there's an medieval expression, auto de fé, which means 'act of faith'. The current auto de fe refers to the ritual of public penance of condemned heretics and apostates during the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions. The phrase also commonly occurs in English in its Portuguese form auto da fé.
Then one day, in 1935, the Bulgarian writer, Elias Canetti, published a novel novel Die Blendung (he wrote in German). The English translation was released in 1946 as Auto-da-Fe.
Many years later, this novel was passed around the pines campsite at Mount Arapiles, as goes the tale, everyone had trouble finishing it. During this time, a climb at Araps was still beating a lot of the regulars, and it took some time for someone to finish it. And so, once it was completed, it was aptly named it Auto da fe. This is my dream climb. It's thin, technical and balancy: awesome.
So I decided to name my original yahoo email after it. But of course I didn't pay enough attention to the spelling. A couple of vowels out of place and all of a sudden I ended up with Autodefa. Once my website was also called this, as well as my new gmail address, it was too late to correct it.
So I welcome you to autodefa. I hope you enjoy it. If you would like to get in contact with me, you can send an email to autodefa@gmail.com
John Clulow
