Mythical Masterpieces @mythicalworx - Tumblr Blog

Love seeing something from TikTok and going “girlie that is literally what led to the downfall of the Papal States”

Jewish baby named Edgardo Mortara is seemingly about to die in Bologna, 1851

Catholic nanny secretly baptises him to save his soul, which she’s not exactly the kind of authority who can do that, but w/e, it’s interpreted by the church as valid later

Kid survives

1857 her secret gets out, a baptising makes a kid a Catholic according to the Church and a Catholic can’t be raised in a non-Catholic household in the Papal States, so the church authorises the police to kidnap Edgardo from his family

Raised personally by Pope Pius IX, Jewish family not allowed to take him back due to Church doctrine, this action destroys the family with grief and despair

This case gets international infamy with the Pope not understanding why everyone’s shiting on him for doing this, including allies

Emperor Napoleon III shifts from opposing Italian unification to supporting it as a direct consequence

Bologna falls the next year, 1859

Kingdom of Italy forms 1861

By 1870 Rome is lost to the Italians and the Papal States are no more

(Edgardo Mortara goes on to become Father Mortara)

(He dies in Belgium in 1940 three months before the Nazis occupied the nation, which if he’d have lived he would’ve been persecuted as a Jew)

communismlives

sztupy

Wikipedia confirms

bonyassfish

Fun fact: the Catholic Church did not stop doing this after Edgaro Mortara. During WW2, many Jewish children were put in convents or catholic-run orphanages for their own safety. Sounds nice right? Except after the war ended, when parents or surviving relative went back to claim their children, the church went, “uhhh, actually they’re catholic now, no take backs!”

The most infamous of these cases was the Finaly affair. Two Jewish children in France, Robert and Gerald Finaly, were placed in a Catholic nursery in 1944 in anticipation of their parents being deported to Auschwitz, where they were both murdered. Their aunt, Marguerite Fischel, survived the war and went to find the boys so she could take them to live with her. However, the nun who had custody of the boys, Antoinette Brun, adamantly refused to give them up, reportedly saying that “The Jews are not grateful”

What followed was a years long custody battle where despite being repeatedly ordered by courts all over Europe to return the boys, Brun took them to many different countries and hid them, with the support and help of other nuns and priests. It was suspected at the time, and later confirmed by documents released in 2020, that Pope Pius XII had supported the effort to keep the boys away from their surviving family and have them be raised Catholic.

Thankfully, after negotiations between a sympathetic cardinal in France and the chief Rabbi of Paris, the boys were finally recovered and reunited with their aunt.

Documents reveal the private discussions behind both Pope Pius XII’s silence about the Nazi deportation of Rome’s Jews in 1943 and the Vatic

I wish I could say that the phenomenon of the Catholic Church kidnapping children and keeping them away from their families for the purposes of forcefully raising them Catholic is unique to Jews, but it’s not. From the mid nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century, the Church ran hundreds of residential schools in the US and Canada where indigenous children were kidnapped from their homes and forced into these cruel and inhumane “schools”. The children were forbidden from speaking their own languages or practicing their own cultures and religions, their hair was cut, and they were subject to emotional, verbal, spiritual, physical, and sexual abuse. Many of the children died due to malnutrition or medical neglect, their bodies buried like dogs beside the schools. The Catholic Church was not the only Church to participate in this, but they’ve been the most reluctant to fully acknowledge and apologize for it. It was only in 2022 that Pope Francis apologized on behalf of the Catholic Church for their part, but some people found the apology inadequate.

Idk what my point is here, just that there’s such a clean link between evangelizing, cultural/religious imperialism, and how damaging and horrifying a religion can be when it is thoroughly convinced of its own superiority. And that unless an institution is forced to change, it probably won’t change on its own.

thebelfry

I just learned that the Russian word for “ladybug” translates to “God’s Little Cow”

vampireapologist-archive-deacti

It’s the same in Irish! bóín Dé!

peniswizard69

in hebrew it’s “our rabbi moses’s cow”

vampireapologist-archive-deacti

Oh I love this news!!!!

pulmonary-poultry

Multiple cultures upon seeing a ladybug for the first time: “Who’s cow is this????”

thejonymyster

postilionstruckbylightning

It feels like some early humans were naming things and one of them ran out of ideas.

Human 1: (points at animal) What’s that?

Human 2: Cow.

Human 1: (points at bug) What’s that?

Human 2: … little cow.

Human 1: But it’s so much smaller. Who would have use for such a small cow?

Human 2: (panicking but in too deep to stop now) God.

derinthescarletpescatarian

The “Lady” in the name “ladybug” is the virgin Mary. People just cannot stop giving religious names to this bug.

The reason for this was that if you lived in an agrarian society then your survival was a throw of the dice every year, depending on the success of the crops. A failed crop year is a very hard year where deaths are expected. And if you grew a cereal like wheat, there were several things that could cause your crops to fail, but one of the big ones was if you happened to get a fuckton of aphids. You know what eats aphids? Ladybugs! If there are lots and lots of ladybugs around, there was a good chance that it’d be a good crop year! They were little crop protectors! When your family lives or dies on the success of that crop, of course they’d be seen as a blessing and given an appropriate name!

magical-bear-dubin

That is such an interesting etymology!!!!

And entomology too i guess

asparklethatisblue

in German they’re Marienkäfer which also pretty much means “Mary’s Beetle”

istadris

In French it’s “Good Lord’s Beast”

Not even a cow, it’s just a little Creature but we know for sure God loves it.

dent-de-l1on

In Dutch it’s “Lieveheersbeestje”, the Good Lord’s Little Beast

A liddol creeture

tesria

In the UK they’re ladybirds, which I believe is the older term that ladybug took over from, but with a somewhat more fanciful suffix.

enriquemzn262

transgenderer

what the fuck

argumate

sweet, might base an agricultural civilisation on this river, hope it behaves itself

theaudientvoid

argumate

might just fuck around and find out

andmaybegayer

Diversity win! This river has ADHD

crazy-pages

Nile: You would not believe how long term you have to mismanage agriculture on my banks to start experiencing soil depletion. I will always be here for you Egypt.

