#canaan

[paradiseyuri]

Created by : ☆ zy𠃩☆ Respective credits to the creator ⓟⒶⓇⒶⒹⒾⓈⒺ♡ⓎⓊⓇⒾ

[booksandchainmail]

are we still all into toxic yuri?

(multifandom amv to Toxic by Britney Spears)

Spoiler warnings: I mean, I've taken clips from a lot of shows but since they're contextless I think the only ones you might get significant lategame spoilers from are Oniisama e and possibly Puella Magi Madoka Magica: Rebellion

Content warnings: sexual assault, death, self harm, incest, violence (gun, knife, other), choking

[israaverse]

[CANAAN] 'NT HBLY, 'Anat the Destroyer, rides eagerly off to battle.

[Please click for better resolution <3]

[esotericderpness]

POV: ur Gideon during vow of silence at Canaan house trying figure out where the hell Harrow is.

[unteriors]

Route 253, Canaan, Vermont.

[dlartistanon]

Some lesser-known throwback yuri (clockwise from top left: Signum/Shamal, Canaan/Maria, Karulau/Touka, Nadie/Ellis)

[indecisiveavocado]

Some notes on the name Palestine

TL;DR: Palestine is a colonialist name from a group trying to deny an indigenous group's indigenousness as part of a genocidal campaign. It may have acquired other meanings, but the etymology is still linked tightly to that, and it still carries that past with it. Anyone who considers themselves pro-indigenous should not use the term.

Let's rewind. The word Palestine is related to "Philistine"; indeed, it comes from them. So who were they?

In short, a bunch of Greeks who created a syncretic culture in what is now, roughly, Gaza. They mixed with the native people, called Canaanites. (We don't know what they called themselves - Philistine itself derives from a Biblical term.)

They vanished pretty fast, and then, a while later, the Romans came.

The indigenous population rebelled too much, so they embarked on a campaign of genocide. They killed people, of course. But they also raped enough women that Judaism is matrilineal. They sold people as slaves, barred them from their holy city and capital, Jerusalem (which they renamed). They destroyed the Jewish holy temple, the Second Temple (there is now a mosque on top of it).

And then they tried to deny that the indigenous population was, in fact, indigenous. They renamed the region Syria Palestina. Why? Because Philistines weren't around anymore. They could pretend there weren't any indigenous people to displace.

Over time, that word, Palestina, moved. It moved to Arabic, where it became Filastin. It moved to English, where it became Palestine.

But the indigenous name for the region (except, arguably, for Gaza, give or take) has never been Palestine.

We don't know what the Neanderthals, the first group there, called it.

But we know what many of the indigenous people call it. Eretz Yisrael. Or, in English, the Land of Israel.

("But wait!" you say. "You just said that in Arabic it was Filastin. Palestinians are native and speak Arabic!"

But they didn't speak Arabic back then. Arabic came with the Arab conquerers (who Palestinians aren't super related to, FYI). Arabs spread vastly during the Islamic conquests, but before that, they were primarily a desert people, whose homeland corresponded to roughly Saudi Arabia, although it extended to places like Syria and Oman. There are majority-Arab countries and places today that range from Morocco to Mauritania, Sudan to Iraq, Egypt to (parts of) Iran. Arabs are not indigenous to any of those places, and neither is Arabic.)

You may not support the Roman genocide. I hope you don't. But you are still using a term European colonialists used to erase indigenous identity as they genocided them, and it still carries that baggage.

(If you refuse to call the region Israel, Canaan is also a fine term - although it may get you some weird looks.)

[bi-numi-aliyani]

A little write-up on the queerness of Lady ʿAshtart

"Star of Ghassul" wall painting from Teleilat Ghassul; Ghassulian culture, Late Chalcolithic, c. 4000–3900 BCE. (Drabsch and Bourke, 2019)

In the poorly-understood religion of preliterate Semitic-speaking peoples, the planet Venus appears to have been worshipped as a male Morning Star (ʿAthtar) and a female Evening Star (ʿAthtart) ("The Sumerian goddess Inanna (3400–2200 BC)" (1994), Paul Collins, pp. 110–11). This is reversed in the Northwest Semitic scheme for reasons I can't quite remember (Ritual and Cult at Ugarit (2002), Dennis Pardee, p. 275). This may have even deeper, more mystical roots, with it being supposed based on their art that the people of the Chalcolithic Ghassulian culture conceived of Venus and its motions in relation to the cycles of life and death (The Mysterious Wall Paintings of Teleilat Ghassul, Jordan: In Context (2015), Bernadette Drabsch, pp. 32, 57, 154, 162).

Ancient depictions of ʿAshtart in gender-ambiguous form (Sugimoto, 2015)

Although ʿAshtart and ʿAshtar (the "th" sound shifting to a "sh" in most of the relevant Semitic languages) developed with their own distinct identities in the various places they were worshipped, the gender-fluid aspect never quite faded away. Some ancient depictions of ʿAshtart give her a beard and even a penis combined with feminine characteristics such as breasts ("The Judean Pillar Figurines and the 'Queen of Heaven'", David T. Sugimoto, in Transformation of a Goddess: Ishtar ­– Astarte ­– Aphrodite (2014), Sugimoto (ed.), pp. 158–164; see also the case of a peculiar mask from Carthage). An association with gender-variant priests is also quite ancient and consistent, as seen with the gala of Inanna-Ishtar and the eunuch priesthood of ʿAttarʿatta (a combination of ʿAshtart and ʿAnat; Atargatis in Greek). This fascinatingly found its way as far as the Eurasian steppe, as after incursions by the Scythians reached ʿAshtart's cult center in Ashkelon they began maintaining a transfeminine priesthood, whose members were called Anarya ("un-man", Greek: Enaree), who served the androgynous goddess Artimpasa (Herodotus gives pejorative accounts in Histories 1.105 and 4.76).

Terracotta mask of the bearded ʿAshtart; Carthage necropolis, c. mid-7th – early 6th century BCE. (The Louvre)

As a Canaanite Pagan and a trans woman, it means something very special that even the Queen of Heaven could look like me.