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moonsceptre · 3 months ago

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Alchemy & Dreams in Beetlejuice Part 2

As mentioned in the last post, red represents Lydia: the material realm & sulphur. The item which falls next to Astrid's cracked photograph is a molecular structure with a red atom and a green atom. It's already common knowledge that Betelgeuse is green-coded, but I have further proof to support the atom theory.

Alchemists viewed the human body (microcosm) as a reflection of the universe (macrocosm). This suggested that atoms could give insights about human nature. Within this context, consider Rosenkreutz illustration of the Chymical Wedding, where the married couple are holding onto the structure. They're supposed to represent two atoms of the same trigonal planar molecule, because they are of the same element, thus sharing a chemical bond.

Alchemy consists of a mix of chemistry, philosophy, semiotics, and metaphysics, with much of the symbolism used to convey alchemical themes in Beetlejuice.

Before I come back to this, let's talk about...

Otho

Throughout the first movie, Otho is typically associated with black and red. He's often wearing black with either a red tie, red buttons, or red shoes (which mysteriously disappear in a couple scenes only to be replaced by different colour shoes).

Red shoes have long been used in media to represent a metaphorical journey (The Red Shoes (1948), Kiki's Delivery Service (1989), and Hans Christian Andersen's The Red Shoes are a few examples). Need I remind you of one of Tim Burton's favourite movies, The Wizard of Oz?

Otho is the only character other than Lydia who piques interest in the dead. Despite his willingness to exploit them, he is ready to believe in their existence and study the handbook. These visual cues are conveying the character's motives.

Part of the alchemical process are the stages "Rubedo" and "Nigredo". Rubedo is Latin for "redness", the stage of understanding where two opposites have joined and created harmony. Nigredo is Latin for "blackness", the stage of putrefaction or decomposition, thus symbolising the dead. In layman's terms, red and black represent the character's willingness to connect with the dead. The only other character really associated with black and red is Lydia, and that speaks for itself.

Otho is a character who inspired the creation of Rory in the second movie. Within Lydia's psyche, Rory has been manifested from guilt. In the first film, Lydia is almost complicit in helping Otho to exorcise the Maitlands after he makes it clear that he wants to capitalise on the dead. In the second film, Lydia is under Rory's management to capitalise on the dead, and she is trying to make peace with that guilt by trying to help people through exorcisms.

Guilt in dreams is often seen as a manifestation of the unconscious mind's attempt to communicate unresolved internal conflicts. This is where the shadow becomes a central concept in Jungian psychology, referring to the parts of the Self that the conscious mind rejects or ignores. Lydia rejects the traits that Otho and Rory embody, and that is why her reconciliation with Astrid is a manifestation of her own forgiveness.

More on The Chemical Wedding

We talked about the purpose of the Chemical Wedding before, but why is it so relevant to the plot of Beetlejuice? Other than the fact Betelgeuse has fallen in love with Lydia, there is an allegorical reason for why the wedding must take place between these two, and no one else but these two.

A Chemical Wedding is the marriage between the sun and the moon. In alchemical texts they are often depicted as the white queen and the red king, though this has nothing to do with literal gender roles, for we see Lydia herself portrayed as the red king in her parallel with Astrid. It is related to the Anima (the female self) and the Animus (the male self). This is also the marriage between mercury and sulfur, spirit and matter, the dead and the living.

One of the most famous works on the subject of a Chemical Wedding is a Rosicrucian allegory published in 1616 by Christian Rosenkreutz. It describes a mystical journey where the main character must attend a wedding at a mysterious castle. The journey is a symbol of the alchemical process, while the wedding itself represents the final transformative stage.

The story is filled with strange and dreamlike imagery, with many claiming it as a source of German dark romanticism.

Rosenkreuz's allegory actually represents inner transformation of the individual, with marriage being used as a metaphor, insofar as the masculine and feminine halves must be merged together in matrimony to achieve completion within oneself.