Huang He: *kicks in the door* FUCK YOUR DYNASTY IT'S FAMINE TIME!!!

babiriye

Rivers move.

The Mississippi River meander belt is a map series that shows the historic path of the river and how it changes over time.

Rivers are quite literally a force of nature and should not be underestimated.

This video gives a good explanation as to why:

ruffboi-mags

I mean yes, I'm pretty sure most of us know that rivers meander, but the SCALE of the Huang He meandering is wild.

beyondthisdarkhouse

Okay, so... for the past 1,500 years, China has had an artificial Grand Canal essential to traffic between the North and South. They had genius engineers building bridges, dams, water-mills, and irrigation systems. They understood hydrology. Yes the Yellow River silts up like a motherfucker, but that is not an insurmountable problem.

So my question is, what was the role of humans in these course changes? Did the river just lol randomly move and people went "well I guess I'll just die then", or were there factors like people failing to dredge active channels, poorly maintaining weirs or levees, actively digging new channels, and/or sabotaging pre-existing waterworks?

Did the river just move, or was it sometimes stolen?

beyondthisdarkhouse

TODAY I HAVE LEARNED:

Not only does the Yellow River fundamentally say "haha fuck you" to any human attempt to dam or control it, but messing around with its water control systems has been a fundamental part of military strategy for thousands of years.

In fact, the military use of dam destruction and water diversion in China in the twentieth century alone would require several library shelves to completely document, and the books would emit soft sounds of weeping at night.

In the second half of the 20th century the Chinese government dedicated significant amounts of effort to making sure the Yellow River did not flood, and by the end of the century, the river expressed its gratitude by silting up so much it stopped reaching the ocean at all sometimes.

It's official: I am terrified of the Yellow River and suggest we give that motherfucker any propitiation it wants.

spaceshipsandpurpledrank

punissuer

ID / TL;DW: young Black man explains the history of voodoo dolls: they originated in England, where Black people where prohibited from learning to read or write, to help witches keep track of what ailed their patients. Eg., person goes to witch and laments headache, they treat their headache and make a small doll (called "poppet"), trying to represent them as good as possible, stick a needle in its head and put it up a shelf. When they return next week, the witch takes their poppet and asks about their headache. If it's gone, they remove the needle, otherwise they know they have to treat a rather persistent headache.

tartrazeen

I'm just gonna freeze-frame this for everybody:

chaoticrandomosity

Clarification on “stripes” in the image above:

This was being hit with a specific sort of whip-like stick. (Brain fog is preventing me from remembering what it was called), but specifically, it was capital punishment to the back of the head of a child.

sztupy

A German regional court has ruled that Google is directly liable for the content of its AI search overviews. According to the court, previou

ayeforscotland

Let’s fucking go

made-in-manetheren

This is HUGE.

1. The court holds Google responsible for statements made by its AI, considering them Google's statements (search engines have limited liability for results in their engine as they're the words of other sites/companies/people), meaning when their AI lies/hallucinates they're liable for the defamation/harm resulting from those statements.

2. Google's defense that customers are generally aware of the lack of reliability and are responsible for fact checking was dismissed. As the court pointed out, that would "significantly diminish" AI Search's stated purpose and it can't be distinguished from Google's business practices/statements as a search tool.

3. Studies have found about 91% of Google's everyday AI responses are accurate, leaving millions of searches per HOUR with potential liability for falsehoods. 56% of correct responses weren't supported by the sources the AI listed. Both of which mean Google is now liable for a LOT more AI "errors."

4. Google was held liable for 80% of court costs in this case and this precedent is expected to reverberate around the world. This is a massive shift from the 3rd-party search provider role Google has previously played and it comes right as they've tied ALL searches to their AI search.

TL;DR Google reeeeeally stepped in it this time.

alianoralacanta

5. If the words are Google's, this solidifies the position of universities who demand that all answers from AI are fully cited. If all the in-line citations now have to be (Google, 2026), that's going to make it obvious when someone's trying to use Google as a source. There's still the difficulty with people who are academically dishonest by trying to pass off the AI writing as their own. 6. 91% accuracy is officially too low to use as a source of references, which means the AI can't be used as a source of references either. This makes it less legitimate for such purposes than Wikipedia of all places (Wikipedia might need date/time proof of when it was accessed for the reference to be valid, but at least it is possible to prove the link existed at a particular date and time). 7. This will help encourage the rollout of courses on how to avoid AI search for students who need academic accuracy, because it's statistically not good enough to use. 8. This strengthens the case intellectual property authors have against Google in the EU, as this is proof that an intellectual property transfer took place.

directactionforhope

Every time you catch yourself going, "Fuck, are humans just inherently evil and naturally inclined to selfishness and harm???" you HAVE to remember that that's literally a core ideal of Christianity.

So if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run the vast majority of news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.

If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not working with biased evidence (surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real)

And if it turns out the feeling WAS partly the result of cultural Christianity, then hey, that's great news, because it means there's that much (and it really is SO MUCH) less evidence that humans inherently suck. Which is good, because we don't

vasyan-pupkinyan

ignore that cultural trauma, ask an archeologist / paleontologist.

how often do we find human remains / burials attributable to a peaceful death of old age, or at least to disease / wild animals? and attributable to human violence, i.e. with traces of weapon impacts?

to use an old quote, the last ape became the first human not when he picked up a stick to reach some fruit, but when he used that stick to bash another ape over the head and take away his fruit.

directactionforhope

I disagree with pretty much all of that, actually. Modern archeology is only just in the process of pulling itself out of hundreds of years of racism, bias, colonialism, disproven assumptions, widespread graverobbing, and massive, blatant pseudoscience; many ideas and publications in the field that older than about 20 years are of highly questionable provenance.

