I don't know anything about astrology (though I'll admit to liking the Chinese Zodiac for drawing purposes <!--emo&
--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif' /><!--endemo-->, and of course I also consider our Navagrahas to be Gods; but that's where it ends for me <i>personally</i>. <- Meaning: what other people do is none of my business as long as they don't make it my business).
But I do have questions of which I can't make out whether they were already covered somewhere above.
<!--QuoteBegin-Bodhi+Jan 22 2009, 09:36 AM-->QUOTE(Bodhi @ Jan 22 2009, 09:36 AM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->and whether it was predictive in nature (that is predicting the future outcome on basis of astral-configuration).[right][snapback]93601[/snapback][/right]<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->The following from the translation of the Mahabharatam that Bodhi had found earlier seems to describe a sort of predictive astrology - but don't know whether it is similar to the other sort(s?) of predictive astrology mentioned in Bodhi's post above:
http://www.bharatadesam.com/spiritual/maha...arata_05048.php
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->There are, with us, many aged Brahmanas, versed in various sciences, of amiable behaviour, well-born, acquainted with the cycle of the years, engaged in the <b>study of astrology</b>, capable of
<b>understanding with certainty the motions of planets and the conjunctions of stars as also of explaining the mysteries of fate, and answering questions relating to the future,</b> acquainted with the <b>signs of the Zodiac</b>, and versed with the occurrences of every hour, who are <b>prophesying</b> the great destruction of the Kurus and the Srinjayas, and the ultimate victory of the Pandavas, so that Yudhishthira, who never made an enemy, already regardeth his objects fulfilled in consequence of the slaughter of his foes.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->How accurate is the translation ("Zodiac")? And does Zodiac here refer to <i>12 signs</i>?
And I've always had this other question, though it doesn't have much to do with the Indian situation, but it <i>is</i> related to the "<i>12</i> signs of the Zodiac".
From what I read in an encyclopaedia in childhood, the Romans only had 10 months until they added 2 more months to it later. Yes, some confirmation:
http://www.webexhibits.org/calendars/cal...roman.html
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>The Romans borrowed parts of their earliest known calendar from the Greeks. The calendar consisted of 10 months in a year of 304 days.</b> The Romans seem to have ignored the remaining 61 days, which fell in the middle of winter. The 10 months were named Martius, Aprilis, Maius, Junius, Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November, and December. The last six names were taken from the words for five, six, seven, eight, nine, and ten. Romulus, the legendary first ruler of Rome, is supposed to have introduced this calendar in the 700s B.C.E.
(So at 700 B.C.E -> 10 months cycle in Rome, which they got from Greece. So the Zodiac in Greece and Rome didn't yet correspond to the 12 months at that point in time?)
<b>According to tradition, the Roman ruler Numa Pompilius added January and February to the calendar.</b> This made the Roman year 355 days long. To make the calendar correspond approximately to the solar year, Numa also ordered the addition every other year of a month called Mercedinus. Mercedinus was inserted after February 23 or 24, and the last days of February were moved to the end of Mercedinus. In years when it was inserted, Mercedinus added 22 or 23 days to the year.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->"Numa Pompilius" seems to have been the 2nd King of Rome or something (came right after Romulus) and is somewhat shrouded in mystery by time.
When do they say the Mahabharatam was composed? (I know they date Bhagavad Gita rather recently - something that is additionally helpful for them in 'proving' that Krishna was no more than a man who was the victim of apotheosis, as contended by many in the west - but don't know when the west dates the rest of the Mahabharatam.) Asking this in order to contrast it with respect to the 700 BCE mentioned above.
The following, besides explaining who Numa Pompilius was, has some other interesting things too:
http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/...052599.htm
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Numa Pompilius (715-673 B.C.)</b>
Information on the second of the 7 kings of Rome, Numa Pompilius.
  There was living, in those days, at Cures, a Sabine city, a man of renowned justice and piety - Numa Pompilius. He was as conversant as any one in that age could be with all divine and human law. His master is given as Pythagoras of Samos, as tradition speaks of no other. But this is erroneous, for it is generally agreed that it was more than a century later, in the reign of Servius Tullius....
  Livy
The reign of King Numa Pompilius, a <b>Sabine</b> and the second king of Rome, is shrouded in legend like his predecessor, Romulus (753-715), and Numa's successors:
673-642Â Tullus Hostilius
642-617Â Ancus Marcius
616-579Â L. Tarquinius Priscus
578-535Â Servius Tullius
534-510Â L. Tarquinius Superbus
<b>During the legendary reign of the first king of Rome, Romulus, the bachelor Romans had forcibly taken Sabine women.</b> In the interests of harmony, the Sabine women, now Roman wives, persuaded their husbands and fathers not to slaughter each other. When Romulus died, the Sabines refused to permit another Roman to exert power over them. Romans and Sabines reached a compromise. The Romans agreed to a Sabine king, but they would select him. The Romans picked the honorable Sabine Numa Pompilius. Numa, however, thought he'd have to be crazy to wear the crown.
