Toppling the Ivory Tower

[ivorytowerofpisa]

Full pdf!

An anthropological look at the book of Leviticus. (book)

[crabkiddd]

Udemy is the world's largest destination for online courses. Browse the featured courses on Udemy and start learning a new skill today.

Udemy’s got a sale going on again! It look like pretty much all of their courses are available for $15 until February 26, 2016 at 11:59 PM PST. Go learn things!

Also worth mentioning: some of the web tech courses (particularly those by Rob Percival, one of the highest rated instructors on Udemy) come with a one year free hosting package from Eco Web Hosting!

[laughicate]

Journals, articles, books & texts, on folklore, mythology, occult, and related -to- general anthropology, history, archaeology. 

Some good and/or interesting (or hokey) ‘examples’ included for most resources. tryin to organize & share stuff that was floating around onenote.

Journals (open access) — Folklore, Occult, etc

Culutural Analysis - folklore, popular culture, anthropology — The Mythical Ghoul in Arabic Culture

Folklore - folklore, anthropology, archaeology — The Making of a Bewitchment Narrative, Grecian Riddle Jokes

Incantatio - journal on charms, charmers, and charming — Verbal Charms from a 17th Century Manuscript

Oral Tradition — Jewish Folk Literature, Noises of Battle in Old English Poetry

Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics — Nani Fairtyales about the Cruel Bride, Energy as the Mediator between Natural and Supernatural Realms

International Journal of Intangible Heritage 

Studia Mythologica Slavica (many articles not English) — Dragon and Hero, Fertility Rites in the Raining Cave, The Grateful Wolf and Venetic Horses in Strabo’s Geography

Folklorica - Slavic & Eastern European folklore association — Ritual: The Role of Plant Characteristics in Slavic Folk Medicine, Animal Magic

Esoterica - The Journal of Esoteric Studies — The Curious Case of Hermetic Graffiti in Valladolid Cathedral 

The Esoteric Quarterly

Mythological Studies Journal

Luvah - Journal of the Creative Imagination — A More Poetical Character Than Satan

Transpersonal Studies — Shamanic Cosmology as an Evolutionary Neurocognitive Epistemology, Dreamscapes

Beyond Borderlands  — tumblr

Paranthropology

GOLEM - Journal of Religion and Monsters — The Religious Functions of Pokemon, Anti-Semitism and Vampires in British Popular Culture 1875-1914

Correspondences - Online Journal for the Academic Study of Western Esotericism — Kriegsmann’s Philological Quest for Ancient Wisdom 

— History, Archaeology

Adoranten - pre-historic rock art

Chitrolekha - India art & design history — Gomira Dance Mask

Silk Road — Centaurs on the Silk Road: Hellenistic Textiles in Western China

Sino-Platonic - East Asian languages and civilizations — Discursive Weaving Women in Chinese and Greek Traditions

MELA Notes - Middle East Librarians Association

Didaskalia - Journal for Ancient Performance

Ancient Narrative - Greek, Roman, Jewish novelistic traditions — The Construction of the Real and the Ideal in the Ancient Novel

Akroterion - Greek, Roman — The Deer Hunter: A Portrait of Aeneas

Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies  — Erotic and Separation Spells, The Ancients’ One-Horned Ass

Roman Legal Tradition - medieval civil law — Between Slavery and Freedom 

Phronimon - South African society for Greek Philosophy and the Humanities — Special Issue vol. 13 #2, Greek philosophy in dialogue with African+ philosophy

The Heroic Age - Early medieval Northwestern Europe — Icelandic Sword in the Stone

Peregrinations - Medieval Art and Architecture — Special Issue vol. 4 #1, Mappings 

Tiresas - Medieval and Classical — Sexuality in the Natural and Demonic Magic of the Middle Ages

Essays in Medieval Studies  — The Female Spell-caster in Middle English Romances, The Sweet Song of Satan

