced by brass in models built after 1736. Wooden ramrods were used with the first guns but were replaced by iron ones, although guns with wooden scouring sticks were still issued to troops on American service until 1765 and later to loyalist units in the American Revolution. Wooden ramrods, also called scouring sticks, were also used in the Dragoon version produced from 1744 to 1771 for Navy and Marine use.

The accuracy of the Brown Bess was fair, as with most other muskets. In 1811, in London, a test shooting was conducted at the site. The target was a wooden shield the size of an infantry or a cavalry line. The results of the practice were as follows: at a distance of 100 yd 53% hits, 200 yd 30% hits, 300 yd 23% hits. The accuracy of the Brown Bess was in line with most other smoothbore muskets of the 18th to 19th centuries. But it should be borne in mind that this is the result of shooting by ordinary soldiers who had little training. Soldiers of light infantry had more training, and were taught accurate shooting.

The Brown Bess was used not only in the line infantry, but also light infantry, as well as Rogers' Rangers, hunters, skirmishers, Indians and many other irregular troops who used non-standard tactics.

The Brown Bess's bullet was lethal at its full effective range. In the mid-18th century, Robertson measured the speed of musket bullets on a ballistic pendulum. According to him, the speed of a round musket bullet slug was about 1804 feet per second (550 m/s). That is, the muzzle energy of the musket was about 3,500 to 4,000 joules, which is comparable to the energy of modern rifle cartridges. Modern ballistic tests have confirmed these data. According to the Russian lieutenant-general Ivan G. Gogel, all the muskets of the European nations were able to penetrate a wooden shield with a thickness of 1 in at a distance of 300 yards.

British soldiers armed with Brown Besses preferred to reduce the standard number of steps for loading a musket. To this end, they would sometimes drop the cartridge into the barrel and strike the butt on the ground, to seat the load without the use of a ramrod.

Besides not having fore-sights, Brown Bess-muskets were virtually identical to Potzdam muskets up until the Prussian 1801 pattern.

Variations

Many variations and modifications of the standard pattern musket were created over its long history. The earliest version was the Long Land Pattern of 1722, 62 in long (without bayonet), with a 46 in barrel. It was later found that shortening the barrel did not detract from accuracy but made handling easier, giving rise to the Militia (or Marine) Pattern of 1756 and the Short Land Pattern of 1768, which both had a 42 in barrel. Another version with a 39 in barrel was first manufactured for the British East India Company, and was eventually adopted by the British Army in 1790 as the India Pattern.

By the late 1830s and into the early 1840s the weapon was becoming obsolete and its flintlock mechanism was being replaced by the more efficient and reliable percussion cap ignition. The flintlock mechanism was prone to misfiring, especially in wet weather. The last flintlock pattern manufactured was selected for conversion to the new system as the Pattern 1839. As a fire at the Tower of London destroyed large stocks of these in 1841, a new Pattern 1842 musket was manufactured. These remained in service until the 1853 outbreak of the Crimean War, when they were replaced by the Minié and the P53 Enfield rifled musket.

General bibliography

 * Cumpston, Mike. "The guns of empire: 18th century martial muskets". Guns, August 2008, p. 60. FMG Publications, San Diego, CA
 * Reid, Stuart. British Redcoat (2) 1793—1815. Warrior series. Osprey Publishing. ISBN 9781855325562..

title: Brown Bess


text:
Charleville musket

The Charleville musket was a .69 caliber standard French infantry musket used in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was made in 1717 and was last produced during the 1840s. However, it still saw limited use in conflicts through the mid-19th century (such as the Crimean War).

History
Marin le Bourgeoys created the first true flintlock weapons for King Louis XIII shortly after his accession to the throne in 1610. Throughout the 17th century, flintlock muskets were produced in a wide variety of models.

In 1717, a flintlock musket for the French infantry was standardized. This became the first standard flintlock musket to be issued to all French troops. While it is more correctly called a French infantry musket or a French pattern musket, these muskets later became known as "Charleville muskets", after the armory in Charleville-Mézières, Ardennes, France. The standard French infantry-long gun was also produced at Tulle, Saint-Étienne, Maubeuge Arsenal, and other sites. While technically not the correct name for these muskets, the use of the name Charleville dates back to the U.S. Revolutionary War, when Americans tended to refer to all of the musket models as Charlevilles. The naming of these muskets is not consistent. Some references only refer to Model 1763 and later versions as Charleville flintlock muskets, while other references refer to all models as the Charleville. The Charleville musket's design was refined several times during its service life. Later models of Charleville muskets remained in service until 1840, when percussion lock systems made the flintlock mechanism obsolete.

Design features
Charleville muskets had a smoothbore barrel. Rifles were more accurate than smoothbore muskets, but military commanders favored smoothbores on the battlefield, since the round from a rifle had to fit tightly into the barrel and became very difficult to load after a few shots because the black powder quickly fouled the barrel. The longer range and better accuracy of the rifle were also considered to be of little value on a battlefield that was quickly obscured by black powder smoke. Like all smoothbore muskets, the Charleville flintlock musket was only accurate to about 200 yards against a column of men, or eighty to a hundred yards against a man-sized target.

