Thread by @owenbroadcast

if u dont know already, if u see a footnote or background historical note for something unless u actually go check + prove to urself that its real you should not believe it. once i started following footnotes and looking into it people literally just make things up all the time.

before the internet + searchable texts, i mean they probably still do it now, people apparently just made up church father quotes and stuff quite often. most times i have attempted to source a strange augustine quote for example the only thing that comes up is the book im reading

i have often wondered the concrete mechanism at play here like, if some guy 200 pages into a book before control+F searchable type existed just said “eh no ones actually going to check this” and started winging it, or if many fake quotes and documents were circulating, or what.

or if ur going hard on some topic that relates to ancient history or even new testament times, you might see two conflicting claims and then when you check the sources neither of them are grounded in any actual primary source, literally just a guy telling u something he imagined.

essentially 90% of history for me unless its a text someone specific wrote from that time and place just hovers in the “cool story” zone, in the same folder as the stories of persian kings who drugged people and took them to far off palaces and told them it was the afterlife.

these are probably my favorite completely unsourced, to my knowledge, historical tales. the essential part being that rich kings would have a palace surrounded by lush gardens with small aqueducts of wine and milk set up, with women, complex tiles, peacocks, etc. [...]

and the king would drug people, take them there, and when they awoke tell them it was paradise, literally, and that Allah had granted the king the power to transport people here, to the paradisical afterlife. then after they hung there for a while he would drug them again [...]

and bring them back, + he would have the men testify that they had been to + seen paradise, + in this way the king would cultivate a core of extremely loyal dedicated soldiers who did not fear dying for him, and would in fact eagerly do so, as they had already seen heaven waiting

there are many interesting sub-tales herein such as the speaking head on a plate trick, im supposed to be away from internet for christmas but if anyone knows what im talking about lmk and tell me where u got it from or if u know where i heard this that would also impress me.