What do you do when your entire campaign is based on trying to become a dictator? You try to implement unconstitutional bans on Muslims and then try to reinforce your authoritarian moves via scaring the bejesus out of people. Press Secretary Sean Spicer has been running around to microphones everywhere to talk about how the Muslim ban policy is a national security issue. His evidence are all of the terrorist attacks on American soil.
You’ll notice how this “Atlanta” attack keeps being brought up by Spicer. You may have forgotten about the famous terror attack in Atlanta because the media forgot to cover it. They forgot to cover it because it never happened.
The last high-profile terror attack in Atlanta was the Centennial Olympic Park bombing, 21 years ago. And that bombing was carried out by Eric Robert Rudolph, a radical right-wing terrorist from Florida -- not a foreign-inspired terrorist.
In an email to ABC News Wednesday, Spicer finally addressed his repeated reference to an Atlanta terror attack, writing that he "clearly meant Orlando."
Spicer's about-face, claiming that he was referring to the deadly massacre in June at Orlando's gay Pulse nightclub, come on the heels of Conway’s repeated reference to the non-existent Bowling Green Massacre, which she has now acknowledged never happened.
This is your job, man. That’s an easy pitch to hit but I guess when your entire job is predicated on saying black is white and up is down, it’s hard to find reality anymore.
I shall sing of well-formed Earth, mother of all and oldest of all, who nourishes all things living on land. Her beauty nurtures all creatures that walk upon the land, and all that move in the deep or fly in the air. O mighty one, you are the source of fair children and goodly fruit, and on you it depends to give life to, or take it away from, mortal men. Blessed is the man you favor with willing heart, for he will have everything in abundance. His life-giving land teems with crops, and on his fields his flocks thrive while his house is filled with goods. Such men with just laws rule a city of beautiful women, while much prosperity and wealth attend them. Their sons glory in youthful glee and their daughters with cheerful hearts in flower-dances.
from The Homeric Hymns
Apostolos N Athanassakis, translator
Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 1976
ISBN 0-8018-1792-7
“A spirit . . . . . . . . . The undulating and silent well, And rippling rivulet, and evening gloom, Now deepening the dark shades, for speech assuming, Held commune with him; as if he and it Were all that was.” -SHELLEY’S
Alastor
("Vampires" were once believed to be Forces Of Nature....)
“Thy red lips, like worms, Travel over my cheek.” —MOTHERWELL.
For she would willingly bring her life to anchor at the end of its voyage the gloomy harbor of death. opening chorus of Hippolytus -Euripedes. (Suggestion Besame]
Vampires
have been invading our dreams
(and our culture's collective consciousnesses)
for centuries, now.
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The idea of a collective consciousness was first presented by French sociologist Émile Durkheim in 1893.
In the 1970s, scientists began to suggest this collective consciousness could be developed and spread through species non-explicitly; through telepathic or ‘supernatural’ means.
Actually, the duty of the living to keep the dead at rest is centuries-old, and there are exceptions. Cremation and/or feeding the dead to carrion (aka sky burial) is an effective way to destroy a body and set free its spirit. Disclaimer: not all sky burials automatically release the spirit and some cultures that practice it also have methods for avoiding ghosts (#notallskyburials)...but we’re getting a little too anthropological here. There were island cultures in the Pacific and elsewhere that collected the skulls of ancestors and kept them around to they could watch over the extended family. Even in Rome, through the 19th century, certain families would go into the catacombs around the vernal equinox to polish certain skulls that belonged to ancestors. Burial customs are fascinating, almost as fascinating as the traditions that gave rise to such customs, but we’re not interested in them tonight. Tonight it’s all about the dead that won’t stay dead and, in particular, the vampire.
Every culture seems to have had vampires:
“I am a part of the part, which at first was the whole.” GOETHE.—Mephistopheles in Faust.
have existed for millennia; cultures such as theMesopotamians,Hebrews,ancient Greeks, andRomanshad tales ofdemonicentities and blood-drinking spirits which are considered precursors to modern vampires. Despite the occurrence of vampire-like creatures in these ancient civilizations, thefolklorefor the entity we know today as the vampire originates almost exclusively from early 18th-century Southeastern Europe,[1]particularlyTransylvaniaas verbal traditions of many ethnic groups of the region were recorded and published. In most cases, vampires arerevenantsof evil beings, suicide victims, or witches, but can also be created by a malevolent spirit possessing a corpse or by being bitten by a vampire itself. Belief in such legends became so rife that in some areas it causedmass hysteriaand even public executions of people believed to be vampires -wikipedia
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Edited to include:
"The Sefer Hasidim, a book on Jewish piety, stated: "1465 There are women that are called estrie... They were created at sunset [before the first Sabbath before creation]. As a result of this, they are able to change form. There was one woman who was a estrie and she was very sick and there were two women with her at night; one was sleeping and one was awake. And the sick woman stood up and loosened her hair and she was about to fly and suck the blood of the sleeping woman.."
"As we know, the Torah in Shemot (22:17) commands us not to allow witches to live. Rambam (Hil. Sanhedrin 4:3) views this as a biblical prohibition imposed on Beit Din. In Devarim (18:10-11) the Torah lists a variety of wizards to be avoided: “There shall not be found among you any one who passes his son or his daughter through the fire, one that uses divination, a soothsayer, an enchanter, a sorcerer, or a charmer, or one that consults a ghost or familiar spirit, or a necromancer.” The Sifrei and later commentators explicate the differences between these categories. All this is well known.
Not many know that the Sefer Hasidim, among other things, relates a number of incidents involving witch-like creatures called “estries,” who suck the blood of their victims. They fly, assume different forms and continue to attack victims even after they have been killed and buried. Perhaps most curiously, the remedy for a victim of an estrie is to eat from her bread and salt, which somehow acted as an antidote to her bites.
The passages below are my own translations; the original Hebrew sources are listed below. For a discussion of the sources, see J. Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition (New York, 1939), pp. 38-39.
Guest post by R. Eli D. Clark
Rabbi Eli D. Clark lives in Bet Shemesh, Israel. He served as Halakha editor of the Koren Sacks Siddur and also practices international tax law."
WelshpsychoanalystErnest Jonesasserted that vampires are symbolic of several unconscious drives anddefence mechanisms. Emotions such as love, guilt, and hate fuel the idea of the return of the dead from the grave. Desiring a reunion with loved ones, mourners mayprojectthe idea that the recently dead must in return yearn the same. wikipedia.
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(DrLori):
Vampires of folk tradition are not at all the elegant and menacing figures of literature that we think of today. Our conception of the vampire primarily comes from Eastern European folk tradition, although, as Angmar wrote above, blood-drinking revenants appear world-wide. And European vampire traditions center around how to identify a vampire and who is going to become a vampire (hint: you’re pretty much marked at birth) . Most of the corpse-identification traditions center around an imperfect understanding of human decomposition in cool temperatures. (Another hint: this link is pretty graphic, so don’t follow it if you tend toward queasiness.)
Since, by the 19th Century, it was generally understood even in Transylvania that, if you had a rash of mysterious deaths in your town, digging up random bodies looking for a livid one was bad form, and frowned upon by the Church to boot, so another method of vampire detection was developed. This one required that a priest lead a white filly ridden by a virgin girl or boy over the graves in the cemetery. The grave that the horse refused to cross, or shied at, or just flinched over—that was the one that could be dug up by respectable people.
For the record, vampires persist as a phenomenon in Romania to this day. Search Youtube and you’ll find news clips of recent vampire huntings, even though the Romanian government disavows them and most townspeople are reticent and unwilling to talk.
The Vampire as Metaphysical
*
Add the Greek prefix "meta-" (beyond) to the base "physical" (nature), and you getmetaphysical— a near synonym to the Latin-based word "supernatural." Both concern phenomena that are outside everyday experience or knowledge.
The jagged outline of a bat-like wing, torn and hooked. Came a cold wind with a burning sting—and Lilith was upon me. Her hands were still bound, but with her teeth she pulled from my shoulder the cloak Lona made for me, and fixed them in my flesh. I lay as one paralysed.
Already the very life seemed flowing from me into her, when I remembered, and struck her on the hand. She raised her head with a gurgling shriek, and I felt her shiver. I flung her from me, and sprang to my feet.
She was on her knees, and rocked herself to and fro. A second blast of hot-stinging cold enveloped us; the moon shone out clear, and I saw her face—gaunt and ghastly, besmeared with red.
"Down, devil!" I cried.
Where are you taking me?" she asked, with the voice of a dull echo from a sepulchre.
The room was lighted by the candle that burnt there all through the night,
and I saw a female figure standing at the foot of the bed,
a little at the right side. It was in a dark loose dress, and its hair was down and covered its shoulders. A block of stone could not have been more still. There was not the slightest stir of respiration. As I stared at it, the figure appeared to have changed its place, and was now nearer the door; then,close to it, the door opened, and it passed out.
"Can you tell me why in the Pampas, ay and elsewhere, there are bats that come at night and open the veins of cattle and horses and suck dry their veins; how in some islands of the Western seas there are bats which hang on the trees all day, and those who have seen describe as like giant nuts or pods, and that when the sailors sleep on the deck, because that it is hot, flit down on them, and then—and then in the morning are found dead men, white as even Miss Lucy was?”
at the end of its voyage the gloomy harbour of death.
Opening chorus of Hippolytus -Euripedes.
Christopher Lopa
Wharton:
“I wanted to see the place,” he merely said.
The Deacon cleared his throat. “Just take a look . . . yes . . . We thought so . . . But I guess there won’t be anything tosee. . . ” He attempted a chuckle.
The other did not seem to hear him, but laboured on ahead through the pines. The three men came out together in the cleared space before the house. As they emerged from beneath the trees they seemed to have left night behind. The evening star shed a lustre on the speckless snow, and Brand, in that lucid circle, stopped with a jerk, and pointed to the same light foot-prints turned toward the house — the track of a woman in the snow. He stood still, his face working. “Bare feet . . . ” he said.
The Deacon piped up in a quavering voice: “The feet of the dead.”
Vampires exploded into English consciousness during the Victorian era. Bram Stoker’s Dracula might not have been the first Western European treatment of vampirism, but it was the best-written one, and it sparked a cultural wave. Stoker had traveled in Eastern Europe, and combined potent bits of vampire folklore with Victorian anxiety about masculinity, purity and cultural superiority. It was, in short, a hit, and soon everyone was writing about vampires.
Vampirism in Western Europe hit its stride at the start of the cinematic era, and birthed hundreds of movies, making a star of Bela Lugosi and adding to Christopher Lee’s resume.
What these literary treatments had going for them was a perfect combination of gothic horror and social anxiety. You can read (and watch) most early vampire novels and films as seduction and/or rape texts. The protagonist exposes his beloved to the vampire, who takes interest in her. Then our hero tries (unsuccessfullly) to save his beloved from the depredations of the seductive vampire. The scene of the attack is always a bedroom, and the focus remains on a fang penetrating tender flesh (can you get any more phallic?); blood is left on the sheets, the woman in a rapturous faint and the men, who always arrive too late, averting their eyes while they cover her up decently before an investigation can proceed. From there, the narrative shifts to 1) exterminating the threat before it becomes widespread, before “Dracula” can recruit his vampire army, and 2) redeeming the ravished beloved so she can marry our hero. Once touched by the vampire, poor Mina is defiled; the consecrated Host (Body of Christ) burns her forehead and marks her; with just….one…more…. visit from the Count, poor Mina will be damned. She’ll also die a spinster—what could be worse?
Despite the fact that at the time women were considered the primary audience for novels in general, horror stories were pitched to male audiences, being generally too explicit and violent for the gentle sex. Which means that I’m not suggesting female readers wanted or even recognized vampire stories as rape texts. Instead, I think the stories express male anxiety and serve as a response to a social construct that saw women as passive objects, and valuable only in terms of purity, innocence and weakness.
What makes the novels genuinely scary is what makes the vampire genuinely scary: a mix of the exotic with real menace. What’s at stake is not just death, but eternal damnation—virtuous men and women being seduced from their proper lives by an alluring fleshly temptation, being claimed by that temptation willing or not, and dragged into torment and possibly hell. Lucy dies and cannot be at rest until her corpse is “killed” again. A vampire is attractive, mesmerizing, tempting….and destructive.
I don’t think vampires would have taken root in our imaginations if they had not first been planted in Victorian soil. It was the Victorian Age, with its rigid social structures and repressive cultural expectations (virginity before marriage, covering a woman’s body even while emphasizing and exaggerating her shape and sexuality, strict codes of behavior for men: placing “nice” girls on pedestals and worshiping them while at the same time visiting brothels, etc.) Not for nothing was bdsm raised to an art and the high water-mark for numbers of brothels reached in London and New York during the late Victorian period. All those repressed desires had to go somewhere: in popular fiction, it went into what would become gothic literature, and its exploration of darkness and the forbidden.
FEMALE BURIED AS A VIKING WARRIOR CONFIRMED BY GENETIC STUDIES
I do a Facebook Page called Ancient European Swords (feel free to like it; we ban Nazis on sight so although it would be harder to be more Eurocentric, it is, hopefully much less Euro-perior than other pages on similar topics) and this study came to my attention yesterday. And holy shit is it awesome. Lemme tell you why.
Pop Culture’s Myth of the Skjaldmær — Shield Maiden
For years pop culture has bombarded us with the “Shield Maiden”– the female Viking warrior. Everybody knows Lagertha from the History Channel’s Vikings. According to Norwegian Archeologist Dr. Nanna Løkka the “Shield Maiden” has actually displaced the “Scantily Clad Viking Chick As Centerfold” as the top Google image search result for “Viking Women”.
24 of these 40 images depict ‘Viking’ women with weapons. 7 fall into Dr. Løkka’s “Mother/Head of House” category and 4 are clearly in the “Scantily Clad Viking Chick As Centerfold” category.
Many clickbait pages have touted archeological studies which ‘prove’ there were female Viking warriors:
Nonsense. Complete and utter bullshit. The study showed that some of the first Vikings to settle permanently in England were women. That’s it. No weapon graves, no evidence of combat, a huge nothingburger that was the source of endless frustration to archeologists who seriously research gender questions related to Vikings. Misogynists gleefully used this to discredit their work.
From pop culture it is easy to get an impression that we are steeped in evidence that Viking women were all badass sheroes with a babe against the breast in one arm and a sword in the other or some other nonsense like that. The truth is we have very little evidence that Viking women were warriors (until yesterday) at all.
The Literary Evidence
One of our best sources for how Vikings lived, thought and behaved are the written accounts. These basically come in a couple of forms. There are the Eddas — the Poetic and Prose Edda which are our primary sources for Norse mythology. But all of these date from about 200 years AFTER the end of the Viking period and long after the Scandinavian countries and Iceland were Christianized. In any case, the only women with weapons are Valkyries — supernatural women. So, right there you have every sexist who ever studied Vikings saying: Duh. Female Vikings with weapons are imaginary.
Then you have the sagas. Like the Eddas, these were written down post Christianization. In the favor of the sagas, you have evidence for significant amounts of truth in some of them. We can show, for instance, that events attested to in the Sagas really did occur in Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and other places. But other things in the sagas are more fanciful and nebulous — dragons, elves, undead and so forth. Female warriors are attested to in several sagas — Brynhildr in the Saga of the Volsungs, Hervor in Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks, the Brynhildr of the Bósa saga ok Herrauðs, the Swedish princess Thornbjǫrg in Hrólfs saga Gautrekssonar.
Note: so far, Hervor is my favorite. Runs away from home to become a raider, goes to her father’s tomb to claim the magical sword Tyfing. When this gets boring, she marries and has kids. Who says women can’t have it all?
You can find endless discussions of passages from the Sagas which describe women who fight but basically the argument ends with — well, there’s no solid archeological evidence so obviously it’s mythical nonsense. There also is a tendency to look at the negative endings these women come to as proof that Vikings disapproved of women warriors harshly viewed violations of gender norms. The problem with that argument is — these are fucking VIKING SAGAS. Everyone comes to a bad end. There isn’t a damn character in the Saga of Volsungs (including the Gods who face Ragnarok) who dies rich and happy from old age!!!
Archeological Evidence: Jewelry and Amulets
In the last twenty or so years, some non-grave related finds have started to appear which may — or may not — depict female warriors or armed women. These are highly stylized amulets or pendants similar to the image below.
Sadly, these do not depict women with weapons. However, the third figure from left is the most common depiction of women in Viking art — a woman holding a cup or horn of a beverage.
There are now about 40 of these images usually in silver or bronze. Like the images above there are not tons of details in these figures and arguments rage — are they depicting women or men? Ok, if they are women prove they are not the mythological Valkyries. Oh, you can’t prove they aren’t Valkyries? Too bad for you little feminist Viking fan-boi snowflake!
And that’s pretty much where discussion of these items ends. If you get the sense that it has been an uphill battle for believers in the idea that Viking women were autonomous human beings with a wide spectrum of human behaviors and activities, well, you would be correct.
Archeological Evidence: Graves and Grave Goods
Good news! According to archeologist Dr. Neil Price, we know of hundreds of thousands of Viking graves! Yea! Lots of information!
Bad news! We’ve examined about 10,000 of them.
Worse news about female Viking warriors: we have identified only 20 likely female Viking graves containing weapons. And most of those graves (Grave BB from Bogøvej, Gerdrup grave from Sjælland, Grave A505 from Trekoroner-Grydehøj, Løve near Larvik, Mårem in Telemark, Kaupang had several [Ka. 3, Ka. 10, Ka. 16, Ka. 294-296], Birkjholberget cemetary in Kaupang, the Oseburg ship burial, Kinta graves 59:2 and 59:3, Birka bj. 834, Dalstorp A24 are examples) were basically a woman buried with an axe, a woman buried with a spear, or a woman and a man buried with a sword but the sword was positioned closer to the woman in the grave than to the man. Even worse, most of the axes were generic axes; not specifically battle axes. In other words, VERY INCONCLUSIVE.
Nordre Kjølen, a very recently described burial of a woman with a sword, spearhead, axe and several arrows with a shield under her head was the best of them.
Why are there so few females buried with weapons in a warlike culture?
Well, until pretty recently there were no definitive and inexpensive ways to prove ancient grave remains were those of a man or woman. So virtually all Viking graves have been categorized this way:
Grave has brooches, beads, keys — WOMAN.
Grave has weapons — MAN
For all we know half the graves we have could be female warriors. I doubt it. But hell, we just don’t know.
GRAVE BJ 581 CHANGES EVERYTHING.
Give me a minute to set the scene, please.
Between 750 and 1150 CE the town of Birka in Sweden was a bustling, thriving trade center. I’ve seen it called a proto-city. It had a large village; it had a port, there was a military style garrison and a hillfort to watch over it. And of course, where people live, they also die. Birka had a very extensive set of burial grounds.
Birka diorama from the Historiska Museet in Stockholm.
Archeologists have excavated 1,100 of the 3,000 or so graves around Birka. In 1889!!!! the grave Bj 581 was excavated. The findings were published in 1941. The grave was located on a rise between the town and the hillfort that was “in direct contact with the garrison.” What was in the grave? Well, lets take a look:
Contents of Bj 581:
Double edged sword (Probably a Petersen Type C but a Type H or I are also possible — this is based on the drawing of the grave goods. I have NOT been able to access the 1941 paper describing the grave yet. Working on that now.)
Like this. Kulturhistorisk Museet Oslo.
Axe (Probably a Petersen Type M — this is very important because Type M would not be good for splitting wood. Tree axes tend to have wedge shaped profiles when you look down at the top. These axes do not. This axe was designed to go as deeply into a human body as possible. That was the only thing these were good for. Again, based on the illustrations of the grave.
See how narrow the blade is? That would get stuck in a tree. But not in a skull.
Spear, type unknown.
Probably reasonably close. Kulturhistorisk Museet Oslo.
Seax or war knife. The illustration of the grave indicate scale and this was not a small utility knife.
Similar to this guy in the middle.
Arrows. Not hunting arrows; arrows designed to pierce maille armor (chainmail). Useless for hunting; go right through a deer.
Two shields.
A complete set of game pieces for strategy games. Often found in elite warrior graves. The paper authors emphasize this quite heavily and are relying on this specific piece of evidence to make the cast that this person was an “officer” or leader of warriors. I am less certain about what this means. I have tremendous respect for the authors who are top-notch archeologists but this seems more tenuous of a conclusion to me.
Two horses, a mare and a stallion.
Just as interesting is what was NOT in the grave: no brooches, no beads, no keys — none of the characteristic female Viking grave goods.
So obviously, this was the grave of a man, right?
Everybody thought so until The Swedish Research Council funded a study of the geographic movements of people in the Viking period. The goal was to do an osteological study of skeletal remains in the Mälaren Valley. So the researches examined 664 skeletal remains, men, women, children, with the hope of finding out which were local, which were not and get an idea of who was moving where at that time. Everything was all boring and normal and then they came to Bj 581 and suddenly they were all like: This is a woman. In a warrior grave.
So, they re-examined the bones two more times. Pretty damn certain these are female bones — all three times the researchers agreed. This was a woman. She was about 5’ 6” and was over 30 years old when she died. There was no indication of traumatic injury to the bones.
This woman shows a genetic affinity to present day inhabitants of England and Scotland, Iceland and Orkneys, Denmark and Norway and a lesser affinity to present inhabitants of Lithuania and Latvia. There is also an affinity between the female warrior and southern and south-central modern Swedes.
Analysis of the strontium in her molars show she was not native to the Birka area and had travelled in her life.
IMPORTANT CONTEXTUAL COMMENTS:
1. The dead do not bury themselves, the living select what is buried with the dead. Could these items be heirlooms, the property of the buried woman’s husband who may have been left on a battlefield in distant place? We have examples of children buried with weapons, obviously the kids were not full time warriors. Why is this different?
Yes, the archeologists note it is possible that the weapons are not hers. But this really requires special pleading– none of the children buried with weapons are buried with a full panoply of war gear. It’s difficult to argue that they would have buried her with every bit of her husband’s most valuable equipment… and absolutely NO typical female grave goods.
2. Did the remains show any signs of battle trauma?
No, but graves near communities which are not known battle sites usually do not.
However, contrary to what could be expected, weapon related wounds (and trauma in general) are not common in the inhumation burials at Birka (e.g., 2 out of 49 confirmed males showed signs of sharp force trauma). A similarly low frequency is noted at contemporaneous cemeteries in Scandinavia (e.g., Helgesson Arcini,1996). Traces of violent trauma are more common in Viking Age mass burials (e.g., Loe, Boyle, Webb, & Score,2014; Price et al.,2016).
In other words, bodies buried near battle sites, frequently in mass graves, often show signs of battle trauma. Bodies buried at settlements do not.
AND FINALLY, 3. If the genetic results had come back as male would either of the two above questions have arisen at all? No? Why not? Think about it.
Very important last comment on the meaning of this find:
This does not prove that Shield Maidens/female Viking warriors were the norm or common. What we have is simply really solid evidence for at least ONE female warrior. However, in the context of jewelry and amulets that depict armed females, Sagas which mention female warriors and archeological evidence for at least twenty armed female burials which COULD be warriors and THIS ONE HIGH-STATUS ELITE FEMALE WARRIOR BURIAL…
The burden of proof has now shifted away from proving female warriors existed and the new question is: how common were female warriors?
So, I say to all women who love their spears, swords, shields, seaxes as much as any man could – Skål!!!
Final discouraging note:
I’ve spent all day defending this find online from sexists and jerks. I have NO OBJECTION to the people who want to see enlarged muscle attachment points on the bones consistent with other warrior graves — valid point. That has not been examined with Bj 581.
What I hate are the following:
Obviously her husband’s stuff.
This bullshit is being published only because of the TV show Vikings. What crap.
Reenactment of a male farmers grave by Andrimners Hemtagare. Far fewer indications of wealth and prestige although there are several tools which indicate woodworking skills.
What could be cooler? Placed on a boat with your sword and shield, sent into a lake, set ablaze with a flaming arrow, all your friends and family hoisting horns of mead to your memory, cheering as they envisage the Valkyrie leading your spirit to Valhalla! It is so badass that upon reading this, regardless of gender or orientation, your testosterone level increased by at least 3% (after reading this diary, those who do not want beards and mustaches should peek into mirrors just in case).
After the discovery a couple of weeks ago of the first female warrior (pretty much 99% certain; there are some arguments about the chain of custody of the bones which were originally excavated in 1889 and her haplogroup is more Eastern European than Scandinavian but I’m hearing there are more papers on the way about other exciting graves…) the topic of Viking burials is in the air. Were they all that majestic and elaborate?
Well, yes and no. First, a brief digression - the Vikings had no clue they were Vikings. To them, the word “Viking” was a verb indicating raiding, piracy, which were normal, acceptable ways to go about getting wealth and fame. So, pretty much like wall street today except with more blood and fewer lawsuits. As for who they were that changed over time. At the start of what we call the Viking Period, (well just say 800 CE for this diary and quibble about details later), well in a spiritual sense, they probably thought they were the children of Ask and Embla. Pressed for who they were you’d get a lot of Sven the farmer, Hild the seamstress of the tribe of Svear under chieftain Halvdan the Raven or something similar. By the end of the Viking period (call it 1100 CE for ease) they might possibly have identified as Norse, Dane, Swede.
This is important because the funeral customs varied widely over time and geography – as did the spiritual belief systems that informed the burial rituals. And the reason these mortuary rituals and practices are so important to the study of ancient cultures is because they reveal something of how people from the past viewed life and death. But sorting things out is quite a task.
According to archeologist and Viking specialist Dr. Neil Price there are over 500,000 known graves from the Viking period. Ground penetrating radar reveals more graves as its usage grows. In the past ~150 years we have excavated just over 10,000 graves. Two obvious categories of burial are inhumation (buried body) and cremation. Roughly speaking, Sweden preferred cremation throughout the period. In Denmark and Norway there are a mix of inhumation and cremations. Many cremation graves take the form of burial mounds which are very visible today and would have been even more visually apparent to the Vikings themselves. Sometimes these mounds are off on their own, sometimes in small clusters and then there are necropolises such as the Birka cemetery of over 3,000 in Sweden.
Sometimes these sites, both inhumation and cremation are marked. Stones are often set up in patterns such as ships, circles, other more obscure designs. Other times there is simply a single stone. In one island in the middle of the Baltic sea, Gotland, they used elaborate picture stones to mark graves and that deserves a diary of its very own because it is AWESOME.
But the inhumation graves… the burial graves… they get interesting….
WARNING: Vikings had a very different view of animals and people. The following images and discussions may be uncomfortable for some. And I’m actually not kidding about that.
Putting flesh on the bones — the female warrior grave.
Let’s start with our woman warrior from the Birka cemetery. Dr. Neil Price thoughtfully commissioned an illustration of this grave and even more thoughtfully gave permission for me to use it.
We have a woman, roughly 30 or so years old (nice long life for that era and that profession) who has been carefully placed in a sitting position. Her clothing was not preserved but at the back of her skull were several wonderfully ornate bits of silver which had silk fibers attached – high possibility that they were part of a hat. Turns out people sitting in Viking graves is not very usual. It also turns out there are suggestions that some people slept sitting upright during the middle ages, including the Viking period. In her lap was a bag which held 30 gaming pieces (the bag is presumed; nothing survived of it). She may or may not have been sitting in a wooden chair.
Part of a hat or cap? Items on top are from grave 581 and the illustration on bottom left shows where, relative to the skeleton, they were found.
Surrounding her was the gear of war. Sword, war knife, arrows, spears, axes, shields, a utility knife, a stone (whetstone?), comb (very common in Viking graves, male and femaile), a bronze bowl, and a belt with decorative. At her feet were the stirrups from (presumably) her saddle.
Pieces on the bottom are hers.
Very interestingly, on the ground was a quarter of an Arabian silver coin, a dirham, for Nasr ibn Ahmad under the Caliph al-Muktadir who ruled in Baghdad from 908-932 CE. Is it remotely possible that a female Viking warrior walked the streets of Baghdad? We know male Vikings did – they left graffiti at the Hagia Sophia! Oh, the unanswered questions… at the time Baghdad was a center of learning and trade. I wonder what she would have thought of it? On another note, the coin confirms the general timeline for this burial.
Then we have the horses, a mare and a stallion (based on skeletal differences). Interestingly a spear seems to lean against the barrier separating the horses from her body. Was the spear cast into the grave? There are references to the casting of a spear before battle dedicating all who die to Odin (who wielded a spear called Gugnir). Was she dedicated to Odin?
Horses have a long history of being used as sacrificial animals which go back to the Proto Indo-European Steppe Cultures four thousand years before this woman lived; five thousand years before I sit here avoiding work and writing about Vikings. Is it possible that a connection exists over four thousand years of time in ritual practice? This is a question I will return to when we get around to the Gods. Suffice it to say that Dr. David Anthony’s book The Horse, The Wheel and Language has really made me (and people a lot smarter than me) think long and hard about that question. One final note: the horses are not side by side. They were carefully placed, one atop the other, legs folded beneath them.
There, that wasn’t so bad was it? Except for the horses, it looks like a funeral ritual not to horribly alien from our own… you could imagine a female air force pilot being buried in her uniform with her medal ribbons on her chest, jets flying overhead for a send off, right? Different but not completely alien!
Ok, have a look at the next burial from Kaupang, Norway, a lovely trading town on the banks of a Fjord.
Take your time. There is a lot to see.
It all started so simply… in the mid 800’s a man was buried on his left side with his chest against a large stone. He had been covered in fine cloth. Buried with him were two knives, fire steel and flint, a whetstone, fragments of a soapstone bowl and something called “an egg shaped stone.”
So what does this have to do with the boat above?
Well, about 50 years after the man I mentioned was buried the (presumed) locals very carefully put a 27 foot long boat exactly on top of this man with the keel aligned with his body. So, what is in this boat? Let’s start at the prow (bottom of picture for you landlubbers). There is a dead woman and infant. Her hand is on the head of the infant, placed upon blankets. The woman is 45 to 50 years old; could she be the mother? The grandmother? Her right hand was placed on her breast, ankles crossed. Her head rested on a stone, like a pillow. The clothing indicated wealth and were held together with silver jewelry. At her belt hung a knife and a key (keys appear to have been a symbol of women of status). At her right side was a bucket, balanced across her knees was a weaving sword (not a weapon; used to smooth threads on a loom). The infant had been wrapped in her dress at her hip.
Lying head to head with her is a man of unknown age. His feet point the opposite way, to the stern. Around him were weapons. Two axes, one of which would have been an antique when it was buried with him — its head is a type that has been out of style for decades. Spear, sword in sheath with point at his head, two knives, whetstone, multiple shields, arrows. On his stomach: an inverted frying pan. The scattered bits of a shattered pot from Germany lay upon him. An iron dog chain draped next to him and sickle nearby.
Now, we come to the horse.
The decapitated horse.
Oops, sorry, the decapitated, dismembered and reassembled horse.
With a single silver spur inserted into the body.
After that things get a bit strange.
