Queen Victoria's Maternal Aunt Was No Meek - Or Chaste - Wife

 

Portrait by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, 1848

Juliana of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld (1781-1860) was the maternal aunt of Queen Victoria of England (1819-1901) as well as the paternal aunt of her beloved husband, Prince Albert (1819–1861). Her younger sister, Victoria (1786-1861), married twice and had two daughters, one of them being Queen Victoria. 

Queen Victoria's mother, "Vicky of Kent"

The sisters were young at the time that the Russian empress Catherine the Great (1729-1796) was looking for an appropriate wife for her grandson, Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich (1779-1831). He was the so-called "heir-presumptive" for most part of his elder brother, Alexander I's (1777-1825), reign. He might have become the new tsar at the death of his brother, but had - or may have? - secretly renounced his claim to the throne. Anyway, it was his younger brother, Nicholas (1796-1855), who became the new tsar in 1825.

Konstantin Pavlovich, the husband of Juliana

Court Etiquette wasn't Konstantin's favorite concern, and neither was a fitting behavior as a husband of his German bride, Juliana, who converted to Orthodoxy as Grand Duchess Anna Fyodorovna. Or put another way: He was abusive, and it was noticed by bystanders at the court. Juliana was handpicked by Constantin's grandmother, Catherine the Great, and the couple were married in 1796, but the union wasn't a success. Konstantin was a very jealous and brutal husband, who once put his wife inside an enormous vase and used it as target practice. However, she escaped him and her (childless) marriage by an annulment by tsar Alexander I in 1820. He had tried to reconcile his abusive brother with his estranged wife, but in vain, as she had settled for a new life with lovers and freedom. Also, her clandestine affairs brought her what the marriage to Constantine didn't accomplish: Children. The first one was a son, Eduard Edgar Schmidt-Löwe (1808 - 1892). His father may have been a Swiss nobleman, Jules Gabriel Emile de Seigneux, but when he turned as controlling as Constantin the relationship ended. However, in 1818 Eduard was enobled by his mother's younger brother, Ernst I, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, as von Løwenfels. 

Louise Hilda Aglaë d'Aubert

In 1812 Juliana gave birth to her second illegitimate child, Louise Hilda Aglaë d'Aubert. The father of the child was Rodolphe Abraham de Schiferli, a Swiss surgeon, professor and chamberlain of her household from 1812 to 1837. He had advised her during her first pregnancy and was a close friend of hers - also he was a married man. This baby was adopted by a French refugee, Jean Francois d'Aubert, but she died in her early twenties.

This young woman is Juliana as a teen, brimming with life, as well as with hopes and desires of her own, but when she grew old, her life, even dedicated to music as it was, was full of sad losses. She outlived her former, abusive husband by 29 years, and I don't think she mourned his demise, but the death of others, like e.g. her brother Ernest I, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha must have been extremely sad and hard to bear. However, she may have had some relief in the fact that her illegitimate son, Eduard, married his illegitimate daughter and thus her niece, Bertha von Schauenstein.

German princess Juliane of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, who escaped her abusive marriage to the tsar’s brother

 

https://theroyalwomen.com/2021/08/30/juliane-of-saxe-coburg-saalfeld/ 

 

https://www.madamegilflurt.com/2014/02/the-scndalous-life-of-princess-juliane.html 

 

Wikipedia

 

Female Stereotypes: From "Madonna" To "The Sinful Woman"

 

Helene Sedlmayr, ca. 1830 

This 17-year-old girl (born in Munich 1813) has attained eternal fame for something that sadly enough isn't very endurable: Her beauty - and beautiful she was, no doubt about it. It was the Bavarian court painter Joseph Karl Stieler who made her portrait for inclusion in the famous "Gallery of Beauties" which was instituted by King, Ludwig I (1789-1868). This German collection of female beauties wasn't even the first one of its kind, as several other monarchs have made something like it, but this consisted of 38 portraits of women who were considered extremely beautiful. Most of them belonged to the nobility of Munich, and 36 of them were painted by Joseph Karl Stieler, who also painted the king's portrait:

Ludvig I of Bavaria 

As most, but not all, of the confirmed beauties of the king's gallery were out of nobility, what was Helene Sedlmayr doing there? OK, she was beautiful in an almost Madonna-like manner, but, being the daughter of a shoemaker, she wasn't noble, so what was going on? The king always had a keen eye for female beauty, and one of his most famous mistresses was the Irish-born dancer, actress as well as "courtesane", Lola Montez (1821-1861), whom he endowed with a noble title that turned her into "The countess of Landsfeld". Something which the Bavarian government didn't accept, and which played a crucial part in Ludvig I losing his throne. However, although she died young from syphilis in New York, her portrait may still be seen in his gallery of beauties.