The Charleville's 0.69-inch (17.5 mm) caliber barrel was slightly smaller than its main competitor, the 0.75-inch caliber Brown Bess produced by the British. The smaller round was intentionally chosen to reduce weight in the field, but still had enough mass to be effective as a military round. The Charleville's stock was usually made out of walnut.

Charleville muskets were not always used like modern rifles. In pitched battles formations of musketeers did not aim and fire individually, but would fire controlled volleys on command against other close packed formations. This mitigated to some extent the natural inaccuracy of the musket, as well as the general lack of marksmanship training among infantrymen of the period. However from the French Revolutionary Wars onward the French army began to use light infantry tactic on a large scale as well, and thus the Charleville was also regularly used for individually aimed fire by skirmishers operating singly from behind cover. Despite the musket's relative lack of accuracy the French infantrymen, especially the voltigeurs and chasseurs formation, were often highly effective skirmishers with it.

The bayonet also played an important role in warfare during the era of flintlock muskets, unlike its reputation today as a last-ditch weapon. Given the slow reloading process of muzzle loading guns, a hedge of bayonets provided vital protection for musketeers against fast charging cavalry in the open. This low rate of fire also allowed infantry to often close into melee distance without taking too many casualties, and bayonet charges were thus frequently used to decisively rout wavering enemy formations. The Charleville thus played a dual role on the battlefield, obviously as a ranged weapon, but also as a polearm in hand-to-hand combat. This intended use as a makeshift spear dictated the Charleville's general length and weight. A short barrel would leave its user at a disadvantage in combat due to the lack of reach, and the gun also needed to be sturdy enough to be used as a pike or a club, while remaining light enough to be easily handled by the general infantrymen.

The rate of fire depended on the skill of the soldier, which was typically about three shots per minute. The Charleville's barrel was held into place by three barrel bands. This made the Charleville sturdier than the British Brown Bess musket, which used pins to hold the barrel in place. The butt of the Charleville's stock was sometimes referred to as the "patte de vache" (French for "cow's foot"), as its shape was designed to be used as a club in hand-to-hand combat.

Charleville muskets were muzzle-loaded and used a flintlock firing mechanism. They typically fired a round, lead ball but could fire other ammunition such as buck and ball or shot.

Model 1717
After numerous musket designs in the late 17th and early 18th century, most notably the Tulle Musket, the infantry musket was standardized in what would become the Model 1717. This model standardized most of the design features that would be common to all subsequent models, such as a .69 caliber barrel, an approximate length of 60 in and an approximate weight of 9 to 10 lb. The Model 1717 also standardized the smoothbore barrel and flintlock firing mechanism.

Unlike later models, the Model 1717 had a pinned barrel, similar in design to the British Brown Bess. It also had a single barrel band at the center of the barrel, and four iron pipes that held a wooden scouring stick. All of the furniture was iron.

The Model 1717 had a 46 in barrel and an overall length of 62 in, and weighed approximately nine pounds. A total of 48,000 Model 1717 muskets were produced.

Model 1728
The Model 1728 replaced the pinned barrel with a barrel held in place by three barrel bands, which would become standard on all subsequent Charleville muskets. The barrel band design was not only easier to disassemble for cleaning, but was also sturdier, which was an important consideration in bayonet combat.

The lock was also revised, with a longer steel spring and a slightly modified cock design.

Changes in the 1740s included the standardized use of a steel ramrod in 1741 and, after 1746, newly manufactured muskets had the pan/frizzen bridle removed. Other minor changes were also made throughout the Model 1728's production life. These modified versions are generally considered to be minor variations to the Model 1728, and are not typically considered to be a separate and distinct model of musket. A total of 375,000 Model 1728 muskets were produced.

Model 1763
After the Seven Years' War (in North America often known as the French and Indian war), the French infantry musket was redesigned, resulting in the Model 1763.

The barrel was shortened from 46 to 44 in and the octagonal breech plug featured on earlier models was replaced with a more rounded design. The stock's distinctive "cow's foot" butt was modified with a much more straightened design. The ramrod was also given a more trumpet shaped end.

Though shorter in length, the Model 1763 was designed to be heavier and sturdier, and weighed over ten pounds.

A total of 88,000 Model 1763 muskets were produced.

Model 1766

The Model 1763's sturdier design proved to be a bit too heavy, so in 1766 the musket's design was lightened. The barrel wall was thinned, the lock was shortened, the stock was slimmed, and the Model 1763's long iron ramrod cover was replaced by a pinned spring under the breech. The trumpet shaped ramrod of the Model 1763 was also abandoned in favor of a ramrod with a lighter button shaped end.