There is a woman, sitting up in the stern of the boat. It appears as though she was buried with the ship’s oar in her hands. Against her feet are a whetstone and a bridle bit which were arranged so as to touch the horse. A shield behind her body propped her up. Indications are that her clothing was expensive and well made. Resting on the deck was “an egg shaped stone” and another weaving sword. Underneath a rock was an unusual iron staff – possibly the staff of a volva, a woman who practiced magic and fortunetelling. An axe was nearby.
In her lap was a imported bronze bowl engraved with runes to say “in the hand basin”. Inside the bowl? Some bits of metal. And the head of a dog. The body of the dog – most of it anyway – was across the woman’s feet. One pair of dog legs may have been detached. The other two legs? Nowhere to be found. Oh, and it looks like there was some carving on the flesh of the dog based on marks on the bones.
The whole thing was covered in earth and complex arrangements of rocks. Mixed in were cremated human bones and wood.
Does this in any way resemble any kind of funeral you understand? Were the man and woman a couple? Did everyone die at once? Or were some of them killed so they could accompany the others? What relationship does the woman in the stern have to the three other occupants of the boat?
Now consider this: neither of the graves above are horribly atypical for Viking burials (except for the whole confirmed female DNA in a weapon grave thing. That bit is new). That is how diverse Viking burials are.
Let’s look at some other graves. I won’t go into nearly as much detail but look at the pictures and see what kinds of stories they tell.
Woman buried with chest, bucket, two knives. No brooches or beads to indicate wealth. No shoes. But at her left side an iron staff with a spearlike bronze tip. That is unusual. The dead horse and “bisected” dog are not nearly so unusual. No, we have no idea where the rest of the dog went.
Another dog, lucky animal is in one piece. What is up with the stone? Were they afraid he would rise again?
Notice the “coffin” was built into the burial pit. That was fairly common. Two men, very few grave goods. Spear across the bodies. One man bound and decapitated. Criminals? Why bind and decapitate one and not the other? Was one a slave and did not want to buried with his owner?
My favorite fucked up grave. Wealthy woman, buried with fancy clothing, brooches, beads, knife, scissors. Then they took the head off. Then the removed the lower jaw. “Hey, Bjorn! Where’s her jaw?”“Gosh, Svein, I just don’t know. Here, put a pig jaw in place of her jaw, nobody will know.”“Good idea! Glad you had that pig jaw handy.” I mean, WTF???
Another weird one… Boy with broken spear in hand. Rock on boy’s chest. Old man on top of him. Rock on old man’s feet.
So by now you are probably wondering: JUST WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED AT A VIKING FUNERAL?
Fortunately, someone wrote about that. But that will have to wait for the next diary.
Previous Viking Diaries which are good references:
darkening the day-time, torch-like with the smoking blueness of Pluto's gloom,
ribbed and torch-like, with their blaze of darkness spread blue
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Bavarian gentians, Gentiana bavaricae subcaulis (Alpine subspecies), surrounding a clump of Androsace alpina. Wikimedia Commons. Photographed in Austria by https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Tigerente
down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day
torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto's dark-blue daze,
black lamps from the halls of Dio, burning dark blue,
giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter's pale lamps give off light,
lead me then, lead me the way.
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Dark invades the day.
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The abduction of Persephone, Nicolas Mignard (French, 1606-1668)
Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower,
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness,
even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September,
to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark,
and Persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible unfolded in the deeper dark
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The marriage of life and death.
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After reconciliation, Persephone and Hades ride together, Hecate leading the way, Hermes following. Note the torches in two forms. The torch with four arms, carried by Hecate, was used in secret rituals at Eleusis. Apulian red-figure krater, about 350 B.C.E. Borrowed from www.theoi.com/...
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,
among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on the lost bride and her groom.
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Persephone was known to intercede with Hades on behalf of supplicants. Here Orpheus charms the royal couple with music as he begs for the return of his deceased wife. “Orpheus in the Underworld,” Joseph-Ferdinand Lancrenon (French, 1794-1874).
For some Christians: today, Sept. 29, is Michaelmas (or the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels), dedicated to the Archangel Michael.
Judaism, Christianity and Islam all honor this personage. According to tradition, Michael led God's angelic forces against Satan (whose name, ironically, was originally Lucifer or "Light Bearer") and the other rebel angels.
Certain versions of the story specify that it was on Sept. 29 that St. Michael pitched Satan out of Heaven into Hell.
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St. Michael, by Luca Giordano (Italian, 1634-1705)
John Milton's famous description of Hell in the epic poem Paradise Lost, "No light, but rather darkness visible..."is specifically recalled by Lawrence: "black lamps...giving off darkness....darkness invisible..."
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The Bavarian subspecies of gentian really does have the form of a little torch. Wikimedia commons, photo by Franco Folini, San Francisco
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In the classical tradition: most will remember, at this time of year the Greek vegetation goddess Persephone(a.k.a. Roman goddess Proserpina) descends to the underworld. There she lives for a few months with her husband Hades (the Roman Pluto). Nothing grows in her absence. Still, her reliable pattern of descent and re-emergence assures that spring will come.
Pomegranates. Wikipedia. By Augustus Binu, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30617551
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In its well-known form, Persephone’s history looks like just one more of the rape-by-deity narratives so common in Greek and Roman myth.
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Persephone has already refused several suitors. She declines Hades in his turn.
Hades abducts her.
This time, however, female power will prevail -- at least in part.
Persephone's mother Demeter (Ceres, in Rome) goes on strike.
As the senior vegetation goddess, Demeter withholds her life-giving power from the entire Earth until Hades (and his complicit brother, Zeus) agree to let Persephone go.
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Persephone might have been entirely free, according to myth, but for one error. In the underworld, she consumed a few seeds from a pomegranate, symbolic fruit of that realm (and powerful female emblem).
By a standing rule of the (female) Fates, Persephone by this is magically bound in the underworld for part of the year, one month for each seed.
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Hades and Persephone at home in the underworld.
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Apulian red-figure krater, about 330-310 B.C.E. Borrowed from www.theoi.com/...
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(This resonates with certain Celtic tales, where a mortal entering Faerie must refrain from food and drink, or be trapped there forever. Marriage-by-capture survived into historical times as a danger to heiresses, at least in Britain.)
I haven’t found "Dio" in classical dictionaries, but Lawrence may have meant Dīs Pater, sometimes simply called Dīs -- another Roman god associated with minerals, the underworld, the dead and Proserpine (therefore a natural alternate name for Pluto).
The idea of Persephone as"but a voice,"could have been suggested by the Greek noun "phona" (pronounced with long o and a), meaning "sound." (This, however, is probably not the true history of her name.)
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Orpheus, Roman mosaic. At Persephone's request, Hades released his wife, but charged him not to look back at her following him. He failed to rescue her and later, himself died a tragic death.
“Not every man....”
Persephone descends; but few would follow.
Among those who, myth relates, have descended and returned: Orpheus -- the legendary poet, musician and prophet.
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For the Greeks, Orpheus was a founder and prophet of the so-called “Orphic" mysteries....Poets….said that Orpheus'music and singing could charm the birds, fish and wild beasts, coax the trees and rocks into dance, and divert the course of rivers. Orpheus was one of the handful of Greek heroes to visit the Underworld and return; his music and song even had power over Hades….
--Wikipedia
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Psyche (the soul) on a mission to Persephone and Hades in the underworld. Persephone gives Pysche a magic ointment. Charles-Joseph Natoire (French, 1700-1777)
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The poet must descend into the subconscious, into the unconscious, into the dark night of the soul.
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Subterraneous mysteries:
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The “Ninnion tablet," only known depiction of the Mysteries at Eleusis, which offered participants special insight into what comes after death. About 350 B.C.E. Wikipedia. More here: en.wikipedia.org/...
It’s been suggested that at least some rape-by-deity myths symbolize prehistoric events when male gods took over a number of ancient goddess shrines around the Mediterranean.
Even in the male-supremacist classical era, however, Demeter and Persephone remained the primary figures in the secret Eleusinian Mysteries, whose theme was Persephone's descent and return.
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Torches like this were used in the ceremonies at Eleusis. The ancient vase decoration could represent celebrants, or even Demeter and Persephone themselves. Borrowed from hellenismo.wordpress.com/...
Mystery religions offered private initiation experiences that endowed participants with special knowledge and consolation concerning death and what comes after.
The "Greater Mysteries" at Eleusis were enacted at just about this time of year and lasted for 10 days.
Little is known of their content. It seems that at one critical point, initiates were shown an ear of wheat; other objects and symbols are obscure.
Pre-Christian religions featured many dying and rising Gods.
Here we have a dying and rising goddess; instead of the Father and Son, a Mother and Daughter.
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At least one other ancient initiation religion that may have featured a descent to Hades was known as the Orphic or Dionysian Mysteries, said to have been invented by Orpheus.
(And tangentially, but fascinating: according to one hypothesis, visitors at an oracle of the dead near Baiae on the West Coast of the Italian peninsula may have received an actual tour of "Hell" as part of their experience; controversial, but worth a read.)
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More poetry on DKos
“Proserpina” (1874) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.. Tate Gallery, London. The artist painted eight versions. More information here: en.wikipedia.org/...
I had promised Viking Boat Burials would be my next diary, but I’m breaking that promise in hopes of providing a break from the seemingly unrelenting bad news everywhere recently. I wish I could keep this diary violence free but the very topic kind of negates that possibility. This is intended to be a break from seriousness and maybe it will also illustrate that violence is endemic to the human condition.
This quiz is intended to be fun. There are some things you should know: some questions have more than one right answer. Some questions don’t have a definitively wrong answer. If you want to see how I think you would do in Viking society (not necessarily reflective of reality) write down your answers and we can add up the score at the end. Let us know how you did in comments! I’d also like to know what surprised you the most, what was the weirdest thing and what was the most interesting thing. That will help me see what interests you guys for future diaries.
One advantage to taking this quiz with me rather than on facebook is I don’t get all your personal information!
Usual disclaimers: I’m an amateur obsessive about European martial culture, not an academic, scholar or expert. I explicitly disavow any claim of European superiority. All cultures have value and merit, pluses and minuses. Links to other diaries about Vikings at bottom.
Will your memory be carved in runes on stone? Vikings Exhibit in New York City, June 2016.
Okay, grab a pencil or pen and let’s go!
1. You are born into a Pagan Viking Scandinavian family. At the time you are given your name what type of religious ceremony takes place?
A. An animal is sacrificed (depending on your status it may vary: a rooster for the poor, a bull for the very wealthy).
B. An offering is made to the Gods in your name; often some item of metal: a brooch, a knife, a cloak pin or even a weapon.
C. You are sprinkled with water.
D. If you are male your foreskin is removed; if you are female a symbolic nick of the skin of the vagina is made.
2. How did you get your last name?
A. It is my family name and it carries with it my heritage back to the founding of my line by the Gods.
B. My profession gives me my last name
C. It is my father’s first name
D. If I am male it comes from my father; if I am female it comes from my mother
3. As a female in Scandinavian society are you allowed to own property?
A. Yes
B. No
C. I can inherit from my father and/or husband if there are no male heirs but when I marry it becomes my husband’s
Trefoil brooch. Vikings Exhibit in New York City, June 2016.
4. You are a mighty leader and your fleet of Viking ships just completed defeating, routing and plundering one enemy and you intend to attack another. Your men are excited, victorious, ready and eager. However, your magician warns that the guardian spirits of the land you propose to attack are hostile. Do you:
A. Turn to a Christian priest to protect your forces from their spirits
B. Abandon the invasion and turn for home
C. Have your volva (sorceress) offer sacrifices and placate the land spirits before invading
D. Have your volva cast sticks to see if the invasion is favored or ill-omened
Reproduction of a Viking longboat — a warship. This is at the Roskilde Ship Museum in Denmark.
5. You have questioned another man’s honor and you find yourself in an informal duel, fighting for your life. You feel yourself getting exhausted. Can you ask for a break to catch your breath?
A. Don’t be silly! You are in a vicious brawl. It is live or die.
B. A brief break is taken so that everyone can catch their breath. This is understood to be part of custom.
C. Even if your opponent said, “hey why don’t you rest a minute; you look tired and there is no honor in killing a weak opponent” you wouldn’t take the opportunity because he’d kill you in a heartbeat.
Depiction of duel on a Gotlandic picture stone. See top. Boat on bottom. Exit sign top left. Bad photographer right here. Vikings Exhibit in New York City, June 2016.
6. You are the young daughter of a freeman; your father is a skilled leatherworker respected for his craft. Your mother manages the family’s small landholdings and livestock. An older man from a neighboring farm with roughly equivalent social status approaches your father and asks for your hand in marriage. Do you have any say at all in whether or not the marriage takes place?
A. Absolutely. In fact, I have the final word.
B. I must obey my father’s wishes in this.
C. Somewhere between the two choices above – I have a voice and it is listened to but it may not be the final word.
D. Depends solely on the dowry he is offering
7. While trading furs in the Baltic you encounter an Arab trader looking for amber. How do you react?
A. This man is dangerously different. You ignore and avoid him.
B. This stranger is offensive to your gods being dark skinned. You kill him immediately.
C. Maybe he wants to buy furs?
D. You are curious about this guy, interested in his clothing, his sword. You invite him and his interpreter to join you and your shipmates for a dinner and hope to hear interesting new tales.
Reproduction Viking Merchant ship from Roskilde Viking Ship Museum in Denmark.
8. Your husband is away, trading or raiding. What do you have authority to do in his absence?
A. Whatever is necessary for maintenance of the household, which includes the farm and business. You can buy and sell goods, slaves and livestock. You have the ability to make business agreements with other farms and traders.
B. Before he leaves, your husband will designate a male family member or trusted senior freeman servant to manage things.
C. You have a limited ability to do things necessary to get by in the short term; but you could not, for instance, purchase a new plot of land and hire servants or purchase thralls to run it.
9. You are a young boy and you are fascinated by the village sorceress. You tell your parents that you want to learn about the magic she does. How do your parents react?
A. These skills are helpful and useful in life. Learn all you can, but don’t neglect hunting, farming and learning weapons.
B. Becoming a spellcaster is a noble and holy art – you may be touched by the Gods. The sorceress is consulted about taking you on as an apprentice.
C. Your father knocks you to the floor with a violent slap on the face and your mother scolds you that that is a woman’s magic and unmanly.
D. Your parents are not pleased; they wanted you to go raiding, become rich and keep them in luxury as they age.
10. You are a young boy and you go out to play a game with the other boys. One of the older, bigger boys makes it his mission to humiliate you and embarrass you in front of all the kids with his superior physical strength. You go fetch an axe and split his skull, killing him. When you return home with the bloody axe, how do your parents react?
A. You slew an unarmed person. This is a great shame and you are cast out of your home
B. You are praised for reclaiming your honor so quickly
C. Your parents seize weapons and go to slay the boy’s family before that family can seek revenge
D. Your father must pay compensation to the boy’s family
Every seven year old needs one. Vikings Exhibit in New York City, June 2016.
11. You pray and sacrifice to Frey and Freja for a bountiful crop and prolific livestock this coming year. At the end of harvest and slaughter you are instead looking at a long, hungry winter. You react by:
A. Cursing the Gods general uselessness and stupidity, inattention to your prayers, calling them lazy, inattentive, promiscuous and every foul thing you can imagine without fear of divine retaliation
B. Make a last minute, last ditch sacrificial offering of your fattest pig, bull and stallion for deliverance, burning the meat so the gods may enjoy it and reward you for your generous gift
12. It is the middle of that long, hungry winter and suddenly there is a stranger outside your hall who claims to be lost, seeking food and shelter.
A. Drive him away. You don’t have enough to feed your own people!
B. Bring him inside, give him fresh warm clothes and food like the rest of the community, some mead or ale, ensure there is a place for him to sleep, and start planning on having another mouth to feed through this winter.
C. Give him a little food and drink, let him sleep with the animals and send him on his way as quickly as possible.
D. Kill him and distribute his belongings amongst your people. Look, this bastard had half a loaf of bread and some dried meat in his provisions! That can feed your people.
13. You are in the middle of a formal duel with a long-time neighbor over a slain servant. Your opponent signals he needs a break for a drink and the fight stops. He lays his sword beside him in the grass and kneels to drink from the stream. You walk up beside him and pick up his sword. What happens next?
A. You examine his blade and realize his sword is not well made. You return the sword to him telling him that his sword is flawed and tell him to wait a few minutes. You return with another of your swords, a fine, high quality weapon and give it to him so that the remainder of the fight can be on a more equal footing.
B. Hack the bastard’s head off with his own sword.
C. Throw the sword into the river and mock his carelessness
D. Return the sword to him and indicate you are ready to resume the duel.
Nice inlay in the pommel neighbor! Vikings Exhibit in New York City, June 2016.
14. You are a Pagan Viking and you hear a Christian king will pay good silver for men to fight against the invading Pagans but requires you to “take the cross” before you can serve him.
A. You go to the Pagans to warn them of what the Christian king is doing and possibly fight with them.
B. You take the cross. Couldn’t hurt to have an extra God on your side could it? Off to war!
C. Spiritual matters are serious things. You must learn as much as you can about this Christian God before making a decision one way or another.
D. Lie and say you have already become Christian. That way you get to fight and plunder, get the silver and never technically betray your Gods.
E. Lie and say you are already Christian but remain keenly aware you owe the Gods a large sacrifice when this adventure ends.
15. Regardless of gender, age or status, you anticipate an impending, dangerous conflict which may result in your death soon. You should:
A. Take steps to head off the conflict; it’s for the best of the community if you can maintain the peace
B. Prepare for the conflict. Everything that has ever happened or that will happen is carved and cannot be changed, and your only choice is how you face the events destined for you.
C. Instigate the conflict and get it over with. Waiting is for the weak.
16. Your husband has been gone in the local lord’s service for several months. You love him and are committed to your marriage with him. The children you have together challenge and enrich your lives. But it sure would be nice to have warm body next to you in bed on those cold winter nights; especially that young, handsome field hand you suspect of spying on you when you were bathing in the river.
A. You freely have sex with the young field hand with no concerns about pregnancy or reputation although it is understood that on your husband’s return the affair will end
B. You have sex with him cautiously, timing activities to avoid pregnancy. Your honor and possibly inheritance could be harmed if you have an illegitimate child although it would not be so terrible as to end your marriage and social standing
C. The penalties, social, marital and material are so harsh you abstain in fear.
The carved runes on this weaving sword (used for textiles) say: “Think of me; I think of you. Love me; I love you.” Vikings Exhibit in New York City, June 2016.
17. On your journeys as a Viking in Turkey, Iraq or even Morocco, you encounter a person with black skin, something you have never seen before. When you return to your shipmates, how will you describe this person to them?
A. Depends on the gender; a female might be described as a sorceress; a male as some kind of spirit such as a dverger
B. A horrific abomination to be avoided at all costs
C. As a blue skinned person who is very interesting
D. As a miraculous thing
18. Would a Viking agree that a person consists of three parts: mind, body and spirit?
A. Yes, Vikings would recognize this description of a person
B. This would be an incomplete description because it omits the role of the family (ancestors and descendants) and the inner parts of the spirit
C. Mind, body and spirit were viewed as an undifferentiated whole
19. You are a gay man in Viking society. What is expected of you in order that you stay a member of Viking society?
A. That you abstain entirely from unnatural, unmanly sexual acts
B. That you marry, have children and keep quiet about any activities with male lovers
C. That you make sure you are in the active “manly” role – not the passive role.
D. Doesn’t matter what you do; you are a fuðflogi, a coward who fears women’s vaginas.
20. You are a young woman who is bored with the noble life, so you take spears, sword, shield and disappear into the woods and take up robbing people for money, often killing them if they resist. Lured on to greater things, you rob your grandfather’s grave mound and, after a chat with him, take his sword and use it as you become a Viking on the seaways, raiding and plundering. After a few years, this lifestyle loses its appeal. What are your options?
A. Start a new life under a different name, marry and have kids like the other soccer moms.
B. Return to your family, accept your punishment for the crimes you have committed and make repayments. You will be married off, but your value as a wife has decreased as has your status.
C. Return to your family. Your activities have increased your wealth and status allowing you to move up in the world.
D. Flee to a Christian country, convert and enter a convent.
Admit it guys, you’re just wanting her booty. Kuturhistorisk Museet Oslo.
21. You are a famous warrior because your fearless, reckless behavior in combat stands out from even other brave men. You wear no armor, just spear, sword and shield but you do have a bearskin you wear. Before battle you bite your shield and howl.
A. You are a berserker
B. You are a berserker and more than that, you are probably a shape-shifter who can become a bear or wolf if needed
C. You’re a goddamned fool for not wearing armor or a helmet. Stay in the shield wall or die!
22. As a professional warrior you go to battle wearing a mail shirt (chainmail), a helmet, two spears, a seax, an axe, a sword and a shield. How many OFFENSIVE weapons do you have available?
A. Four
B. Five
C. Six
23. You are a poor man who has gone to seek his fortunes in war. You fight well but die on the battlefield. Where do you go for your afterlife?
A. Valhalla! You were slain in battle, the Valkyries come for you and you are one of Odin’s Einherjar who will spend eternity (until Ragnorok) drinking, fighting and feasting with the best of them!
B. Thor will welcome you, a working class warrior, to his hall
C. Freyja may take you to Folkvangr, her hall.
D. Hel. You’re going to Hel, with the farmers, the fishermen, the weavers, the merchants, the thralls and everybody else. Nothin’ special about you.
24. You and your brother are legendary heroes and warriors with knowledge of the location of a huge amount of hidden treasure. Your brother-in-law makes war on you to gain the treasure. At the end, both you and your brother are captured. Because your brother-in-law is known for his cruelty, you are 100% certain the death by torture awaits you and your brother.
A. Give him the location of the treasure in return for a quick death without torture.
B. Offer the location of the treasure if your brother-in-law will give your brother a quick death rather than torture.
C. Ensure your brother is given a quick, honorable death before revealing the location of the treasure.
D. Trick the bastard into killing your brother quickly before your brother gives up the location of the treasure under torture. Then endure your horrific death in silence to spite your brother-in-law.
25. Your husband is kind of a dick, and has just killed your brothers in an unsuccessful attempt to learn the location of a hidden treasure. What do you ask of him?
A. Nothing, he has slain your brothers and he is dead to you.
B. Your honor and future lie with your husband. You ask to celebrate his victory over your brothers in battle with him.
C. You ask for your brothers to be buried as heroes, with full Viking funeral, burial mounds and ritual and you celebrate your husbands great victory with him
D. You leave your husband and mourn your dead brothers in the isolation of a forest
E. You ask for your brothers to be buried as heroes as part of your plan of revenge…
BONUS QUESTION: the blacksmith forge was the center of activity on cold winter days when everyone gathered to see him work around the warmth of the forge. True or False?
One of the biggest Viking anvils I’ve seen. Bigger than one hand. Viking Anvils were tiny. My small one at home is easily six or seven times as big. Kuturhistorisk museet, Oslo.
Answers!
Note on sources: I’ve linked to the index of Dr. Crawford’s YouTube videos so there are not dozens of videos below. Where possible I cite sections or verses. Viking Answer Lady is not an academic source but her research is thorough and I have not found any errors on her page (disputes in interpretation, yes, outright errors, no).
1. Believe it or not, sprinkling water on the infant was also a Viking custom! We don’t have details on what precisely was involved but it is referred to in several sagas, particularly Egil’s Saga (see sections 31 and 35. (Source: The Sagas of the Icelanders, Jane Smiley, Penguin, 2005).
A. 3 points
B. 2 points
C. 4 points
D. 0 points
2. Patriarchal ultra-testosterone driven society: your father’s first name is your last name. I would be Andy Andysson. Malia Obama would be Malia Baracksdottir. (Source: Dr. Jackson Crawford video: Forming Old Norse Last Names)
A. 3 points
B. 2 points
C. 4 points
D. 1 point
3. Woman, your property is yours. There are some exceptions and weirdness whereby a husband can get a wife’s property, but in general, a woman could own her own property as a single woman, in her father’s household, as a spouse, as a widow and so on. (Source: this is apparent in many different sagas but as a good summary visit The Viking Answer Lady: Courtship, Love and Marriage in Viking Scandinavia)
A. 4 points
B. 1 points
C. 3 points
Hers. Keep your dirty paws off! Vikings Exhibit in New York City, June 2016.
4. Shit. The land-vættir (land spirits) oppose your invasion? Go home dude, while the going is good. Take your hundreds of ships, thousands of armed and ready men and leave. Now. Interestingly, this happened to King Harald Bluetooth (yes, Bluetooth technology is named after him, and unlike Erik Bloodaxe, where we can guess the name’s meaning, we don’t know the meaning of Bluetooth here). This is interesting because at the time Harald was a baptized Christian fleeing Pagan land spirits. The four landvættir from this incident are now regarded as the protectors of the four quarters of Iceland: the dragon in the east, the eagle or griffin in the north, the bull in the west, and the giant in the south. (Source: The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway by Snorri Sturlson “Heimskringla”: Saga of King Olaf Tryggvason Section 36).
6. There are conflicting accounts on how much weight a woman’s opinion had with regard to her marriage. The law did not require her consent and the social burden on everyone was to do what was best for the family. I suspect that c is the best answer – you have some say in who you marry, but your parents or siblings may be able to basically force you to marry against your will. But it was not cut and dried that you or your father had the final say. (Source: this is apparent in many different sagas but as a good summary visit The Viking Answer Lady: Courtship, Love and Marriage in Viking Scandinavia)
Tools to trade with — a scale. Vikings Exhibit in New York City, June 2016.
8. Again, this isn’t 100% and it probably varied a bit, but evidence indicates that women would have had a great deal of latitude to transact business in their husband’s absence. They might have a son watch and learn, but mom would likely have the final say. Now that I have said this, I should note there are a lot of dissenting voices which disagree with this interpretation of things. However, I defer to my Source: Dr. Nanna Løkka who gave an informative lecture on Viking Women at Midgardsblot Heavy Metal and Viking Festival in Borre, Norway this past August. Yes, I’m citing a lecture given at a metal festival as a source.
A. 4 points
B. 1 points
C. 2 points
9. You’d likely get slapped if you were a boy wanting to learn female magic. There are a lot of hints that, in the area of magic, gender roles were very rigid. In the poem Lokesenna, Loki insults Odin by accusing him of practicing female magic, and in this poem Loki is breaking his social ties to the other Gods. This is not the only instance where men are insulted by the accusation of practicing female magic.
“Loki said (to Odin): ‘But people say you practiced womanly magic on Samsay, dressed as a woman. You lived as a witch among the humans – and I call that a pervert’s way of living.” ~ Lokasenna, stanza 23 & 24.
10. In Egil’s Saga this scenario plays out. Seven-year old Egil murders ten-year old Grim, who humiliated him in public. Egil is praised and told he will make a good Viking. Seven men died as a result the mini-feud this killing precipitated. It is possible that the wealth and status of Egil’s family shielded him from consequences. (Source: The Sagas of the Icelanders, Jane Smiley, Penguin, 2005).
A. 0 points
B. 4 points
C. 3 points
D. 2 points
11. Dr. Neil Price describes the relationship with the Gods as being one where you have to come to terms with them – on the terms of the Gods – but neither reverence nor blind obedience was demanded by them. Curse those lazy Æsir and Vanir out to your hearts content. (Source: The Viking Mind Messenger Lectures by Neil Price at Cornell University 2012).
A. 4 points
B. 3 points
12. A big chunk of the advice of Odin in the Havamal concerns how to treat your guests – in fact, those are the very first verses!!
“Hail to a good host! A guest has come inside, where should he sit? He is impatient, standing at the threshold, ready to try his luck. He needs a fire, the who has just come in, his knees are shivering. Food and dry clothes will do him well, after his journey over the mountains. He needs water, the one who has just arrived, dry clothes, and a warm welcome from a friendly host – and if he can get it, a chance to listen and be listened to.” ~ Hávamál verses 2 - 4
Hospitality was a key tenet of Norse culture. Over and over it comes up in the myths and sagas. It is never expected that you give a stranger so much that you starve, but it is expected that if you have something on your plate, the guest will have something very similar; if you have ale, your guest has ale. If you have clean, dry clothing and your guest is soaked and caked with mud – let him have dry clothes. This obligation is reciprocal. For example, if your guest only stays a day or two, local news and tales may suffice to pay for lodging. If he stays a month, he has to help gather firewood and go hunting or fishing. (Source: The Poetic Edda, Translated by Dr. Jackson Crawford, 2015; many of Dr. Crawford’s online videos on Norse culture and history).
A. 0 points
B. 4 points
C. 3 points
D. 2 points
13. This is a formal duel (Holmgang) with someone you’ve had dealings with going back years. If you notice his sword is flawed, you give him a good sword to finish the duel. Throwing his sword in the river would be theft. Killing him as he knelt would be murder. Returning the defective sword to him would probably never be known to anyone but you, but you wouldn’t want to live with the knowledge you won because of a defective sword. (Source: Dr. Jackson Crawford’s video: Drengskapr (Viking Manliness) and Throstein Staff-Struck).
A. 4 points
B. 0 points
C. 1 points
D. 2 points
14. The Pagan Vikings don’t seem to have always had a clear picture of the exclusive nature of Christianity, and this has plagued monotheists to this day in Iceland. During Viking times, it seems that Pagans often accepted Christ as another God to call on or worship as needed along with the familiar cast of characters they knew so well. We have Thor’s hammer necklaces that are suspiciously similar to the Christian cross, and the idea was that if you were among Christians, it was a cross, and among Pagans, it represented Mjolnir. Christians often used extreme methods to get the ONE GOD idea across. Egil’s Saga see section 50. (Source: The Sagas of the Icelanders, Jane Smiley, Penguin, 2005).
A. 0 points
B. 4 points
C. 2 points
D. 3 points
E. 2 points
15. The Norns, including your own personal Norn, carved (they did not weave, they carved) your fate before you were born. No use hiding from it or rushing towards it. Just face it as bravely as you can.
“Cows die, family die, you will die the same way. I know only one thing that never dies: the reputation of the one who’s died.” -Hávamál 77
16. Again, this probably varied quite a bit, but I lean towards B. As is normal for a patriarchal society, men could pretty much do as they pleased, and if you were a wealthy enough guy you could go to the slave market and buy a pretty bed-slave and do whatever you wished to her without consequence regardless of age or her bodily health. Thralls in general were disposable. Concubines were different. They were less than wives but were free. Believe it or not, there are records indicating a wife’s delight that a concubine joined the household – extra hands for labor and she didn’t have to put up with too much pawing from her husband (remember, a lot of marriages were arranged for economic and social reasons).
