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:

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'

A fundamental tragedy of human society appears to be that certain core societal goods are almost invariably mutually exclusive.

For some reason, friendliness in a culture seems consistently opposed to politeness, joy and vitality rarely co-occurs with safety and contentment.

Anyone who has spent prolonged time in the less developed part of the world, f.ex. Africa, will know that people there are famously extremely friendly and hospitable. Total strangers with no wealth and little spare time will go out of their way to help you on a whim.

Debates about species reintroductions always bring out some of the most solipsistic and stubborn reactions in people. The discussion around brown bears in California seems a good microcosm of this - an extremely recent extinction (the last animal was seen exactly 100 years ago), it appears on the state flag. Nevertheless, many oppose the notion of reintroductions on the basis of the fact that bears, though shy and despite confrontations with humans being rare, could pose a potential danger to humans - which is true. Brown bears are large predators.

But if the people of California should not be subjected to living with such an "intolerable" risk, even a very minute one... why should those of Alaska? Of Wyoming? Idaho? If any danger posed to people by such an animal is morally unacceptable, surely the logic is very clear, that they should be wiped out everywhere, not merely in California.
Very few people have the guts to openly agree "dangerous animals should be hunted to extinction everywhere", but great numbers of people will confess what amounts to it - that they should be preserved sure, but over there. Where those other ppl live. Where they aren't my issue.

There's a very interesting & complicated sort of symbolism tied up in serpents and dragons in the ancient world, which manifests in this way - that dragons serve consistently as embodiments of two opposite elements, fire and water, & their dimensions, heaven & the underworld.

Disentangling this is difficult without coming off as slightly unhinged, but consider that there are 3 words which can mean variously "serpent" in ancient Hebrew - נָחָשׁ, שָׂרָף and תַּנִּין - "nakhash", "seraph" and "tannin"

All convey different connotations.

It's always interesting how people who talk about "grey morality" in fiction/storytelling almost never seem to actually know what this means.

A Song of Ice and Fire, Memory, Sorrow & Thorn, The First Law - these are not stories with grey morality! They are black and white.

This becomes clear enough if we ask the simple question "what do we mean when we say a story 'isn't black and white?'"

What ppl usually say they mean is that the story doesn't divide everything into a moral binary. But, well, don't they?

Predators tend not to eat other predators because, occupying the highest trophic levels in an ecosystem, they accumulate higher levels of toxic compounds and parasites. This is true of many species, but manifests in humans as a reflex of revulsion.

https://twitter.com/JohnOberg/status/1743661207091835140

Since I seem to have tossed an apple of discord with this tweet just before going to bed, I'll elaborate a bit in saying that, yes, ofc, some cultures do consume dogs - and other predators too. However, eating predators is *decidedly* more uncommon cross-culturally vs herbivores.

It always annoys me when books or television portray the Norse and Anglo-Saxons as somehow radically different from each other.

Narratively I get it - playing up the difference makes for good visual and dramatic storytelling. But it just isn't true.

https://twitter.com/sewistwrites/status/1732796998783283313

The Saxons will often be portrayed as somewhat dour, inept, repressed and generally quite weedy and incompetent. There is rarely any indication that they were a boisterous culture of warrior-poets.

Reading again some novels about Arthur and the sub-Roman period in Britain, and it is striking just how... disconnected the popular image of the period that has developed is from the actual history.

The druids are an obvious example, but it's much more fundamental.



The final grasp of Roman control in Britain was withdrawn about 410 AD. The isle that they left behind was very much not some misty, druid-controlled pagan backwater only coated by a thin veneer of Romanitas. The Britons post-Rome still identified w Rome. Many even spoke Latin!

France is, when one considers it, a very strange nation. There is something almost arrogant in its capricious desire to exemplify both extremes of every polarity:

France contains the strongest symbols of monarchy, and the quintessence of republicanism. The Sun King and the Guillotine. It has demonstrated the very worst excesses of both systems, and their greatest virtues. It is at once uniquely hidebound and traditionalist in Western Europe, and yet the most avowedly secular. Few nations are so convinced of their rightful place on the world stage, and yet even fewer are so parochial. It is very difficult to fathom the country, perhaps because the French themselves seem, as yet, quite incapable of doing so.




Only the French would decide that the solution to their continuing colonial holdings in Polynesia would be, not to grant them full independence, nor a continued state of subordination, but instead to force all the Polynesians to speak French, and thus "erase" the ethnic divide.

I am once again asking what exactly "normal" means in sentences like this.

https://twitter.com/GrahamSmith_/status/1722187440134217774

Is this normal?

Continuing Hutton's history of Wicca, and a striking point is the seemingly omnipresent assumption in the "Intellectual catchment" which would ultimately agglomerate in Wicca that nearly everyone, prior to recorded history, followed the same general rites.
There were two separate strains of cultural thought, centered respectively on Pan/Dionysus and an amalgamated feminine "Goddess", which would coalesce in the Wiccan God & Goddess. Both, however, individually display the same trend.

Reading on the developmental history of Wicca and modern religious "witchcraft", one thing that is striking is how absent from the conversation any hint of actual Germanic paganism, and how muted the strains even of the Celtic, are. It is all classicism and airy conjectures. The Victorian and Edwardian esotericists, poets and forerunners of the later pagan movement were obsessed with Pan, Dionysus and, on the feminine side, figures such as Diana, Isis, Ishtar and Aphrodite. Woden or Freya get not a mention, Dagda and Brigid scarcely a hearing.

It is very interesting reading R. Hutton's description of what you might call "Abstracted Academic Paganism"

As Hutton details, a great deal of the current popular view (and previous academic view) of "paganism" and how it functions derives from the whims of folklorists. The idea, for instance, that Medieval Europeans (post-Christianisation) were essentially still pagan derives in large part from a 19th-century historiography which regarded both Euro commoners and the tribes from colonial regions as essentially living, cultural fossils.

GRRM is a decent writer, but his project is fundamentally self-contradicting, and the main reason he cannot finish his books (aside from the show reducing his motivation) is that he cannot find a way to resolve the story in a way that is both satisfying yet subversive.

https://twitter.com/AtavismDr/status/1662190623997214722

The reality is, nearly all the complaints people raised against the ending of the television show would also most probably apply to the books. Yes, the execution was awful, but that wasn't the only problem.

S8 wasn't a good plot executed poorly, it was a bad plot badly done.