I personally am much more convinced and compelled by newer theories that, if any piece of technology made us human, it was not the weapon - it was the carrier bag, the story, and/or fire. (But not fire with the primary purpose of violence, mind you - fire with the primary purpose of heat and food and sanitation)

Here's a quote on this from one of my absolute favorite thinkers and writers, Ursula K. Le Guin:

If you haven't got something to put it in, food will escape you- even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning when you wake up and it's cold and raining and wouldn't it be good to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy oat patch in the rain, and wouldn't it be a good thing if you had something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with both hands? A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient. The first cultural device was probably a recipient. . . . Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier. So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women's Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975). But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky...? I don't know. I don 't even care. I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news... It sometimes seems that that story is approaching its end. Lest there be no more telling of stories at all , some of us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we'd better start telling another one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one's fin- ished. Maybe. The trouble is , we've all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.

-via Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Originally published 1986, new edition with forewords and commentaries published 2024.

directactionforhope

Oh also if any technology did make us human, archeological evidence currently very strongly argues it was when we harnessed fire and invented cooking.

Fire is literally the reason our brains are larger than any other species of ape's, because harnessing fire meant we spent radically less energy spent on digestion - and those excess resources instead changed the evolution of the human brain.

Also fire is probably the reason we're not fully covered in hair anymore, evolutionarily - because we evolved in equatorial Africa, where not wearing a fur coat everywhere was an evolutionary advantage due to, you know, the temperature of it all. Once we could make our own heat to survive the cold nights and winters, less insulation was a huge evolutionary advance in equatorial regions especially

Cooking may be more than just a part of your daily routine, it may be what made your brain as powerful as it is

Wherever humans have gone in the world, they have carried with them two things, language and fire. As they traveled through tropical forests they hoarded the precious embers of old fires and sheltered them from downpours. When they settled the barren Arctic, they took with them the memory of fire, and recreated it in stoneware vessels filled with animal fat. Darwin himself considered these the two most significant achievements of humanity. It is, of course, impossible to imagine a human society that does not have language, but—given the right climate and an adequacy of raw wild food—could there be a primitive tribe that survives without cooking? In fact, no such people have ever been found. Nor will they be, according to a provocative theory by Harvard biologist Richard Wrangham, who believes that fire is needed to fuel the organ that makes possible all the other products of culture, language included: the human brain. Every animal on earth is constrained by its energy budget; the calories obtained from food will stretch only so far. And for most human beings, most of the time, these calories are burned not at the gym, but invisibly, in powering the heart, the digestive system and especially the brain, in the silent work of moving molecules around within and among its 100 billion cells. A human body at rest devotes roughly one-fifth of its energy to the brain, regardless of whether it is thinking anything useful, or even thinking at all. Thus, the unprecedented increase in brain size that hominids embarked on around 1.8 million years ago had to be paid for with added calories either taken in or diverted from some other function in the body. Many anthropologists think the key breakthrough was adding meat to the diet. But Wrangham and his Harvard colleague Rachel Carmody think that’s only a part of what was going on in evolution at the time. What matters, they say, is not just how many calories you can put into your mouth, but what happens to the food once it gets there. How much useful energy does it provide, after subtracting the calories spent in chewing, swallowing and digesting? The real breakthrough, they argue, was cooking.

-via Smithsonian Magazine, June 2013. Emphasis mine. In the time since this article was published, what was considered a "provocative theory" in 2013 has become a matter of increasing scientific evidence and scientific consensus.

Richard Wrangham lays out his theory as a whole in his 2010 book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.

For more current summaries on the history of fire, and scientific and archeological evidence for its role in human evolution:

Evolutionary fire ecology: An historical account and future directions. August 2023. BioScience, volume 73, issue 8, pages 602–608. Permalink: https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biad059, paywall-free.

The discovery of fire by humans: a long and convoluted process. By J. A. J. Gowlett. June 2016. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, volume 371, issue 1696, epage 20150164. Permalink: doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0164, paywall free.

Or, less scholarly:

It takes a lot of calories to power a human brain. Find out how cooking and gut microbes help us make the most of our food.

reasonsforhope

Humans are not defined by our capacity for violence.

Current archeological evidence suggests that humans are, if anything, defined by the hearthfire.

By cooking. By our ability to keep ourselves warm. By our ability to provide for ourselves and each other. By humanity's millennia-long quest to beat back the ravages of starvation and hunger.

By our millennia-long quest to make our lives, and the lives of those we love, more and more into something we can live

kedreeva

Also like do go ahead and ask an archaeologist/anthropologist. Ask them about the healed broken bones they've seen that is evidence of humans caring for one another since we became human. Ask them about the hearths they've found for humans to gather around, and the cookware they've seen crafted by human hands. Ask them about the small circle of bricks in front of hearths that confounded them until someone realized it was to keep chicken chicks in the house where children could play with them. Ask them about the tools of creation they've seen. Ask them about the musical instruments, and the artwork spanning back to when we lived in caves. Ask them about the children's footsteps, their play preserved in mud. Ask them about the clothing they've seen and the hands that stitched them or wove them.

Ask them how long ago we looked at wolves and saw friends. Ask them when we first tilled the soil and planted seeds so we could grow things on purpose. Ask them how long ago we began to travel simply to explore the world around us.

Ask them why they put their hands on the earth searching for history and spend hours digging through archives and talking to other humans about the past. Archaeologists and Anthropologists are like the #1 people to love humans so much they want to know everything about all of the humans across history, and IMO the questions you ask them are a bigger reflection of the person asking them than anything else.

aetherograph

We are a social species. In order to cooperate enough to hunt meat, to find enough food, we have to work TOGETHER. We have to make a together.

The Thin Veneer Theory--the Christian one, the one that says humans are inherently violent--falls completely the fuck apart when you realise that we would not have survived if we were that violent. We just would not have! If you kill someone in your very small group--because we lived in very small groups at first, under 10 people--then you've lost someone's knowledge, their hands, their legs, their eyes, their HELP. Help that you are going to need! Makes no sense. Not even chimps, our most violent cousins, are this violent to one another across their species. Because it's impractical for a social animal.

But the data says otherwise as well. Humans help. From birth. Other social animals also help--not just their immediately family or their group, but even other species of animal from them. Helping is inherent to being an intelligent animal that lives in groups, it seems.