Women had sexual affairs, and the main concern seems to have been –keep it discreet. Don’t dishonor your husband by flaunting it. Have your fun, try to allow everyone to pretend it isn’t happening, and we will all go along to get along. If a wife got caught blatantly having an affair or had her lover’s child, she could lose at least part of her inheritance, but she wouldn’t have to wear a scarlet A or leave town. (Source: The Viking Answer Lady: Courtship, Love and Marriage in Viking Scandinavia)
A. 2 points
B. 4 points
C. 1 points
17. Black, as a personal descriptor, seems to have only applied to hair in Old Norse. Think of the word chestnut meaning reddish-brown in English. You would not say “She had chestnut hair.” People would know what you meant, but that is a word applied to horses, not humans! To the Vikings, Africans were blue men– they were described as having blue skin = blámaðr. The tiny fragments of records of the Norse encountering people we today call black indicate intense curiosity and an admiration of their fighting skills. Again, the racists have no clue at all and totally fail to understand the Vikings had NO CONCEPTION OF RACE like the modern one. (Source: mostly Colors In Old Norse video by Dr. Jackson Crawford. Not an acceptable source but interesting discussion on Reddit here).
A. 1 points
B. 0 points
C. 4 points
D. 2 points
18. Vikings conceptualized individuals as consisting of four distinct parts:
The hamr, the physical body.
The hamingja, the personification of your luck WHICH IS A SEPARATE THING FROM YOU AND CAN LEAVE YOU TO DO THINGS ON ITS OWN. One account tells of warriors watching the enemy advance and one of the warriors says: hey, these guys have a lot of luck spirits and we don’t. I’m outta here!
The hugr, your internal essence. A person may be described as having a wolf’s hugr – physically this is a man; spiritually this is an actual wolf.
The fylgia, the follower. This female spirit (always female, even for men) is a sort of family spirit and may appear in dreams, trances or near death. Often this fylgia gives advice and is inherited.
19. First, my apologies to lesbians. Sadly, you are entirely invisible in the Viking record. For gay men, so long as you married and had children, it seems you could have a male lover or a dozen male lovers. The big thing is this: the family unit was the center of Viking society. With the high death rates for children, the short life expectancy in general, and the need for hands to do labor, the expectation was that you would have children. What you did extracurricularly may not have mattered very much to anyone. The sagas speak deprecatingly about men who receive anal sex and less so of the men doing the penetrating, but that may be later Christian attitudes entering the literature. (Source: The Viking Answer Lady: Homosexuality in Viking Scandinavia)
A. 1 points
B. 0 points
C. 3 points
D. 2 points
20. In the Saga of Hervor, the correct answer is C! Yea ladies! Go rob and kill someone and then marry above your status to celebrate! Wait! Damn, those Christians ruined everything… I should note that Dr. Judith Jesch of the University of Nottingham and an expert on women in the Viking Period argues vigorously that there were NO women warriors and any mentioned in the sagas are symbolic and mythological. (Source: The Saga of Hervor and Heidrek, translated by Christopher Tolkien [yes, the son of who you think]).
A. 2 points
B. 1 points
C. 4 points
D. 0 points
I have ambitions for my daughter…
21. The question of what a berserker is and how they were viewed is really complex and will need a more detailed discussion. Suffice it to say there is a lot to suggest that in addition to being seen as fierce warriors, berserkers were also viewed as taking on the spirit of an animal – wolf or bear usually – and fighting not as humans but with an animal strength and power. (Source: The Viking Mind Messenger Lectures by Neil Price at Cornell University 2012).
A. 3 points
B. 4 points
C. 1 point
22. This is a trick question; let me explain. Spears, sword and axe are all clearly offensive weapons. But all of them can serve defensive functions. A seax, or long, thick bladed war-knife is a sort of back up weapon if you lose the above. So, we have five offensive weapons, right?
No. Experimentation with HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) is suggesting that the shield functioned quite effectively as an offensive weapon. Far from simply being held in front of the body to block blows, the RIM of the shield was used to hit the opponent. The shield was held loosely by the grip and swung about to bind the opponent’s weapon. There at least a dozen ways the shield is described or illustrated as being used in an offensive rather than defensive manner. (Roland Warzecha - Sword & Shield Fighting video)
23. The Viking afterlife is a mystery to us, so there is no definitive answer here. However, we do know this: Odin did not favor the poor or those who lacked noble ancestry. Odin, by preference, sought and rewarded the nobles. There is nowhere in the mythology that tells of Odin rewarding the poor man who did well. In fact, in one of their many father/son arguments, Odin mocks Thor by insinuating that he lets nobodies of no notable lineage in his hall. Sadly, this is the one and only reference we have to Thor’s hall and its role in the afterlife.
Equally baffling is one line in the Poetic Edda which states that the Goddess Freyja collects half of the heroic dead and brings them to her hall, Folkvangr. It is very specific, stating Odin gets half of those slain in battle and Freyja gets the other half. And that is all we know.
“Freyja rules in the ninth land, Folkvang – that is where she arranges the seats. She chooses half the dead who die in battle, and Odin takes the other half.” ~ Grimnismal verse 14.
Dr. Jackson Crawford, linguist and specialist in Old Norse, speculates that Folkvangr is linguistically linked to Valhalla, and wonders if Freyja acts a sort of Commander of Valkyries for Odin. Dr. Neil Price, archeologist and specialist in Viking culture, seems to feel that there may have been many, many Viking otherworlds and afterlives.
24. This is straight from the Saga of the Volsungs, and of course you arrange for your brother to be killed rapidly and then endure your death in silence without revealing where the treasure is. You are a Viking. (Saga of the Volsungs, Dr. Jackson Crawford, 2017).
A. 1 point
B. 2 points
C. 3 points
D. 4 points
25. Again, straight from the Saga of the Volsungs. Your revenge consists of killing both of your sons that you had with your husband, who murdered your brothers, cooking their hearts and livers and feeding them to your husband as he washes the meal down with mead drank from a cup made from the skull of one of his sons. Then you stab him to death, barricade the doors to the hall and set fire to the hall so that you, and all of your husband’s men, burn to death.
BONUS QUESTION: False – while the forge was no doubt quite warm, blacksmith shops were usually located outside of villages (quite frequently in caves overlooking villages in Norway) possibly because of concerns of accidental fires starting (as a blacksmith I can tell you this is a real concern even in the modern forge) or possibly because the blacksmith did magical work, turning rocks into tools, brooches, wagon wheel rims, horse bridles, axes, and swords? Maybe he was in league with the dwarves? (Source: Dr. Ragnar Orton Le, archeologist at Midgard Historisk Senter, Lecture: “The Blacksmith and the Cave, August 2016).
Archeologists find these things everywhere. Not sure what they are. Viking toothpicks? Back scratchers? I guess we will never know. Kuturhistorisk Museet Oslo.
SCORE:
80 – 100 points – YOU ARE A VIKING.
60 – 79 points – You have visited Viking trading posts, spent time with Vikings and are welcomed by name by theVikings.
40 – 59 points – You’ve heard of the Northmen and read some of the writings about them.
20 – 39 points – The Vikings have carried you off in a raid and you are a thrall, laboring on a Viking farm.
19 — 29 points – The first you heard of the Vikings is when a bunch of hairy men with big beards burst into the monastery chapel during prayer and slaughtered everyone…
When Mein Kampf was published in 1939, Adolf Hitler left no doubt about his world view and his “struggle”. His was a philosophy of grievance. The fatherland was being screwed and now it was getting even. At odds with all the democracies because of their inherent weaknesses, the fuhrer was focused on the “other” whose presence threatened him— Jews, the sick and disabled, blacks, gypsies, communists were all deemed inferior to the Aryan. White men and women bred for dominance were determined to be a master race. Their defeat would have marked the end of days if National Socialism failed:
...(the Aryan) is thePrometheusof mankind, from whose shining brow the divine spark of genius has at all times flashed forth, always kindling anew that fire which, in the form of knowledge, illuminated the dark night by drawing aside the veil of mystery and thus showing man how to rise and become master over all the other beings on the earth. Should he be forced to disappear, a profound darkness will descend on the earth; within a few thousand years human culture will vanish and the world will become a desert. Mein Kampf, p. 226
Looking in the mirror and seeing near perfection is a fairly common obsession among narcissists and teenage egoists. The latter generally grow out of their mania, the former become enmeshed by it. These diaries have been flush with Trump being compared to Hitler and called a narcissist. The President has much more at stake now. His presidency is under siege by men much brighter, more skilled in the law, and committed to the truth. The question now is not so much how bad is Trump. More than half the nation has decided. The real question now is how does this end?
Putting aside political skirmishing, there are very real investigations ongoing that are looking into potential criminal acts that may have been committed by the President’s family and friends. Indeed, key to these investigations is whether there is a nexus connecting illegal acts and the President himself. A good source for evaluating the investigations and the case for impeachment can be found at the Bookings website and their report Presidential obstruction of justice: The case of Donald J. Trump. The authors, Barry Berke, Noah Bookbinder, and Norman Eisen, carefully review the record and give compelling arguments for the case against the President and likely scenarios for its conclusion. What is most striking about this report is the sourcing of the events and its explanation of pertinent case law which impact the arguments for and against a criminal finding by the various investigations into the acts surrounding the Russian hacking of our recent election.
Of interest in their report is the delicate balance between the appearance of criminal activity and the protections afforded those alleged to have committed the acts. For instance, there is ample supporting evidence that the meeting between Donald Trump, Jr. and a Russian lawyer in June 2016 promised the campaign negative information gathered by the Russian government on Hillary Clinton. This “help” would be illegal on its face due to the incursion of a foreign government in an election and because the information was gathered through illegal hacking of the democrat’s computer files. In addition to Trump, Jr., campaign manager Paul Manafort and campaign adviser and Trump son-in-law, Jared Kushner were known to have attended. All three campaign officials lied when initially questioned about the meeting. That would seem to be enough to prove complicity of the campaign in illegal acts and with collusion with the Russian government. A potential nexus with the President adds to the import of this meeting as Trump Sr. is purported to have dictated a false explanation for the meeting in his son’s name that was published in Trump Jr.’s name following the initial disclosure of the meeting. This would seemingly implicate the President in the nefarious plot providing the nexus for collusion. The slam dunk, however, may be contravened by the President’s pardon powers which would negate the prosecution of any crime committed by the players and, thus, could inoculate Trump’s collusion. The report carefully reviews the limits of a president’s powers to pardon once it could be proved that a pardon was given to further or hide a corrupt act.
And so, like Hitler’s Germany, all this is in response to some perceived grievances that befall our nation. In Trump’s view, the grievance is localized rather than Hitler’s more existential threats from foreign or insurgent sources. Our less than titan Prometheus suffers personal affronts at the hands of his predecessors (Obama and every other former president) and his opponent in the recent election. He can neither measure up to them, nor can he destroy their legacies. Instead, our fire gatherer has promulgated that he, and he alone, can preserve our nation’s greatness. He has, in fact, suggested on several occasions his own “indispensability” to our democracy:
February 13, 2016(tweet):I am the only one who can fix this. Very sad. Will not happen under my watch! #MakeAmericaGreatAgain
March 3, 2016 (tweet): I am the only one who can beat Hillary Clinton…
March 18, 2016 (announcement): I am the only one who can make America truly great…
July 21, 2016 (speech): I alone can fix (the system)…
etc., ad nauseam.
The grandiosity evident in his own view of himself reveals a not-so-hidden mania that requires him to be somewhat “incomparable.” This is the man who unabashedly claims to have one of the highest IQ’s, largest fortunes, biggest and longest body parts. Who famously was quoted to have claimed the he was “...very highly educated. I know words; I have the best words.”The self loving president descends from Hitler’s promethean “indispensable Aryan.” How does he round this view with that of his own Secretary of State, who correctly points out that this ball of hellfire is really a fucking moron? The man is truly disturbed and sadly misinformed by his own counsel. Worse, however, he and the nation are ill-served by those around him who enable his singular derangement as they become complicit in his criminal acts as well. Those whom he has already jettisoned because they either are no longer useful or have crossed him have all prophylactically “lawyered up” well understand the dynamic.
His tormentor, Robert Mueller, pecks at him relentlessly. Behind the scenes, Trump wishes him gone and plots war and pardons. As with all tales that begin with irony, Mein Kampf suggests a different kind of armageddon if Mueller is stopped:
“...Should he be forced to disappear, a profound darkness will descend on the earth; within a few thousand years human culture will vanish and the world will become a desert.“
In any case, Trump will be held to account by the realization of his own lack of exceptionalism, and the unrelenting truth taught by history--greatness is a shared state earned through collaboration of all mankind and not limited to a particular sect, or sex, or nationality, or hair and eye combination. It matters little whom one loves or to whom (or if) one prays. This 21st century orange and yellow titan forgets the “ME” in Prometheus is followed by “US.” As I write, Trump’s personal kampf, is only beginning. His punishment will be meted out not by gods or titans, but by serious men with a multitude of facts and evidence. Let us hope that we are living through an aberration. Let us pray that this will end, to borrow from Thomas Eliot who so eloquently put it in The Hollow Men, “...not with a bang but a whimper.”
Disclaimer the first: My chosen subjects are definitely Eurocentric. That’s where my passion and my heart lie: in Bronze Age and Iron Age Europe. However, I reject any notion of Euro-periority. There is nothing that makes Europeans smarter, better or any such nonsense than Africans, Asians or any humans anywhere else.
Disclaimer the second: This diary contains descriptions of sex, violence, rape, murder, slavery and animal sacrifice. So gather the kids and read it aloud! Ahem, so be cautious because I am not going to pull punches and I am going to try to describe things as close to the archeological/literary descriptions as I can. This may be uncomfortable to read.
What made the Vikings stand out in history?
Why do we remember them so vividly when the Franks, the Goths, the Bulgars and on and on recede into an anonymous background of tribal names? Was it their weapons? No, in fact many of their most famous weapons were probably made by the Franks in what is now Northern Germany. Their clothing and ornamentation was not unique, similar ornamentation and dress existed throughout Germanic and Baltic tribes. Their religions and myths were not all that different from other Pagan Germanic and Slavic tribes. So, why do we know about Vikings? Why do they capture our imaginations, 1,000 years after they vanished?
Two reasons, I think:
The writings of the Icelanders which captured the mythology and the individual stories of these people in a way that made them real, human and immediate to us and;
Their ships
The r(ev)olutionary technology of the Viking ships
Since the neolithic, Europeans have used boats extensively for trade, travel, migration, fishing, romance (you don’t think young people in the stone age rowed to the middle of a lake to catch a gorgeous sunset or sunrise? Think again). In the Bronze Age boats made from hollowed out logs were common — and amazingly capable of long journeys along the Atlantic coastlines. So were wood frame covered in hide circular boats (those things look terrifyingly frail to me). Soon sails came along and humans were really moving.
But the Viking ship was something new, a further step along in technological development that allowed the formerly backwater Pagan Northern Scandinavian culture to break out and spread. And spread it did.
Vinland (Canada) should be included. Viking build a settlement there and occupied it for at least three years. You may color me highly skeptical of claims for Viking settlements in Mississippi, New England and so forth.
In the Hagia Sophia in Turkey a Viking inscribed in Younger Futhark runes something along the lines of “Halfdan was here.” Runestones in Sweden recount a disastrous expedition to China. There are accounts of Vikings in North Africa (apparently they greatly admired the warrior prowess of the “Blue Men”— black was a term reserved for hair color, not skin and Vikings called black people blue). In the 900’s Vikings walked the streets of Bagdhad. Russia gets its name from the Swedish Viking tribe the Rus’.
And it wasn’t just the dudes who travelled. Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir became known as Gudrid The Well Travelled and boy did she earn that title. Born in Iceland. Travelled to Greenland, then to Vinland. Gave birth to the first European born in North America. Then back to Greenland, then Norway, then Iceland. She was a Christian and headed off to Rome for a quick pilgrimage. Finally, back to Iceland as a nun. Not bad considering she had 0 frequent flyer miles for her entire lifetime!
So what specifically made these boats so badass? I hope to revisit this in another diary but for today’s purposes, they used wood split along the grain which preserved the strength of the wood (not a Viking innovation), they allowed for use of oars and sails (not a Viking innovation), the design of the boats was a clinker design which overlapped planks for additional strength (not a specifically Viking innovation).
Then they combined all of the above with a wide, shallow boat bottom. That was a huge innovation. This allowed for carrying what at the time was a large number of men, surprising amounts of cargo and safe ocean travel. But these same ships could travel up very shallow rivers as well because of the flat bottom (shallow draft). So that same boat in port on the coast of the Netherlands peacefully trading could two days later be a hundred miles up French rivers raiding towns and back in Norway a another three days later.
“Another thing they [longboats] could do was sail very close to the wind – atypical for European ships of that time," Short continues. "So they could sail in many directions, and unexpected directions given the wind." One of the advances that enabled this virtually unique ability, related to "tacking" in today's terminology, was the "beitass," which was a spar that helped brace the sail against strong winds.
Finally the Viking ships had one more characteristic which allowed them to travel in turbulent waters that would destroy the contemporary ships of their rivals:
F L E X I B I L I T Y .
When waves crashed against a Viking longship the ship actually bent — the wood was allowed to flex against the pressure of the wave, preventing the planks from breaking. When the pressure eased the planks would spring back to their original shapes and the ship would still be seaworthy.
Nothing else in that day and age combined those characteristics. And these capabilities brought immense wealth and power to the Northmen.
The significance of these ships to the Vikings
Scandinavians fully appreciated what they had in their unique ships. Ships permeated their culture, the traders and raiders (often one and the same people) who used these ships were at the top of the social ladder. Ships are depicted in art, on jewelry, in tapestries, carved into stones, on coins and of course… graves.
Interestingly, Viking burials sometimes involved symbolic ships rather than actual physical boats or ships. Examples of this are gravesites with stone markers laid out in the shape of a boat or ship. Often this occurred at inland locations but that was not always true. An example of this in the very southern tip of Sweden is Ale’s stones, pictured below. The blue at the top is the Baltic Sea:
Ale’s Stenar (Ale’s stones) — Viking Age burial site marked out by stones placed in in the shape of a ship.
It also was not uncommon for ordinary citizens to be buried with a boat; small boats barely big enough for two sometimes appear in graves and midsize ships also appear here and there. You can read about an interesting two generation use grave for four in my previous diary.
But you didn’t come here to read about dead poor people. You are here for the full scale Viking ship funeral.
Norse and Danish Vikings apparently liked both cremation and inhumation funerals. Sometimes they planted ‘em, sometimes they burned ‘em before planting ‘em.
Swedish Vikings definitely preferred cremation over burial.
Vikings had no clue they were Vikings. To them, the word “Viking” was a verb indicating raiding, piracy, which were normal, acceptable ways to go about getting wealth and fame. They saw themselves in terms of tribal identity like “Rus”, “Svear”and so on.
The Oseberg Viking Ship Burial
Can you imagine being a farmer who is sick of ploughing around big hills in your field so you get a shovel and dig to see if they can just be removed and find this?
The Oseberg ship in its full majesty.
That’s what happened to Norwegian Farmer Oscar Rom in August 1903. We are so damn lucky because he contacted archaeologist Gabriel Gustafson and in summer 1904 he excavated the ship and it’s treasures. And holy shit there were treasures; not gold and silver — sadly the grave was robbed in prehistory of those items and there was probably mountains of it — but archeological treasures.
The biggest treasure was the ship itself. Made of oak sometime around 820 CE in southwestern Norway (opposite side of the penninsula from the burial site). Her length was 71 feet/21.6 meters in length; 16 feet/5 meters wide; the central mast probably stood 33 feet/10 meters high and the sail would have been 297 square feet/90 square meters in size allowing her to travel at a calculated 10 knots of speed. Each side of the boat had 15 oar holes, meaning there were spots for 30 oars.
The decorative wood carvings on the prow of the Oseberg ship.
But this boat was not only functional; it was beautiful and ornately decorated:
The prow and stern is richly carved with beautiful animal ornamentation far below the waterline and up along the prow, which ends in a spiralling serpent’s head. Such an ornately decorated ship has undoubtedly been reserved for special members of the aristocracy.
This style of carving is so uniquely distinct that it gives its name to an entire period of Viking art: the Oseberg style which is known as the “gripping animal” style. It often depicts either fantastical beasts or everyday animals (wolves, ravens and so forth) in an exaggerated manned, often biting their own or another animal’s limbs. More examples of this style are pictured below.
The People in the Oseberg Viking Burial
So who would be buried in such a magnificent ship? Knowing the hyper-martial patriarchal Viking culture you can probably guess that only a warrior chieftain with a reputation for bloodthirsty conquest and raiding could possibly have been honored in this way.
Actually, this burial was for two women. Both were older women by the average of the Viking period. The older was between 70 and 80 years old and had probably been killed by cancer. The younger was in her fifties and we do not know what killed her. It is distinctly possible that she was sacrificed or voluntarily committed suicide to accompany the older woman. Her collarbone was broken but had been healing for several weeks before her death.
A structure much like a small house had been built as a burial chamber just behind the main mast of the ship. In this chamber the two women had been placed, with very elaborate, decorative tapestries on the wall. They were placed on a bed which was made up with bed linen. One woman was dressed in a red wool dress knitted in a lozenge twill pattern with fine silk strips appliqued to a tunic under the dress and a linen gauze veil. The other was dressed in a blue wool dress and had a wool veil (I have no understanding of textiles; this is more or less copied from the Wikipedia page and verified with two Viking textile enthusiasts).
The recreated burial chamber with the original timbers in the original positions on display at the Viking Ship museum in Oslo.
The Grave Goods
These women were buried with some SERIOUS bling and we can only imagine what gold, silver, electrum and so forth was looted in antiquity. But the thieves left the following goodies for us to find:
A cart (the only complete Viking Age cart found so far)
Five carved animal heads (pictures of four below, the fifth is not on display)
Five beds (including a runic carved post)
Two tents.
Fifteen horses
Six dogs
Two small cows
Full inventory here. These goods are beyond opulent for the period. Most Viking graves have a bone comb, maybe the remnants of a small knife, a few beads. These women were important.
Another thing that is clear from this list is that A LOT of animals were sacrificed for this funeral rite.
Finally there are some items I want to call special attention to: the five carved animal heads, a leather band knotted in a specific way, the carved bed post with runic symbols, a small bag containing cannabis (seeds I believe, I’ve not been able to confirm from a reputable source), a wooden pipe, 4 rattles and a wooden stick about 40 cm long that has been compared to an arrow.
Ignore the ugly dude taking the photo. I suck as a photographer. Viking Ship Museum, Oslo.
My favorite of the carvings. Notice none are of dragons; all appear to be some kind of cat variant. Viking Ship Museum Oslo.
Viking ship museum Oslo.
The face of this one resembles a jaguar to me. Photo taken at the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo.
Fabric from the Oseberg ship which is absolutely NEVER to be photographed by stupid tourists. This was pointed out to me after I had photographed it. Yes, I felt guilty and like a dumb American. Viking Ship Museum, Oslo.
Some of the silk I was forbidden to photograph and stupidly photographed anyway. Bad Andy. Viking Ship Museum Oslo.
The cart. Viking Ship Museum Stockholm. Ha! Gotcha. No, this is still Oslo.
The “Buddha bucket” from the Oseberg burial. Viking Ship Museum Oslo.
Closeup of “Buddha bucket” ornamentation brass and cloisonne figure. Note the swastikas pre being ruined by the goddamn nazis. Bastards. The label “buddha” refers to the figure being cross legged. This is closer to Saxon art in England than any Asian art and does not appear to indicate a trade link to Asia.
What mysteries are hidden in the all of the above information?
There are two major thoughts about who these women may have been and their roles in Viking society and the interesting thing is that they may not be incompatible. Dendrochronology tells us that the timbers for the burial chamber were felled in autumn of 834. Tests of the dental remains of the women indicate the women lived near Adger, Norway. Based on this, the speculation is that the older, high ranked woman may have been Queen Åsa of the Yngling family; grandmother of Harald Fairhair, the first king to unite the Norway.
The other idea is that the women were Völva, the women who practiced magic in Viking culture. Their magic and mysteries were referred to as seiðr. The presence of the wand-like wooden rod shaped like an arrow, cannabis, the knotted leather, a bedpost carved with runes and a valknut along with the animal heads may indicate powerful magical/spiritual workings.
Although the cannibis could have easily been used to treat the pain of the cancer that claimed the older woman.
Even more interesting than the who is this: we know that for the Oseberg burial the Vikings brought the ship ashore, conducted the funeral rituals, placed the women inside the burial chamber and half buried the ship in a mound… but left the other half, including the burial chamber accessible for months and months. People were visiting the dead women, leaving objects, taking objects. We know this from leaves, grains and pollens in the burial chamber showing the changing of the seasons.
What does this mean?
Okay Andyt, you’ve given us a lot of pictures and objects but what does that add up to? What actually happened at a Viking ship funeral?
I’m so glad you asked that. Let’s leave Oseberg behind and travel forwards in time and Eastwards in geography to the only account of a Viking Ship funeral we have…
The remarkable account of Ibn Fadlan
Ibn Fadlan was a emissary from the Abbisad Caliph of Baghdad, Muqtadir to the Khan of the Bulghars. The Bulghars had recently converted to Islam and were seeking religious instruction and protection from the Jewish Khazars who controlled the area. All indications are that he was a remarkably observant traveler who strove to record what he saw accurately and faithfully. Evidence of this is his willingness to note not only his successes but also his failures and errors on his journey. He set out in 921 from Baghdad and in 922 he encountered a people called the Rus who were most likely Swedish Vikings. They had arrived to trade at the upper reaches of the Volga river.
Initial impressions
Ibn Fadlan was a diplomat from the then current center of world civilization and education. He was traveling in the backwoods of the barbaric frontiers. What would he think of the Vikings?
I saw the Rus, who had come from trade and had camped by the river Itil. I have never seen bodies more perfect than theirs. They were like palm trees. They are fair and ruddy. They wear neither coats nor caftans, but a garment which covers one side of the body and leaves one hand free. Each of them carries an axe, a sword, and a knife and is never parted from any of the arms we have mentioned. Their swords are broad bladed and grooved like the Frankish ones. From the tips of his toes to his neck, each man is tattooed in dark green with designs, and so forth.
He was not as impressed with their bathroom habits:
They are the filthiest of God’s creatures. They do not clean themselves after urinating or defacating, nor do they wash after having sex. They do not wash their hands after meals. They are like wandering asses.
The Vikings seem to have perplexed Ibn Fadlan. He was impressed with their jewelry and ornamentation, disgusted that they publicly had sex with the female slaves they were selling (FYI slave trade was a huge part of the Viking economy. And Christian Europe’s economy. And the Arabic world too. The big difference apparently was that the Christians and Mulsims raped their slaves in private) and fascinated by them.
Then he heard that their chieftain had died a that he should see the funeral. We have no archeological evidence for this burial — which since it is a cremation is not surprising.
The Viking Ship Funeral and how it accords with evidence from other Viking graves
The funeral starts with a temporary burial of the chieftan. The funeral is so complex and takes so long to plan they must bury their dead leader first to prevent decomposition.
This agrees with what we see archeologically in Iceland – we have found temporary burial sites next to primary graves. Temporary graves in Iceland had post based structure over it. Was only used for a few days. Very little timber in Iceland which makes postholes near graves really remarkable – that was a scarce resource.
Even temporary grave was not bare. The chieftain was placed in temporary grave with food, alcohol and a musical instrument.
Dr. Neil Price comments that “sounds like something to pass the time while waiting for main burial.” This implies the dead man is thought to be active in the temporary grave. For this burial he was buried in clothes he died in.
What follows is a ten day long funeral, not ten days of preparation for a funeral.
Special clothing is manufactured for the dead man to be buried in. The implications are alarming for archeologists – our reconstructions are often based on what the people were buried in. A full 1/3 of the dead chieftan’s money is spent on the clothing, about the cost of a farm.
Another 1/3 of dead man’s money is spent on alcohol. Often this is interpreted as a giant party. Dr. Neil Price argues this is not the case. People are drinking and drinking and drinking for 10 days. Sometimes people die from drinking at funerals — as Ibn Fadlan says: “...so that sometimes one them dies with his wine cup in his hand.”. These people appear to be using alcohol to create a “different frame of mind.”— a ritual frame of mind. Archeologists assume graves are created by sober people, that may be wrong.
The remaining 1/3 of the chieftan’s wealth will go to the family.
Feasts occur frequently during the ten days of the funeral.
They ask the young slaves of the chieftain “who will die with him?” In this account a young female slave volunteers —we do NOT know to what degree this is truly voluntary— to be sacrificed at the chieftain’s funeral and accompany him into the next world. Once she has committed to doing this, the choice is irrevocable according to Ibn Fadlan.
The ship of the chieftain is prepared for burning by being drawn onto land and placed atop piles of timber.
The dead man is placed in special chamber, a kind of room built on the boat.
Oseberg is an example. “it looked like tent made of wood”
Dead man placed sitting up on a bench, cushions around him.
We sleep lying down, Viking slept sitting up in bed – their beds are very short. Perhaps the dead man is perceived as sleeping?
The Rus begin filling up chamber and decks with goods in a very precise sequence. Food, drink, flowers, weapons (order typed here is random; not the actual order used in the burial) and as they do this the people are singing and chanting but our Ibn Fadlan has no clue what they are saying.
Large numbers of animals are being killed as this goes on. We have examples of this from other graves. In this account they run two horses until they are blowing, lathered in sweat and tired then two men attack them with swords — the Arabic terms used by Ibn Fadlan are for fighting, combat, not for food slaughter or sacrifice. They are hacking these animals. This was not quietly and cleanly done. These are dramatic, immediate events.
Similar finding for other boat burials: Oseburg – 13 decapitated horses, Gokstad 15 decapitated horses, heaps of seven dogs.
As one animal is killed the other animals are watching and going crazy. This is not funerals as we know them. Cows, dogs, birds –they pull living birds to pieces and throw the parts at different sections of the grave.
Because this is not enough drama and excitement, the volunteer slave woman is going round the tents of the men of the camp – many, many tents – and having sex with each man in turn. As the men climax they cry, “Tell your master I only do this out of love for him.” Again, we have no idea how voluntary this is.
All of these proceedings are being guided and directed by a woman Ibn Fadlan refers to as the “Angel of Death” and a “witch”— Dr. Price calls her a sort of “funeral director.” This woman’s daughters accompany the slave woman who has volunteered to go with the chieftain everywhere.
The Actual Ship Burning
Engraving showing two volvas. Original illustration by Carl Larsson (1853-1919), engraving by Gunnar Forssell (1859-1903). Originally from Fredrik Sander's 1893 edition of the poetic Edda.
This ritual begins with a fascinating moment described by Ibn Fadlan as follows:
“...they led the slave girl towards something which they had constructed and which looked like the frame of a door. She placed her feet on the palms of the hands of the men, until she could look over this frame. She said some words and they let her down. They raised her a second time and she did as she had the first and then they set her down again. And a third time and she did as she (had) done the other two…
I asked the interpreter what she had been doing. He replied:
‘The first time they lifted her up she said: There I see my father and my mother.
The second time she said: There I see all my dead relatives sitting.
