It is night in the taiga of the frozen north. The shaman has been bound and left alone inside a tent. You gather around it in the darkness. Sounds emerge.
Animal sounds.
They want to talk.
A paper last year examined this "dark tent ritual," which is found from western Siberia all the way to the American plains.
It combines new genetic studies with old methods to give a history to what some consider timeless--a shamanic ritual.
The author, Charles Stépanoff, believes it emerged in Siberia and crossed the Bering Strait with the Paleo-Eskimos.
This is the second wave of migration to America, which brought the Dorset and Saqqaq cultures, and very likely the Na-Dene language family.
He examines ethnographic accounts and identifies aspects of this ritual which are unique, or combined in a unique way, and appear consistently across this range
He also identifies the purpose of the ritual, to communicate with animal spirits, which implies a specific perspective on the world he calls "personal animism"
In Siberia, he finds the ritual associated with only Paleo-Asian peoples, a set of language families that excludes the widespread and more recent Altaic
Recent genetic data connects these Paleo-Asians with the Mal'ta-Buret culture, which contributed Ancient North Eurasian ancestry to both North American and Indo-European populations
The same data connects them to the Na-Dene language family, whose possible relationship to modern Siberia I've mentioned elsewhere
By looking at the distribution of this unique ritual and combining it with genetic and linguistic data, not only can we give a history to a kind of religion often thought timeless, we can all also peer into the deep past of North America and find its Ancient North Eurasian roots
A Greek study session involved, if I remember correctly, first having Kirkpatrick read a chunk in Greek, pausing to make minor grammar notes, and then allowing Lewis to translate as much as he could, consulting his books.
They didn't read the entire Iliad, though, just the parts more directly concerning Achilles.
Where many classical schools separate languages and classics, this is how Lewis got them both, and he loved it.
If he could have spent his whole life this way, he would have.
I've seen people throwing around the "ackshually, the Jooz are Khazars" thing. Sometimes they limit this specifically to the Ashkenazi, rather than Jews in general.
A few genetics links pushing back:
This is what the genetic "family tree" of Jewish groups look like. They all descend from Ancient Near Eastern populations, including the Ashkenazis.
Here are genetic distances between various Jewish groups. The Ashkenazis are clustered pretty tightly with other Jewish groups, setting aside ones that intermarried with non-Mediterranean populations.
What is the connection between controversial academic LEO STRAUSS and eccentrice Ozark farmer BUCK NELSON?
Read quickly, before Twitter bans me for disclosing THE TRUTH
I have, through certain secret connections, come into possession of a draft copy of the work Leo Strauss was laboring to finish when he died.
Close friends say he considered it his "magnum opus," that it would "shake the foundations of the modern world," and "save the republic."
In this work, in the central chapter, he makes a single reference to Nelson. In private correspondence, he revealed that this footnote was "the key to all his thought."
Posting actual pictures of the document would be too dangerous, but I can copy the footnote here:
The Mississippians had many familiar things in their cosmos: a firmament above, a world tree or axis mundi, an underworld. But some aspects were also very distinctive.
The Underworld was considered an underwater realm, associated with the night sky, and associated with the piasa. The piasa had several variants, one of which was the underwater panther.
(I have a completely unfounded theory that this partly refers to giant otters.)
The winged, horned serpent variant may be distantly related to Quetzalcoatl.