[...]
He was unwilling to leave his happy life to take on the unpredictable politics of a warring nation.
[...]
Eventually Numa was persuaded it was his religious duty to rule, and so, at age 40, Numa Pompilius inaugurated his career as king of Rome. Numa's reign was marked by its piety and pacificism. It was Numa who erected the temple of <b>Janus</b> [the two-faced god of gates whose name we see in the first calendar month (January)].
(Janus <!--emo&--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif' /><!--endemo--> )
  "[Numa Pompilius] built the temple of Janus at the foot of the Aventine as an index of peace and war, to signify when it was open that the State was under arms, and when it was shut that all the surrounding nations were at peace."
  Livy I.19
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Wacky on Sabines: "The Sabines (Latin Sabini, singular Sabinus) were an Italic tribe that lived in ancient Italy, inhabiting Latium before the founding of Rome"
Yes, we all knew the familiar traditio-history where Romans invaded Italy and played a role similar to the Oryans-kidnapping-Dravoodian women - but directed toward the local Sabines in this case. Bad Romans. (I keep seeing this pattern historically/traditionally attested in many European and related countries, but it is not something we have traditionally had in India. Hindoos are very grateful for the AIT fable to finally give us a similar legend too.)
Did the Romans bring Latin (develop it from their own original tongue), or was it mostly from the local languages that Latin was derived, with a few words contributed by the invaders. I don't know much about their own traditional history of their languages. Were the local languages more like the Iberian ones or whatever?
Links on the side at http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/...52599.htm:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->⢠Numa's Calendar Changes
⢠Roman Calendar
To the 304 day calendar of ten months, Numa added February and January between December and March thereby increasing the calendar to between 354 and 355 days.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Wackypedia has curious things to say on the meaning of the Zodiac word - it's not too sure:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Zodiac</b>
Zodiac denotes an annual cycle of twelve stations along the ecliptic, the apparent path of the Sun across the heavens through the constellations that divide the ecliptic into twelve equal zones of celestial longitude. The zodiac is recognized as the first known celestial coordinate system. <b>Babylonian astronomers developed the zodiac of twelve signs.[citation needed] The term zodiac comes from the Latin zÅdiacus, from the Greek ζῳδιακÏÏ [κÏκλοÏ] (zodiakos kyklos), meaning "circle of animals", derived from ζῴδιον (zodion), the diminutive of ζῷον (zoon) "animal".</b> The American Heritage Dictionary(1970) derives the word further from Indo-European 'gwei-', 'to live'. 'zoe', 'life' is listed as the suffixed form of this Indo-European word. <b>However</b>, the classical Greek zodiac also includes signs (also constellations) that are not represented by animals (e.g., Aquarius, Virgo, Gemini, andâfor someâLibra). <b>Another suggested etymology is that the Greek term is cognate with the Sanskrit sodi, denoting "a path", i.e., the path through which the Sun travels.</b> [1]
The zodiac also means a region of the celestial sphere that includes a band of eight arc degrees above and below the ecliptic, and therefore encompasses the paths of the Moon and the naked eye planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn). The classical astronomers called these planets wandering stars to differentiate them from the fixed stars of the celestial sphere (Ptolemy). Astrologers understood the movement of the planets and the Sun through the zodiac as a means of explaining and predicting events on Earth.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Am a bit confused: in the following - as in most encyclopaedias - the Greeks get their Zodiac from Babylon (where Babylon is credited with innovating the 12 signs, see wacky above), but the Romans who had got their calendar from the Greeks only have 10 months when they finally get to Italy, and <i>then</i> they add two more months - a bit of a cyclical knot in history. Or perhaps the months in the ancient Greco-Roman world were not initially connected with the 12 signs of the Zodiac which the Greeks got from the Babylonians? That's a possibility, I suppose...