The third time she said: There I see my master sitting in Paradise and Paradise is green and beautiful. There are men with him and [young people/children] and he is calling me. Take me to him.
This interpretation is a mix of several sources of the translation which I have compiled/composed myself. Dr. Neil Price and Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness are my primary resources
The slave woman enters ship by walking up a staircase made by the hands of the men onto the deck. She sings a farewell song to her female companions. Awaiting her are six of the dead man’s closest relatives.
Interpretation of the Viking ship funeral from 1882.
She is given a drink to drink. Based on the effects it is obvious this drink is drugged.
Each of the six male relatives has sex with the slave girl — again we are given no context for her feelings or reactions to this. She has been drugged by this time with some kind of beverage.
At this time the slave girl entered the pavilion where the chieftain is. She appears confused and the “Angel of Death” grabs her head and forces her inside.
All the men begin to bang on shields with staves. According to Ibn Fadlan this is done to drown the slave girls cries so other slave girls will not be afraid to follow her example.
Two of the male relatives hold her hands. Two hold her feet. The “Angel of Death” places a cord around her throat and gives the ends to the remaining two relatives. The men with the cords strangle the slave girl at the same time that the Angel of Death begins to stab her repeatedly in the chest with a broad bladed dagger.
We have archeological examples of this; many; many examples. One good one is the Ballateare skull comes from a burial mound for a young man. On top of mound is 20 year old woman, slain by blow to back of head. She is covered with a thick layer of cremated animal remains including several cows, which are all sealed inside a secondary mound. This type of sacrifice may be related to the bog bodies from hundreds of years prior found throughout northern Europe — men and women killed by multiple simultaneous methods (stabbing, bludgeoning, strangling) and then deposited in a lake.
The slain slave woman is placed on bed next to her master.
The closest male relative approaches the ship completely naked. He is very careful to keep all orifices away from boat and as he backs towards boat, he covers anus with hand.
Dr. Price feels this man is very afraid of something coming out of boat and entering him.
This male relative places first lit torch on boat. Once he does that everyone else is safe to approach. Everybody then approaches, without any magical precautions, and throws torches onto the ship.
Reproduction Viking ship burning at Edinburgh Hogmanany celebrations, 2004.
The whole process is accompanied by music, singing, people coming and going to the grave.
A Viking laughs at Ibn Fadlan and via an interpreter tells him Arabs are fools to bury their dead because they put the best among them into the earth where worms and insects eat them where by burning the Vikings enter Paradise immediately. When a wind picks up and carries some of the ashes away the Viking laughs again and says that the wind will bear his lord to Paradise.
After ashes cool they build a mound on top, put a post and carve the name of the dead man and his ruler.
We find post holes near graves throughout Viking world.
Conclusions
Vikings saw life and death in fundamentally different ways from us in the modern world. They lived in a world inhabited by spirits, elves and dwarves, giants, trolls and Gods. The dead went places we know tiny bits about: Valhöll where the heroes went after dying in battle, Folkvangr, the mysterious place where Freyja took her half of the dead, Hel, where Loki’s daughter, half beautiful woman and half corpse ruled over the ordinary dead.
Yet at the same time the literary sources tell us of the above they also tell us that heroes entering the burial mounds of their ancestors find their ancestors waiting for them to speak and gift weapons and armour. Other sources tell of the dead having active social lives within the mounds and interact with the living dispensing advice and wisdom.
But we know so little. Dr. Price says that archeology will not get to the detail of what story is being told in each individual grave. However, it may get to ballpark of what they are talking about in those stories, what they are referring to, and if is there a continuing story from one grave to another within a cemetery and within the community.
But to illustrate how large the gaps in our knowledge are let me leave you with this thought: we have no clue what happens to Viking females — girls and women — after death. No idea at all. There are references to Völvas returning to speak prophecies after death but there are no tales that say women go to, for example, Frigg’s hall after death. It is a complete mystery.
Wardruna: Helvengen (the Road to Hel)
Norwegian—————————————————--English translation
Hvem skal synge meg—————————————Who shall sing me
i daudsvevna slynge meg———————————-into the death-sleep sling me
når eg på Helvegen går————————————When I walk on the Path of Death
og dei spora eg trår er kalda, så kalda————and the tracks I tread are cold, so cold
Eg songane søkte——————————————-I sought the songs
Eg songane sende——————————————I sent the songs
då den djupaste brunni————————————when the deepest well
gav meg dråper så ramme——————————--gave me the drops so touched
av Valfaders pant——————————————-of Death-fathers wager
Alt veit eg, Odin———————————————--I know it all, Odin
var du gjømde ditt auge————————————where you hid your eye
Hvem skal synge meg—————————————Who shall sing me
i daudsvevna slynge meg———————————-into the death-sleep sling me
når eg på Helvegen går————————————When I walk on the Path of Death
og dei spora eg trår er kalda, så kalda————and the tracks I tread are cold, so cold
Årle ell i dagars hell—————————————-early in the days end
enn veit ravnen om eg fell——————————--still the raven knows if I fall
Når du ved Helgrindi står ——————————When you stand by the Gate of Death
og når du laus deg må riva———————————-And you have to tear free
skal eg fylgje deg———————————————--I shall follow you
over Gjallarbrua med min song————-across the Resounding Bridge with my song
Du blir løyst frå banda som bind deg!--You will be free from the bonds that bind you!
Du er løyst frå banda som batt deg!------you are free from the bonds that bound you!
*
Quote from Håvamål -- The High Ones Speech, Poetic Edda
Døyr fe, døyr frender——————————————-Cattle die, kinsmen die
Døyr sjølv det sama——————————————--You yourself will also die
men ordet om deg aldreg døyr———————but the word about you will never die
vinn du et gjetord gjevt—————————————--if you win a good reputation
Døyr fe, døyr frender ——————————————--Cattle die, kinsmen die
Døyr sjølv det sama———————————————-You yourself will also die
Eg veit et som aldreg døyr————————————I know one that never dies
dom om daudan kvar——————————————-the reputation of those who died
On November 21, CNN published an op-ed by conservative journalist S.E. Cupp called “Why conservatives lost faith in mainstream media,”[1] in which she opines over how the mainstream media has become—in her words—an “elitist outfit with a blind spot for conservative America.” In it, she calls for a higher level of integrity among the conservative media, while ironically using the same sloppy rhetoric that’s kept their bar low for so long. While her call is commendable, she demonstrates the choice that many in the conservative media have made to embrace mythology and entertainment over logic and truth. This choice is not only morally dubious, but it is one that endangers the health of our democracy in the era of Trump. These are dangers Cupp herself shows she is clearly aware of, yet she’s unable to conceive a strategy to mitigate the threat. Since the best defense the American public has against these practices is awareness, Cupp’s words are worth observing and unpacking.
Her essay begins with typical conservative complaints about the failings of the mainstream media, celebrates the rise of Limbaugh and Fox News, then decries the current state of affairs in the Trump era, then ends with a call for higher journalistic standards among the conservative media.
It is that last part, where she laments the loss of trust in the media and makes what appears to be a sincere and significant call to the conservative media at large that I found to be of greatest worth.
Sowing distrust in [the media] ... not only creates confusion and chaos, it leads to ill-fated uprisings
(like white nationalism), needless paranoia, increased hostilities and a collective sense that no one
can be trusted.
Hear, hear. Her prescriptions for fixing this situation are also sensible and straight forward:
Journalists can help themselves by, simply put, being better at our jobs. ... The media must prove it is
deserving of the trust it desires. Mistakes, which will happen, must be corrected swiftly. ...
Conservative journalism, in particular, must provide clear-eyed commentary and analysis in the era of
Trump.
... the uniting principle among conservatives in media must be truth.
These are all commendable sentiments, but she fails to acknowledge the role of the conservative media in creating the current state of affairs she so deplores. This is a common failing among otherwise respectable conservative commentators. They are awake enough to see the dangers present in our society, but are not willing or able to look inside their own house for their share of the cause and cure.
While I very much agree with Cupp that conservative media should have the quest for the truth as a foundational principle, it doesn’t, and it’s not going to any time soon. That’s because although the driving intent behind the mainstream media is to inform, the driving intent behind conservative media is to influence. When informing the public is your overriding goal, adherence to truthfulness is a very necessary principle needed to fulfill that goal. When influencing the public is your goal, bringing hearts and minds into your cause becomes the measuring stick of success, and the degree to which the truth is employed becomes a secondary consideration.
Cupp extols the rise of figures such as Limbaugh and Fox News, who ushered in a wave of popular media that brought conservatism to the masses by making it easy to understand and abide, but did so at the cost of journalistic integrity. Yes, these commentators and networks got the conservative story out that she feels the mainstream media failed to adequately represent, but they did so using vitriol, rhetorical fallacies, and, at times, willful dishonesty.
If that last charge seems outrageous, one just needs to look at the Daily Show’s list of 50 false statements made on Fox News, compiled by Politifact in February 2015.[2] Each statement was made either by one of the network’s hosts or by its guests and left unchallenged. Politifact also analyzed each falsehood, demonstrating why the statement can be reasonably considered untrue. To my knowledge, Fox News has yet to retract, clarify, or otherwise rectify any of them.
By contrast, let’s look at some recent examples of sloppy reporting on the part of the mainstream media—for example, CNN’s reporting that Anthony Scaramucci had met with members of a Russian investment fund.[3] Or the time the Washington Post erroneously reported that Russian hackers had successfully penetrated the U.S. electric grid.[4] In both cases, the Post and CNN owned up to their mistakes and took responsibility. Both posted retractions; in CNN’s case, two journalists and one editor resigned over the story.[5]
Mistakes will always be made, but those are the actions of professionals who hold the truth as a uniting principle. Yet there were no recriminations over Fox’s false statements in the mainstream media or from the public at large, except for left-wing media monitoring sites and blogs, which were largely ignored.
The reality is that Fox News is not held to the same level of accountability as outfits like CNN and the Post because the erroneous statements made on its network are the business’s product, and not anomalies to be corrected. Each of the false statements in the Daily Show’s list was intended to influence public opinion toward the conservative point of view at that time, and turning around and publishing a retraction or apology would have only worked against that intent.
So when Cupp states, “Mistakes, which will happen, must be corrected swiftly,” who is she talking to? The mainstream media already adheres to this principle, and most of the conservative media have no motivation to abide by it. (For another side-by-side comparison of this difference at work, I recommend reading the article “A tale of two networks” by Laurel Raymond.[6])
These false or misleading statements are not random or without purpose. They are designed to build a well-crafted narrative intended to sway public opinion towards the conservative media’s favored policies and representatives. This narrative takes different forms depending on the issue, audience, or events at hand; a popular one is the “us vs. them” myth. This myth is built using a paradigm called the persecutor-victim-rescuer triad. It typically goes something like this: “You are the victim having your way of life threatened or assaulted; they are the liberal media persecuting you for not abiding by their dangerous and unseemly ways; we in the conservative media are your rescuer, standing up for you against this assault.”
If you think I’m exaggerating at all, you can find an example of this paradigm right in the title of Cupp’s op-ed, “Why conservatives lost faith in mainstream media.” The title states conservatives “lost faith” in the mainstream media, as if there was a time when they had it. If there was, her op-ed does nothing to illuminate when that was, and fails to describe the form that faith took. That’s because there was never a time when conservative leaders and publishers had “faith” in the mainstream media, because it didn’t serve their goals. As far back as the 50s, in conservative papers such as Human Events, there was an inherent distrust of non-conservative media, and Richard Nixon was famously hostile to the mainstream press.[7] So with a few clicks on her keyboard, Cupp has deftly set up a takedown of the mainstream press based largely on a false premise that sets the reader up for a persecutor-victim-rescuer triad.
Cupp makes it clear that the mainstream media has been the persecutor, with statements such as, “As the [mainstream] media merged with Hollywood ... it grew even bolder in its disregard for the common man ...” Who were “the common man” being set up as the victims? “... the commuting salesman, the farmer, the churchgoer, the truck driver.” And who is coming to the rescue? “When liberal anchors or editorial boards ... slammed conservatives ... we called them out” (emphasis added).
With the triad in place, she cements the mythology in one sentence:
But with Drudge, Limbaugh and Fox flexing their considerable muscles, the conservative skepticism of"the media" became a conservative skepticism of the "liberal media," or as Sarah Palin liked to say, the"Lamestream Media."
Here she presents the essential drama, with conservative stalwarts “flexing their muscles” like superheroes, being “skeptical” of any media that’s not on “our” side— i.e., “lame.” The narrative we’re being served here also glosses over the misdeeds and occasional cruelty (anyone remember Sandra Fluke?[8] ) these figures perpetrated in order to gain their stature, while laughably praising them for their “skepticism.” I would be trolled right off the blogs, both conservative and liberal, if I went in there writing about how powerful Rush Limbaugh became through the force of his “skepticism.”
The purpose of going through this analysis is to demonstrate how easily credibility can be conjured by spinning a self-made myth. The frequency and audacity with which the conservative media employs these methods not only puts the free press as a whole in danger, but it also destroys the credibility of any honest conservative media and ideas. When they choose to rely solely upon methods of influence, conservative media may be effective at winning hearts and minds in the short term, but that support is built on fantasy. In the long term, the unrelenting force of reality will ultimately destroy the fantasy. The question then becomes not when reality will crash the party, but who will suffer when it does.
If you don’t believe that reliance upon fantasy can have dangerous consequences, then let’s talk about Donald Trump.
Now the consequences are getting real, and that’s reflected in the radically different tone Cupp takes when she moves to the subject of Trump. Now we hear distress:
As he faced incoming fire from both sides ... being mad at the liberal media wasn't going to cut it.
Suddenly, ALL media was bad, and ALL news was fake....Trump has bragged about that fact that more conservatives trust him than they do the media. But it's
nothing to be proud of. It's something that should deeply trouble everyone ...
Yes, yes indeed, it should. We have elected a man who exists deep in a realm of fantasy, compulsively spinning lies and half-truths that are shocking both in their venom and transparency.
Cupp’s prescription for this state of affairs is a stronger, “more clear-eyed” conservative media that prizes truth as its uniting principle. We should all be in favor of that. But the hand-wringing is too little, too late. In truth, Trump’s ascent was enabled by a public zeitgeist that had already been put in place over the course of years by the conservative media’s deliberate choice to employ mythologies like the persecutor-victim-rescuer triad, rather than exercising the higher ideals Cupp now implores them to use. This choice created a bubble that insulated candidate Trump from losing the support of the American electorate in the face of events that would have tanked any normal candidate—the Access Hollywood tape, the numerous groundless and transparent lies, his policy ignorance, and his un-presidential demeanor.
I’m disappointed that it has taken until now, when she sees her own camp being threatened, for Cupp to decide it’s time to raise the journalistic bar. The damage the conservative media’s influence-peddling has done to the spirit and clearheaded thinking of the American public—those commuting salesmen, farmers, churchgoers, and truck drivers she proudly defends—is devastating, but I’m also encouraged that she sees it is time for a change. To recover, this country will need all the truth-loving journalism it can muster. At this point, though, that’s no longer enough.
Nixon didn’t give in to the charges of Watergate until Senator Barry Goldwater came to the White House to tell Nixon he’d lost the support of his own party. Nixon, understanding the truism from baseball, “When your own man calls you out, you’re out,” resigned shortly thereafter. Nixon’s scandal damaged the Republican brand, but there was a point where the party leadership had to put the needs of the country over the needs of the party.
Today, Trump feels completely empowered to do all the disservice he’s been doing to the country and its free press because his own team will not call him out on it. I wonder if Cupp is willing to uphold those principles of journalistic truth she expounds, even if it means calling her own side out. Because that would mean having to take responsibility and stand accountable for the role she and her camp played in creating this mess. That would mean having to make the choice to face reality and move away from the fantasy. That would mean choosing to inform the American people about the strengths and benefits of conservative ideas and letting them choose which course is best for them, instead of trying to sell them on a mythology.
The consequences of failing to do these things are now more dire than just the behavior of Donald Trump or the loss of conservative influence. We’ve seen that state actors like Russia are copying the conservative media playbook. They are using the same methods to build myths of their own and wield their own influence over the public.[9][10] A public that can be influenced by a set of tactics and mythologies used by domestic media is vulnerable to influence by the use of those same tactics and mythologies by a foreign power. That should be a rallying cause for all American journalists—conservative, liberal, and everything in between. But inoculating the populace to these tactics would involve waking them up to the lies, myths, and fantasies that have been perpetrated upon them for so long. That’s not something established political powers will want to dismantle on their own, but the process can begin if we have conservative journalists who are truly willing to place truth above all else, including their own ideology and influence.
If Cupp, along with other conservative commentators like her, chooses to place the needs of the country above the needs of party or ideology, America has a chance. I hope for all of our sakes that the intentions behind her call are sincere, and that her words are heeded.
Carl Jung, long before Joseph Campbell, spoke of the power of Myth. Think then, as these words river through the paths of your least resistance, of mythology as a psychological bed not a literary device. Let the bed be soft, prone to erosion, cut deep, perhaps, but not bedrock. Imagine that a mythological landscape may change in a biblical flood or a volcanic shock. Imagine a seismic shift that settles the very plates of your inner world into a newfound calm equilibrium.
Good.
Imagine peace.
Good.
During the anti-war movement of the late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies, those who marched and sang and chanted against the undeclared war in Vietnam sought an end not only to that war but to war in general. The idea they expressed in art and action was that peace and love might prevail as human consciousness dared to expand, that human rights might extend across all races, across genders, across borders until all mankind experienced the equality one nation’s constitution promised its citizens. Cooperation might take us father than competition, they proposed.
These ideas met powerful resistance. Those in favor of continued hostilities or the far more widespread faction that favored unquestioning support of governmental and military structures strove to undermine the credibility and the organizations that dared to disrupt. This was the first true test of the Military-Industrial Complex of which President Eisenhower had warned years earlier.
Stretch memory and you may recall a time when every war fought held an underlying hope of creating a lasting peace. The Great War, not yet having to be numbered as the first World War, was undertaken as The War to End All War. Until the rise of the Military-Industrial Complex, peace was considered the natural goal of any grand-scale human endeavor. The Roman Aqueducts would distribute water to the people and bring peace to the land, the Legion would help to spread the Pax Romana. The Magna Carta intended to establish a system of laws that might bring civil peace. The founders of the United States, narrow as they may have been in their view of humanity to exclude women, Native Americans, dark-skinned persons and those who did not own land, saw fit to exclude the creation of a standing army. The Constitution they framed allows for moneys to be raised and an army gathered for periods of no more than two years, ensuring, they imagined, that any conflict in which the nation engaged must be limited in scope and duration.
Peace, once, was the goal of the establishment. Then it became the goal of the anti-establishment. Then peace became derided as the naïve fantasy of hippies and children. Now, those who speak of peace find themselves dismissed to the margins to converse with the crystal-vibration healers and the tin-foil hat mind-control theorists.
Our cultural mythology accepts war as a perpetual inevitability. We say, “It has always been thus,” when in fact for centuries war came so intermittently that such international conflicts stood out as distant historical landmarks stretching back up the banks of the river Time, cautionary remembrances of the turbulent spans separated by long stretches of calm.
With the religious tribalism of America’s most recent violence, the Judeo-Christian vs. Muslim undertones of the ongoing war against ever-shifting terrorists in the middle-East, our warriorism takes on an epic grandiosity. We fight not for oil interests or for ideological gains, but for God, even if we dare not say that aloud for fear of revealing our own bigotry and self-appointed superiority of mythological commitment.
Most of the world’s major religions, certainly the Abrahamic ones, value afterlife over life and foresee apocalyptic endings for humanity. These beliefs came into being before humanity had developed and codified scientific systems for examining, exploring and then proving or disproving theories about how the world works. Thus, these systems relied on ideas of pattern and reflection, anecdote, fantasy and experience. As each person lived and then died, surely the whole of humanity must face the same fate. The world we know will end in catastrophic fire, or the world we know will end in Ragnarokian ice depending on the climate one inhabits, but always the assumption was that the world we know will end.
With the invention of nuclear weapons, weapons capable of ending the world we know pyrotechnically and leaving a nuclear winter, allowing us to end our world in both fire and ice, apocalyptic destruction shifted from the unpredictability of a wrathful god’s hands to the unpredictability of a foolish humanity’s hands. In this way, like surgeons who come to feel they have mastered life and death, humankind itself began to ascend toward a sort of godhood, limited in potency to destruction, but unlimited in hubris and self-certainty.
Even as science empowered humanity to decide its own fate, religious organizations saw proof that we moved closer to their gods’ plans. Ongoing war in the middle east served not to profit the makers and sellers of weapons, the drillers and sellers of oil, but to fulfill the very will of god, bringing us inexorably toward the final conflagration. Worshippers of one god would meet worshippers of another, each side seen by the other as disbelievers, bringing about the ultimate conflict and delivering to one side or the other the ultimate reward of some after death paradise and in that paradise to enjoy unlimited, eternal bragging rights.
Our mythologies guide our actions at conscious and unconscious levels. When we carry with us mythologies of end times, of volatility, of cataclysm, we cannot help but move toward those final moments in our daily actions as individuals and as a society. When we believe we approach such times, reckless nihilism prevails; when we believe in an afterlife reward, the basic survival instinct can be subverted. Like adolescents who imagine themselves immortal while seeking to prove courage, we drive at high speed toward the canyon we have dug.
What if humanity can survive?
Imagine peace.
Good.
Imagine, if you dare, that we live not at the end of our species’ long history of war, but at the start of our species’ longer history of peace. Imagine a nation without a standing army, with no intent to impose its will or its belief system on others, only the intent to serve as an example to other nations of the possibilities that grow from generous prosperity. Imagine the billions spent attacking other nations in the name of self-defense being spent instead on infrastructure, on scientific research, on education and cultural advancement. Imagine all those benefits shared so freely, so expansively that no nation would want to attack us as we serve as a perpetual source of innovation and support and inspiration.
We claim to be a shining city on a hill, a beacon. Yet we rankle when others try to climb to the hill, to seek the beacon’s light. Perhaps immigration is the sincerest form of flattery.
Imagine a whole world raised, brilliant, shining.
Good.
Until we see habits for the weak bonds of comforting inertia, we cannot break free to think new thoughts.
As these new ideas and possibilities filter as tributaries into your stream of consciousness, churn the waters just a bit more to filter out some lingering noxious sediment.
Tacitus said, “To know who controls you, see who you may not criticize.”
In the nineteen-eighties, when the anti-war movement had been generally silenced or marginalized, the United States began re-engaging in foreign conflicts in South America, in the Middle East. Playing on guilt experienced by peace activists for their vilification of the drafted troops who fought dirty in a dirty conflict, the Military-Industrial Complex, working through its political and entertainment concerns, saw to it that any objection to military action would be widely perceived as an attack on our troops. To say that a war was unjust would be perceived as a belittlement of those who volunteered to serve. To suggest that the lives of the poor should not be sacrificed for the profits of the wealthy was to denigrate the sacrifice of the former and not the greed of the latter.
Even the most incisive of the late-night satirists, those who regularly skewer the elected leadership, the pious and the wealthy dare not say anything of the military other than to heap praise on the troops for their service and their sacrifice. To question the value of any military endeavor, we hear the unspoken hiss of the dangerous riptide warn, renders their sacrifice valueless and therefore such criticism cannot be allowed in word, in deed, and certainly not in consumable mass-media.
The fetishized military stands alone under an umbrella of protection from criticism. Each soldier, sadistic Abu Ghraib torturer or camouflage-garbed desk clerk at an Ohio Army base, must be revered as a mythological figure, an Ajax, an Alaric, a Lancelot, a Roland, unassailable in virtue by mere allegiance to the uniformed force and entitled to pre-boarding privileges while fire-fighters, teachers, doctors and other heroes wait, herded with us mortals into roped off lines, for our group numbers to be called.
While we roll onward toward a mythologically mandated destiny of fiery demolition, who can we imagine might most benefit from an unquestioning belief in the sanctity and righteousness of everlasting war?
The shallow white-water terror makes us manipulable, easily ordered into ever-more perilous rapids. Slow your breath. Calm your mind. Disregard the instruction of those who say we must take the most violent route. Dip the paddle-rudder of your will to steer not where you are told, but where your conscience leads.
Wide, deep waters let us contemplate in peace. Let us rest and marshal our resources. Imagine humanity, caring, open, decent, loving humanity, reaching downstream toward an ever-lasting lake.
Who was the last honorable Republican president? Was it Bush Sr? Eisenhower?
We are well aware that the current occupant of the White House regularly partakes in receiving emoluments, attacking federal agencies, denigrating opponents, disparaging allies, coddling dictators, and colluding with Russia. Donald Trump also has personal issues that are widely considered immoral or unethical, such as laundering money for criminals, as well as, infidelity to wives and business contracts alike.
But, is Trump an aberration or a symptom of increasing malignancy?
How far back do we have to go to find a Republican president who fulfilled his duties with honor? Nixon set the precedent for criminal behavior in the modern Republican party with the break in and theft of DNC materials. The criminal cover-up of those crimes led to his resignation, thanks to pressure from Republicans with a modicum of shame and honor. Reagan followed up a half decade later by negotiating for Iran to keep our hostages until he became president. Then, during his term, he either ignored or approved the illegal selling of arms to Iran and using the proceeds to illegally fund Contra rebels in Nicaragua. Now, Reagan is practically considered a saint, while members of his administration who carried out the crimes are revered among Republicans. George HW Bush might have been the most honorable of the modern lot, but he was caught up in Iran-Contra too, and later invaded Panama on dubious pretenses before starting the decades long military intervention in Iraq. George W Bush, under false pretenses, eventually invaded Iraq, which killed and hurt millions of people, and which has been a significant contributor to instability in the region to this day. Let’s also not forget the previously unacceptable torture that Bush Jr approved.
Perhaps we have to go back to Eisenhower to find honor in a Republican president. Or, maybe George HW Bush was the only honorable modern Republican president. At best, he was forced to bloody his hands as all presidents must do in this imperfect world. Still, Iran-Contra, Panama and Iraq hang over him. Yet, that is not what kept him from a second term. That happened because he committed a sin that was unforgiveable to proponents of supply-side economics; he broke a promise of no new taxes.
This hints at why modern Republicans cannot govern with honor. Their philosophy prevents it.
Modern Republicans govern in compliance with Reagan’s famous quote.
The nine most terrifying words in the English Language are, I’m from the government and I’m here to help.
They have demonized the government. They can’t admit that government can be helpful and even necessary. So, they discredit and destroy government whenever it suits their purposes.
This anti-government fervor dovetails with adoration of the market. Private enterprise and markets are the solution to all of our economic needs. Taxes are believed to distribute from the efficient market to the inefficient government. Wealth is idolized. Poverty is considered a choice. Increasing inequality is ignored.
All of which complements the racism Republicans foster. Government destroying welfare queens, who happen to be black or brown, are created whole cloth to vilify all social programs and convince racists that cutting their own benefits is the best way to prevent the demise of the republic.
Not that they will publicly admit to any such duplicity, racist or otherwise. They don’t have to. They can lie about their true intents. The ends justify the means. They can withhold forthright discussions to private settings.
Fundamentalist Christians are particularly prone to concealing their true intentions. They fervently believe that they must do god’s will, which they believe is opposed at every turn by evil beings, including nonbelieving humans. Therefore, in order to assist in reestablishing god’s dominion over earth, they are free to use the weapons of deception and cheating in the ongoing spiritual war. In fact, they are not entirely good Christian soldiers if they fail to incorporate these tools into their arsenal.
When truth is optional, facts may be the enemy. Only facts that confirm their worldview are acceptable. Therefore, rational and critical thinking are discouraged. Education is not necessary in their “real world”, so, it is thusly scorned.
With a dearth of facts and reality supporting their stances, the entire Republican movement has shifted to a cult of mythology and personality. Democrats and liberals are ugly creatures inhabiting dimly lit television commercials. Republicans are heroes simply for opposing heinous Democrats. Above all is the mythology that shall not be questioned. Republicans are for law and order. They support our troops. They are fiscally responsible. They are better for the economy. Facts be damned.
One by one, facts and reality disprove the Republican myths. But, they are too invested to heed the facts. They risk annihilation and eternal damnation should they change course. They must maintain control and not give in to alternative explanations. Ostensibly dishonorable acts are simply misinterpreted as such by loathsome nonbelievers and liberals, according to Republican mythology.
They have to act as they do. To them, it’s a holy war. They believe that it’s an us or them world. If blacks or immigrants gain, white people must lose. Never mind the stagnant wages and growing inequality. We must give to the rich. Supply-side is king, and the rich will save us. It’s part of the mythology.
But, it’s wrong, or, at best, incomplete. Republicans will not regain their honor until they acknowledge and act on this.
It doesn’t have to be a zero sum game. Everybody can be provided support and opportunity. We don’t have to blame anybody. There can still be rich people, and there is enough to go around to take care of each person. We just have to spread the riches more equitably. To do so, Republicans will have to reassess some of their core tenets. To this end, here are some relevant points.
Government can work for people
Government does good things
Democrats have good ideas and policies
Liberals are worthy of respect
Supply side economics has failed for most people
What’s best for the country is not always best for the wealthy
Money should not be more influential than people
If they can’t change their views, then the dishonorable actions will continue.
Both sides are not equally culpable in this. Democrats make mistakes, but are willing to admit mistakes and adapt to changing conditions. The few tenets that Democrats insist on include the notion that human rights are universal and that all people deserve respect. Even in opposition, Democrats have engaged Republicans in respectful debate. A notable example of this is the health care insurance debate in which Democrats engaged in exhaustive discussions and offered multiple compromises when they controlled the debate, which Republicans unjustly called ramming down their throat, while Republicans held far fewer hearings and only included Democrats to the minimum extent required by existing legislative standards when Republicans controlled the debate.
When warranted, Democrats have demonstrated time and again a willingness to admit mistakes and to adapt. Republicans lie and cheat to avoid changing course, and, therefore, act with dishonor. It sullies not just their name. It threatens the survival of our constitutional republic, as well as, with climate change accelerating, everything up to and including modern civilization.
Until and unless they are able to step away from the corner they have backed into, Republicans will continue to push towards a dark precipice. If we cross that threshold, it will not be good for any of us. The winners will have to rebuild from the ruins, with no guarantee that they can even get back to where we are now. Republicans can adhere to their myths and personalities, or they can act with honor and give all of humanity a chance to advance.
Long ago, when time had barely began and the old Goddesses ruled, the Three Fates determined the time on earth for all beings.
“The Golden Thread,” by John Strudwick.
Clotho “The Spinner” - Maiden - spun the Thread of Life. Lachesis “Caster of Lots” - Matron - measured the Thread of Life. And Atropos, or Astropos “Unbending” - Crone - cut the Thread of Life.
Sixty million years ago, there weren’t any humans, so each thread determined the life of a creature, including lots of dinosaurs and even bugs.
