Blackcurrant is a small shrub growing to three to six feet tall. The plant is distinguished by a strong fragrance from leaves and stems. The fruit is an edible berry, very dark purple in color with a glossy skin.

During World War II, most fruits rich in vitamin C, such as oranges, became almost impossible to obtain in the United Kingdom. Since blackcurrant berries are a rich source of vitamin C, blackcurrant cultivation was encouraged by the British government. From 1942 on, almost the entire British blackcurrant crop was made into blackcurrant syrup and distributed to the nation’s children free, giving rise to the lasting popularity of blackcurrant flavorings in Britain.

Blackcurrant cordial is often mixed with cider to make a drink called Cider & Black available at pubs. Adding a small amount of blackcurrant juice to Guinness is preferred by some to heighten the taste of the popular beer. Japan imports $3.6 million in New Zealand blackcurrants for uses as dietary supplements, snacks and food products. In Russia, sweetened vodka may also be infused with blackcurrant leaves or berries, making a deep yellowish-green beverage with a sharp flavor and astringent taste.

In the United States, Blackcurrant flavor is rather rare in candies and jellies compared to UK candies. The syrup mixed with white wine is called Kir or Kir Royale when mixed with Champagne. Blackcurrants are used in cooking because their astringent nature brings out flavor in many sauces, meat dishes and desserts. The whole blackcurrant stem with fruit can be frozen, then shaken vigorously. The tops and tails are broken off and fruit can be separated easily.

The Eternal Return is a belief, expressed in religious behavior, in the ability to return to the mythical age, to become contemporary with the events described in one’s myths. It should be distinguished from the philosophical concept of eternal return, which holds that all arrangements of matter in the universe must necessarily recur if given an infinite amount of time.

According to the theories of religious historian Mircea Eliade, the power of a thing resides in its origin, so that knowing the origin of an object, an animal, a plant, and so on is equivalent to acquiring a magical power over them. The way a thing was created establishes that thing’s nature and the pattern to which it should conform. By gaining control over the origin of a thing, one also gains control over the thing itself.

The theory implies that as the power of a thing lies in its origin, the entire world’s power lies in the cosmogony. If the Sacred established all valid patterns in the beginning during the time recorded in myth, then the mythical age is sacred time, the only time that contains any value. Man’s life only has value to the extent that it conforms to the patterns of the mythical age.

Eliade also explained how traditional man could find value for his own life. According to Eliade, traditional man’s creative possibilities are endless because the possibilities for applying the mythical model are endless. He indicated that if the Sacred’s essence lies only in its first appearance, then any later appearance must actually be the first appearance. Thus, the cyclic view of time in ancient thought is attributed to the Eternal Return. In many religions, a ritual cycle correlates certain parts of the year with mythical events, making each year a repetition of the mythical age.

Pleroma refers to the totality of divine powers. The word means fullness and is used in Christian theological contexts, both in Gnosticism generally, and by Paul of Tarsus in Colossians 2.9.

Gnosticism holds that the world is controlled by archons, among whom some versions of Gnosticism claim is the deity of the Old Testament, who held aspects of the human captive, either knowingly or accidentally. The heavenly pleroma is the totality of all that is regarded in our understanding of divine. The pleroma is often referred to as the light existing above our world, occupied by spiritual beings who self-emanated from the pleroma. These beings are described as eternal beings and sometimes as archons. Jesus is interpreted as an intermediary aeon who was sent, along with his counterpart Sophia, from the pleroma, with whose aid humanity can recover the lost knowledge of the divine origins of humanity and in so doing be brought back into unity with the Pleroma. The term is thus a central element of Gnostic religious cosmology.

Carl Jung used the word in his mystical 1916 unpublished work, Seven Sermons to the Dead, which was finally published in an appendix to the second edition of Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections in 1962. According to Jung, pleroma is both nothing and everything. It is quite fruitless to think about pleroma. Therein both thinking and being cease, since the eternal and infinite possess no qualities.

The Egyptian sage known as Hermes Trismegistus’s Pymander gives an interesting account. Hermes states that the divine sovereign showed him that this world is a copy of an ideal world in heaven, created by the darkness to ensnare mankind.

A phoenix is a mythical bird with a colorful plumage and a tail of gold and scarlet (or purple, blue, and green according to some legends). It has a 500 to 1,000 year life-cycle, near the end of which it builds itself a nest of twigs that then ignites. Both nest and bird burn fiercely and are reduced to ashes, from which a new, young phoenix or phoenix egg arises, reborn anew to live again. The new phoenix is destined to live as long as its old self. In some stories, the new phoenix embalms the ashes of its old self in an egg made of myrrh.

Originally, the phoenix was identified by the Egyptians as a stork or heron-like bird called a benu, known from the Book of the Dead and other Egyptian texts as one of the sacred symbols of worship at Heliopolis, closely associated with the rising sun and the Egyptian sun-god Ra.

The Greeks identified it with their own word phoenix, meaning the color purple-red or crimson. They and the Romans subsequently pictured the bird more like a peacock or an eagle. According to the Greeks the phoenix lived in Phoenicia next to a well. At dawn, it bathed in the water of the well, and the Greek sun-god Helios stopped his chariot (the sun) in order to listen to its song. 

One inspiration that has been suggested for the Egyptian phoenix is the flamingo of East Africa. This bright pink or white bird nests on salt flats that are too hot for its eggs or chicks to survive. It builds a mound several inches tall and large enough to support its egg, which it lays in that marginally cooler location. The convection currents around these mounds resembles the turbulence of a flame.

Phoenix is also the English-language name given to the most important bird in Chinese mythology, the fenghuang, with its own set of characteristics and symbolic meanings. In Russian folklore, the phoenix appears as the Zhar-Ptitsa or firebird, subject of the famous 1910 ballet score by Igor Stravinsky.