But if you don't want to believe all those experiments and data, that's fine. Believe your own DNA then. Unless you are from Subsaharan African peoples, you have more than one species of human in your DNA. This means at some point, your grandmother and grandfather found someone of a whole other species attractive. That's a fact. And we keep finding more species hidden in our DNA even now--I think the most recent one was Denisovian! I don't know HOW you could interpret THAT information as "humans are violent and hate strangers" because it wouldn't be there if two people of two different species hadn't fucked enough to make a baby that survived long enough to make another and so on down the millions of years to now. That's incredible stuff. That means MILLIONS of humans had cross-species relationships! That means our species is SO friendly that we willing to reach across species and make babies with someone else! That is an incredibly high amount of friendliness!!!

We are a motley of many species of human being. That alone should be proof enough that we are inherently so full up with the desire to Make Friends that we will do it over and over to strangers and other animals unlike ourselves. We domesticated one of our main predators. We were so friendly and kind to cats they decided to bring us their babies and we were so friendly and kind we took care of those babies and now we make images of cats and put them everywhere and share them with one another. Even animals we eat, we are kind to and even decide that some of our gods are in their image, and make rules that say "it is Forbidden to kill this animal in a way that brings it suffering, it is Forbidden by the gods to make this animal suffer while it is alive" in MANY religions.

I do not fucking know what kind fo miserable attitude makes you say that you truly believe your species--your species, which has buildings and roads, maps and schools, books and movies, holidays and parades, sports and medicine and everything ELSE that requires lots of cooperation--is inherently NOT cooperative, altruistic, friendly in nature. We wouldn't HAVE society if we weren't a species that LIKES to cooperate with others! We wouldn't have agriculture! We wouldn't have ANYTHING! It ALL required cooperation!

animate-mush

The thing about the whole AD vs CE vs whether it's all just cosmetic discourse is that it totally ignores where this numbering system comes from. We should just call it what it is: Bede notation.

It was invented by one person for a specific purpose - to have a universalizable way of establishing historical dates, rather than having to deal with dynastically based date systems. And it was a really good idea. This is not surprising, since Bede is basically the father of Historiography. He also is the guy who gave us the notion of Primary Sources. Bede is amazing.

When a guy revolutionizes the entire way calendaring is done, he has the right to set his zero point wherever he pleases.

People have pointed out that one problem with CE notation is that it presents itself as neutral when it is exactly the same system as AD. What exactly is "common" about this era? The zero point doesn't become neutral just by effacing its source.

(Also BCE is nonsense. Just use negative numbers)

It makes sense for scholarly tradition to not want to be tied to a specific religion. But scholarly tradition is very enthusiastic about being tied to earlier scholarly tradition. The convention of AD was established by a scholar for a scholarly purpose. We know his name. We know what he was doing, and why, and how. And he was doing it better than anybody else. That is worth honoring.

Rather than pretending that it's a neutral system, acknowledge that it's not. It's not some naturally occurring "common era," it's the system developed by Bede, centered around dates that were important to him personally (but which he intended to be universally applicable).

Like we should be honest about the facts that (a) an awful lot of people have been measuring dates this way for nearly 1400 years and changing it in a non-cosmetic way would involve a lot of seriously obnoxious bookkeeping, and (b) the zero is where it is because that's where the guy who invented the system decided to put it. "Anno Domini" is meaningless to people who aren't into that particular Dominus, and "Common Era" is meaningless period (and imparts a false appearance of neutrality). Pinning it to its creator, though, is already scholarly convention and is objective. It may or may not be the year of Our Lord, and it certainly isn't Common (whatever that means) but it is unarguably the schema developed by Bede, for better or for worse. So unless we're actually going to rebuild it from scratch, we may as well call it that. And even if we do rebuild it from scratch, we should still call it that. Because that is what it is.

animate-mush

Reblogging in honor of the feast of St. Bede today.

I have been informed that Bede notation may in fact have been first devised by Dionysus the Humble of Scythia to calculate the date of Easter more accurately. But my broader point stands.

Bede, yo.

kurzler

a quick psa to anyone recently getting into greek mythology and is a victim of tumblr and/or tiktok misconceptions:

-there is no shame in being introduced to mytholgy from something like percy jackson, epic the musical or anything like that, but keep in mind that actual myths are going to be VERY different from modern retellings

-the myth of medusa you probably know (her being a victim of poseidon and being cursed by athena) isn't 100% accurate to GREEK mythology (look up ovid)

-there is no version of persephone's abduction in which persephone willingly stays with hades, that's a tumblr invention (look up homeric hymn to demeter)

-as much as i would like it, no, cerberus' name does not mean "spot" (probably a misunderstanding from this wikipedia article)

-zeus isn't the only god who does terrible things to women, your fav male god probably has done the same

-on that note, your fav greek hero has probably done some heinous shit as well

-gods are more complicated than simply being "god of [insert thing]", many titles overlap between gods and some may even change depending on where they were worshipped

-also, apollo and artemis being the gods of the sun and the moon isn't 100% accurate, their main aspects as deities originally were music and the hunt

-titans and gods aren't two wholly different concepts, titan is just the word used to decribe the generation of gods before the olympians

-hector isn't the villain some people make him out to be

-hephaestus WAS married to aphrodite. they divorced. yes, divorce was a thing in ancient greece. hephaestus' wife is aglaia

-ancient greek society didn't have the same concepts of sexuality that we have now, it's incorrect to describe virgin goddesses like artemis and athena as lesbians, BUT it's also not wholly accurate to describe them as aromantic/asexual, it's more complex than that

-you can never fully understand certain myths if you don't understand the societal context in which they were told

-myths have lots and lots of retellings, there isn't one singular "canon", but we can try to distinguish between older and newer versions and bewteen greek and roman versions

-most of what you know about sparta is probably incorrect

-reading/waching retellings is not a substitute to reading the original myths, read the iliad! read the odyssey! i know they may seem intimidating, but they're much more entertaining than you may think

greek mythology is so complex and interesting, don't go into it with preconcieved notions! try to be open to learn!