But without human lives at stake, the Fates found it boring to tend to the threads. Atropos, the Crone empowered to cut the thread of Life, took to drinking wine all day, and put the thread cutter on a timer, rather then tend to it every time a bug’s life thread needed cutting.
One day Dionysus, the god of wine and partying visited, and he and Atropos got especially drunken. Atropos stumbled and fell against Clothos’ Spinner, and her shears cut deeply into a spinning thread.
“Oh Athena!” cried Clothos, “That’s the threat for the life of the Earth itself!”
Fortunately Dionysus grabbed some duct tape and hastily wrapped up the damaged thread, which now thumped every time it spun, since the duct tape put it out of balance.
“That should hold it,” said Clothos,”But what will happen?”
What happened was the fraying of the thread caused a massive meteorite to smash into the Earth, damaging it as Atropos’ shears had damaged the Earth’s thread, and vastly changing every feature of the Earth, 60 million years ago.
Most dinosaurs and multitudes of other creatures and plants went extinct.
livescience.com: Some died.
However, dinosaurs that were capable of flight did survive the impact. Some of them were already feathered.
Some survived.
Later, representatives of every surviving species of flying dinosaurs convened on what would be the Plain of Jordan. They met in a mammoth conference to discuss their future, shaken by their brush with extinction, and upset at the Goddesses’ lax oversight.
The female flying dinosaurs organized their own caucus to discuss their own issues.
An Archaeopteryx spoke first.
From dinosaur.org
“I’m out there looking for alpha males for breeding to strengthen our gene pool, when out of the blue, some loser is jumping on my back. This has to stop. Sex should happen solely at the Females’ discretion!!”
The conference broke out in wild approval with all sorts of squawks and tweets and caws filling the air.
“But what can we do?” asked an Avialae.
dinosaurstop.com
“I say we all swear together, right now, to boycott males with large penises that facilitate sexual assaults. Natural selection will take care of the rest. “
All of the female flying dinosaurs, from that day on, refused sex with large-dicked dinosaurs, and for good measure, some refused all large dinosaurs, too.
As millions of years rolled by, the flying dinosaurs evolved, replacing scales with feathers, and the larger dicked dinosaurs died off without breeding, and without heirs. The flying dinosaurs eventually became birds, and by then the bird penis has been naturally selected out of existence, and replaced by a cloaca.
In some cases, such as raptors and shorebirds, the females are also often larger than the males.
The manly Eagle or strutting rooster? No penis. Over 95% of the bird population? Dickless.
Instead most male birds have a universal opening for excreting, pissing, and ejaculating, called a cloaca, and breed via a cloaca “kiss” with the female.
Only ducks, and some flightless birds, still have penises.
While I am writing figuratively, three books I am currently reading gave me a scientific basis for the idea that female birds could deliberately plan an organized meeting to boycott large penises for millions of years until they vanished.
The first book, The Evolution of Beauty, by Richard Prum, posits that female sexual choices actually determine many important evolutionary changes. It is true that when birds were flying dinosaurs, the males had penises. But as they evolved into birds, the penises disappeared from the vast majority of birds because of the females’ rejection of it.
The Second book, The Genius of Birds, by Jennifer Ackerman, claims birds are extremely smart. Nest building, navigation skills, and vocal learning are only part of their abilities. Could birds be brilliant enough to deliberately shape their own physical evolution, I wondered?
My final source is The Far Side Cartoons, by Gary Larson, which conclusively demonstrated that animals, including birds, can meet confer and plan at advanced stages.
When I read Prum’s claim that female preferences would drive dramatic physical changes in the male, it blew my mind. I screamed and cried that my little world would not let me go.
I had to stop what I was doing and write about it.
This theory surprised me, because I’d been seeking explanations for notable frog activity in the Chorus Frog Mitigation Area every early spring, in my back yard.
Why would (dickless) male frogs assemble into groups and croak together, loudly all night, revealing their presence to every predator within a half mile?
Now I realized it’s because the female frogs insist on it. If a male frog demurs from this very audible and visual display, his gene line ends.
I once thought the male frogs’ gatherings (leks) were a harem. There’s clearly an Alpha voice in their ribbetings. But the more I watched, I realized that the female frogs have total autonomy over mating. Ten or twenty male frogs will croak all night, but females may approach only one or two the whole evening. Many male chorus frogs probably never mate, and croak every night until their vocal cords wear out, or a bullfrog or coon happens onto them.
The female chorus frogs are also massive, compared to the males. Why? Among other benefits, it would help the female thwart sexual assault.
The female chorus frog (bottom) is twice the size of the male.
Charles Darwin wrote about sexual selection as aesthetically and female driven. Prum wrote lyrically to revive this convincing theory in The Evolution of Beauty.
I for one seem to have witnessed it in my own backyard.
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I didn’t think about it all that much, just moved my foot a couple of inches over from where I would have been walking. So, I didn’t kill the ant.
Ants are strong, industrious and fast. But according to entomologists Hölldobler and Wilson, on average I’m about 750 times taller, and would weigh about a million times more than that ant.
Give or take.
So I had an advantage of sorts.
I didn’t feel particularly god-like, though there was an element of that as I towered imperiously above. Like a god, I also realized the ant probably wasn’t even aware I was there, or was only there in answer to some ant mysticism or mythology, but hardly in the corporeal sense.
But I passed on crushing it beneath the soul of my shoe.
It just wasn’t a day for killing, and I had the advantage of making that choice.
But it reminded me of my own relationship to the ant, and my own role in a world where I am often, the ant.
Times when I am helpless before forces beyond my control, forces I might not even be aware are impending.
The folks in what was Panama City, Florida, probably felt some of that October 10 of this year as Hurricane Michael stormed ashore, almost a category five; Japanese families in Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have had a microsecond of awareness; Jews in Berlin most likely realized it was too late on Kristallnacht, Nov. 9-10, 1938.
Times when we are the ant.
Times when we want to shout to some larger deity, some agency, someone, any one, that we are alive, we deserve to live. But the choice isn’t ours.
We make those choices daily, without a thought for most of us, relative to the plant and animal kingdom, enjoying our steaks, seafood, poultry, even the plants consumed on the diet of mystics and vegans.
But we are all connected to that life, and when our bodies return to dust, some of that dust will give rise to the plants that feed the animals our children will consume.
I didn’t step on the ant.
That too, is a metaphor for me, in the stepping I do daily interacting with the people I know, and more so with those I know and love.
In the poisonous world of ‘social’ media and vitriolic politics, we step on others. In business in particular, and politics, it seems those who step on others gain ground. Which is an interesting thought, ‘gain ground.’
They do gain that, real estate, profit.
But they lose ground in the push and pull of the good and evil in being human, in recognizing and promoting the connectedness of all. They can become wealthy by stepping on people; they can even become president. But they add nothing to the good in the world, rather, they compound the evil.
From time to time it is good to think about where we step.
LGBTQ Literature is aReaders and Book Loversseries dedicated to discussing literature that has made an impact on the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. From fiction to contemporary nonfiction to history and everything in between, any literature that touches on LGBTQ themes is welcome in this series. LGBTQ Literature posts on the last Sunday of every month at 7:30 PM EST. If you are interested in writing for the series,please send a kosmailtoChrislove.
“Everything flows.”–Herakleitos of Ephesos, ca. 500 B.C.E.
Warning to readers and scholars: The diary author is not greatly learned in Latin. I’ve shamelessly relied on translators and others, including but not limited to that inconsistently reliable narrator, Wikipedia. Caveat lector.
.
CITY OF ROME, turn of what is now called the Christian Era. Augustus, succeeding the murdered Julius Caesar, has been proclaimed a god. Publius Ovidius Naso* -- or Ovid as he would be known to later students – middle-aged descendent of a wealthy family, maverick, always preferring literature to government, undertakes a new, book-length project.
“Of bodies changed to other shapes I sing...”
Not some Virgilian epic, lapidary as a Roman wall, consequential, ponderous.
Light-hearted and serious, quirky and tragic, grounded in tradition yet inventive, fleshly and philosophical, irreverent, satirical, fluid in its transitions, yet true to a demanding meter: his most ambitious project.
Concept: “one continuous song,” threading from the world’s creation through all the ages of myth, up to the god Augustus. A catalogue of myths; the stories flowing into one another, and each one a transformation.
Daphne to a laurel tree. Narcissus to a flower. Procne to a nightingale. Actaeon to a stag.
A man to a woman and back again. A man and woman into one person, double-sexed. A woman to a man.
Form flowing into form, surreal and miraculous.
The Metamorphoses itself has lived through many changes of form. Ovid’s Roman Empire, of course, descended to dust. His work survived. Shakespeare, among others, mined its pages. It has been available in English since 1621 and continues to inspire new works of art down to this day.**
(The verse quotes in this diary are from the translation by A.D. Melville, published by Oxford University Press in 1986. The prose is from an online version by Anthony S. Kline.)
It must be acknowledged that the modern reader, taking the Metamorphoses as a work in its own right, tends to blench. Rape. Rape, rape, attempted rape, and more rape. Worse – pedophilia. Infanticide. Horrendous tortures. Routine misogyny. Deities behaving worse than mortals. Dismemberment. Incest. Still more rape. (Those ancients seriously needed #MeToo.)
Why bother with this mythical rubble? Except to blast its sexism and other barbarities?
Well....suppose we think of it as archaeology of the imagination.
(And is it really worse than Game of Thrones? Or actual horrors in the news today?)
We in the 21st Century enjoy a nearly endless stream of science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction, magical realism, literary surrealism, and superhero . (Forbes magazine reported last year that overall sales of fantasy and science fiction doubled between 2010 and 2017.)
To satisfy human appetites for the weird, wonderful and outright impossible, Ovid’s Rome had nothing exactly equivalent.
It was in the century after Ovid that Greek and Roman authors, it seems, first began producing what we would recognize as fantastical fiction.*** The earlier Greeks, I think, had none, though Plato took a step that way with his ideal Republic.
What the classical world did have, in Ovid’s day and earlier, was myth. Myth offered a vast storehouse of tales, well-known and mainstream, variant, obscure, deliberately tweaked in new directions by poets and playwrights. From this treasury Ovid drew. He chose, tailored, and linked together some 250 stories to construct the Metamorphoses.
Certain of his tales have what we would call “morals.” (“Vanity is dangerous,”“Be generous to guests, no matter who.”) Many do not.
Some are tragic, some “comic” in the old sense of ending well. Some are “just so” tales of how things got to be the way they are. Some are just odd. All are far removed from the mundane. And each one must have resonated with its audiences, or would not have survived.
Our own imaginative literature, at its best, does more than entertain. It sets us down in the country of imagination. Enriches our sense of possibility. Reshapes our minds. We differently perceive, under its influence, human nature, society, history, even our chronic existential pains.
So. Similarly, viewing mythology as imaginative literature, it may be is worth a moment to contemplate Ovid’s transformation tales involving gender, in all their weirdness.
We should of course not expect to find in Ovid our modern understanding, which draws a line between biological sex and personal, subjective experience of gender. Greek and Roman cultures were far from ready for that leap. But like all literature, the work also belongs to readers, who are left free to make their own interpretations, or even tease out meanings the author did not consciously intend.
John Flaxman, Tiresias (illustration for Dante’s Divine Comedy, 1807). Royal Academy of Arts, UK.
Tiresias. (Book III. Male to female to male.) The story is older than Homer. Ovid keeps it short.
In his version, Tiresias was walking along one day when he happened across two snakes mating. He struck them with a stick. This transformed him from man to woman.
After seven years as a woman, Tiresias encountered another pair of snakes coupling. Reasoning that if it worked once, it might again, Tiresias attacked the snakes in the same way, and indeed, changed back into a man.
Ovid also relates that Tiresias was later asked to settle an argument, as to which gender enjoys the most pleasure in sex. Tiresias answered in favor of women; the goddess Juno did not like that answer, and blinded him in revenge. But her husband granted Tiresias, in compensation, the gift of prophecy.
Quite a life.
Ovid’s readers would probably have known the basic story already, as well as how the shade of Tiresias spoke to Homer’s Odysseus in the underworld; the prophet gave that hero sound advice about his voyage, which unfortunately was not followed.
The original readership would also have recognized Tiresias as the blind prophet of Thebes who advised Oedipus that the plague devastating the city meant divine anger for some transgression. Tiresias is supposed to have been a fixture in Thebes for seven generations.
Some other version of the mythtold the sex-change story a little differently. In one version, Tiresias refrained from harming the second pair of snakes and therefore turned back into a man. In a more obscure version, he stepped on the snakes.
Some report that blindness struck Tiresias -- not for offending Juno, but for catching a glimpse of the goddess Athene naked. Or for telling mortals the secrets of the gods.
Later story-tellers elaborated: As a woman, Tiresias supposedly married and had several children; one daughter herself became a famous seer. The legend ramified; most of these details have been lost.
Wikipedia had this summing-up: “Tiresias [in Hellenistic and Roman literature] is presented as a complexly liminal figure, mediating between humankind and the gods, male and female, blind and seeing, present and future, this world and the Underworld.” Couldn’t put it better.
Seers and poets must experience everything possible.
As Whitman wrote: “I contain multitudes.”
...
Sleeping Hermaphroditus, Louvre. Origin unknown, discovered in the early 1600s, Rome. The mattress is modern. Several Roman and more recent copies exist. Wikimedia Commons.
Hermaphroditus. (Book IV. Male and female to intersex.)
Another Greek import. Ovid’s is the only full version of the story to survive, though it is probably not the original one.
Hermes, the messenger god, and Aphrodite, goddess of love, produced a son named Hermaphroditus. He grew up into a handsome youth.
A water nymph named Salmacis developed a serious case of the hots for the inexperienced youngster. She persisted. He resisted. When he went for a swim, Salmacis followed him into the water.
At last, she entwines herself face to face with his beauty….as ivy often interlaces tall tree trunks. Or as the cuttlefish holds the prey, it has surprised, underwater, wrapping its tentacles everywhere….
“It is right to struggle, perverse one,” she says, “but you will still not escape. Grant this, you gods, that no day comes to part me from him, or him from me.” Her prayer reached the gods. Now the entwined bodies of the two were joined together, and one form covered both. Just as when someone grafts a twig into the bark, they see both grow joined together, and develop as one, so when they were mated together in a close embrace, they were not two, but a two-fold form, so that they could not be called male or female, and seemed neither or either.
At the request of Hermaphroditus, Ovid says, his parents worked some magic on Salmacis’ pool, so that any man who immersed himself in it would be weakened, leaving it as “half a man."
This seems to have started as “just so” story, explaining why a particular body of water was considered dangerous. It might also have been a "just so" story about intersexuality.
“Some say,” wrote historian Diodorus Siculus in the century before Ovid, “that this Hermaphroditus is a god and appears at certain times among men, and that he is born with a physical body which is a combination of that of a man and that of a woman....”
This sounds almost like the Hindu concept of gods becoming embodied by in various avatars through history.
Other people, the historian added, considered the birth of such a person to be, instead, some kind of omen.
The property of double sex was occasionally attributed to other classical deities, such as Dionysos.
(Irrelevant but fun fact: the story of Hermaphroditus happens to appear the same book of Ovid as the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, with which Shakespeare created such a romp, as his play-within-a-play performed by rural amateurs in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.)
...
Iphis and her mother pray to Isis. Borrowed from isiopolis.com/…, Probably an edition of Ovid, no further information supplied
Iphis and Ianthe. (Book IX. Female to male. )
On the island of Crete, a husband informed his pregnant wife that if her baby turned out to be a girl, it must be killed; if a boy, they could keep it.
“Girls are more burdensome,” he told her, regretfully
The wife prayed over this awful edict. The goddess Isis came to her in a dream.
The moon’s crescent horns were on her forehead, and the shining gold of yellow ears of corn... With her were the jackal-headed Anubis, the hallowed cat-headed Bast, the dappled bull Apis, and Harpocrates, the god who holds his tongue, and urges silence….The sacred rattle, the sistrum, was there; and Osiris, for whom her search never ends….the goddess spoke to her, saying: ‘O, you who belong to me, forget your heavy cares, and do not obey your husband....”
Keep the baby, the goddess instructed, no matter what.
The child turned out to be a girl. The mother called her “Iphis,” a gender-neutral name derived (according to the notes in Melville’s translation) from a Greek word meaning “power.”
She raised Iphis as a boy. The father never knew a thing.
In time, the father arranged a marriage between his “son" Iphis and a girl named Ianthe.
Uh-oh.
And to complicate things more, it was love on both sides.
“Ianthe longed to fix the wedding day…
Poor Iphis loved a girl, girl loving girl,
And knew her love was doomed and loved the more.”
Iphis’ mother could not think how to get out of this fix. Finally, she took her daughter with her to the temple of Isis, where they prayed for help.
On the spot, Iphis transformed into a boy. The goddess even have her an instant haircut.
(Wait, what? I thought she was already disguised as a boy, why did she need a haircut?)
Ovid described a plaque in Isis’ temple, reading:
“These offerings, vowed by Iphis as a maid,
By Iphis, now a man, are gladly paid.”
And everyone lived happily ever after.
A similar tale or variation, was later included by the Greek author Antoninus Liberalisin his Metamorphoseon Synagoge (“Collection of Transformations”), about 200 C.E. (give or take a century). This version gives different names to family members, excludes the marriage angle, and attributes the transformation to a local goddess, Leto. The protagonist in this version was called Leukippos, “White Horse.”
Unlike Ovid’s casual acceptance of bisexual behavior on the part of the god Apollo and some others, it’s interesting that the poet put a long lament in Iphis’ mouth about how impossible and unnatural it is for one woman to love another. Apparently there were some things to which the imagination of an Ovid couldn’t extend.
We might possibly interpret Iphis, in modern terms, as a story of clandestine same-sex marriage. Ianthe herself could have been witting, all along, while the family invented all the rest as social camouflage.
Or there could be other ways to novelize it. In fact, at least one modern novel has been based loosely on Iphis and Ianthe.
Another fun fact: according to Wikipedia, “The 17th-century publisher Humphrey Moseley once claimed to possess a manuscript of a play based on the Iphis and Ianthe story, by William Shakespeare…[citation needed]” Such a manuscript, however, has never turned up.
...
Poseidon in hot pursuit (not Caenis, a different victim). Red-figure lekythos (oil flask), Attica, about 440 B.C.E., Metropolitan Museum
Caenis/Caeneus (Book XII. Female to male.)
Caenis, a member of the Lapith tribe, was the most beautiful girl in Thessaly. She had many suitors, but accepted none. One day, as Caenis walked on the beach, Neptune emerged from the sea and raped her.
The sea-god then turned around and offered to grant Caenis a wish.
So Caenis said,
.
“This wrong you’ve done me needs an enormous wish.
Put pain like that beyond my power. Grant me
To cease to be a woman–-everything
That gift will be to me.” She spoke her last
Words in a deeper tone; they might well seem
A man’s words. So it was...
...Rejoicing in the gift,
Caeneus fared forth to range [the river] Peneus’ ways,
And there in men’s pursuits he spent his days.
.
Caeneus reappeared a little later in the Metamorphoses during a famous battle between the Lapiths and centaurs.
This bloodbath, according to myth, broke out at a Lapith wedding. The centaurs who were guests got drunk. One swooped down on the bride and carried her away. The others decided they liked the concept and proceeded to grab any women they fancied.
(Sounds like something from Game of Thrones? And you kind of have to imagine Caeneus, disgusted, thinking, “Not this time,you don’t.")
Ovid puts the story of the resulting fight in the mouth of Nestor, an ancient hero of the Iliad, and writes it in a parody of Homeric style.
Caeneus disposed of five centaurs, one of them armed with a battle axe, when another called him out personally:
.
“You, Caenis, there!
Must I endure you? You, always a wench,
Always Caenis to me! Doesn’t your birth
Remind you, don’t you realize what act
Won your reward, what price you paid to seem
A spurious man? Just think what you were born,
Think what you bore! Away! Back to your wheel
And wool-box! Spin your thread. Leave war to men!”
Such were his taunts, and as he galloped by,
Caeneus let fly his spear…
.
...wounding the centaur. The centaur struck back, but Caeneus was so tough, the centaur’s spear bounced right off. Caeneus then slew his attacker.
The rest of the centaurs closed in on Caeneus. To their shock, no weapon could wound him. (Invulnerable, millennia before Superman!)
The centaurs then proceeded to strip the earth of huge boulders and uproot trees. They piled all this debris on top of Caeneus until a huge swathe of countryside was bare. (Scene in the header art of this diary.)
.
“Buried beneath the giant pile, Caeneus
Tossing and heaving under the weight of trees
Sustained on sturdy shoulders the vast mass
Of timber. Even so the burden towered
Higher than mouth and head and he could draw
No air to breathe...
At times he heaved, as if an earthquake shook...
His end remains uncertain. Some declare
The wood’s vast weight had forced him to the void
Of Tartarus (the Underworld). But Mopsus [a Lapith seer] disagreed.
The story of Caenis/Caeneus dates back as far as Hesiod, contemporary of Homer. But Ovid’s version is the only extended version to survive.
...
Sithon (Book IV. ….to male...to female...to male...to female…?)
The merest tantalizing reference:
.
….Nor will I speak
Of nature’s law relaxed and Sithon’s sex
Ambiguous, now a woman, now a man.
.
Nothing whatever has been preserved about this gender-fluid mythological character by any other source.
We may imagine what we will.
…
Ovid banished from Rome, as imagined by J.M.W. Turner, 1838
No one can be certain why the Emperor Augustus, banished Ovid to the distant Black Sea port of Tomis (today Constanta, Romania).
Ovid himself referred only to carmina et error, “a poem and a mistake.” Some scholars connect this with his major erotic works, the Amores (Loves) and Ars Amatoria (Art of Love). Others believe he may have become entangled tangentially in a conspiracy against the Emperor. In the end, nobody knows.
From exile, Ovid continue to write and pleaded for repatriation, to no avail. After a decade of exile, he died in Tomis, about age 60.
Ovid was married to three different women, divorcing twice; the third time, about age 30, apparently was the charm. He left a single child, a daughter.
Ovid Among the Scythians, by Eugene Delacroix, 1859. National Gallery, London.
Asides
For Ovid’s enduring fertility as a source for writers and artists: read down.
In an ironic coda, perhaps, to Ovid’s banishment, the first published translation of Ovid’s Amores into English — by Christopher Marlowe -- was burned in London, June 1599, on orders from the Bishop of London and Archbishop of Canterbury. Like Ovid’s Metamorphoses, however, the Marlowe translation of the Amores survived. (The Metamorphoses itself would not appear in English for another 22 years.)
I always like to give some kind of shout-out to Marlowe on or near the anniversary of his deathday, May 30, 1593. Possibly the first “out” gay poet in English, at least the first we know of with that public reputation, Marlowe had outshone Shakespeare on the London stage at the time he was stabbed to death in what is usually described as a tavern brawl, aetatis 29. “His life he contemn’d [despised] in comparison of liberty of speech,” wrote Marlowe’s friend and sometime collaborator, Thomas Nashe (whose works also faced interdiction). There have been worse obituaries. R.I.P.
.
Statue of Ovid by Ettore Ferrari, located in present-day Constanta, Romania. Via Wikimedia Commons: by Ettore Ferrari - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0 ro, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16459782
NOTES
*Publius was the family name, Ovidius his given name and Naso a cognomen or distinguishing nickname, commonly appended back in the day. The ablative form of nasus, “nose,” the cognomen Naso apparently led to the poet’s being depicted with an exceptionally large proboscis. There was also, however, in Latin literature an association between satire and a sharp nose. So the full name translated to our own normal format would probably amount to “Ovidius Publius the Satirist.”
**Read down at the Wikipedia link for some of the more recent metamorphoses.
***The Metamorphoses of Apuleius is a (distinctly NSFW) novel surviving from the 2nd Century C.E.,in which – among other misadventures – the protagonist finds himself accidentally changed by magic into a donkey. Also from the 2nd Century, A True Story by Lucian of Samosata relates the earliest known story of a voyage to the moon; scholars disagree whether this work ought to be shelved with science fiction, fantasy, parody or satre. Both of these novels, like Ovid’s Metamorphoses, embed tales collected from various sources.
PRINCIPAL SOURCES
Ovid. Metamorphoses. Transl. A.D. Melville. Introd. and notes, E.J. Kenney. Oxford University Press, 1986. (Paperback reprint, 1992)
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So here we are, 100 years later, and it's happening. Again. Or is that "still?"
We didn't understand what happened last time the world decided to blow itself up -- and we aren't seeing it now. Depending on my mood, I blame it on poor education, international lack of honesty about how great nations became "great" nations. And, of course, greed.
God is dead and greed rules us. When saving a few pennies is, to a corporation, worth destroying a family's livelihood and future, the world will continue to be a toxic muck.
So here we are again. Or, as I said -- still here because maybe we never really left.
Lying to the public and each other with a determined willingly to believe the unbelievable because the lies make us feel better. Or less bad. Whichever.
Every nation revises history. They leave out the bad bits -- slaughters of the innocent, unjust wars against minorities and civilians. They invent heroes, turn defeats into victories.
American history is no different. It's relatively easy to make our history match our myths when such a large percentage of U.S. citizens haven't learned any history since third grade. There's some question about how well third-grade lessons were absorbed. Recent studies show a troubling pattern of ignorance in which even the basics of history are unknown to most of our natural-born citizens. Ironically, naturalized citizens are far better educated. They had to pass a test to become citizens. The rest of us got a free pass.
College students don't know when we fought the Revolution, much less why. They can't name our first president (George Washington, just in case you aren't sure). Many aren't clear what happened on 9/11. I've been asked which came first, World Wars I or II -- indicating more than ignorance. More like deep stupidity.
All over Facebook, morons gather to impress each other with the vigor of their uninformed opinions. They proclaim we fought the Revolution to not pay taxes and keep our guns. Saying that's not how it happened is insufficient. I lack the words to say how untrue that is.
Why did we have a Revolution? How come we rebelled against England rather than peaceably settling our differences? Wouldn't it have been easier to make a deal?
Yes, it would have been easier to make a deal and we tried. Unfortunately, it turned out to be impossible. We fought a revolution when we exhausted every peaceful option. Petitions and negotiations failed, but we kept trying, even after shots had been fired and independence declared.
We didn't want a war with England. There were lots of excellent reasons:
Our economy was entirely dependent on trade with England. Through English merchants, we could trade with the rest of the world. Without them, we were stuck with no trading partners or ships
We needed Britain to supply us with anything we ate or drank (think tea) unless we could grow it in North America.
We relied on England for finished goods other than those we could make in our own homes, including furniture, guns, clothing, cutlery, dishes, porcelain
We had no factories, mills, or shipyards
Our population was too small to sustain an army
We had no navy, no commanders. No trained army. We barely had guns
We were ill-equipped to fight a war.
All luxury goods and many necessities came from or through England. We had some nascent industries, but they were not ready for prime time. It wasn't until 1789 we built our first cotton-spinning mill -- made possible by an Englishman named Slater who immigrated from England and showed us how to do it.
Our American colonies didn't want to be Americans. First of all, there was no America to be part of ... and secondly, we wanted to be British. We wanted the right to vote in parliamentary elections as equals with other British citizens. The cry "no taxation without representation" (remember that?) didn't mean we weren't willing to pay taxes. It meant we wanted the right to vote on which taxes we paid. And how much.
We wanted to be heard, to participate in government. Whether or not we would or would not pay a particular tax was not at issue. Everyone pays taxes. We wanted seats in Parliament and British citizenship.
King George was a Royal asshole. His counselors strongly recommended he make a deal with the colonists. Most Americans considered themselves Englishmen. If the British king had been a more flexible, savvy or intelligent monarch, war could have been averted. We would be, as the Canadians are, part of the British Commonwealth. There would have been no war. A bone-headed monarch thought a war was better than compromise. He was a fool, but it worked out okay.
We declared war which many folks here and abroad thought was folly. We almost lost it. We would have lost were it not for two critical things:
British unwillingness to pursue the war aggressively
French ships and European mercenaries.
Without French assistance and hired mercenaries from central Europe, we would have been squashed by the British who were better armed and better trained. They had battleships with guns and trained seamen to man them.
We didn't.
Just as we considered ourselves English, albeit living abroad in a colony rather than in England itself, British soldiers and commanders were not overly eager to slaughter people they considered fellow Englishmen. They didn't pursue the war with the deadly determination they could have ... and if they had? Who knows how it would have worked out?
Did we really win because the British were inept and couldn't beat an untrained ragtag rabble army? That's our story and we're sticking to it.
I side with those who think that the British found it distasteful to shoot people with whom a short time before they had been friends and with whom they hoped to be friends again. Many British soldiers had family in "the colonies" and vice-versa. It was a painful fight, not unlike a civil war.
Many British citizens sympathized with the colonists including a goodly percentage of troops. Sympathy ran high even in the upper echelons of the British government. Many important people in England were none too happy with King George. So they did as they were ordered but without enthusiasm.
Then there was a huge miscalculation. The British did not expect the French to show up. As soon as the French fleet arrived, a few more battles were fought and the British went home. Had they pursued the war with vigor from the start, we wouldn't have lasted long enough for the French to get here, much less save our butts.
The mythology surrounding the American Revolution is natural. Every nation needs heroes and myths and we are no exception. But as grown-ups, we can apply a bit of healthy skepticism, read a couple of books. Learn there's more to the story than the stuff we learned when we were eight. Like, the second part of the Revolutionary war known as "The War of 1812." Part two of the Revolution which we lost fair and square when the British burned Washington D.C.
We did not win the Revolution. We survived it. Barely.
This is why our current government is more than a mere miscalculation, a bad election. It's not something we'll "pull out of" after which everything will go back to normal. I'm not sure we have a normal to go back to.
It's not only how the evil underbelly of America has been exposed for all to see. It's also that the planet is under attack. Americans -- and everyone else -- need to fix it if we want to continue to live here.
We need to be very careful about how we move "forward." We have to tread carefully. We have to work with our allies and our non-allies because everyone needs to put their shoulders to the wheel to keep our world livable.
We used to have the good fortune to live in a nation of laws but I'm not sure this is a nation of laws anymore. I'm not sure what we are. I'm not sure what the world is or whether there will be a world in another 100 years. Or for that matter, in another thirty.
Ignorance is the enemy of education, learning, and truth. I think by definition, that makes our government the enemy of freedom.
The gods were so sure that they had won. Gilgamesh, great king of Uruk, had tried to defy them, and he had been crushed. His lover was dead and remained so, and he himself had trudged back to his capital in weary defeat, frustrated at every turn in his search for the secret of immortality. Sooner or later, probably more sooner than later, the mighty king of Uruk would be dust. The gods had made their point. Immortality was theirs, and theirs alone...
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A few weeks after the great king returned to his capital, he went forth alone, in the very early morning, to the east gate of the city. He carried with him only a small cloth bag with something heavy inside. His step was light again; the guards wondered if he were starting out on another journey. In a manner of speaking, he told them, smiling. They did not dare ask him any other questions, which saddened Gilgamesh for a moment. He had so much to say now.
