Traditional Buddhist religious painting illustrating bodhisattvas and the heavenly spheres. - Buddhism in Mongolia derives much of its recent characteristics from Tibetan Buddhism of the Gelugpa school. Traditionally, Mongols worshiped heaven (the 'clear blue sky') and their ancestors, and they followed ancient northern Asian practices of shamanism, in which human intermediaries went into trance and SPOKE to and for some of the numberless infinities of spirits responsible for human luck or misfortune. Although the emperors of the Yuan Dynasty in the 14th and 15th century had already converted to Tibetan Buddhism, the Mongols returned to their old shamanist ways after the collapse of their empire. In 1578 Altan Khan, a Mongol military leader with ambitions to unite the Mongols and to emulate the career of Chinggis, invited the head of the rising Yellow Sect of Tibetan Buddhism to a summit. They formed an alliance that gave Altan Khan legitimacy and religious sanction for his imperial pretensions and that provided the Buddhist school with protection and patronage. (Photo by: Shang Hsi (fl. 1426-1435)/Pictures From History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
The Wordle Postgame Report is a brief analysis of a game of Wordle, the five-letter-word guessing game now owned by the New York Times. If you do not play Wordle, Indignity encourages you to please skip this item. The existence of the Wordle Postgame Report does not constitute an endorsement of playing Wordle, not playing Wordle, or of the New York Times.
December 13, SPOKE, 4/6
IT LOOKED, FOR a moment, like a winning start when SPEND came up green on the S and P and yellow on the E. Then the two gray spaces started to look like a chute. Surely there were more than six SP- words with an E in them. Time to start winnowing. SPACE? Yes, the E went at the end; no, A and C weren't in it. Next vowel: SPORE. Yes to the O, no to the R. SPOME, SPOGE, SPOLE... Where was it? The K. I might have said something aloud in disdain.
The Wordle Postgame Report will be posted semi-regularly on the website of the Indignity newsletter, and on Popula, which we encourage you to support. Thank you for reading!