http://www.webexhibits.org/calendars/cal...roman.html
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The Roman republican calendar was a dating system that evolved in Rome prior to the Christian era. According to legend, Romulus, the founder of Rome, instituted the calendar in about 738 B.C.E. This dating system, however, was probably a product of evolution from the Greek lunar calendar, which in turn was derived from the Babylonian. The original Roman calendar appears to have consisted only of 10 months and of a year of 304 days. The remaining 61¼ days were apparently ignored, resulting in a gap during the winter season. The months bore the names Martius, Aprilis, Maius, Juniius, Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November, and Decemberâthe last six names correspond to the Latin words for the numbers 5 through 10. The Roman ruler Numa Pompilius is credited with adding January at the beginning and February at the end of the calendar to create the 12-month year. In 452 B.C.E., February was moved between January and March.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
'Western' astrology has gone slightly askew apparently (everything Greco-Roman is credited to the "west", why is that by the way):
Wacky's Zodiac page again -
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Zodiac in astrology</b>
Astrologers use astronomical observations of the movements of the night sky for divinatory purposes. The zodiac remains in use in modern astrology, though the issue of tropical astrology (used mainly by Western astrologers) and sidereal astrology (used mainly by Indian astrologers) is central. At issue in the debate is whether the signs should be defined in terms of zones derived from nodal points defined by Earth's motion during a tropical year, or whether the signs should be defined in terms of signs roughly aligned with the constellations of the same name (for sidereal astrologers). This matters because of an astronomical phenomenon called the precession of the equinoxes, whereby the position of the stars in the sky has changed over time. The axis of rotation of the Earth slowly changes direction, making one complete turn approximately every 26,000 years. Originally, Aries corresponded to the summer equinox for the Northern hemisphere, but after about 1/4 of a cycle since the zodiac was invented, Aries now corresponds to 1/4 of the year, roughly April. Likewise, over the centuries the twelve zodiacal signs in Western astrology no longer correspond to the same part of the sky as their original constellations, or their Indian counterparts. In effect, in Western astrology the link between sign and constellation has been broken, whereas in Indian astrology it remains of paramount importance.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
It's all too confusing for me. But at least the Chinese Zodiac features animals (which includes the Long/Dragon). Come to think of it, the Chinese Zodiac <i>is</i> entirely made up of animals, unlike the Greek Zodiac (though "zoo" means animals in Greek, see first wacky quoteblock above. And they've derived zoo from some PIE word meaning "life", even if the Libra sign is not alive.)
If I knew the future, I would be playing the lottery or go to a casino (now, now, don't frown: it's not gambling if you know you're going to win). No other use for any predictive - or other - astrology in <i>my own</i> life comes to mind.
--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif' /><!--endemo-->, and of course I also consider our Navagrahas to be Gods; but that's where it ends for me <i>personally</i>. <- Meaning: what other people do is none of my business as long as they don't make it my business). But I do have questions of which I can't make out whether they were already covered somewhere above.
<!--QuoteBegin-Bodhi+Jan 22 2009, 09:36 AM-->QUOTE(Bodhi @ Jan 22 2009, 09:36 AM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->and whether it was predictive in nature (that is predicting the future outcome on basis of astral-configuration).[right][snapback]93601[/snapback][/right]<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->The following from the translation of the Mahabharatam that Bodhi had found earlier seems to describe a sort of predictive astrology - but don't know whether it is similar to the other sort(s?) of predictive astrology mentioned in Bodhi's post above:
http://www.bharatadesam.com/spiritual/maha...arata_05048.php
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->There are, with us, many aged Brahmanas, versed in various sciences, of amiable behaviour, well-born, acquainted with the cycle of the years, engaged in the <b>study of astrology</b>, capable of
<b>understanding with certainty the motions of planets and the conjunctions of stars as also of explaining the mysteries of fate, and answering questions relating to the future,</b> acquainted with the <b>signs of the Zodiac</b>, and versed with the occurrences of every hour, who are <b>prophesying</b> the great destruction of the Kurus and the Srinjayas, and the ultimate victory of the Pandavas, so that Yudhishthira, who never made an enemy, already regardeth his objects fulfilled in consequence of the slaughter of his foes.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->How accurate is the translation ("Zodiac")? And does Zodiac here refer to <i>12 signs</i>?
And I've always had this other question, though it doesn't have much to do with the Indian situation, but it <i>is</i> related to the "<i>12</i> signs of the Zodiac".
From what I read in an encyclopaedia in childhood, the Romans only had 10 months until they added 2 more months to it later. Yes, some confirmation:
http://www.webexhibits.org/calendars/cal...roman.html
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>The Romans borrowed parts of their earliest known calendar from the Greeks. The calendar consisted of 10 months in a year of 304 days.</b> The Romans seem to have ignored the remaining 61 days, which fell in the middle of winter. The 10 months were named Martius, Aprilis, Maius, Junius, Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November, and December. The last six names were taken from the words for five, six, seven, eight, nine, and ten. Romulus, the legendary first ruler of Rome, is supposed to have introduced this calendar in the 700s B.C.E.