<big>Most of our diaries are posting on Fridays, 2:25pm leftkost, 5:25pm east. Upcoming also, a gaming/coding/programming scitechfant mini-series with audiobook for Sundays, starting December 8, 2:25/5:25pm:</big>
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That Time Scrabble Saved the Word: A Fantasy Revenge Novella (in installments)
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Most religious traditions incorporate myths,stories, and legends into their belief systems. Within any particular culture,the people often do not make a distinction between these three things, but many scholars prefer to view these as distinct analytical categories. Some view folklore as a broad category which includes stories, songs, oral histories, and prayers; myth is the genre of folklore that is concerned with sacred stories about cultural origins.
Religion, in many traditions, helps to explain the unknown, that which has not been personally experienced. One these unknowns is how everything began, how humans first came into existence: in other words,creation. In most, but not all religious traditions, there are creation stories explaining the beginning of the world, life, and, most importantly, humans.
Lil pulled off her helmet, unzipped her leathers, scrubbed her knuckles through her silver-flecked dark hair, and grinned at the little girl coming running to the paddock fence. “Hiya, kid.”
“Hiya, Lily!” The little girl grinned back and climbed up onto the second board of the gate, curled her bare toes over its edge, gripped the top board with both arms, and nodded for Lil to give the gate a push to make it swing away. “What’d you bring us?” she called over her shoulder.
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<big> Street Prophets Coffee Hour is an Open Thread. Bring your favorite cuppa, and hang with us a while. What’s on your mind today? And feel welcome to put your community links in comments.
To start, here are community links of a sister-group in DK: if you know of kosaks who like to read fiction, memoir, and similar things not usually found in DK, here’s the group to tell them about:
“Something familiar, something peculiar...” from the ‘pens’ of kosaks: our light and sometimes darker tales of life, myth, adventure, romance, science fiction, history, pastiche, epic poetry, lyrical saga, legend, ballad, cat&doggerel, fantasy, homage or mash-up of literature, familial history or personal memory and musings, children’s tales born of elsewhen or otherwhere, long-length serialized, or briefer material in single diaries, for the entertainment and pleasure of ourselves and friends (especially those who can’t afford kindles & ebooks), and to help fundraise a little for the CommunityNeedsList diary series folks.
Our most recent posting, if you came by Friday, was The Dragon and the Lake by Street Prophets’ own michelewln.
Dark Redemption, an urban fantasy novel by writer/artist quarkstomper, chapters running Wednesdays mid-evening on all coasts and in-lands for the foreseeable future, if there is any.
On Thursdays, writer/artist michelewln’s Sean’s Stories, a novelette series of the medieval past with things to say about the present, too.
On Fridays — a mystery until it posts, 2:30pm leftkost, 5:30pm east
Who’s a Clever Girl, Then ■↶»LINK«↷■ — from science, a myth…
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Waystation America ■↶»LINK«↷■ — an econopolitical dark
fantasy of the moment… <big><big> 🌇</big></big>
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,
Vulgar and Crude:
the mathematical
modeling of sex
at high altitudes ■↶»LINK«↷■ a
reminiscence and
meander from
unique perspective…
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That Time Scrabble
Saved the World: ■↶»LINK«↷■
An Artificial-Intelligence
Fantasy Revenge Novella
(in 4 installments)
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Three Mornings ■↶»LINK«↷■—
Grand Isle,
Grand Canyon,
Berea…
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Short Stories ■↶»LINK«↷■ That Are Very
Short Indeed
,
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Simplicity; or
Sometimes the
Death-Trap
Does Not Work ■↶»LINK«↷■—
an historical tale of
actual Ancient Rome, in verse…
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Sean’s Stories ■↶»LINK«↷■ — a novelette seris
of the medieval past
with things to say about
the present, too...
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The Revenge of Gilgamesh ■↶»LINK«↷■ — forever down thru’
the mists of time
to now….
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Poetry & Images from
kosak cawfeemug
(Gilbert Satchell) ■↶»LINK«↷■
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Out of the Darkness
Came a Yule Tide ■↶»LINK«↷■ —blessed be…
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Motorcycle Apples
Cave Tales Trees ■↶»LINK«↷■ — a creation myth,
in layers....
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The Literary Mack the Knife and Friends ■↶»LINK«↷■
in filksong, with
Louis Armstrong,
Ella Fitzgerald, Dune,
the Hollywood Argyles,
Tolkien, and
Noel Harrison…
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Life as Improvisation;
a Simple Melodic Line ■↶»LINK«↷■
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The Grinding Season ■↶»LINK«↷■—
the heat of southern
summers, the mill
that family is…
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Dys-content ■↶»LINK«↷■ — a good teacher
makes all the difference…
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Dark Redemption: an urban fantasy
novel by chapters ■↶»LINK«↷■
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The Crazy and
Ridiculous and
Wonderful ‘ A
Christmas Carol’
by Charles Dickens ■↶»LINK«↷■—
with an original child,
and a poem as well…
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Night falls over the City of Redemption. Beneath the gleaming skyscrapers and picturesque facade of the City of Redemption lies another city; a community of dark and ancient magic populated by creatures of the night.
Redemption is a medium sized city in the north of England. The castle it grew up around was at various times in history a shrine, a fortress, a monastery and a manor. Today it is a thoroughly modern city, although the ruins of the castle and a rich accumulation of architectural styles serve as a reminder of the city's long history. Something old dwells behind the glass and steel skyscrapers of the city's heart; something older than the Victorian brownstones and the Gothic cathedrals; older than the remnants of the fortress walls which once ringed the town; older even than the sections of ancient forest preserved since feudal times. Magic lurks at the roots of the city and it draws creatures of darkness. Here club-hopping vampires can be seen at the city's night spots; urban werewolves run in the streets; witches and sorcerers ply their trade in unexpected places; and occasionally one will even meet one of the fae, the Fair Folk whom it is perilous for mortals to know. Dark Redemption started out as an online role-playing game created by James Crowther (aka Jex, Lord Featherbunny), one of the Secret Masters of a Harry Potter fansite called VH. It quickly evolved into a kind of shared world novel in which each writer's plot became a thread in the greater tale of a city of magic and Gothic horror. For a while, With Jex's permission, I was serializing some of the major plots from the story in my "Live and Let Dice" column on the website Pop Thought.
The game, sadly, eventually dwindled away, and Pop Thought, too, is no more. I've decided to revive my story thread from the game and present it here. Hopefully, I may even finish it. Stranger things have happened.
So for now, let us join Strephon, a semi-immortal half-fae, and Cassandra, a mortal reporter, as they investigate the city’s secrets.
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Strephon Bellman: A semi-immortal half-fae, the offspring of a mortal father and a faerie mother. He is a faerie from the waist up, and has looked much the same for over a century; but his legs are mortal, and have aged as a normal person’s body would. For that reason, he has been confined to a wheelchair for much of the past several decades. He was once married to a mortal named Phyllis, but since her death, he has withdrawn from both the Faerie Realm and the world of mortals, content to observe things from the sanctuary of his old Victorian mansion. His aunt, the Queen of Faerie, has commissioned him to investigate fae activity in the City of Redemption, forcing him to become involved in the world of Redemption’s magical community.
Mrs Hudson: Strephon’s cat. A perfectly respectable cat who minds her own business and wishes that others would do the same.
Devon:A courtier of the Faerie Realm who delivers the Queen’s commission to Strephon and who pops in every now and then to pester him. He likes to wear black and affects a cool, sarcastic persona. Strephon refers to him as a cousin, although whether there is a family connection between the two of them or Strephon is just employing a human convention is difficult to say. Strephon finds him annoying.
Tobias Simms: A Jamaican cab driver who often drives Strephon around town. He is a large, friendly man and acts somewhat like a guardian angel for Strephon, because Strephon is friends with his grandmother, a local wise woman. He has a habit of showing up just when he is wanted because “Gran’ told me you might be needing me.”
Cassandra True: A reporter for The Daily Oracle, a local tabloid noted for sensationalistic stories and for photographs of well-endowed ladies. When we meet her, Cassandra’s job consists mostly of writing captions for the “Page Three Girls”, but she has ambitions of better things. She has an interest in the hidden history of the City of Redemption and a drive to uncover the truth. She little knows what secrets she might uncover.
Melchior Dusk: The mortal guise of Lord Melchior, a powerful fae noble. He calls himself one of the “Silicon Fae” and claims to be a new breed of fae with an affinity for technology and immunity to cold iron. How he gained these abilities, he has not divulged. He has bought Vanir Technology, a company designing computer games, and is applying fae magic to the firm’s new gaming platform. Since any time a fae noble is absent from the Faerie Court for any significant length of time it can only mean he’s plotting something, Strephon has been charged with finding out exactly what he’s up to. Melchior is also trying to recruit Strephon to his side for his own purposes.
Inanna: An executive assistant working for Lord Melchior. Like Melchior, she is a fae, and also like him, her faerie nature has been augmented to give her an affinity for technology and an immunity to cold iron, an anathema to most fae. A saucy minx, she exhibits a most improper interest in the mortal portions of Strephon’s anatomy.
Grandma Simms: A wise woman who runs the local Friendlee-Mart on Fitch Street and is the undisputed matriarch of the Jamaican community. She has known Strephon for years and he respects her wisdom and her no-nonsense advice. He doesn’t always follow her advice, but when he doesn’t, he usually wishes that he had.
Isaac Masey: A police detective who was investigating wolf attacks in the city until one of his suspects bit him. He is now trying to balance his responsibilities as a police officer against his new status as a werewolf and the consort of a powerful pack leader. He does not play a large role in this story.
Aoi Kurayami: A shrewd businesswoman who owns a tech firm as well as a string of cyber-cafes. As serene as a worldly Buddha and as lethal as a shuriken, she is also a powerful vampiress, and her club, the “Cyba-Netsu” is popular place with the city’s denizens of the night, as well as with mortal clientele who enjoy living on the dark side.
Malcolm Raven: Werewolf and leader of the Raven wolf pack. He is also a business rival of Lucinda Dupres.
Lukas Bianka: Handsome and charismatic, a respected businessman and the founder of the Redemption Decency League. But although he fights moral turpitude by day, by night he is the leader of the Reaver Pack, one of the more unsavory werewolf clans of the city. His pack is noted for wearing collars inlaid with silver runes as a mark of their loyalty to him, and perhaps for other reasons as well.
Lucinda Dupres: Leader of the Moonshadow Pack, one of the most powerful wolf packs of the city. She also runs a marketing firm, with the same ruthless efficiency as she runs her wolf clan. Both Lukas Bianka and Malcolm Raven of the rival Raven Clan would like to merge their respective clans with her, but so far she prefers to keep her pack independent. She has recently acquired a new “pet”, Detective Masey.
Mr. L.G. Trotter: President of the city’s largest bank. Although a titan of finance, he is socially a quiet, unassuming man. He probably collects silver cow creamers or some such thing.
Mrs. Trotter: The wife of the banker, and devoted patron of the arts. She leads the Redemption Culture Claque, a civic group devoted to promoting the arts and preserving the city’s rich history; and she organizes its annual Gilbert and Sullivan Festival. If she were in a Marx Brothers movie she’d be played by Margaret Dumond.
Thoth: (also known as Mithras, Aliester Crowley, and Timmy), An eccentric bookseller who runs the oldest established New Age bookstore in the city. He claims to have been the Egyptian god Thoth, and since he is immortal, he may be telling the truth. He is also as mad as a moonbeam sandwich.
Byron Sanders: Senior programmer for Vanir Technologies and creator of the original “Virtual Hot Tub” game. He’s in his mid-20s, although he looks younger. Since Melchior bought out the company he has become more and more unsettled by the uncanny changes Melchior and his people have brought. He thinks Melchior might be an alien, but he’s wrong. He’s sure that there’s something not quite human about Melchior and there is is more correct than he could ever imagine.
regarding the struggles in the art community during this pandemic & it has motivated me to remind folks just how important the role of artist is to society.
What is it that makes a society out of a group of humans struggling as a group for survival? Does their activities as farmers or hunters make them a society or a civilization? Is it the tools they use? The structures they build?
While tools & architecture may be important elements of a particular group, I would suggest that what makes them a society or civilization as distinct from another group that may even be using the same tools or building styles, is the stories that they share among themselves by which they define their distinct identity as a people as differentiated from other groups of humans.
We often use the term “mythology” to describe these stories but that term is too easily disregarded.
America is defined by its mythology, its stories. We have the stories of the founding fathers. We have the stories of Jamestown & the Pilgrims in Massachusetts. There are lesser known stories that have hidden influence, s.a. the story of Roger Williams & the founding of the concept of religious freedom in America. Then we have the stories written by the likes of Ralph Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Mark Twain. The paintings of the Hudson River Group: en.wikipedia.org/… & modern art by the likes of Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Georgia O’Keefe, Norman Rockwell… Musicians s.a. our recently lost John Prine (if you don’t know his music, start with his early works s.a. Paradise, “Sam Stone” or “Hello in There”), Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin & Jim Morrison, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong.
Our TV shows like “I Love Lucy,”“Leave it to Beaver,”“Ozzie & Harriet,”“Sid Caesar,” “All in the Family,”“The Cosby Show” (irregardless of Bill’s personal failings), Seinfeld, Cheers, Friends & many more.
There are the newer contributions by Hollywood, The movies starring the likes of John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Stewart & Henry Fonda. Even new movies s.a. Saving Private Ryan.
All of these stories help us to define what it means to be an American.
Fundamentally speaking, the artist in a given society is the person(s) who defines for us what it means to be a member of the given society. We would have no concept of what it means to be an American if it were not for the stories & the images, that we use to define for ourselves what it means to be an American. & this is an ongoing process. While this essay is not meant to be political, what we see in the political discussions are attempts to promote contrasting stories about what it means to be an American.
Without the artist, none of this is possible. While art is often created in private, it is only through public sharing that it becomes part of the iconography of a society. We are constantly defining & redefining what it means to be an American & a human on the planet Earth. This pandemic has become a part of the newest version of the defining.
We need our artists to speak & write & imagine these concepts for us. Yes, we do this as individuals all of the time, but there are always those individuals who are more articulate & can create images & sounds that better describe what we ourselves are imagining. We need a society that supports artists. Particularly artists who can imagine our world in new ways in order to help us move forward as a society. Otherwise, we will be relegated to a society imagined by the corporate marketing departments whose primary function is to convince us to be good little consumers.
While our minds are regularly boggled by the level of devotion and adoration accorded Donald Trump by his hardcore supplicants, sycophants and enablers, we only rarely get a glimpse of the full narrative of Trump as “the Chosen One”, an almost mythical figure, the flawed savior, the most gifted and most persecuted man in history, bearer of the unmatched wisdom of a truly great, yet humble individual.
“Humble”? Donald Trump? You learn the all-purpose answer from the true believers of the Gospel of Trump is that we mere mortals cannot truly grasp the scope of his genius. Case in point: I recently saw an interview in which a Trump surrogate was pressed as to why Donald Trump blocks any and all attempts to review his school records, his medical records, or his tax and financial records. The jaw-dropping answer was that it’s a sign of Donald Trump’s “humility”.
The mythology spun around Donald Trump is of a superior human being, gifted both physically and mentally, a “natural leader”, “visionary”, a “very stable genius”, someone destined for greatness. An all-star athlete and top-of-class scholar, so extravagantly successful in every way he doesn’t release his records so as not to embarrass or humiliate others less blessed.
With the power of myth, the “Chosen One” narrative draws on sources as diverse as the biblical King Cyrus and the historical Thomas Becket, unlikely heroes and, like loveable rogues and scoundrels throughout history, found religion when chosen by God to save civilization from the barbarians at the gates.
In some dark corners of the internet, he’s known as “The God-Emperor”. Trump himself has no doubts about his superiority (if not divinity):
“I think nobody knows more about taxes than I do, maybe in the history of the world.”
“Nobody in the history of this country has ever known so much about infrastructure as Donald Trump.”
“Nobody knows banking better than I do…I understand money better than anybody. I think nobody knows the system better than I do.”
Another part of the Trump “Chosen One” narrative is the misunderstood “humble public servant”, having sacrificed his life of wealth and celebrity to selflessly serve his country, to take on the world’s demons and tame them with no thought of self-enrichment or the exercise of self-serving power.
"I don't want to Win for myself, I only want to Win for the people".
"I think I've made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard."
"I didn't need [the presidency]. I didn't need it! I had a very nice life.
I used to get actually good press."
Trump’s love-hate relationship with the press, as well as their mutual dependency, is at the heart of his ‘selflessness’ theme, his sense of both victimhood and entitlement, demanding media praise he believes is deserved and crying foul, the system is rigged, when it is withheld or insufficient. Yet he nobly suffers it, a cross he is willing to bear.
The messianic subtext is unmistakable and resonates with his base, the fervent belief that Donald Trump is sacrificing his life to save America from a New World Order, or from Socialism, civil war, or the zombie apocalypse.
“The Chosen One” is willing to save us from unspecified but nonetheless impending doom, and in fact only he can, and is willing to bear the burden of his selflessness and sacrifice. And all he requires is absolute loyalty and total belief.
“There’s nobody bigger or better at the military than I am.”
“I know more (about ISIS) than the generals do. Believe me.”
“Nobody’s ever been more successful than me.”
“No one is smarter than me.”
Trump insists that his conversation with the president of Ukraine was “perfect”, but he is so humble about that conversation that he would bury all record of it and then reveal the identity of “the spy” that shared it with the world - taking his humility to an entirely new level.
The problem with ‘selfless superman’ Trump mythology is that it’s patently false. His entire brand is built on glamour, greed and winning at any cost. He is both a carnival barker and snake-oil salesman, and perhaps the ultimate ‘vulture capitalist’, a ruthless, predatory businessman leaving a trail of victims, employees, former partners and bankruptcies in his wake. And for good measure, he’s a sexual predator, racist and misogynist.
For his most zealous followers, Donald Trump’s amoral corruption and his righteous crusade are not mutually exclusive. They co-exist comfortably within a very flexible, cult-like mythology of an unorthodox 21st Century messiah. The difficulty with the narrative is that it nominates for sainthood a person so reprehensible.
“No one respects women more than me.”
“No one reads the Bible more than me.”
"I gave up two more seasons ofCelebrity Apprentice."
Ray Cunneff is a former CBS television executive, professional television and motion picture writer. His book, “2020: A Trump Odyssey — The Rise of America’s Fascist Dictator” is available (eBook) on Amazon Kindle
(The weather here has been crappy and rainy all week, so I’ve been cooped up inside.)
In Norse mythology, Yggdrasil, the Tree of Life, was the source of everything, stretching through all of the Nine Worlds and up into the Heavens. The Father of the Gods, Odin, hung himself from the tree’s branches in order to gain wisdom. Today, the Tree of Life is a symbol for the interconnectedness of all things. So any good hippie should know how to make a nice Tree of Life to hang on the wall. :)
I’m going to make mine from raffia ribbonBegin by wrapping a metal hoop with raffiaDouble a long length of raffia and attach it to the rim with a lark’s head knotAdd more strands around the rim, and wrap them. Join the thinner pieces together to form thicker branches.Arrange the thicker branches so they all converge at one pointThat will be the top of your trunkNow, spread out the roots and tie them off at the rimAdding some dangles
Ever since I can remember, my fascination has been with the study of the social foundations of human intellectual life: namely, in antiquity, mythology, and the classical legends.
Having completed my Master’s in Critical Comparative Scriptures at the School of Arts and Humanities at Claremont Graduate University, and as particularly an American student of myth, I might be expected to visit the Creation Museum in Kentucky; and yet, I never have, and have no plans to do so.
The reasons for this, are simple. At the time of this writing, I live in California; and it seems to me rather spendthrift, to travel cross-country to see an exhibit, and immediately come back. I have neither friends nor relations in Kentucky, and therefore nowhere to stay or anyone to meet. Secondly, the Creation Museum is expensive; even members must pay over $50 apiece to enter. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the Creation Museum is by no reasonable measure an instructive or accurate rendition of the mythology it purports to display.
The subject purportedly on display in the Creation Museum, is the legend of the Garden of Eden: a Judeo-Christian origin-fable of human suffering, loosely based on Greek and Zoroastrian antecedents. In this legend, the first human beings live undisturbed in a peaceful garden in present-day Mesopotamia, until persuaded by a ‘Serpent’ (Prometheus) to ingest the fruit of the ‘Tree of Knowledge’, which induces a conscience, and a heightened sense of mortality. Fearful that they might then obtain the fruit of the ‘Tree of Life’ and become immortal, their Creator expels them from the garden into the wider world, and condemns them to every manner of hardship.
The representation of this myth in the Creation Museum, is far from faithful, even to the syncretic and fragmentary present form, insofar as it tries to incorporate dinosaur paleontology, hominin evolution, and geological data into the myth, which originally acknowledged none of these. On principle, there is nothing wrong with this. Numerous Early Modern scientists, including Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Al-Haytham (Alhazen), Al-Petraj (Alpetragius), Omar Khayyám, and their successors Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, Hubble, Herschel, Bohr, Einstein, Polodsky, Rosen, etc., saw no contradiction between an honest study of the cosmos, and reverence for its Creator. There is equally nothing wrong with alleging, as the Creation Museum does, that the discovery of marine fossils at high altitudes, inspired the legend of the global Deluge. This legend is re-created at the Creation Museum, under the name of the Ark Encounter, after the mythical vessel in which the human protagonists of the story survived the disaster.
Archaeologically speaking, the legendary Deluge may be identified as any of several inundations in and around the ancient city of Uruk, in the Tigris-Euphrates river basin (present-day Iraq): the site, supposedly, of the Eden myth, and of most associated legendry. Nonetheless, it was far from ‘global’ or ‘universal’, except from the view of the protagonists in the story itself. As well: the attempt, at the Creation Museum, to incorporate dinosaurs into either Deluge or Garden, is incorrect both mythologically and scientifically, insofar as both legends are set firmly in the anthropocene epoch, long after the extinction of all non-avian dinosaurs. In that respect, the Creation Museum has committed at least one serious error, and ignored its own source-material.
As a representation of Judeo-Christian creation mythology, the Creation Museum has failed spectacularly. Paleontological imagery is basically irrelevant to a myth based loosely on Syro-Palestinian, and Mesopotamian sources, and set mostly in the Iron Age. Admittedly, confusion has arisen, because the principal text, known as the Book of Genesis, relates a legend of the beginning of the cosmos; but the same book, having done so, leaps immediately to the creation-myth of the human race, without reference to the intervening geological ages. The Creation Museum does attempt to correct this omission, by displays of the Big Bang and cosmological development; but these displays do not quite compensate for the mistake of incorporating prehistoric organisms into a display of historical fiction, supra.
All these data, combined, suffice to dissuade any serious scholar, and most lay visitors, from the Creation Museum. If that museum were ever rebuilt, into some form more faithful to its true subject of mythology, and its cost of entrance significantly lowered, perhaps more intellectuals would be inclined to join its audience; and possibly, myself among them.
Western news media take only a token notice of Indian politics; but it would require a great ignorance not to notice an India torn into factions by the rabble-rousing of a nationalist party (mostly called by its acronym of B.J.P.) and its loud-mouthed leader, Prime Minister Narendra Modi. This Modi, by his policy and its execution, merits all the comparisons in the world to figures like Hitler, Johnson, Bolsonaro, Trump, Mussolini, et al., and enjoys support among the most unlikely-looking people. I have relatives myself on both sides of the question.
One of the B.J.P.’s most obvious hypocrisies, is its invocation of the name of the legendary Prince Rám, the Indian original of the Greek hero ‘Menelaus’. The epic of the Ramayan (India’s Iliad) is too long to repeat here, but seeing it invoked by the zealots of the B.J.P., is an insult to anyone who knows it, and goes to inform my own response as well.
My response to the B.J.P., and to all self-proclaimed ‘Hindu Nationalists’ everywhere, is this: if we Hindus set ourselves up as the world’s elite;–– Aryans as much in the Nazi, as in the original Sanskrit sense of the word;–– if we say, in other words, We are right and everyone else is wrong, why then do we worship Rám, who accepted a hermitess’ half-eaten fruit? Who went into exile, rather than fight his brothers for their father’s throne? If we make a cause of war over a simple choice of what god to worship, why do we honor Rám, who to rescue his kidnapped wife, teamed up with a subspecies of hominin (called ‘Vaanars’ in the text), whom neither the sages of his day, or the scientists of ours, even considered human?
I should go on to say: is it such a great offence, to worship the Creator alone, as Muslims do, and consider all the lesser immortals as His creations? Surely not. Whom did the lesser immortals worship, long ago before human civilization was out of the Stone Age, if not Him? Allah or Brahman, or Ra-Atum or Ahura Mazda or the first of the Elohim: these are all names for Him to whom all the world, from Big Bang to Cosmic Contraction, is the blink of an eye.
Moreover, ecumenism is the distinguishing tradition of greatness in India. All our greatest and most legendary rulers have been exemplars of it: the very idea of religious tolerance was created by such kings as Chandragupta Maurya, his descendant Ashoka, the next dynasty’s Vikramditya, and the Mughal emperor, Jalal-al-din Mohammed Akbar. Who is the hero, the very type and example of a good king, in Early Modern times? Akbar, who welcomed all faiths, all traditions, all customs, and suppressed nothing but cruelty. Who is the archfiend, the very type and example of an evil king, in those times? his descendant Aurangzeb, who tolerated no faiths, no traditions, no customs but those he chose himself, and suppressed everything but cruelty.
The secular, ecumenical state is not a modern idea, nor was it imposed by the Occident. It was an ideal embraced by all those good kings mentioned above: Rám, Chandragupta, Ashoka, Vikramditya, and Akbar, and many more. It was introduced on the national scale, for the first time as far as we know, by Cyrus the Great, the first emperor of Persia. Why was he the Great? I might ask. Not because he conquered other kings (though he certainly did); not because he was generous (though he undoubtedly was); not because he built cities, roads, aqueducts, canals, and gigantic memorials (though he indisputably did those things); but because he allowed freedom of practice under his rule. He said, more or less, to all newly-conquered peoples: you may follow your own laws, worship your own gods, live in your ancestral homes, hold your own festivals, etc., as long as you answer to me. That made him the Great, and that made him a good king. We can do no better than to follow his example. The descendants of his people still live among us; they are the Parsi people, and they are as Indian as its food.
Not to flog a dead horse, I should refrain from the mention of Mahatma Gandhi, and the Buddha before him: liberators both, to whom we should not be ungrateful for our freedom, and yet to whom it is vilest ingratitude to show intolerance. But so ends all I would say to the nationalists in India, and I beg my readers to take heed of this message.
Would it seem contrived and unbelievable to you if I suggested that the United States has its own angel? Its own demon? Would it be significant or silly to suppose that as a nation we are attended by our very own celestial intercessor who may be benevolent, or possibly malevolent, or both, but whose task is to exercise influence in our affairs? Bit of a stretch, huh?
Don’t be too quick to dismiss the idea out of hand. Before going any further, if you hold them, please suspend your rationalist, materialist, and/or humanist predispositions to reject any idea, experience, or tradition of spirituality that doesn’t fit in your wheelhouse. For the rest of you, if you follow a spiritual practice or religious tradition whose teaching posits an extramundane reality and experience, the kind that might be described by such words as numinous or mystical, transcendent or metaphysical, do not suppose that what I am talking about is the same phenomena affirmed by your particular practice or tradition.
What I mean by “angel” and “demon” is more aptly understood as daimon (δαίμων), which in ancient Greece was the term that alluded to the generalized and inscrutable agency that lay outside human capacity but which nevertheless stimulated and influenced the course of events. It was the animation of both desirable and undesirable forces that led inexorably toward an end or outcome that seemed either inevitable or at least foreshadowed by all that preceded it. Daimon portended and effectuated either good or bad fortune, and denoted anything that arose as a determination of human existence, such as failure, tribulation, or death, or success, felicity, or wealth. In mythology and philosophy as well as popular belief, daimon was construed as the mercurial and indeterminable potencies that moved reality along in all its complexity and bewilderment.
It is from this notion of daimon in Greco-Roman antiquity that our Christian notion of “demons” is derived; in Latin it is daemon, and it is where we get the English words demon and demonic (daimonion, δαιμόνιον). A daimon could be good or evil, benign or malicious, protective or adversarial, but in either case they permeated the human social world and brought guidance, direction, control, and not infrequently, activity that was taken to be tragically or comedically magical. In popular belief and mythology, daimons (pl) were thought of as non-human and immaterial beings who nonetheless became embodied and emplaced; they were not “gods” per se, but they exhibited superhuman power in the course of their activities. Thus they could be thought of as a sort of tertium quid, neither deity nor human, but an amazing and amusing mixture of both.
Readers of Plato will remember his “Socrates’ Defense (Apology),” where Socrates acknowledges that the reason he never entered into the politics of the public square was that his daimon prevented him: “I am subject to a divine or supernatural experience [daimonion]…. It began in my early childhood—a sort of voice which comes to me, and when it comes it always dissuades me from what I am proposing to do, and never urges me on. It is this that debars me from entering public life” (Apology, 31c-d). Less than the “voice of God” but more than “my own conscience,” this daimon operated as a peculiar mode of extra-human activity or force that influenced or governed behavior, and as such it was not necessarily associated with any particular “deity.”
Analogously, we speak of “being under the influence of” something or somebody. Some like to think that a layer of protection has been extended inexplicably and undeservedly by a “guardian angel.” There is an entire class of clerics whose purpose and skill are directed toward ridding a person or place of an unwanted and sinister presence we simply call a “demon.” We may not “believe” in any of this, but we nevertheless seem, almost effortlessly, to discern connections and meanings in otherwise discrete and isolated events, formulating overarching explanations that disclose motives of action and plausible outcomes. In this way we think we perceive the social, economic, or political “forces” at work, guiding and shaping the events and relations as they unfold, and detecting whether their final scenario will be benevolent or malevolent. It would not be too much of a stretch to use the word daimon to refer to the micro-, meso-, and macro-level forces and influences that characterize the infrastructure and superstructure of our socioeconomic environment. Sociologists, political scientists, economists, journalists, artists, educators, agriculturalists, religionists, and a host of others all acknowledge the importance of the forces or dynamics operative in the circumstances and contexts in which our lives play out. So it is that we look for, and attend to, the daimons at work in the worlds we inhabit.
Think for a moment about the “spirit of America.” What does that mean? For openers, it is actually a “thing,” at least as the phrase is pressed to serve as a descriptor of some entity. A quick search shows that this phrase refers to an automobile, a B-2 bomber, a blimp, a boat. It is the name of a motion picture, a piece of music, and a band. It also designates an organization that provides material support to American military and diplomatic personnel, and a program that offers safe and comprehensive water-based education and recreation. More recently, it designated an event in the White House presented as a showcase for the products manufactured by small businesses.