Hortulus - Medieval studies — Courtliness & the Deployment of Sodomy in 12th-Century Histories of Britain, Monsters & Monstrosities issue, Magic & Witchcraft issue

Annual of Medieval Studies at CEU

Medieval Archaeology — Divided and Galleried Hall-Houses, The Hall of the Knights Templar at Temple Balsall

Medieval Feminist Forum  — multiculturalism issue; Gender, Skin Color and the Power of Place … Romance of Moriaen, Writing Novels About Medieval Women for Modern Readers, Amazons & Guerilleres

Quidditas - medieval and renaissance 

Medieval Warfare

The Viking Society - ridiculous amount of articles from 1895-2011

Journals (limited free/sub/institution access)

Al-Masaq - Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean — Piracy as Statecraft: The Policies of Taifa of Denia, free issue

Mythical Creatures of Europe - article + map

Folklore - limited free access — Volume 122 #3, On the Ambiguity of Elves

Digital Philology -  a journal of medieval cultures — Saracens & Race in Roman de la Rose Iconography

Pomegranate - International Journal for Pagan Studies

Transcultural Psychiatry

European Journal of English Studies  — Myths East of Venice issue, Esotericism issue

Books, Texts, Images etc. — Folklore, Occult etc.

Magical Gem Database - Greek/Egyptian gems & talismans [x] [x]

Biblioteca Aracana - (mostly) Greek pagan history, rituals, poetry etc. — Greater Tool Consecration, The Yew-Demon

Curse Tablets from Roman Britain - [x]

The Gnostic Society Library — The Corpus Hermeticum, Hymn of the Robe of Glory

Grimoar - vast occult text library — Grimoires, Greek & Roman Necromancy, Queer Theology, Ancient Christian Magic

Internet Sacred Text Archive - religion, occult, folklore, etc. ancient texts

Verse and Transmutation - A Corpus of Middle English Alchemical Poetry

— History

The Internet Classics Archive - mainly Greco-Roman, some Persian & Chinese translated texts

Bodleian Oriental Manuscript Collection - [x] [x] [x]

Virtual Magic Bowl Archive - Jewish-Aramaic incantation bowl text and images [x] [x] 

Vindolanda Tablets - images and translations of tablets from 1st & 2nd c. [x]

Corsair - online catalog of the Piedmont Morgan library (manuscripts) [x] [x]

Beinecke rare book & manuscripts  — Wagstaff miscellany, al-Qur’ān—1813

LUNA - tonnes from Byzantine manuscripts to Arabic cartography

Maps on the web - Oxford Library [x] [x] [x]

Bodleian Library manuscripts - photographs of 11th-17th c. manuscripts — Treatises on Heraldry, The Worcester Fragments (polyphonic music), 12 c. misc medical and herbal texts

Early Manuscripts at Oxford U - very high quality photographs — (view through bottom left) Military texts by Athenaeus Mechanicus 16th c. [x] [x], MS Douce 195 Roman de la Rose [x] [x]

Trinity College digital manuscript library  — Mathematica Medica, 15th c.

eTOME - primary sources about Celtic peoples

Websites, Blogs — Folklore, Occult etc.

Demonthings - Ancient Egyptian Demonology Project

Invocatio - (mostly) western esotericism

Heterodoxology - history, esotericism, science — Religion in the Age of Cyborgs

The Recipes Project - food, magic, science, medicine — The Medieval Invisible Man (invisibility recipes)

Morbid Anatomy - museum/library in Brooklyn

— History 

Islamic Philosophy Online - tonnes of texts, articles, links, utilities, this belongs in every section; mostly English

Medicina Antiqua - Graeco-Roman medicine

History of the Ancient World - news and resources — The So-called Galatae, Gauls, Celts in Early Hellenistic Balkans; Maidens, Matrons Magicians: Women & Personal Ritual Power in Late Antique Egypt

Διοτίμα - Women & Gender in Antiquity

Bodleian Library Exhibitions Online — Khusraw & Shirin, Hebrew Manuscripts as a Meeting-Place of Cultures

Medievalists — folk studies, witchcraft, mythology, science tags

Atlas Obscura — Bats and Vampiric Lore of Pére Lachaise Cemetery 

[illyriablack-deactivated2025011]

Ally you’re the best :*

[fredscience-blog]

How to Get Free Access to Academic Papers on Twitter

“No one wants to pay $30 to read a research paper from 1987.”