Though usually considered to be a separate model, the Model 1766 was often referred to as a "light Model 1763" musket, especially in Revolutionary War invoices.

Despite being thinned down, the Model 1766 proved to be rugged and reliable.

A total of 140,000 Model 1766 muskets were produced.

Models 1770 to 1776
Several changes were made to Charleville muskets during the 1770s. References are not consistent with respect to the naming of these models. Some consider many of them to be distinct models, while others consider them to be only variations of earlier models. Most of the modifications during this period were relatively minor.

The Model 1770 had a modified lock plate, stronger barrel bands, and a modified retaining spring. The Model 1771 moved the bayonet lug and strengthened the barrel. The Model 1770 and 1771 are often grouped together as a single model. The Model 1773 was similar to previous models, but again modified the ramrod-retaining spring. The Model 1773 is often considered to be a minor variant to the Model 1770/1771. The Model 1774 had a shorter trigger guard, and the tail of the steel was cut square. The ramrod-design was also modified in the Model 1774, giving it more of a pear shaped head. Similarly minor changes were made for the Model 1776, which is often not considered to be a separate model.

Throughout the 1770s, the stock was modified in an inconsistent fashion. Some muskets were produced with a much more pronounced comb on the stock than others, which have an almost nonexistent comb.

A total of 70,000 Model 1770 to 1776 muskets were produced.

Model 1777

The design of the stock was again modified for the Model 1777, with a cheek rest cut into the inboard side of the butt. The Model 1777 also featured a slanted brass priming pan and bridle, and a modified trigger guard with two rear finger ridges.

The Model 1777 is often incorrectly believed to have been used in large numbers by rebel troops during the American War of Independence. While the Model 1777 was used in the American Revolutionary War, it was generally only used by French troops who served on American soil, such as those under the command of General Rochambeau. American troops were instead armed with earlier Model 1763 and 1766 muskets.

(See also Musket Model 1777).

Other variants

In 1754, the French introduced a shorter Officers version of the Charleville.

Most models were produced in shorter dragoon versions, which were generally about 10 in shorter than their infantry counterpart. The Model 1763, 1766, and 1777 were all available in a cavalry version. These are also often called carbine versions.

The Model 1777 Artillery version had a 36 in barrel and an overall length of 51 in. The furniture was mostly made of brass.

The Model 1777 Dragoon version had a 42-inch barrel and an overall length of 57 in. Most of the furniture was made of brass.

The Model 1777 Navy version was similar in length to the Dragoon version. All furniture on the navy version was made of brass.

The Russian Model 1808 Musket was based heavily on the design of the Model 1777 Charleville. This musket is often called a Tula musket since the majority were manufactured in Tula and bore its name on their locks. The Tula musket was manufactured with only minor changes until 1845, when it was replaced by a percussion lock musket.

The Dutch Model 1815 No. 1 and No. 2, as well as the Koloniaal Model 1836 and 1837 were based heavily on the design of the Model 1777 Corrigé en l'an IX.

Charleville muskets were also copied by Belgium, Austria and Prussia as the Augustin 1842 musket and Potzdam 1809 musket.

In the 1830s and 1840s, many old Charleville muskets (mostly later models) were converted from flintlocks to percussion locks. Several Dutch guns were even converted to breechloaders with the Snider breech-loading system in the 1860s.

Use

Large numbers of Charleville Model 1763 and 1766 muskets were imported into the United States from France during the American War of Independence, due in large part to the influence of Marquis de Lafayette. The Charleville 1766 heavily influenced the design of the Springfield Musket of 1795.

The Model 1766 and 1777 were also used by the French during their participation in the American Revolutionary War.

The Model 1777 was used throughout the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. It remained in service, at least partially, until the mid-1840s.

Modern replica Charleville muskets are produced by several manufacturers. These are used by historical reenactors in both in the Americas and Europe.

title: Charleville musket


text:
Homeric Hymns

The Homeric Hymns (Ὁμηρικοὶ ὕμνοι) are a collection of thirty-three ancient Greek hymns and one epigram. The hymns praise deities of the Greek pantheon and retell mythological stories, often involving a deity's birth, their acceptance among the gods on Mount Olympus, or the establishment of their cult. In antiquity, the hymns were generally, though not universally, attributed to the poet Homer: modern scholarship has established that most date to the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, though some are more recent and the latest, the Hymn to Ares, may have been composed as late as the fifth century CE.

The Homeric Hymns share compositional similarities with the Iliad and the Odyssey, also traditionally attributed to Homer. They share the same artificial literary dialect of Greek, are composed in dactylic hexameter, and make use of short, repeated phrases known as formulae. It is unclear how far writing, as opposed to oral composition, was involved in their creation. They may initially have served as preludes to the recitation of longer poems, and have been performed, at least originally, by singers accompanying themselves on a lyre or other stringed instrument. Performances of the hymns may have taken place at sympotic banquets, religious festivals and royal courts.

