As we approach the 31st, gentle plenary reminders that:

1. The festival of All Saints Day was celebrated for over a century prior to it being moved (in the West) to the 1st of November
2. This move had nothing to do with Sámhain, and began on the continent decades before Ireland 3. While Sámhain is attested as a festival in pre-Christian Ireland, there is no evidence of special associations with the dead during the pagan period.
4. Most Halloween traditions, be it costuming, trick-or-treating, even divination, probably stem from England, not Ireland.

Why is it that "primitive horticulturalists" - i.e. peoples such as the Dani of Papua or the Yanomami or Pirahã of South America - seem to tend towards a sort of "atheistic supernaturalism," believing in a world of invisible, often malicious spirits, but without any higher, organising powers, whilst both more sophisticated cultures *and* more primitive hunter-gathers seem to tend towards theistic cosmologies?

What happens in the jungle vegetable gardens?
This is a genuinely strange phenomenon - there is a remarkable coalescence between the "style" of cosmology found among Papuans, Amazonians and certain Congolese tribes, all extremely distantly related but united by a common climate and lifestyle. Yet this "vegetable garden spirituality," though highly consistent among similar rainforest-dwelling Neolithics, is markedly aberrant compared to what we see both among true hunter-gatherers and more complex societies.

The area of what was once Gaul went through a truly remarkable process of ethnogenesis in the period between 1-600 AD.

From a barely romanized, still essentially Iron Age Celtic culture to Christian, Germanized Gallo-Romans, all the while retaining mostly the same ancestry.
Most people probably don't realize - I certainly didn't, originally - that the Gaulish language was still widely spoken throughout Gallia at the time of the Frankish conquest. It was the *Franks*, ironically, who completed the "Romanization" process.

A striking takeaway of the last 10 years of the aDNA revolution - from the Indo-Europeans, to the Bantu, to the Swahili, to the Japanese - is that you might sooner trust a toddler to pick out a 50-meter target with a revolver than an archaeologist to identify an ancient migration
It should be self-evident that we cannot simply derive from this a reverse principle, and conclude that wherever contemporary archaeologists denied a purported migration, it really did take place - yet the scope of the discrediting is remarkable.

"Real, unembellished history" according to quite a number of historians seems to consist largely of ppl sitting around, munching bread and porridge, between periodic bursts of fighting over miscellaneous economic factors. >Knight is recorded as composing a poem to persuade his captor lord to free him:
"Bet that happened lol"
>King gives a stirring speech before battle:
"Sure that happened"
>Viking is heads out to Constantinople, motivated by a dream:
"Definitely not embellished mhm"

This is only half true. Rwanda is a cohesive, fairly well-run and (by regional standards) prosperous and stable country. The Congo, it is true, is essentially not a real state, hence why the massive size disparity between it and Rwanda confers no military advantage.

https://twitter.com/HMBrough_/status/1895917687966249184

It is an interesting quirk of the global export of the nation state system that we aren't really able to account for "unorganized regions" anymore. With the exception of Antarctica, every plot of land *must* be attached to a specific polity with a government and a flag.

There is a phenomenon I've noticed a lot in many contemporary walks of life - term it "introductionism": ppl never actually reading primary literature, or watching classical movies, or engaging directly with high art, but interacting with everything through "accessible" mediums


In a world of limited time, I've come around to the realisation that 8/10 times, instead of reading a book ABOUT Shakespeare, read Shakespeare. Read Plato. Just read that book you want to get to, don't read endless books ABOUT reading that book.

Unclear why so many seem to struggle to understand that just because the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European *were* a single, definable ethnogroup, that doesn't mean IE-speakers *today* are.

https://twitter.com/cobbaltt/status/1888627058110333100

Obviously there's no such thing as an "Indo-European race" - Indians, Afghans, Kurds, Spaniards, Germans and Lithuanians are not all part of one esoteric, "hyperborean" identity. But the original PIE-speakers would indeed have been a particular tribe or cluster of related tribes.

One of the most frustrating tendencies in academic conversations around novel belief systems like Wicca or New Age spirituality is researchers caveating all their (invariably devastating) assessments of the historical claims with varieties of "-of course far be it from me to devalue people's deeply held beliefs, I don't want to say that anyone is wrong in their convictions..."

Rubbish. If somebody is claiming to be "reviving the authentic religious expression of the British Isles (or wherever)", and you are systematically demolishing every one of the assertions underpinning said religious system, then you patently ARE devaluing said misguided notions. Truth claims are truth claims - it is not "kind" or "respectful" to treat these as ultimately irrelevant, and indeed doing so is ultimately a sign of supreme arrogance and contempt, since you don't even consider it worth *looking at* whether said beliefs are correct.

I am not going to get embroiled in any of the politics on this, but will only point out that this entire "The Boers/Bantus got to South Africa" first debate is one on which both sides are consistently silly, because both are right and wrong depending on the part of South Africa. The Bantu reached parts of what is now South Africa already in the 1st millennium AD, and areas like the Xhosaland and Zululand probably had Bantu-speaking populations already prior to 1000 AD, though not necessarily the current Bantu groups.