IF I was the type of person who had a major grudge against academic paywalls, and IF I encouraged people who had access to share with those who don’t, THEN I would encourage anyone having trouble finding research articles to look into the hashtag #icanhazpdf.

[ivorytowerofpisa]

Would there happen to be anyone out there who knows a little Latin & could help me with a line? It’s Charisius--

ostentum quod praeter consuetudinem offertur, ut puta si uideatur terra ardere uel caelum uel mare: portentum quod porro et diutius manet futurumque postmodum aliquid significat: monstrum est contra naturam, ut est Minotaurus: prodigium quod mores faciunt, per quod detrimentum exspectatur.

I’ve been looking around at grammar rules and futzing with Google Translate, but I’m not finding what I need-- all I want to know is: does “monstrum est contra naturam” say “the [monstrum] is contrary to nature” or “it is contrary to the nature of the [monstrum]” ? (and maybe: accordingly, how should “ut est Minotaurus” be parsed then) ?

[ivorytowerofpisa]

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” in Monster Theory: Reading Culture 3-25. Definitive work on monster theory and the “monster” as a cultural body.

[ivorytowerofpisa]

Debra Higgs Strickland, “Introduction: The Future is Necessarily Monstrous,” Different Visions 2 (2010): 1-13. Comparable to Cohen’s 7 Theses, a bit more distilled (and applied-- cohen is more pure theory)

[ivorytowerofpisa]

Assorted noncanonical biblical texts!

[ivorytowerofpisa]

The existence of monsters throws doubt on life’s ability to teach us order.

Monster theory 101, comp. with J. J. Cohen’s 7 Theses & Debra Higgs Strickland’s “The Future is Necessarily Monstrous”.

[ivorytowerofpisa]

William Denver at the 2014 Tenenbaum lecture on the subject of his book  “Did God Have a Wife”. Skip to about 17 minutes, it’s all introductions and acknowledgments till then. Watch it on Youtube here + closed captioning.

(I’ve got some additional textual resources for this subject that I need to organize-- will put them up later!)

[ivorytowerofpisa]

A more detailed look at the writers/writing schools behind the Pentateuch (the first 5 books of Bible) according to the Documentary Hypothesis. This is a great introduction for learning to distinguish the contributions of the Jahwist (J), Eloist (E), the J and E redactionist (RJE), the Priestly (P), the Deuteronomist (D), and the final redactionist (R) writers. Very example-heavy (which is good!) and comprehensive look at the text and its historical context, with some prominent theology explained as well. Really amazing read whether or not you study Bible!

(article begins at the bottom of the first page/p. 730)

[ivorytowerofpisa]

HEyyyyyy so i’ve been pretty dissatisfied with “taupejesus” as a name for my pirated academic articles blog for a while now-- it’s meant to be a joke about how sources are important or else you end up with weird white Jesus, but a: that’s not immediately apparent just glancing at it, and b: i primarily study the Hebrew Bible, so Jesus isn’t a good mascot tbh. 

Everything else about the blog is more or less the same-- themes correspond to what i’m taking in school right now, so there’ll be continue to be content usually along the lines of Hebrew Bible/midrash, occult anthropology/monster theory, some Christian theology/biblical criticism/relics, literary anthropology, etc.

As always, please let me know if you want me to try and find an article for you that’s behind a paywall; i have access to a lot of academic journals since my university subscribes to them and the whole purpose of this blog is making misc. academia more accessible to everyone. 

[ivorytowerofpisa]

A brief overview of some key factors in the Documentary Hypothesis, which uses textual evidence to identify some of the composite narratives which make up the books of the Torah.