byjove

this is a highly controversial opinion, I have no doubt King Arthur was bisexual but I think he was one of the few people in Camelot not interested in fucking Lancelot. he wanted to retain him as an employee but it did not cross his mind that Lancelot was fucking his wife because Lancelot is such a weird little twerp that he did not perceive him as a sexual being. my interpretation.

byjove

So true. The Galehaut/Lancelot relationship was like a dynastic marriage to resolve the conflict between two imperial powers. I like to imagine Galehaut was like “I have decided to abandon my plans of capturing [what is now] all of southern England and surrender to you despite my military advantage, all for the love of my achingly beautiful and spectacular new male wife, Lancelot du Lac.” and Arthur was like “Okay. Weird. Not homophobic or anything but Lancelot? You’re in love with Lancelot?”

byjove

Co-signed. That’s some real shit you said. Also, unlike Arthur, he was willing to yield and share his lover for everyone’s benefit. And then he died for love. A real freak. One of the best freaks in 13th century French literature.

byjove

he’s the most interesting gay wifeguy in literary gay knight history

elodieunderglass

I started a mental sentence with, “well, when we diagram the Arthurian polycule-“

And then realised that would be such a good title for a paper. “Diagramming the Arthurian Polycule: Mapping the Dynamics of the Round Kitchen Table”

ziseviolet

Hi there! I recently learned that in Japanese culture, the crossed collars of a kimono must be crossed left over right, and the only time they do otherwise is during a funeral. Is there a similar rule in crossed-collar hanfu? Thanks, I hope you have a wonderful day!

Hi! Yes, that’s right - in Chinese culture, there’s a rule that crossed-collar Hanfu must have the collars crossed left over right, and the only time otherwise is for traditional funeral clothes for the deceased.

This rule is called 交领右衽/Jiaoling Youren. Jiaoling means “crossed-collar”, and Youren means “right lapel”. Youren refers to the fact that the right collar is wrapped before the left. In the image below, the top section shows how to cross the collars of Hanfu, and the bottom section shows Youren (right) compared to Zuoren (left). Zuoren means “left lapel”, and refers to right-over-left wrapping:

So how did it come about that Hanfu collars are crossed left-over-right? There are two parts to the answer:

1) For convenience:

It’s more convenient for right-handed people to put on and remove Hanfu when the collars are crossed left-over-right. Keep in mind that the ancient Chinese discouraged left-handedness like many other historical cultures, considering it unnatural, barbarian, uncivilized, and unfortunate. Right-over-left collars thus became the norm for the garments of the deceased, as they would no longer need to remove their clothing. In addition, when the ancient Chinese entered the era of agricultural labor, they gradually discovered that left-over-right was more suitable for storing small items inside the collars (for right-handed people, at least), as Hanfu does not have pockets.

2) As a mark of civilization:

As the ancient Chinese used left-over-right collars to better adapt to agricultural labor, many surrounding peoples wore right-over-left collars. For example, several nomadic tribes of the northern steppes used right-over-left because it allowed the right shoulder more freedom of movement, which was more convenient for archery. The ancient Chinese thus considered the left-over-right style to be a mark of civilization, as opposed to the right-over-left collars of the “barbarians”. @fouryearsofshades writes more in detail on this history in this post.

Below is a painting from the famous Dunhuang Murals of the people of Tubo, an ancient Tibetan kingdom from the 7th-9th centuries. Notice how their collars are crossed right-over-left:

In contrast, below are figures from the Han dynasty (206 BC–220 AD) of entertainers (top) and foot soldiers (bottom). Notice how their collars are crossed left-over-right:

Keep in mind that to the ancient Chinese, differentiating their own civilization from other groups was a Very Big Deal, and they did so in several different ways, including fashion. Another example was how men were required to put their hair up, instead of letting it down like the “barbarians” did.

It’s similar to how the ancient Greeks and Romans didn’t wear pants because they found them ridiculous and considered them to be the clothing of “barbarians”. Pants were originally associated with the Persians, Scythians, Sarmatians, and Central Asian peoples.

While values about what constitutes “civilization” and whatnot obviously changed over time, the left-over-right style endured, and eventually became formalized into the Hanfu rule we have now.

Hope this helps!

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

slavicafire

I don’t think I could expect to read a paper on rusalki and their relation to death and sexuality and be this emotionally moved. such a wonderful, in-depth, and human analysis of a folklore entity so often misrepresented and misunderstood to fit a prettier and more comfortable narrative, oh my

slavicafire

because so few people actually try to see beyond the binary, so few understand that humans are strange and their beliefs have always been complex - and that our beliefs about death and about sex are strange, they escape the obvious binaries and categories, especially when one considers cultures where pre-christian beliefs have clashed with or grew into christian ones

it’s a breath of fresh air to read something truly in-depth.

slavicafire

yes, sorry! - here is the paper:

Rusalki: Anthropology of Time, Death, and Sexuality in Slavic Folklore by Jiří Dynda from Vol.20 (2017) of Studia Mythologica Slavica.

I would wholeheartedly recommend you all to read it, especially given it is not a long paper at all. but for those curious as to why I’m so thrilled who have little time at the moment - and also to serve as a bit of an ad - please see some of my favourite fragments:

it is rare to actually see this idea of “slavic nymph (but nastier and deadlier)” being challenged! and as you know, I’m an absolute hater of “x is a Slavic >insert Greek or Roman entity or idea< so this was already promising.

folklore NEVER truly know the conclusively original version! yes! so so so incredibly important! never trust a paper that claims otherwise - reaching very old archetypes is possible, yes, but it’s never possible to state with absolute certainty that it was the first of the first of its kind.

how human, the above, no? is that all they are? can we blame them?

can’t overstate how important this is and HOW EASILY OVERLOOKED. feminist analysis of myth does tend to pay attention to the ideas of the men who ruled the field, yes, but then it overlooks even its own biases. and then, a huge part of historians and ethnographers simply pretend their own contemporary cultural bias never finds a way in.

they do not know how.

how very slavic and how very true, how very reflective of our own strange human nature and our own strange spirituality. neither here nor there. neither dead… nor alive.

and death and birth is the same, and one, and the cycle coils and closes. ancestors are patrons of this revival, yes, and so are gods and so is Christ - but the flowering, the ripening, the most in-between, the liminal, the misunderstood, the tragic yet crucial…

those are the rusalki.

classically-lit-memes4u

I hate it when I talk wistfully about the ancient world and then people are like “you wouldn’t survive back then” yeah obviously I would die immediately but do you think achilles would be able to survive in the modern world if he had to send one polite email? no

classically-lit-memes4u

congrats to these people on being funnier than me on my own fucking post

sandersstudies

“Kids shouldn’t have to know about that.”