In these instances, “spirit of America” is a reference to something intangible that is nonetheless taken to be the essence and ethos of this nation. Pondering this, I reflect on those qualities and characteristics typically associated with this country: freedom, equality, rights, opportunity, justice, empowerment, entrepreneurship, individualism, religion, etc. The particular confluence and embodiment of these could be named as the complex American daimon; their presence and movement animate our action. But I also reflect on more malefic qualities and characteristics: bondage, oppression, violence, impoverishment, deprivation, scarcity, unemployment, disenfranchisement, genocide. These too are part and parcel of the national experience, and just as much an expression of the national daimon.
If we want to probe further into this “spirit of America,” we need to think about what makes up the American character and temperament. Each of us has an image of this nation that exhibits certain features, certain attributes or qualities that we believe distinguish this nation from all others. In thinking along these lines, we are not trying to reify any abstractions that describe America, but we do recognize that an abstract idea like “freedom” or “equality,”“deprivation” or “violence” require instantiation to be perceived as real. Unless someone can point to concrete instances of a characteristic, that characteristic can hardly be said to exist materially or authentically. The abstract idea denoted by the characteristic does not really exist apart from this concreteness, so the notion of a country’s character or temperament must be read off the accumulated instances that materialize its qualities or attributes. The presence and activity of a daimon is recognizable from its exhibition in human behavior.
Unfortunately, it is this combination of benevolent and malevolent qualities or attributes in this nation’s character that materializes both the auspicious and the ominous in an admixture of sunlight and shade; the United States exists as the realization of lightness and darkness, order and chaos, discerned and experienced by its inhabitants in rhythmical alternations of energy and impotence, strength and atrophy, flourishing and withering. At the present moment, our politics, economy, and sociality are so profoundly polarized that it does not require imagination to contend this circumstance is itself an instantiation of the bipolarization of lightness and darkness.
So what are the daimons that animate the favorable and unfavorable characteristics and qualities that are instantiated in the conduct of our national life? In engaging this admixture within our nation, I recognize the forces at work in our circumstances are the daimons that activate our own beliefs, attitudes, values, and behaviors. For example, the impetus to cultivate care and compassion in our national community is a daimon, as is the incitement to passivity and indifference among our citizens. The shortage of exhibitions of the virtues of integrity and truthfulness among our national leaders at the moment suggests that the daimon most assuredly at work is the one animating deceit and duplicity. Wherever there is a cultural environment that condones the practice of these vices so that their exhibition is construed as normal and acceptable, there we have the extra-personal force of a daimon at work. The exhibitions of compassion and the concern for fairness, though evident to a lesser degree, are also manifestations of a more virtuous daimon. Likewise, instances of vulgarity, pettiness, irascibility, and cowardice are rendered acceptable in the private and public places of our country because they are the regularized and normalized behaviors of our nation’s leaders having been inspired by a daimon of a different sort.
To be clear, daimons of benevolence and malevolence inhabit us all, as individuals and as communities constituting a larger society. The notion of daimon entails a relationship of reciprocity between the individual and the larger society; the health and/or the pathology of one stand in a relationship of mutuality and influence with the other. Such a relationship is evident when an individual takes on the attitudes, values, and behaviors affirmed and cultivated by the persons and institutions with which he or she identifies. Likewise, the placement of one in a social network makes possible his or her contribution to the ongoing formation and extension of that network’s culture. It would not be in error to refer to this reciprocity as the daimon at work.
We are, all of us, as individuals and as groups, compounds of rationality and affect, knowledge and ignorance. We are imbued with what we know and feel, and what we believe others to know and feel; it is thus useful to think in terms of common sense, even though the content of that sense is certainly variable within and between groups. Our lives daily are situated at the small and large intersections where choices have to be made about what daimon we will pay attention to in our attitudes and behaviors. We are, as one and as many, too easily and perhaps too naturally prone to excesses and deficiencies at a time when what is most needed is a daimon to inspire and enliven toward the common good. We are, in short, in need of a national exorcism and a habitation by a more virtuous spirit.
Humans first began to settle in Ireland about 10,000 years ago. These Mesolithic hunters and gatherers brought with them animistic religious beliefs and practices. With the transition to a lifestyle that was dependent upon domesticated plants and animals about 6,000 years ago, the religion changed. Spirits which had once animated animals and places, now became gods and goddesses. With the conversion to Christianity which began about 300 CE, the old deities began to disappear, either subsumed into Christianity or suppressed by the new religion.
They are really good at it. ”Woke”, a good term, has been given a whole other meaning by those who would rebrand it in an attempt to cover up centuries of injustice are not even. Many use it as a cudgel to bash the progressive movement are woefully unaware of its meaning and intent. They just know they were told they shouldn’t like it—that it should be pronounced with a sneer. Let’s start here; to be woke in the current usage is to be culturally alert and aware of longstanding injustices:
WOKE
chiefly US slang
aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)
--Merriam-Webster Dictionary
woke, adjective: Originally: well-informed, up-to-date. Now chiefly: alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice; frequently instay woke.
--OED
One would be hard-pressed to advocate for being “unwoke” given the primary definitions above, however, turning a word or phrase into a slur is what the disingenuous do. Terms like “liberal” and “socialism” have been earlier victims of right-wing rebranding. It works, to an extent. because those inclined to agree with conservative policies require shorthand to simplify their arguments and reduce them to a word, or in some cases, a syllable. And for their mindless followers who mimic and retweet in the great echo chambers of their Twitterverse, words needn’t be defined to become weaponized. In their post-truth world cynicism blithely clouds what is real.
branding misses the point
“Progressive” has become another useful term for Republicans and even some Democrats to redefine and mock. “Owning libs” is a past-time worthy of a chyron on some talking heads program dedicated to reengineering reality to fit their audience’s biases. In its current form, woke is used to denigrate the long due investments in our society found in the BBB bill--- or as facile excuses for the loss of an election. It is au courant (see Maureen Dowd and James Carville)to point out the massive spending contained in the bill while refusing to admit that the costs are offset by tax reforms that will enhance even those who are asked to pay their fair share. Only the truly greedy and morally blind can look beyond -provisions in the bill to curb the oncoming climate crisis, child care, and education benefits, health care reforms, affordable housing, among other programs that will benefit the economy in general and the middle class in particular. That is not to deny the overall benefits that would accrue to all levels of society including the wealthy.
For the Republicans, there is not one dollar that could be spent as a wise investment in the future. They are determined to maintain a society that governs for the rich and powerful at the expense of the rest of us. Rich and powerful who hide within faceless corporations whose investment in even their own futures is a risk they are unwilling to bear. Call them the wokeless, or the unwoke, but their position is untenable. They are like the carriage makers who doubled down on wagon wheels and scoffed at the impracticality of the newfangled horseless carriage. They are fighting the inevitable progress that dooms all who trade in holding onto the past, finding comfort and personal advantage in the status quo. Theirs is a future on tenterhooks, denying an inevitability that cannot help but swallow them up.
The unwoke rail against movements like Black Lives Matter that arise out of the lingering injustices of the past. While terms like "defund the police" may be a less than artful expression for the anger and frustration of a black community under siege by renegade police, unarmed black men and women being wantonly murdered is real:
And the opposition from Republicans and moderates within the Democratic Party that Biden is experiencing with his "progressive" agenda, denies that the greatest portion of the agenda is both necessary and prudent. Polling indicates that the programs promised in the bill are widely popular among voters. Taken in the context of history, the reconciliation bill is less “progressive” than it is pragmatic. The effects of climate change that we are experiencing worldwide are alone a convincing argument for action. Those opposed seem to have all been tricked by the wait-and-see police who govern the pace of progress. They would have us slow-walk an end to racism--- as if justice requires caution; drag out action on global warming--- as if the climate will accommodate the urgency of greed and inaction while modern-day Thernardiers exact the last bit of profit from fossil fuels and carbon. These may meet progressive ends, the concepts, however, are more rational than political.
In an article entitled “What does woke mean?” Michael Ruiz, a Fox News reporter, traces its etymology back to a 1962 New York Times article about Fox aficionadoes’ favorite scapegoats:
So an addition to meaning aware and progressive, many people now interpret woke to be a way to describe people who would rather silence their critics than listen to them.
That’s entirely different than what the word meant when it first appeared in print.
That was in a 1962New York Timesarticle about beatniks and pop culture absorbing jazz music and African American slang from Harlem,Oxfordrevealed in a June 2017 article about new words heading into the dictionary.
That article, written by the Black New York City novelist William Melvin Kelley was titled, "If you’re woke, you dig it"– meaning if you’re in the know, you understand…
---Michael Ruiz, foxnews.com
As the Jon Lovitz character and inveterate liar Tommy Flanagan would retort, “Yeah, that’s the ticket!”
inevitable
Building Back Better, despite the claims of those who believe progressives are alien spawns and that Democrats eat babies, is more pragmatic than visionary. There is a surrender on the part of opponents to the immediacy of the future. Is there anyone who doubts the inevitability of EV’s dominating our highways or of the economic foolishness of investing in the future of fossil fuels? Do we question today the wisdom of ponying up the dollars for the federal highway system?
The stubborn denial of the future being orchestrated in Congress by Republicans and some moderates is a vestige of their fear. Leadership requires an ability to forge solutions that test the understanding of voters who need to be advised but not necessarily advisors. For them, the future is a scary thought rife with a potential for personal discomfort. The curse for elected leaders who fear their constituents and, therefore, yield their authority to maintain favor,is that tomorrow is as invidious and intolerable as today and yesterday are to the so-called woke. It is always too late to undo the past and never too soon to envision the future. Those who reject change are represented by the Roman mythical goddess, Invidia (Nemesis in Greek mythology), goddess of greed and envy. Renaissance artists depicted her as unflatteringly self-destructive:
Her face was sickly pale, her whole body lean and wasted, and she squinted horribly; her teeth were discoloured and decayed, her poisonous breast of a greenish hue, and her tongue dripped venom. … Gnawing at others, and being gnawed, she was herself her own torment.
--Ovid, Metamorphoses
Like her modern descendants who act as their own worst enemy by fighting off a future they cannot avoid, these are the unwoke—a species doomed by their own bitterness and self-loathing to a future surely determined by others.
So to return to the question I asked at the beginning, and never answered, who or what was the first vampire? I didn’t answer because it’s pretty hard to say. Where does the line between blood-drinking demons or evil spirits and actual vampires lie? Are they both the same? Is one the progenitor of the other? We can look to the Bible, or further, as much of what is in that Holy Book is based on earlier legend anyway, and there we find one of the candidates for the first vampire, who is, rather ironically, a woman.
Lilith, or Lilitu
Perhaps marking one of the first, but enduring, beliefs that women cause all the trouble (thank you, Book of Genesis!) Lilith crops up in Hebrew belief as the first wife of Adam, but is originally based on figures from ancient Assyrian and Babylonian myth, where she is known as Lilitu, which means night hag, night demon, night monster etc. Unlike the Christian Eve, who is said to have been created from one of Adam’s ribs, Lilith is depicted as having been made from the same clay as him, so technically while Eve would be seen, from the moment of her creation, as a part of and therefore inferior to Adam, Lilith can be seen to be all but equal to him. Nevertheless, according to Hebrew scripture, having refused to be subservient to Adam she ran off and got it on with an angel, said to be Sammael, the Jewish figure of Satan himself, afterwards refusing to return to the Garden of Eden.
Although it’s hard to confirm, with such ancient religions leaving behind few written accounts and ideas and opinions changing as time continues its inexorable march, Lilith in Sumerian belief seems to have been a demon who flew around the underworld bringing nightmares, and is seen as a hateful figure who can, something like a succubus, transform herself into the likeness of a man’s wife and conceive a child with him. Later, Lilith would seek revenge upon the true children of the man and woman, making her a thing to be feared by children and parents alike. This legend would survive into Hebrew times, where the words “lilith-abi” would be inscribed on four amulets hung in a child’s bedroom by Jewish mothers, meaning “Lilith - begone!” and give us our present-day word lullaby.
From the stories told about her, it’s probably fair to demote, or promote, Lilith to the level of a witch - perhaps the first witch - rather than a vampire, but she is said to have drank the blood of infants and to have stirred the desire of men, whereas the vampire, particularly the romantic variation, certainly directed his sexual power at women, or occasionally, if female, at men. There are instances of homosexual or at least bisexual vampires in the writings of Rice and Lee, but they don’t seem to be based on any legend and are surely just there for the advancement of their stories and the development of their characters.
Lamia
Essentially another incarnation of Lilith, Lamia was changed into a bestial being by the Greek goddess Hera after all her children had been destroyed by Zeus’s wife (or she had compelled Lamia to do so herself) in retaliation for Lamia sleeping with her husband. Alternatively, she was a Libyan queen who ordered infants snatched, Herod-like, from their mothers and killed, her savagery affecting her appearance and turning her into a monster. More horribly, the Greek philosopher Aristotle spoke of a ravening beast which tore open the bellies of pregnant mothers and devoured the fetuses. Lamia is the first of these beings to be given shape-shifting abilities, something that would become attached to the vampire myth.
Because of the above, the Lamia became a name used to frighten children into good behaviour, a kind of ancient bogeyman, and she began to be depicted as half-woman, half-serpent. This possibly removes her from the running for being a true vampire, but there are references to her and her kind sucking and drinking blood as well as seducing sleeping men, so some aspects are definitely there. Intelligence and gentility, however, attributes given to the modern vampire, are not: Lamia and her fellow creatures are said to be stupid, and to stink.
A similar creature, called the empousa, was known to target young men for the quality and purity of their blood, and would fatten up her victims before killing and devouring them. This is not necessarily something that translated to the later vampire myths, though Dracula is seen encouraging Jonathan Harker to eat at his castle, while he, the Count, partakes of no food, and it is later revealed that there are three hungry female acolyte vampires in the cellars or dungeon of the castle who wish to feed on him. Other features of the empousa, such as having a foot made of bronze or cow dung, and being frightened away by loud noises, certainly do not conform to our stereotype of the vampire.
Strix
Perhaps leading to the involvement of the vampire bat in the legend, the strix was a bird of antiquity said to feed on the blood and flesh of humans. Description of it as a “nocturnally crying creature which positioned its feet upwards and head below” lends more weight to this possibility. The strix is the first case where we hear of the efficacy of garlic against the beast, which might help explain why it’s seen as being useful in warding off vampires. Strix were also said to be the transformed Polyphontes, who was punished by the gods for her and her sons’ cannibalistic tendencies (this also explains why these strange birds craved human flesh and blood). Striges (plural of strix) have been called “vampire owls”, which certainly fits the description of their behaviour. Later, it was believed that striges transformed into witches, and vice versa, lending more credence to the myth of their association with vampires and creatures of darkness.
Vetala
Really more a precursor to the Haitian zombie, the vetala comes from Indian legend, where it would inhabit the corpse of a recently-buried person and reanimate it, though it does not seem to have been to any evil end, more for mischief. Additionally, vetala are not said to have drank blood, though they did hang upside-down like bats.
Shtriga and dhampir
Dhampir sounds very close, doesn’t it? But let’s deal with shtriga first. Basically witches in Albanian folklore, they were said to possess the evil eye and could curse people, being the only ones who could lift the curse. It was feared they sucked the blood of infants at night, and transformed into flying insects once they had had their fill. One explanation offered for their being evil is that they were childless women, who were jealous of the offspring of others. Again, garlic was used to ward against them or banish them. The crucifix and holy water comes in here too, perhaps for the first time, though as usual it’s the Catholic Church trying to assert its power over the pagan monsters. Despite what I said about the name though, dhampirs can’t be considered as forebears of the vampire, as they appear to be the result of a union between a vampire and a human. In fact, Slavic tradition has it that dhampirs could see vampires who were invisible to other eyes, and this led to many of them pursuing a career as vampire hunters. Dhampirs were supposed to have no shadow - a handy attribute if you are a vampire hunter - and no bones (not quite so handy), making them seem “slippery and jelly-like”. Uh-huh. Some of the more famous fictional dhampirs are Blade, Connor from the seriesAngeland Rayne from the movieBloodrayne.
Moroi and Strigoi
One of almost the birthplaces of the vampire, at least the romantic, novellised one, is Romania, and Stoker set his seminal novel near here, in the Carpathian Mountains. Not too surprising, when you hear the tales and beliefs that emanated from that area. Moroi were basically ghosts which left the grave to trouble the living, while strigoi were witches with two hearts and two souls, which could send out their spirits at night to meet up with others of their kind and attack and consume the blood of animals and humans. After death, strigoi would roam the night, attacking their living family, drinking their blood. Interestingly, in Romanian folklore there were several ways people could become vampires, and some were born fated to be nightcrawlers. A living strigoi would, when she passed away, become a revenant, a dead (or undead) strigoi, but any unbaptised child, anyone who was born with a caul, an extra nipple, a tail or extra hair was also doomed to become a vampire. If you happened to be the seventh boy or seventh girl in a family of all the same sex, that was it for you: vampire in the making. Similarly, if your mother had the bad luck to have a black cat cross her path, if you were born too early, out of wedlock or had blue eyes and red hair your fate was sealed. A pregnant woman who didn’t eat salt, or one considered a strigoi was liable to give birth to a vampire, and anyone who died an unnatural death was also at risk.
Born to Darkness: Recipe for a Vampire
Following on from the above, the Slavic countries seem to have held very firm ideas about how one became a vampire, so let’s have a look at some of them here.
Dabbling in the black arts, being a conjurer or magician
Being a person of poor moral fibre
Unnatural death
Untimely death
Suicide
Born with a caul
Born with a tail
Improperly buried
Animal jumping or bird flying over the corpse or the empty grave
Incest between mother and son
Living a life that was not pious
Dying alone or unseen
Corpse swelling or turning black before burial
Some Slavic regions believed the genesis or birth of the vampire was a gradual event which went in stages. In the first forty days the vampire was most vulnerable, as it started out as an invisible shadow (?) and then as it fed gradually got stronger, forming an invisible (again) boneless, jelly-like mass before finally taking on a full human body. It was then free to roam, even visiting its widow or other women and having children by them. These children had the special sight that resulted in their being the dhampirs as noted above, preparing them for a life as vampire hunters. Not quite following in father’s footsteps, then!
So much for “real” vampires, so far at least. We’ve explored how vampires are supposed to be created, how they can be killed or thwarted, we’ve looked into some of the beliefs surrounding them (and will again later, going a little deeper) and we’ve theorised about who or what the very first vampires were, where they came from. We’ve outlined the characteristics, powers and the various Achilles heels of vampires, and seen the role religion, especially Christianity plays or played in keeping them at bay or destroying them.
But where vampires really started to come to life, so to speak, was in the pages of eighteenth and nineteenth century literature. Gothic fantasies, horror stories, even romances as humans began to have encounters with these evil but fascinating beings. In fact, were it not for the various stories and novels written about them, it’s likely the vampire would be forgotten now as an ancient remnant of an ignorant belief, the name Dracula would mean nothing to us, and Hollywood would have had to look elsewhere for its big moneyspinners.
So let’s look next at vampire literature, and media later, but written material first. And if I can, I want to try to do this chronologically. Which means we begin with this.
With the announcement that Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer will finally be hanging up his robe and retiring, the Democratic Party has a chance to nominate a justice that technically cannot be stolen away by Mitch McConnell. President Biden has long made a pledge to nominate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, and there are quite a few well-regarded candidates being written about as a result. Since the last two Supreme Court justices placed on the court by unpopular president Donald Trump were tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum, the right-wing of the country is stretching itself to complain that the potential nomination of a Black woman to the Supreme Court is reverse racism.*
The argument goes that in campaigning on and promoting one’s intentions to put a woman of color on the Supreme Court, President Biden is discriminating against all of those white people willing to do the bidding of the Federalist Society. Of course, many news outlets are pointing out that the pope of the GOP, Ronald Reagan, made a similar promise back when he was doing sketchy shit to win the presidency of the United States. This has forced right-wingers along the entire spectrum of the GOP, from the duplicitous and craven Sen. Susan Collins to the scary fascist Sen. Josh Hawley, to distance themselves from, and set themselves at odds with, their last made-up example of a successful Republican administration.
*The term “reverse racism” is an acknowledgment that the person claiming it is an ignorant racist.
This, obviously, is an artistic rendering of Medusa. I pulled it off of Creativecommon.org, an organization that makes certain images legal to feature. Apologies. Had I my druthers, the image I would have featured would have been that of the much fairer Elizabeth Koch (https://images.app.goo.gl/fj7wdVB2Z38XsJ6R6) daughter and heir apparent of Charles Koch, ALEC supporter and billionaire once behind Americans for Prosperity along with a laundry list of other Republican think tanks that have conglomerated to weaken federal regulations – particularly those on the environment as they impede on Koch Industries profits. He is also a participant of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC): A group that originally splintered off from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1972 realizing that if the working poor could unionize to improve their life circumstances, why not the wealthy? ALEC decided the best way forward to organize would be to invest in lobbyists to write laws that would enable fossil fuel industrial companies like Peabody Energy and a slurry of others to push climate change denial hence relaxing EPA regulations and enabling Chevron, Exxon-Mobil, Shell et al to prospect public areas, offshore areas, and wherever else they deigned. This way they could produce synthetic products that were non-biodegradable like polyester. In so doing they would also frack mountains and build the nation’s energy portfolio but at great cost to the forests, new frontiers like Alaska, animals, mountains (potentially creating man-made seismic activity), and pollute our land, water, and air so egregiously that some people’s water became un-drinkable and cancer rates in certain areas, particularly BIPOC areas, began to skyrocket. Where did Charles’ and his recently deceased brother, David (48% equal partners of Koch Industries) money come from? Their dad, Fred C. Koch (radical conservative charter member of the John Birch Society), who by virtue of being restricted from drilling in certain areas he wanted to explore for fossil fuel energy by that same regulatory agency, decided he could only accomplish these dreams abroad. He began in the Soviet Union (even though the U.S. officially ended ties with the communist nation) and opened up their first oil refineries. When his five year contract with them was over he decided to give aid and comfort to another burgeoning American enemy, Nazi Germany, by prospecting for oil in their country and finally acquiring success with an oil field that yielded over one thousand tons of crude which would be refined into high octane fuel for the Luftwaffes which would go on to kill more than 40 thousand civilians and destroy over a million homes. He praised the Axis powers as he excoriated American workers in 1938: “Although nobody agrees with me, I am of the opinion that the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy, and Japan, simply because they are all working and working hard” and “The laboring people in those countries are proportionately much better off than they are any place else in the world. When you contrast the state of mind of Germany today with what it was in 1925 you begin to think that perhaps this course of idleness, feeding at the public trough, dependence on government, etc., with which we are afflicted is not permanent and can be overcome.” You know. Because dustbowl U.S.A. during the depression was no excuse Americans should feel as though they were being overcome by adversity. Pull yourselves up by your bootstraps people! No boots? Buy some boots on layaway and pull yourselves up by them people! After he himself was criticized for doing business with a fascist enemy nation he offered the all-too-common excuse {paraphrased}, “Well, everyone was doing a little hanky panky with Nazi Germany during those years. It’s not like anyone had any real idea what it was they were doing in their concentration camps.” Of course he wasn’t wrong. Here’s a list now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_the_Holocaust You may be or have been a customer to one of these yourself. I know I have. And I was bar mitzvahed in 1984! However, two wrongs or 37 wrongs, as was the case here, do not make a right. What does all this have to do with Elizebeth Koch? How does any of this have anything to do with Roman Myth? Well. Let’s start with the latter. As most of us know Roman and Greek myth are essentially the same, the names of the gods being the only major distinction. Gods like Jupiter (Roman Zeus), Neptune (Roman Poseidon), Mercury (Roman Hermes), Minerva (Roman Athena) et al, but the stories were almost identical and Ovid, Roman poet, reinterpreted a lot of them. Jupiter, like Zeus, was basically a serial rapist. This was his chronic, routine behavior, and rather than offer to pick up the dinner check and broadway show, felt, as a greater god, all of creation was his to subordinate. Prolifically cheating on Juno (Roman Hera), whom he also raped, and would essentially blackmail into marrying because she would otherwise have a child out of wedlock. That’s how the gods rolled back then. No computers? No #metoo movement! I think he raped over twenty naiads (water nymphs?).He would shape change into something aesthetically pleasing, lowering their defenses, and then >pounce< Now, Medusa was a Gorgon. I’m not entirely sure what a Gorgon was supposed to be. There were only three of them, allegedly immortal (except Medusa somehow), and she was the prettiest of all three sisters. She was an AVID Minerva cleric and took the vow of chastity to devote her life to this goddess’s temple, the rectory for which, I believe she slept in. Though one might think Jupiter would set his sights on this cleric with beautiful locks, this time Neptune beat him to it, he taking a shine to this fine Gorgon. In Hesiod’s Greek interpretation Poseidon “seduced” her, but Ovid’s interpretation of Neptune’s trespass of Minerva’s temple led to him “violating” the priestess. Minerva was not pleased. And it wasn’t her uncle to whom she would take great umbrage but rather her very own cleric – for breaking her celibacy vow in her own temple, no less (since, of course, she’d dressed provocatively or something) – and transformed her into the monster we think of when we think of Medusa today: a creature with snakes for hair who was so hideous that anyone who’d lay eyes on her would turn to stone. Then Minerva flew her over to some desolate rock of an island far from any other to strand her there until Perseus would invade her cave and decapitate her. A little known factoid would occur after this. Just as Minerva was born, cleaving open the forehead of Jupiter, somehow Medusa’s and Neptune’s issue would be the white winged horse we now know as Pegasus, somehow climbing out of her severed neck. Ipso facto: Something beautiful emerging from something hideous. And I compare. What is Elizebeth Koch – conveniently apolitical – publisher of Catapult and its series of offshoots (Soft Skull, Balloon, and Counterpoint – the Sierra Club quixotically publishing one of their stories in one of her labels) doing to oppose her father and his father’s repulsiveness? Yes, she’s the Pegasus of this story. Great beauty emerging from great ugliness. She cares about people’s thoughts on some level, or she wouldn’t publish them. Yet she cautiously cloaks her own, I think, because she’s either worried about the emotional discord she might provoke in her life by opposing daddy or worried about her inheritance (or both?) It’s not as though Charles and David hadn’t attempted to blackmail their brother Fred Koch because they suspected he was gay. Charles and David fired William Koch in 1981 because they suspected he was attempting to take over of the company from Charles. A family of sharks, indeed. Don’t mistake me. Elizabeth’s brother, Chase, in my view, has an equal role in repudiating his family’s fortune and the means to which they acquired it. And he’s backed some admirable charities including one’s that focus on urban impoverishment and black kids winding up at the business end of many a cop’s gun, but in light of the fact he ultimately joined his father’s company only a few years before he publicly eschewed it and got a slap on the wrist remonstration for a vehicular homicide involving him slaughtering a 12-year-old boy after running a red light he, like many marketing majors, is something of a black hole of charisma. It doesn’t appear to me like he’s going to “Take on the establishment from the inside.” He is a Koch, and, apart from a series of philanthropic positions he’ll surely endow to shine up his golden turd, will always be one. I may very well be wrong, but in Elizabeth I see actual conflict. She seems to be haunted by her legacy, and her development of Catapult is like a solution in search of an agenda. In its intro landing page she acknowledges she’s not entirely sure of what she is, what she thinks, and she’s looking for writers who share her puzzle. And Elizabeth, if you ever wind up reading this: You could be the little mouse who stayed mum, hid behind her pampered station in life, and opened up a publication or two to give a voice to the voiceless? Or you could be the little mouse that finally roared. Yes, there would be consequences. But it’s not as though you would ever starve or be alienated from the world. If anything you would be embraced by it wholeheartedly for the first time. Some capital, like political capital, is earned not by hoarding but by giving away. John Cleese, John Lennon, and David Bowie were all approached to be knighted. Bowie twice. They all refused the honor because they took issue with swearing allegiance to “church and empire.” In doing so they proved there is at least as much prestige in refusing an honor as there is in accepting one. You could probably run for president being the one Koch who could have been a billionaire, but refused to recuse your opinion out of principle and not simply some gauche philanthropic polished turd to be tossed out to the public so that you can continue to avoid politics. You could be a heroine to nation, the star of TED talks, and fascination to the world while conclusively owing nothing to no one. The world needs its Pegasus. Mobil (before it became Exxon-Mobil) once chose it as its logo and did so for good reason. People responded to it, and, as sure as I’m typing here, they would respond to you.
like Christmas Eve, really just prologue. The daylight weakens, here in the northern hemisphere, for seven more long weeks. More hours of night, more time for haunting!
Orion, the Hunter, strides across the autumn sky.
So, a miscellany for the year's decline. But first:
"Occult and Psychical Sciences on DK" is aspooky, fun, and speculative group established by Angmar and named for the vintage Complete Illustrated Book of Occult and Psychical Sciences by Walter B. Gibson (1966). The group welcomes tales and histories of the spooky and scary, related art, personal anecdotes, and general paranormal, philosophical, metaphysical, arcane, esoteric, and existential topics, as well as free-floating conversation about the unexplained. (No claims to actual scientific method--for the most part--are made or implied.) Interested in joining? Contact Angmar.
This poem composed itself some months ago, but wanted saving for the season.
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Night Fall
.
No autumn's easy. While heat draws and drains
Out of the twilight, we make children paint
In fiery reds and luscious oranges
The fragile pageantry of a senescence
(DK library, uploaded by DownHeah Mississippi)
Assuring them this chill is nothing serious.
Redemption's on the road already, nearly here.
"Next month," we promise heartily. "Next year."
We trick our doors with mockeries of fear
(DK library, uploaded by jck)
And fortify ourselves with feastings. Over all
Arches the Hunter. Small lives slip underground
With their supplies. The deer disguise
Their slender shins as saplings, antlers as branches.
(DK library, uploaded by funningforest)
And in the dark, amid the wind-whippped trees,
The last leaf frees itself, and tries the breeze.
.
(DK library, uploaded by lostintheozarks)
(Poem copyright Clio2, 2022)
At the time this poem coalesced, last
spring, my mother, though I did not consciously know this at the time, was already declining towards her death.
DK member novapsyche conducted a monthlong poetry writing workshop. For some reason in this workshop, over and over, my responses to the exercises kept focusing back on Mom, in one way or another.
This August, she took a little fall in her apartment. It did not seem very serious at first, but the general decline became sharp and steep. She died in the early hours of Sept. 18, just three days short of her 95th birthday.
Sorting through personal and family things alone in her apartment. Silences, secrets, sorrows sift from the sheets of photo albums. I gpt home for a rest, was in bed immobile, shivering hot and cold, nerves juddering for 24 hours. (Like a 24-hour bug , it got better.)
What is death? Her unsouled apartment queried.
What is...just everything?
And then...what, nothing? (Which, I believe, is what she believed. Maybe.)
We know how autumn and winter,
according to ancient Greek myth, followed when Hades, ruler of the dead, carried off Persephone to a forced marriage in his underground kingdom. Hades possessed a conventional palace, similar to the above-ground palaces of human kings--except that all the inhabitants of the kingdom were deceased...and the impressive structure was lit only by flames. To reach it, the dead must go a long journey, by land and water, menaced by monsters and needing money to pay the ferryman.
