dr-dendritic-trees

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love the parallels of Hector repeatably having to push Paris into fighting and Agamemnon desperately trying to keep Menelaus from dying in battle.

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A flicker!!! A source of delight!

I will always love animals I just saw a picture of a bird I didn’t know existed and teared up bc it was cute and pretty

The red cheeks r so cute

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hello friend! i have been trawling through your goodreads shelves as i so frequently do, but i have a specific request for recs that i think you might have some answers for and thought i'd go to the source: do you have any book recs for nonfiction about ancient religion?

I do indeed and am glad you asked! I only feel really qualified to recommend books on Ancient Greek religion specifically, but on that topic I have quite a lot:

More general/foundational

foundational to the field at the turn of the century and very important context for the framing of subsequent conversations about Ancient Greek religion is Jane Ellen Harrison. You may want to read more modern things first/instead, but her Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion is sort of where it all begins

Karl Kerenyi is also quite an important voice in the field, and though there are places where his scholarship is notably dubious I think there are things to be gained from his work. Probably try The Religion of the Greeks and Romans

Sarah Iles Johnson has done a bunch of accessible, solidly useful scholarship on ancient religion more broadly, and I think might actually be a realistically good place to start, though her work doesn't feel as intellectually exciting to me personally as a number of other things on this list. Her edited essay collection straightforwardly titled Ancient Religions may give you a lot of what you're looking for.

Yulia Ustinova is another contemporary scholar who has done a bunch of really solidly useful but not stunningly intellectually innovative work in this field. Divine Mania does some useful multidisciplinary stuff.

Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony - this is really a book about mythology and not religious practice, but I mostly just want people to read it.

Marcel Detienne & Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks - I had mixed feelings on this, but it's quite important in the field and probably the Detienne & Vernant mostly concretely focused on religious practice

More specific and fun

Joan Breton Connelly, Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece - my younger self was so very excited about the release of this book. It's not the most substantive work, but it has a special place in my heart

Barbara Goff, Citizen Bacchae: Women's Ritual Practice in Ancient Greece

Giulia Sissa, Greek Virginity - this is a history of sexuality book rather than a history of religion proper, but of course it's a lot about religion and also I had roughly a dozen revelations about things while reading it

there should be some Nicole Loraux on this list but I'm not sure which. Maybe Born from the Earth: Myth and Politics in Athens, which is useful particularly on the way the political and the religious were entwined, though you in particular I think should read The Experiences of Tiresias

Bonnie MacLachan, The Age of Grace: Charis in Early Greek Poetry - this isn't really so relevant to your question and is only useful after doing some exploration of the lyric poets first, but I love it and really can't help but recommend it

Georgia Petridou, Divine Epiphany in Greek Literature and Culture - same as above; this is more a literary study, but I just personally loved it

Andrej Petrovic & Ivana Petrovic, Inner Purity and Pollution in Greek Religion

Alan Sommerstein & Isabelle Torrance, Oaths and Swearing in Ancient Greece

Kathy Gaca, The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity - I think you in particular should read this

I have other more specific recommendations on particular deities and religious centers, but those tend to be drier and this list is long enough. I hope you enjoy this exploration!

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Unpopular opinion but if you don't enjoy the process you should find a different thing to do.

And I think this is true in general but now I'm talking about it in the context of AI.

If you don't enjoy making art and only care about the end piece and how it'll look and how much traction it"lol get online then making art is not something for you, find something you enjoy from start to finish.

Same goes for writing: if you do not enjoy writing and rewriting and then some more and instead want AI to write for you, being a writer is not something you should pursue.

Sure, not every part of creative process is going to be equally enjoyable but you should get satisfaction from solving the problems along the way and you should get a sense of accomplishment on your way of "making the piece yours" and you should have a sense of ownership once you are done.

None of these things will come from typing in a prompt into chatGPT. And I am sad to see so many people are missing on the opportunity to experience the joy of making something with their own hands and brains.

