Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
Wind is one of those things normal people don't think about much in their adult lives. It blends into the tapestry of the world seamlessly and invisibly. But wind is important. Important to weather, culture and history. The way we used to define, name and use wind, and how they have faded to obscurity reflects the unfortunate waning of wind's significance in our modern world.
Firstly how can a wind be defined? For most intents and purposes a wind can be defined by a direction and a speed. In Britain the prevailing wind is a steady Southwesterly, although we get a huge amount of variation. The first thing to note is that winds are denoted by the direction they blow from, not to. Which seems a bit backwards, we would be more likely to label something as "going in a direction" rather than "coming from a direction" in general. But this comes from the fundamentally pagan view of winds that our language has kept hold of: winds are the breaths of Gods. This idea can be found across the world, and civilisations across time and particularly space have developed systems for naming and characterising the winds that blow from different directions. In Athens we can find the "Tower of the Winds", an octagonal tower with statues of the eight winds engraved into it. These are: Boreas (North), Kaikias (NE), Eurus (East), Apeliotes (SE), Notus (South), Lips (SE), Zephyrus (East), and Sciron (NE). Now if you know Greek (I don't) you will see that some of these winds seem to simply be named after the cardinal direction from which they blow. This is, however, backwards. In Greek and in many other languages, the cardinal directions are actually named for the wind. Boreas lives somewhere (very) North of Athens, and so the direction toward him became the word for "North". There is speculation as to whether this is true for English cardinal directions also, but there seems to be no consensus on this.
As well as a name, each wind has its own personality. One of the last remnants of this way of thinking (in English) is found in the cultural figure of "The North Wind", a cold and dark man who brings on the Winter, who blows snowstorms down into Europe, and who is humiliated by the Sun for his failure to remove a man's jacket. We also have vague recollections of vital winds seafarers once relied upon for navigation, for instance the Trade Winds that blow from West Africa to the Caribbean which were fundamental to the initial discovery of the New World and to the subsequent cross pollination of crops, goods and people across the Atlantic. These are part of the global system of prevailing winds, that blow (on average) in predictable directions across the globe. The system in whole is complex, but to give you a simple overview:
At equal lines of latitude, starting from the Equator every 30 degrees (so at 0N, 30N, 60N and 90N, both N & S), there exist alternating bands of low and high pressure. Since air flows from high to low pressure, these cause winds that blow out from the lines at 30N/S and 90N/S, towards the lines at 0N and 60N/S. However, due to the rotation of the Earth and the resulting "Coriolis Effect", wind is pushed rightwards in the Northern Hemisphere and leftwards in the Southern. Overall this causes a system like this:
Since this is meant to be an anime blog, I'll tie it in with two anime-wind observations. First is simply that Studio Ghibli is named for an Italian Southern Wind, a hot and strong wind that sometimes blows from Africa over the Mediterranean. This is turn gave name to an Italian military aircraft, built by the Fascists in WWII for use in Libya. If you've seen The Wind Rises or Porco Rosso, you'll know Miyazaki's love for military aircraft, and so in turn he named his studio after that plane, the engine of which appears in Porco Rosso itself. Another name for a Southern, Mediterranean wind is the Arabic name "Scirocco"; in a confusing interview, Tomino says that he named his character "Paptimus Scirocco" in Zeta Gundam in opposition(?) to Miyazaki's studio.
Finally the word anime itself. As is commonly rehashed online, the word derives from the Latin word "animus", meaning "spirit, soul", through the English term "animation". However closer inspection on the word "animus" reveals its wide range of uses in Latin vernacular, also being used for "life", "mind", "temperament", "motivation", and yes, "wind". In fact the Greek word for wind is also "anemoi", giving us the name for a wind-speed-meter: "anemometer". The correlation of soul and wind is not just a homophonic coincidence however, but an important part of understanding the meaning of "soul". In the Bible the Hebrew word "ruach" is translated usually to soul; but can also mean spirit, ghost, wind or breath. When God first gives man a "soul", he does so by breathing on us, giving us his breath and in turn allowing us to breathe. The word is also found in the term "holy spirit", giving it the beautiful notion of being "God's own breath", and when the Holy Spirit descends upon you, God is literally giving you the breath of life.
"The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being" -Genesis 2:7