There are references to the Homeric Hymns in Greek poetry from around 600 BCE; they appear to have been used as educational texts by the early fifth century BCE, and to have been collected into a single corpus after the third century CE. Their influence on Greek literature and art was relatively small until the third century BCE, when they were used extensively by Alexandrian poets including Callimachus, Theocritus and Apollonius of Rhodes. They were also an influence on Roman poets, such as Lucretius, Catullus, Virgil, Horace and Ovid. In late antiquity (c. 200), they influenced both pagan and Christian literature, and their collection as a corpus probably dates to this period. They were comparatively neglected during the succeeding Byzantine period (that is, until 1453), but continued to be copied in manuscripts of Homeric poetry; all the surviving manuscripts of the hymns date to the fifteenth century. They were also read and emulated widely in fifteenth-century Italy, and indirectly influenced Sandro Botticelli's painting The Birth of Venus.

The Homeric Hymns were first published in print by Demetrios Chalkokondyles in 1488–1489. George Chapman made the first English translation of them in 1642. Part of their text was incorporated, via a 1710 translation by William Congreve, into George Frideric Handel's 1744 musical drama Semele. The rediscovery of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter in 1777 led to a resurgence of European interest in the hymns. In the arts, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe used the Hymn to Demeter as an inspiration for his 1778 melodrama Proserpina. Their textual criticism progressed considerably over the nineteenth century, particularly in German scholarship, though the text continued to present substantial difficulties into the twentieth. The Homeric Hymns were also influential on the English Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century, particularly Leigh Hunt, Thomas Love Peacock and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Later poets to adapt the hymns included Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Constantine P. Cavafy. Their influence has also been traced in the works of James Joyce, the films of Alfred Hitchcock, and the novel Coraline by Neil Gaiman.

Composition
The Homeric Hymns mostly date to the archaic period of Greek history, though they often retell much older stories. The earliest of the hymns date to the seventh century BCE; most were probably composed between that century and the sixth century BCE, though the Hymn to Ares was composed considerably later and may date from as late as the fifth century CE. Although the individual hymns can rarely be dated with certainty, the longer poems (Hymns 2–5) are generally considered archaic in date. The earliest of the Homeric Hymns were composed in a time period when oral poetry was common in Greek culture. It is unclear how far the hymns were composed orally, as opposed to with the use of writing, and scholars debate the degree of consistency or "fixity" likely to have existed between early versions of the hymns in performance. The debate is clouded by the impossibility of determining for certain whether a poem with characteristic features of oral poetry was in fact composed orally, or composed using writing but in imitation of an oral-poetic style. Modern scholarship tends to avoid a sharp distinction between oral and written composition, seeing the poems as traditional texts originating in a strongly oral culture.

The name "Homeric Hymns" derives from the attribution, in antiquity, of the hymns to Homer, then believed to be the poet of the Iliad and Odyssey. The Hymn to Apollo was attributed to Homer by Pindar and Thucydides, who wrote around the beginning and the end of the fifth century BCE respectively. This attribution may have reflected the high esteem in which the hymns were held, as well as their stylistic similarities with the Homeric poems. The dialect of the hymns, an artificial literary language (Kunstsprache) derived largely from the Aeolic and Ionic dialects of Greek, is similar to that used in the Iliad and Odyssey. Like the Iliad and Odyssey, the hymns are composed in the rhythmic form known as dactylic hexameter and make use of formulae: short, set phrases with particular metrical characteristics that could be repeated as a compositional aid.

The attribution to Homer was sometimes questioned in antiquity, such as by the rhetorician Athenaeus, who expressed his doubts about it around 200 CE. Other hypotheses in ancient times included the belief that the Hymn to Apollo was the work of Kynathios of Chios, one of the Homeridae, a circle of poets claiming descent from Homer. Some ancient biographies of Homer denied his authorship of the Homeric Hymns, and the hymns' comparative absence, relative to the Iliad and Odyssey, from the work of scholars based in Hellenistic (323–30 BCE) Alexandria may suggest that they were no longer considered to be his work by this period. However, few direct statements denying Homer's authorship of the hymns survive from antiquity: in the second century CE, the Greek geographer Pausanias maintained their attribution to Homer.

Irene de Jong has contrasted the narrative focus of the Homeric Hymns with that of the Homeric epics, writing that the gods are the primary focus of the hymns, with mortals serving primarily to witness the gods' actions, whereas the epics focus primarily on their mortal characters and use the gods to support the portrayal of human affairs. The poems also make use of different narrative styles: the Homeric Hymns are unlike the Homeric epics in that they employ iterative narration (accounts of events which repeatedly or habitually occur), which is relatively rare in ancient Greek literature, within passages of singulative narration (accounts of specific events related in sequence). René Nünlist has also suggested that the Homeric Hymns generally place greater focus on single events than the Homeric epics, and cover a shorter span of time, resulting in what he calls a comparatively "slow" narration.