Lola Montez 

As to Helene Sedlmayr then she had a much less adventurous life than Lola Montez. Was she the king's mistress? I haven't seen any notes or even rumors stating that she was, so I take it that she wasn't: She simply was a notorious beauty, and he loved female beauty, so she belonged in his gallery. Also, she married one of his valets, and they had nine sons and one daughter. Before her marriage she had been employed in a toy shop which also supplied the royal court, so, contrary to Lola Montez, she hadn't in any way been what's called "a loose woman". No, Helene was "a good girl, who happened to be extremely beautiful".

Princess Diana admirering Helene Sedlmayr

One might say that Lola Montez and Helene Sedlmayr represent two popular, but opposite, female stereotypes, the one of the chaste Madonna and the other one, the sensual, non-chaste seductress. In many ways these stereotypes are utterly ridiculous, but they have been long-lived and can't be ignored as molds for recognizable female characters in the Patriarchy. Interestingly enough, the princess whom we see admirering the portrait of Helene Sedlmayr herself changed from being an idolized Madonna-figure to a somewhat shady and sensuous character by taking a lover: That's all it takes for a woman in the Patriarchy!

By the way, King Ludvig I didn't just exploit these 38 beauties for his gallery of portraits, but he also saw to it that they had an allowance or gave them a position at court. 

https://www.artnet.com/artists/joseph-karl-stieler/

 

https://www.schloss-nymphenburg.de/englisch/palace/room15.htm 

 

Wikipedia

Respecting The Soul And Mind Of A Pet

 

Yup, pets have friends too, and being members of your family, you have to comply with their wishes for visits, food, etc. Otherwise, you would be a cruel and no-good pet-parent with a total lack of empathy.

Are they friends like humans may be friends? I suppose they are, at least in some sense of the word, but who knows for sure? Nobody, but if these weird birds strike up a friendship like humans do, it may be of great value in the continued fight for the preservation of the penguin colony. Anyway, to see such animals, who are so utterly different in looks and behavior, living together in peace and harmony, makes one think good and emphatic thoughts about both humans and animals. 

I saw a documentary about pets which were left all by themselves somewhere after their owners just took off, leaving them to fend for themselves. It was heart-breaking, as it was obvious, that the animals were scared and devastated by being abandoned like that. So very unfair to someone who was led to think of him-/herself as a member of a human family, only to be treated like garbage. There is no doubt that animals have minds to think and remember, to mourn a loss, to love and to feel happiness. They are individuals who should be respected, and not being used as expendable toys.

 

The Woman Who Died Twice

She was a young, pretty and very wealthy, Danish, a widow after a seemingly successful marriage to her somewhat older cousin, the rich ship-owner and merchant Andreas Bodenhoff. 

However, she wasn't only wealthy, but also DEAD: Giertrud Birgitte Bodenhoff (1779-1798).

The grave of Giertrud Birgitte Bodenhoff on the beautiful and stylish cemetery in Copenhagen, Assistens Kirkegården, that also holds Hans Christian Andersen

Such a rich and elaborate grave wasn't for everyone, but Giertrud really was very wealthy. Also, she was out of a well-connected family. One might assume that that ought to have been her guarantee of a peaceful and undisturbed resting place, but no, on the contrary. Not long after her burial, there were rumors that she hadn't been dead when she was interred, but only in some kind of coma. The doctors had treated her with some heavy stuff, morphine and the like when she had a boil inside one of her ears. That in itself is dangerous, and when the patient is overdosed it may even be lethal. Anyway, Giertrud was pronounced dead by her doctors and buried in her splendid grave. As it is, one of her three half-brothers wasn't too sure that she really had died, and he said: "I don't understand, why my sister is laid to rest, 17 years old and with red cheeks."