"Death and the Maiden" trope is a motif that depicts a woman being taken by Death, as he desires to marry her. It is dire for death to marry his living bride, for he wishes to venture the living world and the underworld with her.

Betelgeuse is the perfect complementary opposite to Lydia, each crafted to embody the other's symbolic missing half. Betelgeuse is the animus; he's loud, provocative, and dead; Lydia is the anima; she's quiet, thoughtful, and alive. The contrast is straightforward and uncomplicated. You could easily spend hours analysing their differences, and you'd still be right—because they are deliberately written as foils to one another.

Looking back at how Otho/Rory represents the shadow of Lydia, we should take into account who guided her through this dream sequence. Our psyche creates these thought-images in our unconscious minds as a means to roleplay scenarios where we have internal conflict. It gives us a chance to psychoanalyse ourselves and try to understand the core of our trauma.

Betelgeuse, within Lydia's dream, is acting as a guide (remember his guide outfit in the first film?). He's constantly appearing to her, influencing her and urging her to face her fears. While he's causing chaos in the way he knows best, he's also showing Lydia the bare truth, and this is especially apparent when it comes to Rory: he tells Lydia she's an enabling codependent and forces Rory to tell the truth about his intentions. Betelgeuse is what Jung would refer to as the Trickster archetype. The Trickster is often seen as a figure that disrupts the status quo and challenges the Ego through chaotic and karmic actions, serving as a profound guide in the process of one's personal development. Think of "Jester's privilege", or The Fool in tarot.

In mythological symbolism, there comes the legend of a scorpion that stung Orion to death (the giant red star "Betelgeuse" sits on Orion's belt). The scorpion was delivered as to snub Orion's pride and teach him a lesson by way of death, because the scorpion is a symbol of death and rebirth. This is the Trickster archetype again, teaching a lesson in a very karmic way. Betelgeuse does the same throughout both movies. Otho, the Deetz, and the Deans are all punished by him in the first film for acting as antagonists against the ghosts of Winter River. Despite this, he also acts as an antagonist himself by punishing the Maitlands, two loving parental figures for Lydia, for getting in the way of his plan to marry her.

"They therefore represent a supreme pair of opposites, not hopelessly divided by logical contradiction but, because of the mutual attraction between them, giving promise of union and actually making it possible. The coniunctio oppositorum engaged the speculations of the alchemists in the form of the ‘Chymical Wedding," — Carl Jung, Psychology & Alchemy

In alchemical tradition, Saturn is associated with the metal lead, which symbolises the starting point of the alchemical work—the Nigredo phase. Alchemy is mostly known as the quest to turn lead into gold, but the allegorical meaning is to refine the Self. Saturn is equated with Cronos in mythology, the father of time, who was portrayed as an old man with a scythe/sickle, similar to the grim reaper, who is associated with the end of one's time. Betelgeuse has time-warping powers and wears time-keeping devices on his wrist, all a microcosm for how we measure eternity.

The whole Alchemical Opus works through THREE stages:

Nigredo (Black Stage): Betelgeuse represents lead and Saturn. Putrefaction.

Albedo (White Stage): Before Lydia summons Betelgeuse and agrees to the marriage, he is wearing a black and white suit. White is added to the mix. Purification.

Rubedo (Red Stage): Lydia is manifested a red wedding dress to finish the ceremony. They completed the alchemical process. Lead is turned into Gold.

In the movie's original wedding scene, found here, at 9:11 on the clock the afterlife creature who marries Lydia and Betelgeuse dissipates into fire, and then the scene ends. 911 in numerology is the number of completion, and is used in occultism to symbolise new beginnings and rebirth.

For this reason, it has been theorised that the wedding vows went through, and the Chemical Wedding was completed.

