The Coronation mantle and the Westminster sanctuary pavement

The Great Sanctuary pavement at Westminster Abbey, on which the kings of England were crowned, features a design of rotated squares, around a central roundel of unusual Egyptian alabaster, set within a circle of bright blue glass. The roundel’s visual resemblance to the world and the firmament is underlined by a surrounding inscription, identifying it as the world, the macrocosm. This paper proposes that the design and meaning of the Great Sanctuary pavement reflect the square macrocosmic mantle in which the English king was wrapped during the coronation ceremony. This paper underlines the special nature of the English coronation mantle within the context of other royal and imperial cosmic mantles. Its square form was unique, and it featured in the English coronation liturgies in a way that European mantles did not. The English liturgies stressed its role as a representation of the world or macrocosm

Thyroid hormones regulate anxiety in the male mouse

Thyroid hormone levels are implicated in mood disorders in the adult human but the mechanisms remain unclear partly because, in rodent models, more attention has been paid to the consequences of perinatal hypo and hyperthyroidism. Thyroid hormones act via the thyroid hormone receptor (TR) alpha and beta isoforms, both of which are expressed in the limbic system. TR's modulate gene expression via both unliganded and liganded actions. Though the thyroid hormone receptor (TR) knockouts and a transgenic TRalpha1 knock-in mouse have provided us valuable insight into behavioral phenotypes such as anxiety and depression, it is not clear if this is because of the loss of unliganded actions or liganded actions of the receptor or due to locomotor deficits. We used a hypothyroid mouse model and supplementation with tri-iodothyronine (T3) or thyroxine (T4) to investigate the consequences of dysthyroid hormone levels on behaviors that denote anxiety. Our data from the open field and the light-dark transition tests suggest that adult onset hypothyroidism in male mice produces a mild anxiogenic effect that is possibly due to unliganded receptor actions. T3 or T4 supplementation reverses this phenotype and euthyroid animals show anxiety that is intermediate between the hypothyroid and thyroid hormone supplemented groups. In addition, T3 but not T4 supplemented animals have lower spine density in the CA1 region of the hippocampus and in the central amygdala suggesting that T3-mediated rescue of the hypothyroid state might be due to lower neuronal excitability in the limbic circuit.