How did the rumor of Giertrud not being dead start? Well, a grave digger by the name of Christian Meisling made a confession when he lay dying: He and some of his colleagues had not only digged graves out, but had also been grave-robbers. They knew that this young and rich widow had been laid into her coffin, adorned with jewelry which any poor, pennyless grave digger would want to get his hands on, so they had dug her up. To their extreme horror, the "dead" woman woke up, when they pulled at her ear rings. When she realized what was going on, she begged them to save her life, offering them a lot of money, but they choose to kill her and close the grave upon her once more.

Had Giertrud and her family known this she might have saved herself even before the grave robbers found and murdered her, but they didn't, so this time she stayed dead, so to speak. Actually, for many years, until one of her relatives had her grave opened once more as he wanted to check up on what had happened to her. Even at the time of the death of Giertrud it was well-known that the grave-diggers had robbed several corpses, as some of them had been found in the bushes or on the ground. The dead body of one totally nude, young man, who was found robbed of everything in the bushes by his grave, made it obvious that there must be foul play on the cemetery. 

Viggo Starcke

When the grave of Giertrud was opened in 1953 by her relative, the Danish politican, Viggo Starcke, he found evidence that she had moved - or had been moved - after her interment. However, this observation wasn't conclusive, as some expert said that it happened quite often that corpses moved when their coffin was moved. 

So, WHAT happened to the rich, young widow, who even knew how to run the business she had inherited from her dead husband? I would say that that still is an open question, but I, for one, believe the grave-digger, Mr. Christian Meisling, when he said that he and his colleagues killed her.

 

https://cemeteriesroute.eu/poi-details.aspx?t=2786&p=15521

https://slaegtsbibliotek.dk/920461.pdf 

Wikipedia

Recycling A Brain-Dead Woman

 

Well, if women are glorified trash bags in the context of reproduction, then men are nothing at all - and they know it. The day may come when technology makes it possible to design easy to use artificial and safe uteruses, but up till now science only succeeded in creating artificial semen as well as the IVF-technique. 

It has been known that the IVF-father of many children, Elon Musk, had some plans of working on the design of artificial wombs. However, that plan many have been postponed for a while as he seems to have other concerns right now. "Luckily enough" (???) someone else, namely Yemen born biotechnologist Hashem-Al-Ghaili, has great plans of building a sort of "birth factory" which may accommodate all the experts in gynecology as well as the necessary settings for "birth labs" with machinery that replicates the female womb. In his opinion, it would be easy to bring forth c. 30,000 babies a year in such a "factory". 

Some years ago, scientists working on the same lines as Hashem-Al-Ghaili and Elon Musk, succeeded in bringing forth a lamb in an artificial womb, but as far as I know that's the only time that happened. Something which is understandable when one considers how costly something like that would be, and how vulnerable a fetus is without the natural protection of its mother's womb. 

Babies are cute, but also they are an investment in a society which can't do without workers. If modern women prefer not to have human babies, but only "furbabies", it's understandable, as society hasn't made it easy on them in some so-called "highly developed" countries. 

While guys like e.g. Elon Musk and Hashem-Al-Ghaili may dream of the day when they free the male sex from the female power-grip on breeding by using machinery, mimicking a womb, others may have more sinister ideas. Recently there have been some reports of a pregnant, but brain-dead woman, who shall be forced into going through a full pregnancy and some kind of birth. The reason for this is the new abortion-law-system, and the killing off of Roe. However, this situation has led to several suggestions by some people/men: "If healthy women prefer furbabies to human babies and thus go on strike, refusing to give birth, then we should target brain-dead women to do so!" I find it easy to see such a situation develop from idea to reality because some societies already, sort of, toy with that kind of "solutions".

https://thenextweb.com/news/berlin-scientist-solution-population-decline-artificial-wombs

https://people.com/pregnant-woman-declared-brain-dead-kept-alive-due-to-abortion-ban-11734676

 

https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/watch/georgia-abortion-law-forces-doctors-to-keep-pregnant-brain-dead-woman-alive-239757893686?cid=referral_taboolafeed 

Wikipedia

 

A Dane For Unicorns: Ole Worm

Looks like a joke, but who knows, maybe someone likes the very idea of unicorns that much that he/she is trying to find one this way. One man who might have done just that, was the Danish "multi-"scientist", the medic, the researcher of zoological as well as prehistoric objects and finds, Ole Worm (1558-1654). 