Content and performance
The hymns vary considerably in length, between 3 and 580 surviving lines. They are generally considered to have originally functioned as preludes (prooimia) to recitations of longer works, such as epic poems. Many of the hymns end with a verse indicating that another song will follow, sometimes specifically a work of heroic epic. Over time, however, at least some may have lengthened and been recited independently of other works. The hymns which currently survive as shorter works may equally be abridgements of longer works, retaining the introduction and conclusion of a poem whose central narrative has been lost.

The first known sources referring to the poems as "hymns" (hymnoi) date from the first century BCE. In concept, an ancient hymn was an invocation of a deity, often connected with a specific cult or sanctuary associated with that deity. The hymns often cover the deity's birth, arrival on Olympus, and dealings with human beings. Several discuss the origins of the god's cult or the founding of a major sanctuary dedicated to them. Some are aetiological accounts of religious cults, specific rituals, aspects of a deity's iconography and responsibilities, or of aspects of human technology and culture. The hymns have been considered as agalmata, or gifts offered to deities on behalf of a community or social group. In this capacity, Claude Calame has referred to them as "contracts", by which the praise of the deity in the hymn invites reciprocity from that deity in the form of favour or protection for the singer or their community.

Little is known about the musical settings of the Homeric Hymns. The earliest surviving ancient Greek musical compositions date to the end of the fifth century BCE, after the composition of nearly all of the hymns. Originally, the hymns appear to have been performed by singers accompanying themselves on a stringed instrument, such as a lyre; later, they may have been recited, rather than sung, by an orator holding a staff. The Hymn to Hermes makes reference to a chorus of maidens on the island of Delos, who sang hymns to Apollo, Leto and Artemis. References to instruments of the lyre family (known interchangeably as ) occur throughout the Homeric Hymns and other archaic texts, such as the Iliad and Odyssey. These lyres generally had four strings in the early period of the hymns' composition, though seven-stringed versions became more common during the seventh century BCE. A paean, probably written in 138 BCE, mentions the accompaniment of hymnic singing with a kithara (a seven-stringed instrument of the lyre family), and contrasts this style of music with that of the aulos, a reeded wind instrument. It is unlikely that early Greek music was written down; instead, compositions were transmitted aurally and passed on through tradition. Until the fourth century BCE, few compositions appear to have been intended for repeat performance or long-term transmission.

The Homeric Hymns may have been composed to be recited at religious festivals, perhaps at singing contests: several directly or indirectly ask the god's support in competition. Some allude to the deity's cult at a specific place, and may have been composed for performance within that cult, though the latter did not necessarily follow from the former. They seem likely to have been performed frequently in various contexts throughout antiquity, such as at banquets or symposia. It has been suggested that the fifth hymn, to Aphrodite, could have been composed for performance at a royal or aristocratic court, perhaps of a family in the Troad claiming descent from Aphrodite via her son Aeneas. The hymns' narrative voice has been described by Marco Fantuzzi and Richard Hunter as "communal", usually making only generalised reference to their place of composition or the identity of the speaker. This made the hymns suitable for recitation by different speakers and for different audiences. Jenny Strauss Clay has suggested that the Homeric Hymns played a role in the establishment of a panhellenic conception of the Olympian pantheon, with Zeus as its head, and therefore in promoting the cultural unity of Greeks from different polities.

Antiquity
The Homeric Hymns are quoted comparatively rarely in ancient literature. There are sporadic references to them in early Greek lyric poetry, such as the works of Pindar and Sappho. The lyric poet Alcaeus composed hymns around 600 BCE to Dionysus and to the Dioscuri, which were influenced by the equivalent Homeric hymns, as possibly was Alcaeus's hymn to Hermes. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes also inspired the Ichneutae, a satyr play composed in the fifth century BCE by the Athenian playwright Sophocles. Few definite references to the hymns can be dated to the fourth century BCE, though the Thebaid of Antimachus may contain allusions to the hymns to Aphrodite, Dionysus and Hermes. A few fifth-century painted vases show myths depicted in the Homeric Hymns and may have been inspired by the poems, but it is difficult to be certain whether the correspondences reflect direct contact with the hymns or simply the commonplace nature of their underlying mythic narratives.

The hymns do not appear to have been studied by the Hellenistic scholiasts of Alexandria, though they were used and adapted by Alexandrian poets, particularly of the third century BCE. Eratosthenes, the chief librarian at Alexandria, adapted the Homeric Hymn to Hermes for his own Hermes, an account of the god's birth and invention of the lyre. Phainomena, a didactic poem about the heavens by Aratus, drew on the same poem. Callimachus drew on the Homeric Hymns for his own hymns, and is the earliest-known poet to use them as inspiration for multiple works. The hymns were also used by Theocritus, Callimachus's approximate contemporary, in his Idylls 17, 22 and 24, and by the similarly contemporary Apollonius of Rhodes in his Argonautica. The mythographer Apollodorus, who wrote in the second century BCE, may have had access to a collection of the hymns and considered them Homeric in origin. The first century BCE historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus also quoted from the hymns and referred to them as "Homeric". Diodorus Siculus, another historian writing in the first century BCE, quoted verses of the first Hymn to Dionysus.

