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if i look back, i am lost
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let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
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styofa doing anything
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Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
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@darksp3ctre
it’s the “date of birth: 1303 BC” for me...
kinda hate to show up and be an Actual Archaeologist about this because it would be so much fun if it was real but it's all just a big sequence of misunderstandings over the fact that taking a priceless ancient relic on an international flight requires paperwork. this post goes into more detail on how the image doesn't match.
The tribes of Tumblr appeared to worship Apollo as their primary patron deity, most often under the epithet Apollo Spairahemon ("Apollo the Ball-Thrower") as a god of prophecy and sport. His name was typically invoked to celebrate a user blessed with uncommon prescience. Moments of prophecy were considered highly sacred and were often recorded, and such texts are sometimes accompanied by an artistic depiction of the god — either his traditional masculine image or, unusually, in the form of a young woman, which appears to have been an earlier style before a conservative shift toward more conventional iconography — preparing to cast a round rubber ball that our scholars believe was used in the sport known as "dodge ball". Much as other cults regarded his arrows as bringers of disease and health, this community believed that being struck by this ball would bestow prophetic visions.
Some icons are reproduced below:
An earlier depiction (c. 2020) of Apollo as a girl clad in a simple tunic and playing with other children. Figures are smiling and the image is brightly colored, indicating a celebratory outlook toward knowledge of the future.
A later piece (c. 2022) that resembles the traditional appearance of Apollo. References to childhood and play are omitted, and the god carries a more frightening aspect; perhaps this icon represented grim omens rather than good tidings.
One unrealistic thing about cults in fiction is how there's usually only one evil cult with a unique name.
If you have The Fellowship of the Bleeding Star you also need a Heralds of the Bleeding Star and The Fellowship of the Heralds of the Bleeding Star and the Bleeding Star Fellowship and Reformed Bleeding Star Fellowship and the Union of Bleeding Star Congregations which includes the previous groups but not the Heralds because they disbanded into the New Heralds and Restoration Heralds in 1987.
Not to be confused with the similarly named but unrelated Church of the Blood Star, Blood Star Church, or Blood Star Church - Eastern Sect
The Bloody Church Of Latter-Day Stars.
you really can’t unsee american military propaganda in movies like once you start thinking about it you are doomed to be the friend who’s too political when people put on an action movie for the rest of your life
Ordeal by water, 18th century
she
let's hear it for the nonbinary folks who:
don't present androgynously
use "binary" pronouns in any capacity
identify partially with a binary gender
have a "gendered" name
don't experience body dysmorphia
don't experience gender dysphoria
DO experience gender dysphoria/body dysmorphia but aren't sure what gender or body would suit them
just experience body/gender apathy instead
can't be open about their gender identity yet
you're all absolutely valid.
don't ever feel like you're "not nonbinary enough" because you absolutely are! 💖
Where my freaks at?
guy who is fun-ruiningly pedantic about the differences between a labyrinth and a maze
in my defence, it IS actually a pretty fun difference
labyrinth: never give up! you can do it! just keep pushing!
maze: you are FUCKED. good luck navigating my tangled paths shithead.
it's me. I'm the girl who's incredibly pedantic about labyrinth vs maze. I've never felt so seen
Someone with more classics knowledge than me, please help me understand!
Is the way "labyrinth" is used accurate to its namesake? I keep thinking that, if there's literally only one path, why would Theseus need a ball of magic thread to help him find the way there/back, so either my knowledge is incorrect or this definition is fucked up. I think I remember that Daedalus designed the labyrinth in some special, extra tricky way, but even that doesn't make sense to me as something that would be a problem if there is literally only one path. Did the singular path break physics somehow?
By this definition the Labyrinth designed by Daedalus in Greek mythology is "actually" a maze, but tbqh the source of that weirdness is the fact that the way this post is worded (and the way most people talk when they bring up this fact) implicitly attributes a universal transhistorical quality to this distinction that it simply does not have.
In most languages the distinction between "labyrinth" and "maze" is so nonexistent that they don't even have separate words for them (e.g. in my native Spanish both words would be translated as "laberinto"), and historically speaking, the idea of a distinction between these two terms in English is EXTREMELY recent. For most of history the words "labyrinth" and "maze" in English have been treated as 100% interchangeable (and continue to be treated that way in most everyday contexts) because they're basically two words for the same thing, just with different etymological roots.
The idea that the words "maze" and "labyrinth" refer to different things and that the difference between them is that a labyrinth is unicursal while a maze is multicursal doesn't show up in any literature until the 1920's, and honestly it comes off more like an arbitrary prescriptivist assertion (rather than a descriptivist observation rooted in the way the words were actually being used by people).
they're trying to retcon the original labyrinth. You know, the one named after the labrys, two-headed Minoan axes.
Photographer: Sarah Scott (All other photos Wikimedia Commons)
Here's a piece of the floor pattern in part of the Bronze Age palace of Knossos (c. 1700-1600BCE) on which the legend is based.