(So at 700 B.C.E -> 10 months cycle in Rome, which they got from Greece. So the Zodiac in Greece and Rome didn't yet correspond to the 12 months at that point in time?)
<b>According to tradition, the Roman ruler Numa Pompilius added January and February to the calendar.</b> This made the Roman year 355 days long. To make the calendar correspond approximately to the solar year, Numa also ordered the addition every other year of a month called Mercedinus. Mercedinus was inserted after February 23 or 24, and the last days of February were moved to the end of Mercedinus. In years when it was inserted, Mercedinus added 22 or 23 days to the year.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->"Numa Pompilius" seems to have been the 2nd King of Rome or something (came right after Romulus) and is somewhat shrouded in mystery by time.
When do they say the Mahabharatam was composed? (I know they date Bhagavad Gita rather recently - something that is additionally helpful for them in 'proving' that Krishna was no more than a man who was the victim of apotheosis, as contended by many in the west - but don't know when the west dates the rest of the Mahabharatam.) Asking this in order to contrast it with respect to the 700 BCE mentioned above.
The following, besides explaining who Numa Pompilius was, has some other interesting things too:
http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/...052599.htm
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Numa Pompilius (715-673 B.C.)</b>
Information on the second of the 7 kings of Rome, Numa Pompilius.
  There was living, in those days, at Cures, a Sabine city, a man of renowned justice and piety - Numa Pompilius. He was as conversant as any one in that age could be with all divine and human law. His master is given as Pythagoras of Samos, as tradition speaks of no other. But this is erroneous, for it is generally agreed that it was more than a century later, in the reign of Servius Tullius....
  Livy
The reign of King Numa Pompilius, a <b>Sabine</b> and the second king of Rome, is shrouded in legend like his predecessor, Romulus (753-715), and Numa's successors:
673-642Â Tullus Hostilius
642-617Â Ancus Marcius
616-579Â L. Tarquinius Priscus
578-535Â Servius Tullius
534-510Â L. Tarquinius Superbus
<b>During the legendary reign of the first king of Rome, Romulus, the bachelor Romans had forcibly taken Sabine women.</b> In the interests of harmony, the Sabine women, now Roman wives, persuaded their husbands and fathers not to slaughter each other. When Romulus died, the Sabines refused to permit another Roman to exert power over them. Romans and Sabines reached a compromise. The Romans agreed to a Sabine king, but they would select him. The Romans picked the honorable Sabine Numa Pompilius. Numa, however, thought he'd have to be crazy to wear the crown.
[...]
He was unwilling to leave his happy life to take on the unpredictable politics of a warring nation.
[...]
Eventually Numa was persuaded it was his religious duty to rule, and so, at age 40, Numa Pompilius inaugurated his career as king of Rome. Numa's reign was marked by its piety and pacificism. It was Numa who erected the temple of <b>Janus</b> [the two-faced god of gates whose name we see in the first calendar month (January)].
(Janus <!--emo&
--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif' /><!--endemo--> )Â Â "[Numa Pompilius] built the temple of Janus at the foot of the Aventine as an index of peace and war, to signify when it was open that the State was under arms, and when it was shut that all the surrounding nations were at peace."
  Livy I.19
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Wacky on Sabines: "The Sabines (Latin Sabini, singular Sabinus) were an Italic tribe that lived in ancient Italy, inhabiting Latium before the founding of Rome"
Yes, we all knew the familiar traditio-history where Romans invaded Italy and played a role similar to the Oryans-kidnapping-Dravoodian women - but directed toward the local Sabines in this case. Bad Romans. (I keep seeing this pattern historically/traditionally attested in many European and related countries, but it is not something we have traditionally had in India. Hindoos are very grateful for the AIT fable to finally give us a similar legend too.)
Did the Romans bring Latin (develop it from their own original tongue), or was it mostly from the local languages that Latin was derived, with a few words contributed by the invaders. I don't know much about their own traditional history of their languages. Were the local languages more like the Iberian ones or whatever?
