#MAGI ...OMF

[sanhatation]

Riley!!!

Alright laid ease it’s time for me to wish an extremely happy birthday (and mother’s day lmao) to my amazing mom, Riley! Riley you’ve been such an amazing mother to Sunny and I, raising us to be such wonderful young ladies… i’m kidding. But seriously Riley thank you so much for being so amazing, you’re so crazy but you really know how to act like the oldest when one of us needs it. You’re always there to step up and give one of us advice when something’s wrong… and you actually open the chat.

You were my second friend on here, and I appreciate that so much. You’re one of the few people who made being on this website fun. You were one of the first accounts I followed and loved, and I N E V E R thought we would end up becoming best friends, you seemed so out of reach. Thankfully we have the Astro gods to thank to an extent cause we met through your Astro in NY groupchat (but only to an extent because I couldn’t go and meet you :)))) ). I’m sure you have lots of talented friends that are gonna do so many amazing things for you today, all I can really do is write out how much you mean to me. I know this enough for you you big softie but honestly you deserve better.

Happy Birthday and Happy Mother’s Day @sanhatation

[awed-frog]

OMF WHAT SMURFOGRAPHY

Well - @diomedrian, @aconfusedwriter - maybe it’s very obvious to everyone but me, but it turns out this hat

and this hat

and this hat

are the same hat.

It’s a thing called Phrygian cap, and in Greek art it was associated with anyone from the Eastern countries - Trojan heroes, Amazons, Scythians, actual Phrygians.

(Could be a good time to say the Greeks were not exceedingly good at understanding and representing foreign cultures. Everybody who’s not Greek is basically wearing pajamas and carrying a curved bow, and I mean, I want to believe that’s what the world outside Greece looked life IRL because sweet, but we all know we can’t have nice things by now.)

The Phrygian cap was originally distinct from the pilos or pileus, which was more typically Greek and looked like this

because a) that’s the easiest shape you can make with felt or b) [insert complicated and far-fetched mythological explanation about queen Leda’s eggs], whichever you prefer (the Greeks themselves went with b because why look like a felt-making peasant when you can wax poetic about swans having sex with hot ladies amirite). Back in Antiquity, the Phyrgian cap was just a weird hat foreigners wore, while the pileus became a whole thing in Rome after the Romans came up with a wtf ritual to free slaves - which included shaving their heads and gifting them a pileus hat and probably feeding them live hedgehogs, who even knows.

(A good rule in life is to never ever ask why the Romans did specific things the way they did. There’s always an explanation and it’s always creepy or horrid or plain evil or a combination of all three.)

Fast forward almost two thousand years, and that kind of cap suddenly becomes a symbol of freedom again - this time in revolutionary France, like so

and it’s not even clear why that happened? Could be a nod to the Roman pileus, which was neither curved nor red, or the cap worn by some of the early protestors, or simply a way to piss off Robespierre, who apparently hated the whole concept (I mean I would too if it took me 75.5 minutes to curl my hair just so and then I had to wear some itchy filthy cap on top of my scrumptious iron-hot locks, big mood). And later, Peyo chose the hat for his Smurfs because he wanted Smurf society to embody that same freedom and idealism (according to some, Communist utopia, but apparently that theory’s been debunked? I know there is still some serious academic infighting going on.

In any case I wouldn’t trust the Smurf fandom rn, not after they were a massive factor in spreading coronavirus across the whole continent because yeah there’s a deadly pandemic going on but Ouais alors, we know about the virus but we need to brèk some Smurf cosplé record right the fuck now voyons.)

But also! the Phrygian cap remained associated with the East, which was always perceived as Mystical and Exotic, even back in Antiquity, and that’s why it became the typical magician/wizard’s hat in Western popular culture (the term ‘magician’ itself originally referred to Persian ‘magi’, so there’s that.)

And as a fun addition, this hat

and this hat

are also the same hat.

Apparently, the medieval thing had nothing to do with magicians and everything to do with - wait for it - copying Mongol fashion, because Europe was the back-ass of the world at that time, and Mongols were all the rage. So the traditional felt hat you still find today in many Central Asian countries suddenly became the thing to have in Western courts. Honestly, who knew and why is this kind of history never taught.