A few more fragments. As you see, this was a decorative repeating pattern that became the meander in classical decoration, later seen on Greek vases and Roman mosaics. (And yes, a version of it has been adapted by some assholes, but that's not the fault of the Minoans or any other world cultures that came up with variants of it.}
Interestingly, there's Minoan frescoes at Tell el'Daba, site of a former trading port on the Nile Delta in Egypt, dated perhaps a few centuries later (scholars are still arguing) — almost certainly from a quarter where Minoan merchants were living:
This one combines multiple motifs seen in different frescoes at Knossos, bull dancers and Minoan rosettes and another version of the labyrinth/meander— again, it's more decorative than a literal maze meant to trap people.
Sir Arthur Evans himself wrote of the complex floor plan of the palace: ''I see no reason for not thinking that the mysterious complication of passages is the Labyrinth." (From: Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth, and Reality, website for a recent exhibition at the Ashmoleon Museum.
Other scholars,picking up on his point, have argued that this building was indeed so complex and advanced — it had passive solar heated water tanks, indoor plumbing, light wells, and sliding panels to open and close antechambers, and it was multiple stories at a time when pre-Greeks were living in one-room huts — that visitors would've been overwhelmed....amazed, so to speak. And that's the source of the legend.
Maybe. We can't interview them to confirm.
What we do know is that there was a major systemic collapse between the Minoans and classical Greek period, even more drastic than that between the collapse of Roman dominance of Europe and the Renaissance. The Minoan writing was completely lost, as were most of its technologies and culture.
The stories that come down to are told by mainland Greeks over a thousand years later who were not themselves descendants of the Minoans, although at the height of their power, the Minoans may have conquered (or colonized?) the shores of southeast Greece. Knossos is on the island of Crete, 400km away from Athens across the Aegean Sea.
And despite the legend, we can't even be sure Athens was part of the Minoan empire. If I'm remembering correctly, Athens was just a small collection of huts during Knossos' heyday, not the major city-state it became in the classical period. Local tradition may have retconned its folk hero Theseus, its Superman, back to the time of the Minoans to explain their decline.
So the idea of the labyrinth-as-dungeon really only developed after the people who supposedly built it were long gone.
In the classical period, Greeks recolonized Knossos (whence the name), and here's their version of a drachma, the equivalent of Athens' owl-coin.
Romans loved the story too.
Here's Theseus and the Minotaur on a floor mosaic in Pompeii.
Here's one from a Roman villa in Austria.
And no, I haven't addressed the original question of whether the labyrinth has only one path, for the simple reason that it wasn't important to the story.
It's one of those nitpicky modern questions that could only exist after dictionaries were invented, for languages have accumulated such large vocabularies we look for ways to distinguish different words. It arises from a modern view of storytelling that demands consistency, continuity, and detail of a kind which wasn't important back then. For them, storytelling was more like fanart: interpretation and elaboration, including novel ways of tackling familiar material, were part of the fun.
I suspect that this "a labyrinth has one path" idea comes from some 20th century scholar who had a brainwave one day, looking at those Greek and Roman designs — hey, wait a minute, there's no branches! But that was a descriptive, not a prescriptive observation. We frequently run into trouble, both in scholarship and in everyday life, mistaking one for the other.
The observayion doesn't work for the original Minoan frescoes, because they were painted before the myth of the Minotaur arose, and serve a different purpose. They're not dungeon-mazes, they're decorations, so they don't work very well as maps. And again, Evans' observation about the Palace of Knossos being labyrinth-like is descriptive.
If you want to treat the myth literally, you might say the Greek and Roman style labyrinths are so complex that anyone navigating them to the center and back would likely get turned around without help, especially having to stop off and fight a monster in the dark.
But treating myths literally makes me grumpy. It's like retroactively imposing modern Trek or Who canon onto the old stuff that was written before those story elements were invented. You lose the original story. No bueno.
I understand why a lot of fantasy settings with Ambiguously Catholic organised religions go the old "the Church officially forbids magic while practising it in secret in order to monopolise its power" route, but it's almost a shame because the reality of the situation was much funnier.
Like, yes, a lot of Catholic clergy during the Middle Ages did practice magic in secret, but they weren't keeping it secret as some sort of sinister top-down conspiracy to deny magic to the Common People: they were mostly keeping it secret from their own superiors. It wasn't one of those "well, it's okay when we do it" deals: the Church very much did not want its local priests doing wizard shit. We have official records of local priests being disciplined for getting caught doing wizard shit. And the preponderance of evidence is that most of them would take their lumps, promise to stop doing wizard shit, then go right back to doing wizard shit.
It turns out that if you give a bunch of dudes education, literacy, and a lot of time on their hands, some non-zero percentage of them are going to decide to be wizards, no matter how hard you try to stop them from being wizards.