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"odysseus is [depicted as being] justified in murdering the twelve women because they [are depicted as having] betrayed the household that provides for them" yeah i know, i just don't think it means we can't interrogate the odyssey further. that is an accurate description of what the text portrays and believes, but even so, it's loaded with assumptions. why does the text assume they slept with the suitors willingly when they are otherwise depicted without much interiority (melantho's feelings about eurymachus are ambiguous even compared to melanthius)? if they weren't willing, would it have been depicted differently, and how? if they were willing, what might have made those relationships look attractive or strategic or safe to them? why are they dependent on the household in the first place? why are some readers resistant to the extension of compassion toward them? does that have anything to do with the text's depiction of them? is that worth pushing back against?

i mean, obviously i think the answer to the last question is yes. you should try to understand the context of odysseus' actions, but you should also try to understand the actions of the slaves, even though (and especially because) the text cares about them less. you can interrogate how it portrays and what it believes about power. the odyssey is thousands of years old; it can take it

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I’ve seen this new trend of girls posting videos like “I hate my boyfriend for bringing all of his stupid boy things into our apartment when we moved in together 🙄” and then pictures of his hot wheels collection or a Halloween skeleton or an extremely cool pirate flag. Give him to me you do not deserve him.

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I absolutely agree with this but its interesting seeing how this conversation has evolved. Because I definitely remember seeing conversations ~5-6 years ago that took the opposite tack.

At that time the argument was, iirc:

Man caves are frequently sexist because they end up being a space where a man has totally control, and can hole up and exclude all other familial responsibilities (ex. its quite normal to not be allowed in Dad's Man Cave) while using the fact that the wife gets to decorate the rest of the house to justify her not having any equivalent space free of responsiblity.

Both of these things definitely happen, I'm now wondering to what degree these are two separate failure modes of a relationship and to what degree they're happening simultaneously in some of these relatonships.

I’ve seen this new trend of girls posting videos like “I hate my boyfriend for bringing all of his stupid boy things into our apartment when we moved in together 🙄” and then pictures of his hot wheels collection or a Halloween skeleton or an extremely cool pirate flag. Give him to me you do not deserve him.

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I wish we could teach each other how to love the way we can teach animals that aren’t supposed to be able to feel it.

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Baby saiga being nestled in the hands of a scientist.

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been stewing on an analytical approach to fiction which I call "is this book afraid of me?" and in order to answer this question you determine how hard the book is trying to make sure you don't come after the writer on twitter

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FIBER ARTISTS, I want to know what yall do the most so let’s do a demographic poll

I know we are all victims of the fiber art rabbit hole and nearly all of us dabble in more than one craft, so please vote for your MAIN one, the one you do the most, the one you can do with your eyes closed, and maybe share in the tag what else you do! I hope I covered most of the crafts.

REBLOG for sample size!

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Something that I get chills about is the fact that the oldest story told made by the oldest civilization opens with "In those days, in those distant days, in those ancient nights."

This confirms that there is a civilization older than the Sumerians that we have yet to find

Some people get existential dread from this

Me? I think it's fucking awesome it shows just how much of this world we have yet to discover and that is just fascinating

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quick sketch of Cassandra meeting her doomed nephew :)

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This is the Lunar New Year Tiktaalik of luck, you don't have to do anything to this post to receive luck, this is because Tiktaalik loves you.

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anyways tl;dr on that last post it’s like we’ve reached a point where in popular culture the ancient Greeks are remembered for their mythology and literature (and maybe Athenian democracy) while the Romans are remembered for their patriarchal imperialism, despite the fact that both cultures did plenty of both. and the consequence is that we’ve ended up with a bizarre quasi-gender binary where Greek stuff is for people who like mythology and literature and Roman stuff is for people who like patriarchal imperialism

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Something I find incredibly cool is that they’ve found neandertal bone tools made from polished rib bones, and they couldn’t figure out what they were for for the life of them. 

Until, of course, they showed it to a traditional leatherworker and she took one look at it and said “Oh yeah sure that’s a leather burnisher, you use it to close the pores of leather and work oil into the hide to make it waterproof. Mine looks just the same.” 

“Wait you’re still using the exact same fucking thing 50,000 years later???”

“Well, yeah. We’ve tried other things. Metal scratches up and damages the hide. Wood splinters and wears out. Bone lasts forever and gives the best polish. There are new, cheaper plastic ones, but they crack and break after a couple years. A bone polisher is nearly indestructible, and only gets better with age. The more you use a bone polisher the better it works.”

It’s just. 

50,000 years. 50,000. And over that huge arc of time, we’ve been quietly using the exact same thing, unchanged, because we simply haven’t found anything better to do the job. 

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Clay loom weight decorated with an owl, Greek, 5th Century BCE

From the Acropolis Museum