Links on the side at http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/...52599.htm:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->⢠Numa's Calendar Changes
⢠Roman Calendar
To the 304 day calendar of ten months, Numa added February and January between December and March thereby increasing the calendar to between 354 and 355 days.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Wackypedia has curious things to say on the meaning of the Zodiac word - it's not too sure:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Zodiac</b>
Zodiac denotes an annual cycle of twelve stations along the ecliptic, the apparent path of the Sun across the heavens through the constellations that divide the ecliptic into twelve equal zones of celestial longitude. The zodiac is recognized as the first known celestial coordinate system. <b>Babylonian astronomers developed the zodiac of twelve signs.[citation needed] The term zodiac comes from the Latin zÅdiacus, from the Greek ζῳδιακÏÏ [κÏκλοÏ] (zodiakos kyklos), meaning "circle of animals", derived from ζῴδιον (zodion), the diminutive of ζῷον (zoon) "animal".</b> The American Heritage Dictionary(1970) derives the word further from Indo-European 'gwei-', 'to live'. 'zoe', 'life' is listed as the suffixed form of this Indo-European word. <b>However</b>, the classical Greek zodiac also includes signs (also constellations) that are not represented by animals (e.g., Aquarius, Virgo, Gemini, andâfor someâLibra). <b>Another suggested etymology is that the Greek term is cognate with the Sanskrit sodi, denoting "a path", i.e., the path through which the Sun travels.</b> [1]
The zodiac also means a region of the celestial sphere that includes a band of eight arc degrees above and below the ecliptic, and therefore encompasses the paths of the Moon and the naked eye planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn). The classical astronomers called these planets wandering stars to differentiate them from the fixed stars of the celestial sphere (Ptolemy). Astrologers understood the movement of the planets and the Sun through the zodiac as a means of explaining and predicting events on Earth.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Am a bit confused: in the following - as in most encyclopaedias - the Greeks get their Zodiac from Babylon (where Babylon is credited with innovating the 12 signs, see wacky above), but the Romans who had got their calendar from the Greeks only have 10 months when they finally get to Italy, and <i>then</i> they add two more months - a bit of a cyclical knot in history. Or perhaps the months in the ancient Greco-Roman world were not initially connected with the 12 signs of the Zodiac which the Greeks got from the Babylonians? That's a possibility, I suppose...
http://www.webexhibits.org/calendars/cal...roman.html
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The Roman republican calendar was a dating system that evolved in Rome prior to the Christian era. According to legend, Romulus, the founder of Rome, instituted the calendar in about 738 B.C.E. This dating system, however, was probably a product of evolution from the Greek lunar calendar, which in turn was derived from the Babylonian. The original Roman calendar appears to have consisted only of 10 months and of a year of 304 days. The remaining 61¼ days were apparently ignored, resulting in a gap during the winter season. The months bore the names Martius, Aprilis, Maius, Juniius, Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November, and Decemberâthe last six names correspond to the Latin words for the numbers 5 through 10. The Roman ruler Numa Pompilius is credited with adding January at the beginning and February at the end of the calendar to create the 12-month year. In 452 B.C.E., February was moved between January and March.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
'Western' astrology has gone slightly askew apparently (everything Greco-Roman is credited to the "west", why is that by the way):
Wacky's Zodiac page again -
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Zodiac in astrology</b>
Astrologers use astronomical observations of the movements of the night sky for divinatory purposes. The zodiac remains in use in modern astrology, though the issue of tropical astrology (used mainly by Western astrologers) and sidereal astrology (used mainly by Indian astrologers) is central. At issue in the debate is whether the signs should be defined in terms of zones derived from nodal points defined by Earth's motion during a tropical year, or whether the signs should be defined in terms of signs roughly aligned with the constellations of the same name (for sidereal astrologers). This matters because of an astronomical phenomenon called the precession of the equinoxes, whereby the position of the stars in the sky has changed over time. The axis of rotation of the Earth slowly changes direction, making one complete turn approximately every 26,000 years. Originally, Aries corresponded to the summer equinox for the Northern hemisphere, but after about 1/4 of a cycle since the zodiac was invented, Aries now corresponds to 1/4 of the year, roughly April. Likewise, over the centuries the twelve zodiacal signs in Western astrology no longer correspond to the same part of the sky as their original constellations, or their Indian counterparts. In effect, in Western astrology the link between sign and constellation has been broken, whereas in Indian astrology it remains of paramount importance.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
It's all too confusing for me. But at least the Chinese Zodiac features animals (which includes the Long/Dragon). Come to think of it, the Chinese Zodiac <i>is</i> entirely made up of animals, unlike the Greek Zodiac (though "zoo" means animals in Greek, see first wacky quoteblock above. And they've derived zoo from some PIE word meaning "life", even if the Libra sign is not alive.)
If I knew the future, I would be playing the lottery or go to a casino (now, now, don't frown: it's not gambling if you know you're going to win). No other use for any predictive - or other - astrology in <i>my own</i> life comes to mind.
Death to traitors.