The Greek philosopher Philodemus, who moved to Italy between around 80 and 70 BCE and died around 40 to 35 BCE, has been suggested as a possible originator for the movement of manuscripts of the Homeric Hymns into the Roman world, and consequently for their reception into Latin literature. His own works quoted from the hymns to Demeter and Apollo. In Roman poetry, the opening of Lucretius's De rerum natura, written around the mid 50s BCE, has correspondences with the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, while Catullus emulated the Homeric Hymns in his epyllion on the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. Virgil drew upon the Homeric Hymns in his Aeneid, composed between 29 and 19 BCE. The encounter in Book 1 of the Aeneid between Aeneas and his mother Venus references the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, in which Venus's Greek counterpart seduces Aeneas's father, Anchises. Later in the Aeneid, the account of the theft of Hercules's cattle by the monster Cacus is based upon that of the theft of Apollo's cattle by Hermes in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes.

The Roman poet Ovid made extensive use of the Homeric Hymns: his account of Apollo and Daphne in the Metamorphoses, published in 8 CE, references the Hymn to Apollo, while other parts of the Metamorphoses make reference to the Hymn to Demeter, the Hymn to Aphrodite and the second Hymn to Dionysus. Ovid's account of the abduction of Persephone in his Fasti, written and revised between 2 and around 14 CE, likewise references the Hymn to Demeter. Ovid further makes use of the Hymn to Aphrodite in Heroides 16, in which Paris adapts a section of the hymn to convince Helen of his worthiness for her. The Odes of Ovid's contemporary Horace also make use of the Homeric Hymns, particularly the five longer poems. In the second century CE, the Greek-speaking authors Lucian and Aelius Aristides drew on the hymns: Aristides used them in his orations, while Lucian parodied them in his satirical Dialogues of the Gods.

Late antiquity to Renaissance
In late antiquity (that is, from around the third to the sixth centuries CE), the direct influence of the Homeric Hymns was comparatively limited until the fifth century. The Hymn to Hermes was a partial exception, as it was frequently taught in schools. It is possibly alluded to in an anonymous third-century poem praising a gymnasiarch named Theon, preserved by a papyrus fragment found at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt and probably written by a student for a local festival. It also influenced the "Strasbourg Cosmogony", a poem composed around 350 CE (possibly by the poet and local politician Andronicus) in commemoration of the mythical origins of the Egyptian city of Hermopolis Magna. The Homeric Hymns did influence the fourth-century Christian poem The Vision of Dorotheus and a third-century hymn to Jesus transmitted among the Sibylline Oracles. They may also have been a model, alongside the hymns of Callimachus, for the fourth-century Christian hymns known as the Poemata Arcana, written by Gregory of Nazianzus. In the fifth century, the Greek-speaking poet Nonnus quoted and adapted the hymns; from that time onwards, other poets, such as Musaeus Grammaticus and Coluthus, made use of them.

Although the Homeric Hymns were known and transmitted in the Byzantine period, they were only rarely referenced, and never quoted, in Byzantine literature. The sixth-century poet Paul Silentiarius celebrated the restoration of Hagia Sophia by the emperor Justinian I in a poem which borrowed from the Homeric Hymn to Hermes. Later authors, such as the eleventh-century Michael Psellos, may have drawn upon them, but it is often unclear whether their allusions are drawn directly from the Homeric Hymns or from other works narrating the same myths. The hymns have also been cited as an inspiration for the twelfth-century poetry of Theodore Prodromos. The Homeric Hymns were copied and adapted widely in fifteenth-century Italy, for example by the poets Michael Marullus and Francesco Filelfo. Marsilio Ficino made a translation of them around 1462; Giovanni Tortelli used them for examples in his 1478 grammatical treatise De Orthographia. The Stanze per la giostra ('Stanzas for the Joust'), written in the 1470s by Angelo Poliziano, paraphrase the second Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, and were in turn an inspiration for Sandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, painted in the 1480s.

Early modern period onwards
Georgius Dartona made the first translation of the Homeric Hymns into Latin, which was published in Paris by Chrétien Wechel in 1538. Around 1570, the French humanist Jean Daurat gave lectures in which he advanced an allegorical reading of the opening of the first Hymn to Aphrodite. The first English translation of the hymns was made by George Chapman in 1624, as part of his complete translation of Homer's works. Although they received relatively little attention in English poetry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the playwright and poet William Congreve published a version of the first Hymn to Aphrodite, written in heroic couplets, in 1710. Congreve also wrote an operatic libretto, Semele, set to music by John Eccles in 1707 but never performed. Congreve published the libretto in 1710; in 1744, George Frideric Handel released a version of the opera with his own music and alterations to the libretto made by an unknown collaborator, including a newly-added passage quoting Congreve's translation of the Hymn to Aphrodite. The rediscovery of the Hymn to Demeter in 1777 sparked a series of scholarly editions of the poem in Germany, and its first translations into German (in 1780) and Latin (in 1782). It was also an influence on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's melodrama Proserpina, first published as a prose work in 1778.