Okay so actually letting a serious topic be vague and confusing is much more scary for a child than explaining it in calm language they can understand.

sandersstudies

When you are in a safe place, explain the serious topic in a way the child can understand.

The fire alarm went off at school today because of a mistake, but your teachers did the right thing to take you outside to be sure it was safe.

Some people use wheelchairs because their legs don’t walk very well. It can happen because they are old and tired, or because they got hurt, or because they were born that way.

Your Uncle Jerod talked to mom and dad, and wants you to call her Aunt Kari now. We will call her Kari too, and we can all practice together if it takes some getting used to.

Anticipate age-appropriate fears the child might have so you can assuage those that are not a threat.

Yes, Kitty died at the vet, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not safe for Puppy to go to the vet.

Yes, Peyton and Jo are getting a divorce, but they are both still part of our family and love you very much.

Yes, Grandma has cancer, but cancer is not contagious, so you are not going to get cancer by visiting her.

Anticipate fears that are realistic, and give the child clear direction about what to do, and what happens next.

If someone asks you to get in their car without permission, find Mom, Mama, or a teacher and tell them right away. We will make sure you are safe.

If Sparky’s sickness makes him hurt very badly, we are going to take him to the vet and she will give him some medicine, and he will die, but then he won’t hurt any more. Because Sparky is very sick, we are going to spend some special time with him over the next few days.

If the fire alarm goes off at school again, follow the teacher’s directions. If the fire alarm goes off and you are somewhere alone, go outside, and ask a grownup to call 911.

Reassure the child that they’re safe and loved, validate their feelings, and see if they have follow-up questions. Give them the option to take space to process, or to stay near you to feel safe.

I’m sad about Sparky too. Do you think we could make his favorite peanut-butter treats, while we are spending special time with him?

I understand why Grandma’s cancer makes you feel angry. It doesn’t seem fair that people we love get sick. Would you like a hug?

You were worried about calling 911 if there’s not a grownup around. I wrote down some important things, like our address, and we can go over these together so you are ready if anything like that ever happens.

sandersstudies

These things are principally the job of the child’s parent or guardian, but in some cases directing the child to that caregiver is difficult or impossible (parent refuses/confuses the child, parent is absent, child’s questions are specific and relevant to a situation their parent was not present for, etc.) so I think all adults should be prepared to have these conversations with kids.

soycrates

Gentrification creates a stifling homogeneity in urban areas that makes it less suited for the everyday lives of the lower class and more suited towards the leisure and tourism of those with expendable income.

An old, decrepit laundromat gets replaced by an upscale bakery? And people are mad? It’s not that the poor hate organic vegan cupcakes, it’s that most of us don’t have a way to do laundry in our own home.

Run-down corner stores replaced by hand-made designer clothing boutiques? We don’t hate your eco-fabric shawl, but I can’t eat that for dinner after work like I could have a can of beans I grabbed from that corner store when I don’t have time to take the bus to the real grocery store after work.

What gentrification brings in and of itself is not typically bad, it’s that gentrification brings institutions of leisure and pleasure and makes it so that the poor have to go farther out of their way for basic necessities. It turns low-income living spaces into local tourist attractions. It can even create food deserts by putting restaurants, grocery stores, etc. in that the majority of the lower class cannot afford.

Imagine if someone totally renovated your house and turned it into a mini theme park - they took away your sleeping space, where you prepare food, where you clean yourself and get ready for your day, and replaced it with things that will please people who are visiting, who have their own homes they can go back to, who are here not for their entire life but just as a distraction from their otherwise mundane existence. It’s not that you hate theme parks, it’s not like you’ve never been to a theme park and vow to never visit one again. It’s just that you need to live! To survive! And the leisure of those who have more than you should not invalidate your existence.

soycrates

I am glad this has made the rounds. Some people feel a dense misunderstanding or misinterpretation concerning gentrification, and I think it helps to hear a description/explanation of what gentrification is from those who are both affected by it and educated by the culture from which it hails. I and many others enjoy some of the delights of gentrification while simultaneously having their livelihoods threatened by it.

byjove

he does look fun to draw

byjove

The Picts were actually Really Really Good at engraving fish. And dogs. And birds. And cattle. Which makes the Pictish Beast all the more delightful. I’ve seen it be referred to as the Pictish dragon and the Pictish elephant but I don’t think it’s supposed to be those things either. It’s just a whimsical critter fr.

a-book-of-creatures

Sometimes an art meme is an art meme

byjove

nah, THIS is a Pictish boar. put some respect on the Pictish boar.

en-theos

What's a difference between historians people who just like to study history?

idk maybe the fulltime yearslong professional training by other professionals and constant peer review aka quality control? what's the difference between a five star chef and someone who makes homemade meals every day.

en-theos

like idk I don't intend to undermine amateurs' efforts and passion and they actually contribute to science/knowledge OFTEN and WELL but generally. generally I get paid for this and they don't because I put in 40+ hours a week at the office, I read thousands of pages a year on just the one topic, I write hundreds of pages on tight deadlines and with full citation, I make use of full institutional resources (scholarship databases academic network field specific technology work events etc etc), and my writing gets checked by numerous colleagues and also two guys who have been working in the field for decades and are specialized in my topic. and criticise me heavily on whatever I hand in in order to improve it. and i/we don't just study history, we are the ones producing it.