The way a lot of archaeologists will talk about the Indo-European invasions becomes fairly funny if the same rhetoric is applied to situations like the Reconquista:

"In the end, it is impossible to say how exactly the process of Hispanicization proceeded; it was a slow, gradual movement of people south into Iberia over many centuries, with much evidence of cultural mingling and intermarriage. In light of this, traditional notions of a violent conquest have been increasingly replaced by a model of prolonged migrations, as Christian culture diffused down from the north." Even to this day, and despite the droves of recent evidence, a very profound squeamishness still surrounds this topic for many academics.

https://x.com/Hieraaetus/status/1840756105552498901

I've long found the distinction between the Anglosphere "Santa's elves" and the Scandinavian nisse/tomte traditions quite interesting. They fill roughly the same role in modern Yuletide lore, as the quintessential Christmas critters and associates of St. Nick.
Their origins, though, are wildly different. The American Christmas elves derive from mid-19th-century children's literature, and tend towards the very twee and saccharine: they're often associated with the colour green, and portrayed as childlike.

It is a rather disturbing aspect of human nature that, by all accounts of historical and anthropological inquiry, practically the only thing separating those cultures which have, in history, committed great atrocities from those that have not is capacity. Those who think otherwise generally suffer simply from limited reading:

If there is such a thing as "folk Christianity" and "folk Islam", then there is surely also such a thing as "folk natural scientism"

Most secular moderns aren't scientists, and they relate to scientific authorities much like any other what you might term "worldview authorities" Consider gravity, gravitational theory - practically everyone in the modern West believes in it, but what precisely does it mean for a worldly, practically-minded farmer in Idaho to believe in gravity? In what sense does he believe in it? Because he knows things fall down?

Folk horror is a very interesting genre to me, one I have quite an affection for (if that's the right word), but most of the discussion and analysis you will find surrounding it is rather frustrating - the genre is much more than simply "aren't rural folks & traditions scary?" There is a level at which much folk horror does seemingly reduce to "naive urbanite goes into the countryside, bad things happen" - horror essentially deriving from a semi-exoticising, semi-othering view of rural life. Midsommar is largely this, and I dislike it rather strongly.

Woolly mammoths may have been alive in Europe at the same time as the Trojan War.

Yes, I mean that seriously. Also yes, the word "may" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and I will elaborate.
It is at this point a fairly well-known fact that a small population of woolly mammoths survived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean until only around 1600 BC, a thousand years after the building of the Pyramid of Giza.

What is still less known is the story on the mainland.

An extremely fascinating bit of obscure history is that of the Kongsi republics in Western Borneo - Chinese 'company-states' predicated on gold and tin mining that existed on the island between the 1700s-1800s
The term 'kongsi' (公司) is not a Mandarin Chinese word, but instead from Hokkien, a Chinese language spoken primarily in southeastern Fujian, while the related form 'Kung-sze' exists in Hakka, another regional Sinitic language spoken in the south.

THREAD - The Origins of Kiswahili & the Swahili Coast

(1) In recent decades, Swahili has emerged as the African language par excellence, from culture & education to geopolitics. A bridge across the East African community, Swahili has deep roots - but where do they begin? (2) With 200+ million speakers, the Swahili language is spread today across a vast swathe of eastern Africa, serving as the main national language in Tanzania and (alongside English) in Kenya, and with a growing presence in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and the eastern Congo.

So many people discussing Dune (take a shot) get the prophecy of the Lisan al-Gaib wrong. They point out, correctly, that it is a fake prophecy, planted by the Bene Gesserit, and then conclude from this that Paul's rise as the mahdi is just empty propaganda, but... no. The prophecy is part of the Bene Gesserit's 'Missionaria Protectiva', a panoply of false superstitions planted across the galaxy to aid the Bene Gesserit sisters in their grand breeding project, should they need help on a given world, by providing them leverage to manipulate.

Most reports from traditional agrarian societies are that people despised their subsistence farming life and would do anything to escape it. See for instance Blythe's Akenfield. To be clear, I am also v wistful about the passing of the old countryside and rural traditions, and Akenfield is certainly full of old-timers mourning the passing of many venerable and beautiful things.

But it cannot be understated that the day-to-day for most was miserable.

Easter, Ēostre and Ostara - a 🧵

(1) Easter, like Christmas, Halloween and so many other Western festivals is field for a now-annual set of arguments over the holiday's "true" provenance - Christian or "really" pagan? Much of this roots in a murky and debatable figure - 'Ēostre' (2) The common narrative for the "Easter is pagan" crowd is well-known at this point: Aside from the extreme cranks drawing references to Mesopotamian Ishtar, the story goes that Easter takes its name from a goddess known in Old English as 'Ēostre' and German as 'Ostara'