The hymns were frequently read, praised and adapted by the English Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century. In 1814, the essayist and poet Leigh Hunt published a translation of the second Hymn to Dionysus. Thomas Love Peacock adapted part of the same hymn in the fifth canto of his Rhododaphne, published posthumously in 1818. In January 1818, Percy Bysshe Shelley made a translation of some of the shorter Homeric Hymns into heroic couplets; in July 1820, he translated the Hymn to Hermes into ottava rima. Of Shelley's own poems, The Witch of Atlas, written in 1820, and With a Guitar, to Jane, written in 1822, were most closely influenced by the Homeric Hymns, particularly the Hymn to Hermes. The 1889 poem "Demeter and Persephone" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, reinterprets the narrative of the Hymn to Demeter as an allegory for the coming of Christ.

The Hymn to Demeter was particularly influential as one of the few sources, and the earliest source, for the religious rituals known as the Eleusinian Mysteries. It became an important nexus of the debate as to the nature of early Greek religion in early-nineteenth-century German scholarship. The anthropologist James George Frazer discussed the hymn at length in The Golden Bough, his influential 1890 work of comparative mythology and religion. James Joyce made use of the same hymn, and possibly Frazer's work, in his 1922 novel Ulysses, in which the character Stephen Dedalus references "an old hymn to Demeter" while undergoing a journey reminiscent of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Joyce also drew upon the Hymn to Hermes in the characterisation of both Dedalus and his companion Buck Mulligan. The Cantos by Joyce's friend and mentor Ezra Pound, written between 1915 and 1960, also draw on the Homeric Hymns: Canto I concludes with parts of the hymns to Aphrodite, in both Latin and English. In modern Greek poetry, the 1901 "Interruption" by Constantine P. Cavafy references the myth of Demophon as told in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter.

The first Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite has also been cited as an influence on Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 film Rear Window, particularly for the character of Lisa Freemont, played by Grace Kelly. Judith Fletcher has traced allusions to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter in Neil Gaiman's 2002 children's novel Coraline and its 2009 film adaptation, arguing that the allusions in the novel's text are "subliminal" but become explicit in the film.

Ancient and early modern transmission
Only a few ancient papyrus copies of the Homeric Hymns are known. An Attic vase painted around 470 BCE shows a youth, seated, holding a scroll with the first two words of the second Homeric Hymn to Hermes: this has been used to suggest that the hymns were used as educational texts by this period. At least the longer hymns seem to have been collected into a single edition at some point during the Hellenistic period (323–30 BCE). Alexander Hall has argued that Hymns 1–26, except 6 (the Hymn to Aphrodite) and 8 (the Hymn to Ares), were initially collected into what he calls a "proto-collection", probably no earlier than the Hellenistic period, with the remaining hymns later added as an appendix.

Unlike those of the Iliad and Odyssey, the text of the Homeric Hymns was comparatively little edited by the Hellenistic scholars of Alexandria. Franco Ferrari (classicist) has suggested that, throughout antiquity, manuscripts of the text may have circulated which intentionally included two different versions ("doublets") of the same word: Alexandrian scholars developed the practice of marking these with a dotted antisigma (ↄ), evidence of which can be found in surviving manuscripts of the Hymn to Apollo.

The grouping of the hymns into their current corpus may date to late antiquity. References to the shorter poems as being within the corpus begin to be found in sources dating from the second and third centuries CE. The assemblage of the thirty-three hymns listed today as "Homeric" dates to no earlier than the third century CE. Between the fourth and the thirteenth centuries CE, the Homeric Hymns were generally transcribed in an edition which also contained the Hymns of Callimachus, the Orphic Hymns, the hymns of Proclus and the Orphic Argonautica.

Manuscripts of the Homeric Hymns, often bundling them with other works such as the hymns of Callimachus, continued to be made during the Byzantine period. The surviving medieval manuscripts of the poems date to the fifteenth century and are drawn primarily from the late-antique compilation of the Homeric Hymns along with Orphic and other hymnic poetry. They all descend from a single, now-lost manuscript, known in scholarship by the siglum Ω (omega) and possibly written in minuscule. In fifteenth-century Italy, the hymns were copied widely. A manuscript known by the siglum V, commissioned by the Byzantine-born Catholic cardinal Bessarion probably in the 1460s, published the hymns at the end of a collection of the other works then considered Homeric. This arrangement became standard in subsequent editions of Homer's works, and played an important role in establishing the perceived relationship between the hymns, the Iliad and the Odyssey. The first printed edition (editio princeps) of the works of Homer, which included the Homeric Hymns, was made by the Florence-based Greek scholar Demetrios Chalkokondyles in 1488–1489. The 1566 edition, made by Henri Estienne, was the first to include line numbers and a Latin translation.