I got this job because Ive already spent 7 years in similar institutes training for this fulltime and 6 years before that acquiring the languages to be able to do those 7 years.

aka for comparison that's the same way a chef has years of training, specialisations in national or foreign cuisines, as well as many different types of cooking has then worked his way up in the business being mentored by other chefs from cook to sous chef to chef to chef of michelin restaurants while constantly checked by customers health inspection and food critics and helped by a team of cooks and staff and food suppliers and expensive equipment.

and just like tastes differ but food can be objectively good, knowledge (especially in the humanities) is actually a bunch of consensuses or even just arguments in a trenchcoat but the research has objectively higher truth value. because it's backed up by professional methods and resources and colleagues. that's how we create knowledge.

so let us cook okay

fitzrove

A thing that 'laypeople' often miss:

The ~5-9 years of university training that people go through to work in historical professions are maybe 80% about learning the required skills and only 20% about content (= learning sequences of events or "about" certain phenomena, i.e. what history is in school). If you "study history" for fun in your free time, you're likely reading lots of what other people have written to get to the "content", but may run into issues with stuff like:

1) reliably discerning what factors [historiographical era, school, position in debate] influenced the historian that wrote the piece and hence its usefulness as an account

2) reliably discerning who wrote it in the first place (amateur or pro?) and whether they were using good practices with their sources and methodology. This is important because there are a lot of bad faith and just otherwise poor quality historical interpretations that may be written in an authoritative tone that likely "makes sense" to you if you don't dig deeper into it!

3) if doing original research: evaluating whether something is a primary/secondary source, what circumstances it was created in, whether it's authentic, whether you're missing context, where to find context...

4) Just accessing sufficient information in general (institutional databases but also archives and libraries - for many topics you have to physically go to a specific place!) to be able to make a well-rounded argument

5) like op mentioned, accessing and processing information in multiple languages - you can't really properly study most topics without being able to read sources in the language of that area

6) making sure that what you're researching hasn't actually already been done before

7) Writing up your results in a cohesive, understandable way with solid argumentation and proper citations - so people can hold you accountable and verify your arguments from primary sources if they want to!

warrioreowynofrohan

I would like to vociferously second this. I have been doing a lot of history reading recently, especially on prehistory and ancient history, and I have a BA in history (not on prehistory or ancient history) and, very luckily, have alumni access to my unversity library (without which most of my research would have been impossible or extremely expensive).

My “reading a bunch of stuff” is in no way similar to masters- or doctoral-level academic training. When I read a paper, or several papers, or a book, on a particular topic, I often don’t know the main debates on the topic, how accepted or fringe different positions are, or whether the author I’m reading is presenting a fringe position as mainstream or vice versa. I don’t know the theoretical background behind different positions (have recently been learning fun new words like “Durkheimian”). Multiple reputable authors can disagree sharply and I don’t have the academic background to rigorously evaluate their claims. If I find an academic article from, say, 2016, I may not know if new discoveries have already disproven the material in that article. I only read English – I don’t have primary sources and I can’t judge the nuances of a translation an author is giving for an ancient document. This is the case even when using reputable academic sources. I can get an overview of things, and I know a lot more than I did before, but that’s a world away from having an academic background in a subject. After three years of reading I’m still skimming the surface.

doloneia

studying ancient history & archaeology is awesome because you get to follow citations like a little trail of breadcrumbs 😌 and when you reach the end you realize everyone else has been playing the worlds worst game of telephone

magratmakethetea

I would personally love to hear about the dipylon oenochoe!

doloneia

well, i’m glad you asked! [opens can of worms]

this is my best friend, the dipylon oinochoe. its a beautiful little wine jug from the late geometric period. 22cm tall. you may know it from such hits as “paper talking about the early greek alphabet,” or “paper talking about the early greek alphabet,” etc etc. i’ve been researching him for a project lately. and i think i’m the only one who understands him now.

anyways it’s one of the oldest longer inscriptions we have from the late 8th/early 7th cent BCE. everyone and their mother wants to translate this little guy. they’re all reading it and going “oh wow! its got a perfect hexameter at the start! ‘whoever of the dancers dances most delicately!’" and then they all go "Wait What Do Those Last Signs Mean.”

there are 24 different interpretations. but thats fine. whatever. beef over the last signs seems normal enough. you see that a lot. personally i think its too broken to really tell for certain (those fractures are a bit unfortunately placed tbh) but i fear i am also just a very skeptical guy when it comes to definitive translations so my take on that should be considered with a grain of salt.

but because im researching this oinochoe, i'm reading all these articles arguing over what it Means and what the Implications Are. and you would think… its 2025… we’ve kinda all agreed “pots aren’t people” for several decades… surely there’s an analysis somewhere that focuses Solely On This Pot’s Context... idk like trying not to focus solely on its inscription for once???

but no. no, this is too much to ask for apparently. everyone’s going “well it must've belonged to a dancer! lets talk about dance competitions and homer and the gymnasium how this is all reflected in this one jug!” someone even dropped this one line theorizing it was “passed around at a party,” like it has just been consistently assigned as belonging to a dancer you cannot escape this idea. i tried to find any different ideas. i could not.

so i’m stuck here going “Where Is The Context” because it seems to be, uh, Not Discussed Anywhere. every article is citing back towards stephanos koumanoudes (the guy who purchased it in 1880) but they are Also saying “yeah it was found in 1871! source: koumanoudes!” But He’s Not The Guy That Excavated It, Guys, Where Is It From? nobody is giving me the answer. my favorite one is culhed, he just says “under obscure circumstances,” which is quite possibly the least helpful way to describe this somehow nebulous provenance. but then culhed offhandedly cites someone else. just in the footnotes, as you do. and that someone is yannis galanakis, my new hero.

now yannis galanakis (2011) does not give a single flying fuck about the dipylon oinochoe. he is here for one thing and one thing only: an unpublished stirrup jar that was bought by a totally different guy. most of his article is just concerned about this stirrup jar, how it was sold with a skull (??), and Who Sold That Skull. but galanakis’ stirrup jar is, coincidentally, from this same excavation in 1871. so in his article, where he’s referencing all these people associated with private excavations northeast of the dipylon gate (around modern-day plateia eleutherias), galanakis casually drops the line “among the finds associated with these excavations are some of the most important examples of late geometric pottery, like the dipylon oinochoe.” this is 1) more than Literally Everyone Else I Have Been Reading has been saying and 2) PROVIDING PRIMARY SOURCES FOR THIS DIG?