Previous tags pass peer review:
#the catholic church: *collects guys who are fond of a) studying b) chanting and c) jobs where you get to wear a big hat*#the guys: *immediately start being wizards*#the catholic church: *surprised marginalia cat face*
<Reblog to get a sword.> o()xxx[{::::::::::::::::::::::::::::>
I find it so deeply fascinating that there are medieval and possibly even ancient texts (I can't remember specifics rn but I definitely saw one from early medieval Europe recently) that are like "oh if only I lived in an earlier age when there was literal magic in the world"
I feel like nowadays people project that back ONTO the middle ages, but even back then they were like "there used to be magic and now it's gone"
its magic turtles all the way down etc etc
temporally universal complaints (traced back at least 2000 years):
"kids these days just aren't working hard like they used to"
"young women sure are dressing skimpier than when I was growing up"
"it's so sad the age of magic in the world has passed"
One of my favorite tropes is character with a nasty toxic personality who tries very hard to do the right thing anyway
I like my protagonists sad, tired, bitter, fully convinced they will never get the recognition they deserve, but they still gotta get up in the morning and be a good person
Emerald Spectacles from India, c. 1620-1660 CE: the lenses of these spectacles were cut from a single emerald, and the original, uncut stone weighed more than 300 carats
These eyeglasses are also known by the name Astaneh-e ferdaws, meaning "Gate of Paradise," based on the symbolic associations between the color green and the concept of spiritual salvation or "paradise." Those associations, which are rooted in Islamic tradition, were especially common in Mughal India.
The lenses were crafted from two thin slices of the same emerald. Together, the lenses have a combined weight of about 27 carats, but given the precision, size, and shape of each lens, experts believe that the original emerald likely weighed in excess of 300 carats (more than sixty grams) before it was cleaved down in order to produce the lenses.
The emerald was found at a mine in Muzo, Colombia, and it was then transported across the Atlantic by Spanish or Portuguese merchants.
Each lens is encircled by rose-cut diamonds, which run along an ornate frame made of gold and silver. This diamond-studded frame was installed during the late 1800s, when modern stylistic elements were incorporated into the original pince-nez design.
The "Gate of Paradise" spectacles are often accompanied by a second pair of eyeglasses that were created during the same period, and they were almost certainly commissioned by the same person; these other spectacles are known by the name Halqeh-e nur, meaning "Halo of Light," and they feature lenses that were cleaved from a single diamond.
It's estimated that the original, uncut diamond weighed about 200-300 carats, which would make it one of the largest uncut diamonds ever discovered.
The lenses are so clear and so flat that they sometimes seem almost invisible.
Both sets of spectacles date back to the mid-1600s, and it's believed that they were commissioned by a Mughal emperor or prince. The identity of that person is still a bit of a mystery, but it has been widely speculated that the patron was Shah Jahan -- the Mughal ruler who famously commissioned the Taj Mahal after the death of his wife, Mumtaz Mahal. Shah Jahan ruled as the Mughal emperor from about 1628 to 1658.
The emerald and diamond lenses may have been chosen for symbolic, sentimental, or cultural reasons, or they may have been chosen simply because they're pretty and extravagant; the original purpose and significance is still unclear, but there is evidence to suggest that they were actually designed to be worn by someone.
It has often been said that these spectacles possess mystical properties, including the ability to promote healing, to ward off evil, to impart wisdom, and/or to bring the wearer closer to enlightenment. Those beliefs mostly stem from Indic and Islamic traditions that ascribe spiritual qualities to both emeralds and diamonds. Emeralds are often associated with spiritual salvation, healing, cleansing, and eternal life, while diamonds are associated with enlightenment, wisdom, celestial light, and mysticism.
The "Gate of Paradise" and the "Halo of Light" spectacles were both kept in the collections of a wealthy Indian family until 1980, when they were sold to private collectors, and they were then put up for auction once again in 2021. They were most recently valued at about $2 million to $3.4 million per pair.
Sources & More Info:
Sotheby's: Mughal Spectacles
Architectural Digest of India: At Sotheby's auction, Mughal-era eyeglasses made of diamond and emerald create a stir
Only Natural Diamonds: Auspicious Sight & the Halqeh-e Nur Spectacles
The Royal Society Publishing: Cleaving the Halqeh-Ye Nur Diamonds
Gemological Institution of America: Two Antique Mughal Spectacles with Gemstone Lenses
Manuscript: From Satan's Crown to the Holy Grail: emeralds in myth, magic, and history
CNN: The $3.5 million Spectacles Said to Ward off Evil
BBC: Rare Mughal Era Spectacles to be Auctioned by Sotheby's
Uhhhhhhhh that seems bad
The autism study is planning to link confidential data "with broad coverage in the U.S. population" in one place for the first time.
HELLO
in all seriousness i better not see a single gif of that fuckass harry potter show on this hellsite.
don't make them, don't post them, don't reblog them. just don't give free advertising to a millionaire giddy over stripping trans people of their rights.