By the end of the eighteenth century, twenty-five Byzantine manuscripts were known. One, known as M or the Codex Mosquensis, was written by the polymath Ioannes Eugenikos in the first half of the fifteenth century, possibly in Constantinople or Italy. This manuscript preserved both the first Hymn to Dionysus and the Hymn to Demeter, but both were lost at some point after its creation and remained unknown until 1777, when the philologist Christian Frederick Matthaei discovered Μ in a barn outside Moscow. All surviving manuscripts, apart from Μ, have among their sources a lost one known by the siglum Ψ (psi), which probably dates to the twelfth or thirteenth century. This may be a manuscript mentioned in a letter by the humanist Giovanni Aurispa in 1424, which he stated he had acquired in Constantinople; Aurispa's manuscript has also been suggested as being Ω. As of 2016, a total of twenty-nine manuscripts of the hymns are known.

Modern scholarship
Until the later twentieth century, the Homeric Hymns received relatively little attention from classical scholars or translators. No collation of the hymns' manuscripts was made between that of Chalkokondyles in 1488 and 1749. Joshua Barnes published an edition of the hymns in 1711, which was the first to attempt to explain textual issues by citing parallels in other texts considered to be Homeric. Friedrich August Wolf published two editions, as part of larger editions of Homer, in 1794 and 1807. The first modern edition of the hymns as a separate text, without the Homeric epics, was made in 1796 by Karl David Ilgen and followed by editions by August Mattiae in 1805 and Gottfried Hermann in 1806. In 1886, Albert Gemoll published a German edition of the hymns: this was both the first modern edition in a vernacular language (that is, not in Latin) and the only edition to date that has printed digammas in their text. The present conventional order of the hymns was established by the Oxford edition of Alfred Goodwin in 1893, following that employed by the manuscript M: previously, the Hymn to Apollo had been placed first. Reviewing Goodwin's work in 1894, Edward Ernest Sikes judged that most of the important work on the Homeric Hymns had previously been done by German scholars, and that "little of importance" had recently been written, apart from Goodwin's edition, on them in English.

In the first half of the eighteenth century, Jacques Philippe d’Orville wrote a book of notes on the text of the Homeric Hymns, in which he condemned Barnes's then-standard 1711 edition and the 1722 edition of Michel Maittaire. The first modern textual criticism of the hymns dates to 1749, when David Ruhnken published his readings of two medieval manuscripts, known as A and C. Their text was a matter of considerable scholarly attention in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. August Baumeister published an edition of the hymns in 1860, which was the first to integrate readings based on the Θ (theta) family of manuscripts (a sub-family of those descended from Ψ). Robert Yelverton Tyrrell wrote in 1894 that the text of the Homeric Hymns had been "state of chaos" before Baumeister's edition, though their text was still considered problematic at the turn of the 20th century: Thomas Leyden Agar wrote in 1916 of the "manifold and manifest" errors of tradition in the hymns. In 1984, Bruno Gentili suggested that variations found in the manuscript tradition as to the reading of particular passages may have been considered equally-correct alternations available to a rhapsode, and therefore that attempts to discriminate between them in modern editions were misguided.

Between 1894 and 1897, Thomas William Allen published a series of four articles in The Journal of Hellenic Studies on textual problems in the Homeric Hymns, which became the basis of the 1904 edition of the hymns he co-produced with Edward Ernest Sikes. In 1912, Allen published an edition of the hymns in the Oxford Classical Texts series. He published an updated version of his 1904 edition in 1936, co-edited with William Reginald Halliday; Sikes refused to collaborate on it, but remained credited as an editor. The first commentary on a single hymn was that of Nicholas Richardson on the Hymn to Demeter in 1974. In his Loeb Classical Library edition of 2003, Martin West rejected the argument of Gentili, choosing instead to posit a correct reading for each known alternation.

title: Homeric Hymns


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Warendorf (district)

Warendorf is a Kreis (district) in the northern part of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Neighboring districts are Steinfurt, Osnabrück (district), Gütersloh, Soest, district-free city Hamm, Coesfeld and the district-free city Münster.

History
In medieval times the region was part of the Prince-Bishopric of Münster. When it became part of the Prussian Province of Westphalia, the new government in 1816 created the districts of Warendorf and Beckum. In 1975 these two districts were merged to form today's district.

Geography
The district is located east of the city of Münster. The Ems river runs through the district from east to west. The Lippe River forms part of the southern border of the district.

Coat of arms
The coat of arms is a combination of the two coats of the precursor districts Warendorf and Beckum. The two sun roses are taken from the Warendorf coat of arms, which took it from the family coat of arms of the Vogt family in Warendorpe. The wavy line comes from the Beckum coat of arms, and symbolized the richness of water in the area, especially the Werse river. The coat of arms was granted in 1976.

title: Warendorf (district)