I’m not certain how many of you know this, but the opening scene to Prometheus is actually supposed to be the Indo-European creation myth.
The twins Manu the priest, and Yemo his brother perform the first sacrifice.
Yemo is sacrificed to create the world and all life.
From the body of Yemo, Manu fashions the whole of mankind, this is why it’s called Mankind. The etymology is that we’re the sons of Manu.
This is why the engineer kills David later on in the movie because he offends him by telling the engineer his father wishes to live forever.
Death is integral to life. The Indo-Europeans understood this and so too did the engineers who are supposed to be them.
The whole movie had a lot of things you may not have noticed. The engineers even speak reconstructed Proto-Indo-European. It sort of feels like a home coming to a place you’ve never been to.
The last part to the myth is supposed to be Trito, who, like Manu, continues the sacrifice and appeases the Gods. However in this story, it seems the real Hero dies, and the sacrifice is broken. I wonder if this was an intended. Maybe some reflection is needed here.
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There used to be a monument in Germany, that many of you have never seen or heard about, destroyed just after the second world war by an internal socialist party in Germany.
It used to be an incredible sight to behold in Berlin.
It is called the Kaiser Wilhelm national monument, and nestled in Berlin, commissioned by Kaiser Wilhelm’s grandson, conceptualized by Gustav Halmhuber, where Reinhold Begas, Wilhelm von Rümann and several of Rümann’s students sculpted the magnificent art.
The whole piece of work was a glory to behold, but it is being forgotten to time because it was intentionally destroyed, for reasons you can probably surmise. It was political, it was vital, it was beautiful. People still remembered sitting at the feet of the God of War.
“Wait, so you are saying that Indic, Iranic, Germanic, Celtic, Italic, Baltic, Slavic, Albanic, Armenic, Hellenic, and even the extinct Tocharic and Anatolic peoples all descend from a people called the Heryos?”
“Aryans, Joe, Aryans.”
“And these people did what again?”
“Great things, Joe. These people did great things. They domesticated horses, invented the wheel and the chariot, let me ask you something Joe. Have you ever heard of the Zhou Dynasty of CHI-na? A mighty people, Joe, a ruthless people, you see, through contact with the Tocharian branches of the Aryans, they called themselves Arśi or Kuśi, meaning light or bright ones, very Noble people, Joe, the CHInese were granted chariots, and the whole of CHInese history was forever altered by the Aryan presence on the silk road.
“But, wait, hold on a minute. How do we know what these extinct people call themselves? Why are there no Aryans in China now?”
“Hold on, Joe, I was getting to that. First off, there are Aryans in China, they are just more mixed now, much like our population, very mixed from waves and waves of immigration, I would have never let that happen if I were Emperor of the Tocharians, horrible, horrible situation. Anyways these Aryans are now more mixed with Turkic peoples and refer to themselves as Uyghurs and there has been a three-thousand year long blood feud between the Aryans and the descendants of the West with the Sons of the Han and the descendants of the East over who controls the flow of spice. Our archeologists have uncovered this ongoing conflict from the ruins of the desert, many ruins, Joe, vast, vast amounts of ruins. In these ruins there are many, many texts, and in these texts we have decoded the language and self referential language of the Aryans and their battles with the Han.”
A short story about Haiti and the consequences of African Independence from the perspective of a foreign diplomat recording his observations several decades into their self-governance.
The quickest way to spot someone of 110-120IQ is to say something which is mostly correct but leaves out details you expect to be inferred and wait for them to say “well actually.”
People will look at this exam and stare at you dead in the eyes, mumble something about the Flynn effect under their breath, and tell you people today are the smartest to have ever lived.
The amount of people replying to this and not understanding this was not meant to be a maximally difficult test, but a test of minimal expectations is quite astounding.
These were the math tests taken during the entrance exams in the mid 1800s at Harvard. How many would pass these MINIMUM expectations today?