[ivorytowerofpisa]

Background info on some of the earliest incarnations of European witch hunting and its development over time. (Please note that while I think this is a good survey of this information, I would encourage you to be particularly critical of Thurston and some of his sources. Personally, I found his criticism of some feminist authors’ works [on witch hunting] rather lacking, substantiating his position by depicting his opposition as an overly-simplified monolith. I also find his comparison of the “overestimation” on the part of feminist authors regarding the death toll of the European witch hunts to the “overestimation” on the part of anti/post-colonial authors regarding the number of African victims of the slave trade to be extremely distasteful. I have no grounds to refute Thurston’s estimates, but I object to his execution.)

Apologies for the formatting and quality for the quality of the scans-- this is how I received them. I recommend downloading the file and rotating the images to avoid neck strain. 

edit: link should be fixed now!

[ivorytowerofpisa]

Hello all, here’s the thing: i’ve got some cool stuff i want to share, but none of them have accessible abstracts and honestly i’m Tired, so look i’m going to upload them and describe the contents myself in plain language for now, ok. Might go back and edit descriptions later so they’re more Academic or whatever, but rn i just want to get some stuff up!

[cloudbower]

J.J. Cohen’s 7 Monster Theses

I. The Monster’s Body Is A Cultural Body (embodiment of a certain cultural moment; a monster is a symbol: to “demonstrate”)

II. The Monster Always Escapes (shifting in nature, adapts to be read against contemporary issues)

III. The Monster Is the Harbinger of Category Crisis (problemises the clash of extremes; rebukes binary “either/or” syllogistic reasoning; “revolution in the very logic of meaning”)

IV. The Monster Dwells At the Gates of Difference (functions as dialectical Other; deforms the ‘readable text’ of Other—body/person, cultural response, possibility of objectivity; “This violent foreclosure erects a self-validating, Hegelian master/slave dialectic that naturalizes the subjugation of one cultural body by another by writing the body excluded from personhood and agency as in every way, monstrous; paradoxically threatens to erase difference by revealing quali/quantifiable difference as thus mutable rather than essential.)

V. The Monster Polices the Borders of the Possible (warning against exploration of its uncertain demenses, the monster is transgressive; two living stories- how the monster came to be, “its testimony, detailing what cultural use the monster serves. The monster of prohibition exists to demarcate the bonds that hold together… culture, to call horrid attention to the borders that cannot—must not—be crossed;” a monster’s destructiveness is really deconstructivist, threatens to reveal that difference originates in process, not design or fact.)

VI. Fear of the Monster is really a kind of desire (linking monstrosity to the forbidden makes the monster appealing as a temporary egress, escape from constraint; allows for safe realm of expression and play, “the same impulse to ataractic fantasy is behind much lavishly bizarre manuscript marginalia;” neutralization of potential monstrous threat through comedy; enables the formation of all kinds of identities; offers “basis of critique, a margin from which to reread dominant paradigms.”)

VII. The Monster stands at the Threshold of Becoming (“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine;” monsters always reflective of their creators.)

(from “Monster Theory;” “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)”)

[ivorytowerofpisa]

Sacred commodities: the circulation of medieval relics by Patrick Geary.

An examination of sacred relics as commodities in the Middle Ages may seem to be pushing the definition of commodities as "goods destined for circulation and exchange" to an extreme. Could one reasonably describe a human body or portions thereof as destined for circulation? Can we really compare the production and circulation of saints' remains to that of gold in prehistoric Europe, cloth in preRevolutionary France, or qat in northeastern Africa? The differences are of course great. Nevertheless, although relics were almost universally understood to be important sources of personal supernatural power and formed the primary focus of religious devotion throughout Europe from the eighth through the twelfth centuries, they were bought and sold, stolen or divided, much as any other commodity was. As a result the world of relics may prove an ideal if somewhat unusual microcosm in which to examine the creation, evaluation, and circulation of commodities in traditional Europe.