He built the very first museum in Denmark and just filled it up with exotica, like e.g. old fossils and stuffed animals of all kinds. Much of it exist even today, but, of course, there are no unicorns to be found in his collections as they belong to the world of fantasy and old legends. That truth was established by him when he found out that all those "unicorns"-horn that were found up til then were in reality narwhal-horns.

He was very diligent as well as open to all kinds of interesting subjects that he saw as worthwhile to study. For instance, he found out that lemmings were indeed natural animals of the rodent family. Up till then the general belief had been that they simply generated from air, which may sound crazy now, but wasn't considered so at that time. Also, he was very concerned about the old myth about birds of paradise not having any feet. That weird idea he disproved, but when it comes to the "unicorn-horns" one of the legends stayed on, at least for a while: According to the myth, grounded unicorn-horns were a wonderful medicine for curing victims of poisoning, but when he set out to poison some cats and dogs to disprove this notion, they really seemed to be cured by this remedy. Well, after all, he was a man of this time ....

However, most probably it was this experiment that earned him the interest of H.P. Lovecraft and turned him into one of his notorious characters, namely Olaus Wormius, who was set to translate the so-called "Grimoire the Necronomicon" from Arabic into Latin. This fictive character is rather creepy, which Ole Worm doesn't seem to have been.

His rich collections were famous, and it was obvious that in his opinion nothing - absolutely nothing - was too small or too big to study. However, when he contracted a bladder-infection, neither his studies nor his medical knowledge were enough to save him. His big collection of exotica was sold to the Danish king, Frederik III, and became part of "The Royal Kunstkammer". 

This painting from 1647 of the Worm family depicts Ole, and, as he married three times, all of these wives as well as their many children and other relatives. Also, there has been made room for Jesus and the four apostles.

https://collections.reading.ac.uk/special-collections/2020/05/12/a-cabinet-of-curiosities-ole-worms-museum-wormianum-1655/

https://www.strangescience.net/oleworm.htm 

Wikipedia

 

 

 

The Invisible, But Murderous, Stalker

 

Christina Grimmie (1994-2016)

I've often thought about the strange phenomenon of someone - man or woman - coming to mean "everything" for an individual, whom they don't even know in person, but has seen on the scene or on a screen. That means that someone is sitting at his computer - and it very often is a "he" - and out of the blue he falls in love with a woman, whom he sees performing in some way. She may be an artist, an actor or simply a pretty woman, who may be selling "adult shows", but somehow these individuals, these strangers, are being turned into an important part of some man's private life: He comes to feel that he has a relationship with the paid sex-show-goddess or, as in the case of Christina Grimmie, the famous and very popular Voice-singer from YouTube. Actually, they have never met, but he has dreams and plans about the day they shall do so. He feels that being attracted to her gives him a right to approach her and somehow "collect what's his" - without her ever having been so.

Kevin James Loibl (1989-2016)

 

Many fans are still mourning the death of Christina Grimmie, but some who knew her murderer, the super-incel Kevin James Loibl, are also feeling sad for him. As with many other stalker-killers targeting young, budding, female stars, he was a recluse, even to an extent that he shunned sun-light, sitting in his room with shaded windows, living his life at the computer. However, he simply fell in love with this young, budding singer, and then he started to change his looks in order to win her heart. He had LASIK eye surgery, had his teeth bleached, lost 50 pounds and had some hair implants to cover up his receding hairline. As Christina was religious, he even started to profess a new-found belief in God himself.

 

After one of her performances he had a chance of meeting her in person, and she, seeing him as one of her many devoted fans, was about to hug him, when he shot her before shooting himself. What an utterly stupid, meaningless tragedy because a socially imbecile fell in love with the picture, he had made up in his mind!

 

Christina was a talented, young woman who loved life and animals, like e.g. this dog from an animal shelter.
 

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/gunman-who-killed-voice-singer-christina-grimmie-id-d-kevin-n590316 

 

https://christinagrimmie.com/

 

https://edition.cnn.com/2016/06/22/us/christina-grimmie-the-voice-orlando-police-end-investigation