and these sources.... these primary sources have never been mentioned in Any Other Publications re: the dipylon oinochoe??? except MAYBE one from 2013 (coulié) thats in french, apparently only available in print, and the nearest copy is a library 2hrs away from me (so i cant actually verify what she says yet). but every other article about the dipylon oinochoe is basically like “yeah, see powell 1988” -> “yeah, see koumanoudes 1880” -> “i bought this from some guy named ioannes, lol” and its just created this Massive Echo Chamber where the provenance is "Koumanoudes" and the context is "Dancer." when... we have... two publications... written by people who were actually involved in this private excavation (which to be clear here was very much illegal at some points, but ioannes palaiologos do not care abt the government saying Stop Excavating Please). these two sources are hirschfeld (1872) and rayet (1888).

the provenance that these 1870s/80s accounts are providing isnt Actually That Detailed, but there are parts that line up pretty well (ie, swords/spears/knives being found in the graves, murex on top, several layers of successive tombs) which are Totally Absent from later articles talking about the purpose of this vessel, of its inscription, and of its owner/transcriber (which i dont think can be determined Anyways [cf Arrington 2024, this is just a Normal Take i think] but like whatever i guess Pots Are People Now, according to Powell 1988+Binek 2017+Osborne 2006). i phrased it in my paper and my presentation as “its like this oinochoe been totally disconnected from its context” and its to the point where its so egregious that someone will, in one article, drop a reference to galanakis’ research on the excavation of 1871 (where he cites two eyewitness accounts) and not. Not Once have they looked into it.

because if they had. and this is the fucking crazy part ok this is where i Lost My Shit For A Solid Week. there is, in hirschfeld 1872, an identical oinochoe (number 48, page 147 in this journal) with the same damn height (22.5cm; powell 1988 says the dipylon oinochoe is about 23cm) and decoration (a grazing deer) and concentric lines its a goddamn identical piece just judging from the description of it (and hirschfeld very unhelpfully did Not include this jug among his plates). deers grazing arent very common in late geometric pottery, its mostly just the dipylon workshop cranking them out AND theres only a few oinochoe attributed to dipylon workshop so This Is Quite Possibly The Same Vessel (or so i thought, we'll get to that). the one problem is that this vessel is just NOT from dipylon??? its from the old military hospital in athens??? which was built south of the acropolis in 1834??? and they found roman mosaics during that construction??? so this mentioned vessel could actually have been found in the 1830s??? and again nobody has said jack fucking shit about this connection, afaik i am the only one who has ever actually sat down with these Implications all lined up in a row, so i had to try and disprove myself on my own like it was 5d chess. i was the “I Want To Believe” meme but if it was about the dipylon oinochoe being from somewhere near dipylon.

and i'm digging through as many sources as i possibly can find to prove there's a mysterious second jug that might be from this hospital area (which, granted, was still a funerary space during the geometric period). i went through all of hirschfeld's references to alexander conze's plates showing pottery shapes, but they just ended up also being oinochoe, which made me lose my mind even more. hirschfeld would be like "yeah this deer was in this position from conze taf VII-2" and you go "ok so whats conze taf vii-2 look like? oh my fucking god its a GRAZING ANIMAL AGAIN." at some point i ended up reading a phd dissertation from the national and kapodistrian univerisity of athens to know more about this military hospital?? and then i switched gears and went searching through coldstream 1968’s list of geometric pottery (it might be outdated now, but it was the only thorough source i could find atp) and went through Every Single Oinochoe from the dipylon workshop and almost every single one was totally different. like they just could not be this mystery oinochoe (in which case, I Would Have Some Really Bad News About The Dipylon Oinochoe).

until i found my second best friend. munich CVA 3 taf 112. who literally nobody except me gives a shit about. its taf description is 2 paragraphs long. its the exact same height as these two aforementioned oinochoe. it has the exact same deer grazing motif. fuck it, its even got an unknown provenance because it was acquired from Some Guy Named Paul in 1907 (who also has connections to people like furtwängler [most unfortunate last name ever], another guy who wrote about the dipylon oinochoe in 1881). so in my quest to achieve some sort of emotional resolution here i possibly found a sister vessel to the dipylon oinochoe??? and maybe even that jug's provenance. who knows. i dont wanna say anything definitive yet. also if anyone has access to paul julius arndt's personal papers and especially his financial records, hit me up, because where the fuck did he get this identical looking jug.

however. most modern scholarship about the dipylon oinochoe does not care about munich cva 3 taf 112 (and its similarities to the dipylon oinochoe), or the few references to the 1871 excavations at palatia eleutherias several blocks northeast of the dipylon gate (and what little context/descriptions they provide of funerary remains), because they do not care about the dipylon oinochoe. they care about the letters inscribed on it, and they want to debate the meanings of those letters in a self-inflicted vacuum devoid of all other evidence beyond 35 legible signs and 11 fragmentary/illegible ones.

this seems to me to be a futile endeavour, especially seeing as everyone just keeps citing each other as to where the vessel came from & who to look at for more information & cutting it all off at koumanoudes (or, slightly better, galanakis). and i cannot for the life of me fathom why they have all stopped at koumanoudes or galanakis, if they're so desperate to find this concept of a person behind the oinochoe, because they could actually gain some possible insight into that person through the few grave descriptions provided. but they're only citing others who are citing others who are going off of koumanoudes' limited description from an article's addendum in 1880. and i'd argue that this sort of circular discussion strangles any attempt to actually examine the Dipylon oinochoe in a meaningful sense.

doloneia

fun update: the catalogue of paul's 1908 museum donations contains a preamble dedicated to furtwängler and lemme tell you chat i did indeed chuck my phone at my laptop in a mixture of shock and exasperation

doloneia

wait prev you can't just hide gold like this in the tags, i'm gonna be quoting this forever

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