Hades and Persephone at home. The lady holds a torch. TBH, she looks a little pissed off, to me, like she might even be about to swack him one.
In northern Europe, by contrast, there is
some evidence to suggest that the dead may have been thought to inhabit a parallel world that was a mirror image of ours, positioned upside down and not all that far from the surface of the earth (or water). (Free to view, courtesy of Cambridge University Press, 2021 article, "The inverted dead in Bronze Age barrows.")
Ancient people in what is now Britain, Holland, France and Germany over thousands of years ritually buried or deposited in fresh water, at specific locations, quantities of human and animal bones, weapons, ornaments and ritual objects, perhaps as offerings to the underworld. Older than Stonehenge, this Mesolithic ritual headpiece made from a deer skull and horns is one of 21 excavated at Star Carr in Yorkshire. (Photo: British Museum) More about Star Carr: en.wikipedia.org/...
RELATED: In case you missed it, check out Dr Lori's rundown on Halloween, including the ancient pagan traditions of Samhain.
Later, in Christianized Europe, of course,
you got your choice...
Or...
Oops, took the wrong exit--get me out of here!
All Saints' Day, also known as All Hallows' Day,the Feast of All Saints...and Hallowmass,is a Christian solemnity celebrated in honour of all the saintsof the church, whether they are known or unknown.
(There are unknown saints ! Who knew? But of course there are. Probably most of them. And how many circulate, inconspicuously, among us, right now?)
In New Orleans, All Saint's Day is traditionally for cleaning up and refurbishing tomb sites. Candles are lit and graves may be decorated with mementos. (Lafayette Cemetery on a wet day.)
[All Saints' Day] is thus the day before All Souls' Day, which commemorates the faithful departed.
All Souls' Day is celebratedon Nov. 2 with a multitudinous array of rites and customs around the world, by no means all of them lacking beauty, and humor.
Mexico: Dia de Los Muertos
RELATED: Speaking of humor, novapsyche's NaPoWriMo,* Day 15: The bizarro world next door challenged participants to pick a tabloid headline and turn it into a poem. I happened compose this piece, which--though we students were directed to make the exercise serious--insisted on flouting any po-faced attitude toward...yes, maternal death. (Channeling Eudora Welty? But was that choice of subject a bit weird, or what?)
(BTW I hasten to say what I wrote isn't directly about our family, and nothing that terrible has happened with Mom's ashes, which she earlier requested we scatter in some beautiful place.)
*National Poetry Writing Month
A coda.
These is a little town in England called Abbot's Bromley, where a ritual outdoor dance has been solemnly performed each year, it is believed, since at least 1226. For more than 20 years now it has also been enacted in Revelsperformances around the U.S., celebrating the Winter Solstice.
The enigmatic troupe (once all men, now not always) traditionally includes, besides those wearing or carrying antlers, a boy archer, a "man-woman" or "Maid Marian," a hobby horse, and a fool. No one knows why. But there is something about it.
So...a group in Massachusetts did this. (Authentic spooky traditional tune btw.)
Stay warm out there, and keep alert because you never know what strange, and sometimes wonderful, things are out there to encounter, in this darkening season. :-)
Since it is now the Year of the Rabbit, let’s have a few bun-buns as our guests tonight.
Rabbits or hares?
Lepus species are typically precocial, born relatively mature and mobile with hair and good vision, while rabbit species are altricial, born hairless and blind, and requiring closer care. Hares live a relatively solitary life in a simple nest above the ground, while most rabbits live in social groups in burrows or warrens. Hares are generally larger than rabbits, with ears that are more elongated, and with hind legs that are larger and longer.
wikipedia.org
European rabbit
desert cottontail rabbit
scrub hare
Cape hare
I don’t think the Chinese zodiac is too picky about the distinction, but both have figured in world mythology.
The rabbit often appears in folklore as the tricksterarchetype, as he uses his cunning to outwit his enemies.
In Aztec mythology, a pantheon of four hundred rabbit gods known as Centzon Totochtin, led by Ometochtli or Two Rabbit, represented fertility, parties, and drunkenness.
In Central Africa, the common hare (Kalulu), is "inevitably described" as a trickster figure.[74]
In Japanese tradition, rabbits live on the Moon where they make mochi, the popular snack of mashed sticky rice. This comes from interpreting the pattern of dark patches on the moon as a rabbit standing on tiptoes on the left pounding on an usu, a Japanese mortar.
In Jewish folklore, rabbits (shfanim שפנים) are associated with cowardice, a usage still current in contemporary Israeli spoken Hebrew (similar to the English colloquial use of "chicken" to denote cowardice).
In Korean mythology, as in Japanese, rabbits live on the moon making rice cakes ("Tteok" in Korean).
A Vietnamese mythological story portrays the rabbit of innocence and youthfulness. The gods of the myth are shown to be hunting and killing rabbits to show off their power.
In Irish folklore, the hare is often associated with Sidh (Fairy) or other pagan elements. In these stories, characters who harm hares often suffer dreadful consequences.
PWBPeeps is a group that posts a daily diary and nightly open thread for animal lovers. We share photos, seek & give advice about pet health and behavior issues, support each other in times of sadness and stress, celebrate together when times are good, and on most days have an inordinate amount of fun.
You are welcome to join us!
Here are few not-too-onerous PWB rules
Do not “Troll” the Pootie Peeps Diaries. If you don’t like animal diaries, there’s no need to tell us about it. Just go find some other diary more to your liking.
Whatever happens in the outer blog STAYS in the outer blog. This is a place to relax and play; please treat it accordingly.
If you would like a pic from the comment threads, please ask the poster. He/she may have a copyright to those pics. Many thanks!
There are some pics we never post: snakes, creepy crawlies, any and all photos that depict or encourage human cruelty toward animals. These are considered “out of bounds” and will not be tolerated.
If you’re not sure about an issue...please ask. Someone is always glad to help.
Each lie Santos has been busted for telling has been worse than the last, and now even the old lies are turning out to be worse than once thought. A few weeks ago it was revealed that George Santos had clearly claimed his mother died in the attack on the World Trade Center buildings on Sept. 11, 2001. Besides being a grotesque lie clearly told to garner unearned sympathy, Santos retreated from the lie, saying she “was in her office in the South Tower on Sept. 11, 2001, when the horrific events of that day unfolded.” He added that she died a few years later from cancer.
It was then reported that she died in 2016. That was the second lie on top of that initial lie. Well, now reports are coming out that that this Sept. 11, stolen valor lie is a three-level whopper.
The line between comedy and tragedy is paper-thin. One might argue it only exists in the eye of the beholder and, like a prism held to the light, depending on the time and place and angle with which you look at something, you may see comedy or tragedy. The anti-vaxxer movement and its intrinsic conspiracies are something that can be looked at both ways. The tragedy is in the sickness, death, and mental gymnastics COVID-19 and vaccine deniers endure instead of demanding better medical infrastructure and economic security from their elected officials.
An example of the anti-science tragedy that many of us deal with comically (for our own sanity and well-being) was the fad of anti-vaxxers sticking keys and metal utensils on their bodies and claiming their blood had been magnetized by the Fauci-ouchie. A more recent fad over the past couple of years has involved anti-vaxxers going on social media accounts and claiming that since receiving one or more doses of a COVID-19 vaccine, they or a loved one have been experiencing a very traumatizing side effect of uncontrollable shaking. Also referred to as “spasms,” it is possibly the only side effect that hasn’t actually been seen in any study. The videos declaring this side effect are strange. Whether or not the person in the video is truly experiencing some kind of physical issue is hard to verify, but what is verifiable is that whatever they are going through, it does not have to do with COVID-19 vaccinations—at least not physiologically.
Many of these posts begin with some preamble like “Thanks Pfizer,” or “After the COVID vax...” and then a video. There has been an increase in responses to these videos, probably because post-Elon Musk Twitter has allowed an avalanche of COVID-19 misinformation accounts back onto the platform. The responses make fun of these anti-vaxxer videos because at a certain point, it is too difficult to refrain.
Last year I made up a short list of characters in myth and fiction who changed sex, and shared it online in support of the trans community. Now I have gone looking much more seriously for ammo against the idea of Culture Wars. These are not cases of gender dysphoria, such as we are fussing about today, but they highlight the hypocritical bigotry of those who are determined to be our enemies, as we saw recently with drag in popular culture.
For example—Oh, Noez, Disney went woke again! In 1985! For those who were not total Oz nerds as children, Ozma, born Princess of Oz, was kidnapped as a baby and enchanted into a boy named Pip. He was kept that way until his early teen years, when he escaped from the evil witch Mombi, found out his true identity, and had to confront the need for transitioning back.
Dorothy releasing Princess Ozma [from a mirror] in Disney's Return to Oz
Can you write ONE post card today? Everyone loves their kids. Some politicians would have you believe that trans kids should be put in a one size fits all box. Trans kids need support, acceptance and love. #TruthBrigadehttps://t.co/tZDf5qTmAR
In this text, there are two points of interest: firstly, the identification of the reciter, not with a protective divinity, but with the enemy himself, the son of Seth, the companion of Sebek, but not with Maga, is highly unusual. . . . . However, the context and structure do not allow another interpretation to be made easily. Weill [...] interprets this identification with the dangerous enemy as an attempt to confuse the entity, who is therefore paralyzed and controlled by the words of the reciter.1
That type of confusion leading to paralyzation and control of the listener sounds very much like hypnotism or some similar phenomenon or process.
Rogers continues:
Such an identification supports the view that in these ‘I am X’ texts, identification does not mean merely becoming a mouthpiece through which a deity or being speaks, but that reciter becomes the being itself; here the reciter does not speak on behalf of or channel the strength of these crocodile beings whose will is outside the speaker, but becomes them in order to control their actions.1
This can be considered a sort of ventriloquism of a subject by way of a negative (command). When I say ‘subject’, I mean that which is embedded in the sentence, a semantic / grammatical subject. By “exchanging” places with the listener, the speaker can then describe what the being is to do, as though the speaker is that being.
This negative (command) would utilize the performative, a type of verb by which one does what one simultaneously says. J. L. Austin, in How to Do Things with Words (1955) defined and described performatives and how they work:
These have on the face of them the look—or at least the grammatical make-up—of ‘statements’; but nevertheless they are seen, when more closely inspected, to be, quite plainly, not utterances which could be ‘true’ or ‘false’. … Here we should say that in saying these words we are doing something—namely, marrying, rather than reporting something, namely that we are marrying.2
What this indicates to me is that the speaker self-identifies with the being which she or he means to control. This brings directly to mind the verbal strategy of totalitarian speakers when they directly identify themselves with their followers or the members of the audience.
When Trump tells his audience “I am your retribution,” that is a version of him becoming the entity that he wishes to possess. He does this with the transitive property as well (“They’re going after me because I won’t let them go after you”; “They’re trying to silence me because I will never let them silence you,” etc.)
This has, it would appear, an immediate effect of being preternaturally persuasive to the listener; but the accumulative effect must also loom large. A repeated internal identification must leave psychological marks or traces; and in fact that verbal jiu jitsu may be the induction into a psychologically paralyzed state—hypnosis.
The phenomenon of mass-hypnosis exists in every group where mutual participation and mutual mental contagion are active—and that includes practically every human group. It becomes real hypnosis when a “ leader” makes use of this group vulnerability to imprint his persuasions onto the other members systematically. The word mass-hypnosis often is a euphemism for mutual mental contagion.3
It is a well known clinical fact that the larger the group with which a hypnotist is working, the greater the effect of his suggestions will be. This is because everybody’s ego surrenders more easily within a group, where unwittingly a psychic leveling and merging is taking place. Simultaneously, the existence of a mutual mental infection helps to increase the persuasive impact of what is spoken and suggested. “Togetherness” and a relative anonymity within the crowd increase the feeling of mutual participation and the walls of the ego and individual responsibility are gradually leveled down —“The other fellow is just like me.” Control of the superego is taken over more and more by those who lead or direct or inspire the group. The unconscious tendencies that the individual becomes more aware of are now ascribed to mass influence. This justifies at the [s]ame time the less controlled actions of the group. The mass becomes, as it were, responsible for the unleashed, unconscious drives of its component individual parts.3
This effect is only amplified with the tools of mass media, particularly broadcast media (but even lower-tech methods, such as electrified loudspeakers, etc.). Whatever increases the reach of the live audience to be in touch with this incantation is a tool in the verbal artist’s arsenal. “A great gathering of people subjects to collective mutual mental contagion very readily,” Meerloo remarked.4
Trump himself has taken to social media as both a refuge as well as an amphitheater: it collects his voice and rings it out concentrically. His followers are dazed.
(I would wager that Hitler had to have done this same thing, this direct identification with the audience in a bid to force the audience to be in alliance with him. His use of radio can be seen in this light; and indeed others have noted the electrifying and entrancing effect of Hitler’s oratory.)
Now, why is this important? Austin, again remarking upon performatives, details when such a verbal formula is to be taken as imperative:
[I]t is a necessary part of [the suggestion] that, say, the person to be the object of the verb ‘I order to ...’ must, by some previous procedure, tacit or verbal, have first constituted the person who is to do the ordering an authority, e.g. by saying ‘I promise to do what you order me to do.’5
We know from previous reports that Trump has extracted loyalty oaths not only explicitly from those around him in his inner circle but from his followers as well, both verbally and in written form. Indeed, he maintains the fiction that he retains the power of the office of the Presidency and construes President Biden as a usurper, thus constituting within himself all of the authority necessary to accomplish this effect, this ability to order.
Most people with at least a passing acquaintance with the Morrigan know her as a fearsome goddess of war. And so she is. But she is very much more; among her many attributes she is a goddess of prophecy. In the existing writings of ancient Irish lore (mainly the work of Christian monks recording the pre-Christian oral traditions of Ireland during the 9th to 12th centuries CE) the Morrigan speaks prophetically numerous times. On occasion her words take one of several forms of traditional Irish poetry.
What we know as "The Morrigan's peace prophecy" appears near the end of the myth commonly known as the Second Battle of Moytura. She's addressing the victorious forces of the Tuatha De, the gods of Ireland, following their hard-won defeat of the monstrous alien invaders known as the Fomorians. There has been much destruction, many dead on both sides; her kinfolk and their armies stand in a blood soaked battlefield, catching their breath before taking stock of all that now faces them moving forward.
An ancient stone monument at Carrowkeel, Ireland, one of several at the site claimed to be the location of the battle.
She reminds them that there was a reason for their fighting. That life does go on, and a better future awaits-
The Morrigan's Peace Prophecy
Peace to the sky
Sky above Earth
Earth below sky
Strength in each one
A cup overflowing
Full of honey
Mead in plenty
Summer in winter
Spear upon a shield
Shield on a warrior
A fort bold and fierce
Grieving cries are ended
Fleece from sheep
Crops on trees
A branch resting
Heavy with produce
Wealth of sons
A son under patronage
On the neck of a bull
A bull of magical poetry
Knots in trees
Trees for fire
Fire when wished for
Wished for earth
A memorial stone
A dwelling surrounded by prosperity
Green growth in the air
In spring and in autumn
Crops abound
Held secure the land
Land as far as the shore
Surrounded by a foreshore fair
With ever-sturdy woodlands
Extensive and ranging far
Have you any news?
Peace up to the sky
It will be eternal peace.
A limestone pillar, one of many which dot the Plain of Moytura.
She reminds us of why we fight, and that there will come a time when we can stop fighting. What seems like an endless struggle really will end. It wasn't all in vain.
Thank you for reading. This is an open thread, all topics are welcome.
* Side note- Old and Middle Irish are notoriously hard to translate; some translators omit portions that are simply too difficult. As a result, there are a number of different translations. The one presented here is by no means the only possible version.
The House Committee on Education and the Workforce convened Wednesday to discuss the Biden administration’s proposed labor rule, which would reportedly make 3.6 million more Americans eligible for overtime pay and protections. The Republican-controlled hearing aimed to stoke fear that increasing wages for people working overtime would destroy our economy.
In order to do this, Republican Chairwoman Virginia Foxx of North Carolina (most recently known as the angry press conference ghost) began her question time by arguing, at a hearing about Americans who are working overtime, that a lot of Americans don’t want to work … and in order to get ahead, you need to work hard.
Unfortunately, what Miss Conti was talking about is there’s just a lot of people in this country don't want to work, period, and want somebody else to take care of them, and that's not what this country is all about. What we need—we have great opportunities in this country for people to be successful if they want to work hard.
Again: This hearing is about overtime pay. Overtime.
The Canaanite fertility god Baal is best-known in the West as a rival to the biblical god Yahweh.
"Museum Pieces" is a diary series that explores the history behind some of the most interesting museum exhibits and historical places.
A votive figurine of Baal, in the Museum of World Treasures, Wichita KS
The ancient land of Canaan lay in a crucially strategic area. Midway between the great civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt, in modern-day Israel and Lebanon, the Canaanites were astride one of the greatest trade routes of the ancient world, allowing them to prosper by both facilitating and taxing this commerce.
Despite their advantageous geographic position, however, Canaan was an ecologically poor place. Although the coastal plain along the Mediterranean usually received adequate rainfall, it was subject to seasonal droughts. The interior areas, meanwhile, were dry desert, and all of the agriculture there depended heavily upon the unreliable and variable flow of the Jordan River. Food production, then, tended to vary drastically from year to year, and the Canaanites were forced to store whatever surplus they could produce in the good years, in granaries and barns, in order to get through the frequent periods of drought.
Each desert town or village had to depend upon its own local resources to get by, and during times of drought many were forced to either migrate to another area (usually Egypt or Mesopotamia) or to fight over control of resources with neighboring villages. So, although the Canaanites as a whole shared much of their culture, there was no unifying political rulership akin to the Egyptian Pharaoh, and each settlement regarded itself as an independent entity whose relations to each other were often hostile. Being an inter-cultural trading center, there were also many “foreign” influences, and a variety of different languages were spoken.
One thing all of the Canaanites did share in common, however, was their religion, and given the central role that agriculture played in their lives, it was no surprise, then, that the most important god of the Canaanite pantheon was the rain god Baal. (Each city center tended to have its own local versions of religious beliefs, mythologies and practices, though, and many of the ancient writings refer to “Baal of this town” or “Baal of that town”.)
Archaeologically, much of what we know about Baal and Canaanite religion comes from excavations begun almost 100 years ago. In 1928, an ancient tomb was accidentally uncovered by a Syrian farmer near the modern town of Ras el Shamra, and when French archaeologists investigated, they found the remains of a Canaanite town called Ugarit, which had been an active trading center from 1400 BCE to 1200 BCE. Several decades of excavations revealed the palace of the local ruler, some temples to local gods, and several libraries.
The libraries contained some 1500 clay tablets that were impressed with cuneiform markings. This alphabet was common to a number of different languages in the region, and texts were found in these libraries that had been written in Akkadian, Sumerian and Hurrian, as well as Egyptian hieroglyphs. Many of the texts were also written in the local Ugaritic dialect, and some of these were religious myths and legends centering around the god Baal. In all, some 200 different Canaanite gods were mentioned.
Prior to these finds, the Canaanite gods were known mostly through excerpts in the biblical Old Testament. According to these stories, when the Israelites were taken by their god Yahweh from Egypt to conquer and settle in the lands which God had promised them in Canaan, they (in particular the local King Ahab and his wife Jezebel) began to assimilate over time with the local people and adopted their god Baal. The Old Testament tells us that the biblical figure Gideon also bore the name Jerub-Baal, and King Saul named one of his sons Ish-Baal. To combat what he viewed as this religious impurity, we are told, the Hebrew prophet Elijah arranged a contest between the priests of Yahweh and those of Baal. Both sides built a ceremonial pyre atop Mount Carmel, and prayed to their respective god to light it by a divine act. According to the biblical Book of First Kings, it was only Yahweh who sent fire down from heaven to set Elijah’s offering aflame. All of the Israelite Baal-worshippers were then killed. This story was repeated later in the Islamic Quran.
The Ugaritic cuneiform texts set out the Canaanite version of their legends. According to the stories, Baal was the god of storms, known as the “Lord of Rain and Dew” or as “He Who Rides the Clouds”. His position as the bringer of rain made him the most important of the Canaanite pantheon, and he was often depicted as a sort of co-ruler of all the gods, along with an older and wiser Creator deity named El. In one story Baal was depicted in conflict with the sea god Yamm who wanted to rule all the gods. With the help of the craftsman god Kothar, Baal defeated Yamm and beat him into submission with his magical mace.
In celebration of his victory, Baal wanted to have a palace to live in that was as splendid as that of the god El, and asked El’s wife Asherah (also sometimes known as Astarte) to persuade her husband to allow it. Baal then recruited Kothar to construct it, lining it with silver and gold. The magnificent palace atop Mount Zaphon was said to cover 10,000 acres. In return, the story said, Baal agreed to provide humanity with rain and water to make the land fertile and fruitful.
But now the god of death, Mot, tricked Baal into entering the underworld, where he was trapped and the rains stopped. Humanity suffered a deadly drought. In response Baal’s sister Anat, the goddess of the hunt, tracked him down to the realm of the dead, defeated Mot and rescued Baal, restoring the life-giving rain to the lands. Mot, however, revived (since gods are immortal) and continued to fight with Baal. Plentiful rains, the Canaanites believed, were therefore the result of Baal’s victories over Mot, while droughts and famine resulted when Mot was able to temporarily gain the upper hand. Baal thus replaced El as the chief among the gods.
Baal worship became widespread in much of the ancient world, carried by trade ties to Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, and on to Greece. By the time of the Roman Empire, the Phoenicians, who were descendants of the Canaanites and who retained much of their religion, had carried Baal-worship to their trading city of Carthage in North Africa. That city became a rival to the Romans, and the two fought several conflicts before Carthage was destroyed. Roman chroniclers of the time were quick to point out that the Carthaginian Baal-worshippers practiced child sacrifice, burning their firstborn sons, and also practiced ritual sex between the priests of Baal and priestesses of Astarte—both of which in Roman eyes confirmed their rival’s status as “barbarians”. Modern archaeological excavations have found gravesites at Carthage containing the cremated remains of children, indicating that the “human sacrifice” stories may have been true.
In art, Baal was usually depicted as a horned figure or with a horned helmet, often accompanied by goats or sheep. In a stone panel in the Louvre, he holds a spear from which plants are growing, symbolizing his dual role as the warrior-protector of humanity and as the life-giving rain god.
Today, the Museum of World Treasures in Wichita KS has a small votive figurine of Baal on display.
NOTE: As some of you already know, all of my diaries here are draft chapters for a number of books I am working on. So I welcome any corrections you may have, whether it's typos or places that are unclear or factual errors. I think of y'all as my pre-publication editors and proofreaders. ;)
These videos are kind of cheesy, and aimed at people much younger than me. However, I think they’re fun, informative introductions to their various myths.
Enjoy!
Nahua (Aztec) Mythology and the Origins of Humanity
As you can see by Itzl's concerned look, this group is for us to check in at to let people know we are alive, doing OK, and not affected by such things as heat, blizzards, floods, wild fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, power outages, or other such things that could keep us off DKos. If you're not here, or anywhere else on DKos, and there are adverse conditions in your area (floods, heatwaves, hurricanes, etc.), we are going to check up on you. If you are going to be away from your computer for a day or a week, let us know here. We care!
IAN is a great group to join, and a good place to learn to write diaries. Drop one of us a PM to be added to the Itzl Alert Network anytime! We all share the publishing duties, and we welcomeeveryonewho reads IAN to write diaries for the group! Every member is an editor, so anyone can take a turn when they have something to say, photos and music to share, a cause to promote or news!
I stumbled on this YouTube channel, and found the videos both goofily charming and informative, at least as introductions to their subjects. Hope you’ll like them too.
Aztec Creation Myth
The story of creation, according to the Aztecs, is actually a story of birth, death, and rebirth. When the world is destroyed, it's born again through the sacrifice of one of the gods, and so through the birth of a new sun. So you'll often hear ofthe legend of the five suns- the five births of the world.
As you can see by Itzl's concerned look, this group is for us to check in at to let people know we are alive, doing OK, and not affected by such things as heat, blizzards, floods, wild fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, power outages, or other such things that could keep us off DKos. If you're not here, or anywhere else on DKos, and there are adverse conditions in your area (floods, heatwaves, hurricanes, etc.), we are going to check up on you. If you are going to be away from your computer for a day or a week, let us know here. We care!
IAN is a great group to join, and a good place to learn to write diaries. Drop one of us a PM to be added to the Itzl Alert Network anytime! We all share the publishing duties, and we welcomeeveryonewho reads IAN to write diaries for the group! Every member is an editor, so anyone can take a turn when they have something to say, photos and music to share, a cause to promote or news!
Welcome, kibitzers, to the middle of the palindromic week.
Today was supposedly the day the Trojan Horse was left by the Greeks as a “peace offering. Dunno how they could figure out the day when they can’t agree on what century the war was fought but precision and accuracy are different things.
In Greek mythology, the Trojan Horse was a wooden horse said to have been used by the Greeks during the Trojan War to enter the city of Troy and win the war. The Trojan Horse is not mentioned in Homer'sIliad, with the poem ending before the war is concluded, and it is only briefly mentioned in the Odyssey. But in the Aeneid by Virgil, after a fruitless 10-year siege, the Greeks constructed a huge wooden horse at the behest of Odysseus, and hid a select force of men inside, including Odysseus himself. The Greeks pretended to sail away, and the Trojans pulled the horse into their city as a victory trophy. That night, the Greek force crept out of the horse and opened the gates for the rest of the Greek army, which had sailed back under the cover of darkness. The Greeks entered and destroyed the city, ending the war.
Metaphorically, a "Trojan horse" has come to mean any trick or stratagem that causes a target to invite a foe into a securely protected bastion or place. A malicious computer program that tricks users into willingly running it is also called a "Trojan horse" or simply a "Trojan".
The main ancient source for the story still extant is the Aeneid of Virgil, a Latinepic poem from the time of Augustus. The story featured heavily in the Little Iliad and the Sack of Troy, both part of the Epic Cycle, but these have only survived in fragments and epitomes. As Odysseus was the chief architect of the Trojan Horse, it is also referred to in Homer's Odyssey.[1]In the Greek tradition, the horse is called the "wooden horse" (δουράτεοςἵπποςdouráteos híppos in Homeric/Ionic Greek (Odyssey 8.512); δούρειοςἵππος, doúreios híppos in Attic Greek). In Dictys Cretensis' account, the idea of the Trojan Horse's construction comes from Helenus, who prophesies that the Greeks must dedicate a wooden horse to Athena.[2]
It has been speculated that the story of the Trojan Horse resulted from later poets creatively misunderstanding an actual historical use of a siege engine at Troy. Animal names are often used for military machinery, as with the Romanonager and various Bronze Age Assyrian siege engines which were often covered with dampened horse hides to protect against flaming arrows.[15]Pausanias, who lived in the 2nd century AD, wrote in his book Description of Greece, "That the work of Epeius was a contrivance to make a breach in the Trojan wall is known to everybody who does not attribute utter silliness to the Phrygians";[16] by the Phrygians, he meant the Trojans.
Some authors have suggested that the gift might also have been a ship, with warriors hidden inside.[17] It has been noted that the terms used to put men in the horse are those used by ancient Greek authors to describe the embarkation of men on a ship and that there are analogies between the building of ships by Paris at the beginning of the Trojan saga and the building of the horse at the end;[18] ships are called "sea-horses" once in the Odyssey.[19] This view has recently gained support from naval archaeology:[20][21] ancient text and images show that a Phoenician merchant ship type decorated with a horse head, called hippos ('horse') by Greeks, became very diffuse in the Levant area around the beginning of the 1st millennium BC and was used to trade precious metals and sometimes to pay tribute after the end of a war.[21] That has caused the suggestion that the original story viewed the Greek soldiers hiding inside the hull of such a vessel, possibly disguised as a tribute, and that the term was later misunderstood in the oral transmission of the story, the origin to the Trojan horse myth.
Ships with a horsehead decoration, perhaps cult ships, are also represented in artifacts of the Minoan/Mycenaean era;[22][23] the image[24] on a seal found in the palace of Knossos, dated around 1200 BC, which depicts a ship with oarsmen and a superimposed horse figure, originally interpreted as a representation of horse transport by sea,[25] may in fact be related to this kind of vessels, and even be considered as the first (pre-literary) representation of the Trojan Horse episode.[26]
A more speculative theory, originally proposed by Fritz Schachermeyr, is that the Trojan Horse is a metaphor for a destructive earthquake that damaged the walls of Troy and allowed the Greeks inside.[27] In his theory, the horse represents Poseidon, who as well as being god of the sea was also god of horses and earthquakes. The theory is supported by the fact that archaeological digs have found that Troy VI was heavily damaged in an earthquake[27] but is hard to square with the mythological claim that Poseidon himself built the walls of Troy in the first place.[28]
Whatever it was, it’s been a favorite of cartoonists ever since.
Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share a virtual kitchen table with other readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another. Drop by to talk about music, your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper…. Newcomers may notice that many who post in this series already know one another to some degree, but we welcome guests at our kitchen table and hope to make some new friends as well.
Over the weekend, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was stumping for Donald Trump in Las Vegas, Nevada, when she compared the convicted felon to Jesus.
"The Democrats and the fake news media want to constantly talk about 'Oh, President Trump is a convicted felon,'” Greene told the crowd, before launching into what the Bible might characterize as “blasphemy.”
“Well, you want to know something? The man that I worship is also a convicted felon. And he was murdered on a Roman cross,” Greene added. A member of the crowd can be heard yelling “by the Jews,” which seems to match the brand of Christianity Greene subscribes to.
A quick fact check will tell you that besides our concept of “felony” only dating back to 14th century England, Jesus was arrested and executed by first century Romans. Another quick fact check would show that the scholarly consensus is that Jesus was likely crucified for proclaiming himself “King of the Jews,” and not for falsifying business records in order to hide hush money payments to a woman he had an extra marital affair with.
Unfortunately for humanity, the GOP’s rush to downplay Trump's felony convictions, and attack our justice system, seems to have been somewhat effective. A recent CBS News/YouGov Poll found that 80% of Republicans believe the Biden administration directed the New York district attorney to bring charges against Trump. The majority of people polled (57%) believe that Trump’s charges are independent of the Biden administration.
So while the voting base of the GOP may be a lost cause this upcoming election, there are still many more people who see Trump’s conviction as a real and serious fact.
Donald Trump was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records on May 30. What are potential voters saying about this historic news? And what is the Biden-Harris campaign doing now that the “teflon Don" is no more?
The Republican National Convention was dedicated to make-believe. Tall tales about how magical and wondrous things were four years ago when Donald Trump was president ruled the entire slate of soul-destroying GOP speeches.
But as long as four years ago may seem these days, it isn’t too long ago to remember. Let's take a trip down memory lane to July 2020.