#beetlejuice #beetlejuice 2 #beetlejuice beetlejuice #theories #alchemy #carl jung #numerology #dream analysis #lydia deetz

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dragoneyes618 · 3 months ago

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"Islam was the second religion to emanate from Judaism, but as its founder was not a Jew and as it was not originally a Jewish sect, Islam's encounter with Judaism was significantly less bitter than Christianity's. As Salo Baron notes: "It was, therefore, from the beginning, a struggle between strangers, rather than an internecine strife among brethren." Largely because of this factor, Jews in the Islamic world were rarely persecuted as violently as their brethren in the Christian world. S. D. Goitein, perhaps the twentieth century's leading historian of Jewish life in the Arab world, concludes: "when the known facts are weighed, I believe it correct to say that as a whole the position of the non-Muslims [Christians and Jews under medieval Islamic rule] was far better than that of the Jews in medieval Christian Europe."

Goitein's assessment is valid, but it tells us much more about the Jews' condition under Christians than about their treatment by Muslims. For while the Jews of the Muslim world may have rarely experienced the tortures, pogroms, and expulsions that typified Jewish life under medieval Christian rule, their life under Islam was usually a life of degradation and insecurity. At the whim of a Muslim leader, a synagogue would be destroyed, Jewish orphans would be forcibly converted to Islam, or Jews would be forced to pay even more excessive taxes than usual.

Like Christianity's, Islam's anti-Judaism is deeply rooted. Islam too was born from the womb of Judaism; it too was rejected by the Jews whose validation was sought; and it too suffered an identity crisis vis-a-vis Judaism.

When Islam was born in the seventh century, there was a substantial Jewish population in Medina, where the first Muslim community arose. The Jews of pre-Islamic Arabia were active advocates of their religion, to such an extent that several kings of Himyar, now Yemen, converted to Judaism. Contemporary inscriptions described Dhu Nuwas As'ar, the last Jewish king of Himyar, as a believer in one deity whom the king called Rahman, the Merciful One, as called in Judaism and later in Islam.

During his early years, Muhammad related well to the Jews of Arabia, and their religious practices and ideas deeply influenced him. As Goitein noted: "The intrinsic values of the belief in one God, the creator of the world, the God of Justice and mercy, before whom everyone high and low bears responsibility came to Muhammad, as he never ceased to emphasized, from Israel."

The profound influence of the Jews, their Bible, and their laws on Muhammad is clearly expressed in the Koran, the Muslim bible, and in Muhammad's early religious legislation. Indeed, Muhammad saw himself as another Moses. In the Koran, he writes of his message (Sura 46, verse 12), "Before it the book of Moses was revealed....This Book confirms it. It is revealed in the Arabic tongue." Moses is a dominant figure on the Koran, in which he is mentioned over one hundred times.The Jewish doctrine that most deeply influenced Muhammad was monotheism: "There is no God but God." Muhammad's monotheism was so attuned to the uncompromising nature of Judaism's monotheism that though he had also been influenced by Christian teachers, he rejected the Christian trinity and the divinity of Jesus as not monotheistic: "Unbelievers are those that say, 'Allah is one of three.' There is but one God. If they do not desist from so saying, those of them that disbelieve shall be sternly punished" (5:71-73).

Jewish law also deeply influenced Muhammad. In the early days of Islam, Muslims prayed in the direction of the Jews' holy city, Jerusalem, and observed the most solemn Jewish holiday, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Only later, when Muhammad reluctantly concluded that the Jews would not embrace him as their prophet and convert to Islam, did he substitute Mecca for Jerusalem, and the fast of Ramadan for Yom Kippur. Similarly, Muhammad based Muslim dietary laws upon Judaism's laws of Kashrut: "You are forbidden carrion, blood, and the flesh of swine; also any flesh...of animals sacrificed to idols." The five daily prayers of Islam are likewise modeled on the three daily services of the Jews.

Second in importance only to his adoption of the Jews' God was Muhammad's adoption of the Jews' founding father, Abraham, as Islam's founder. In Sura 2, verse 125, Muhammad writes how Abraham and his son Ishmael converted the Kaaba, the holy rock of Arabian paganism, into the holy shrine of Islam.

Believing himself to be the final and greatest prophet of Mosaic monotheism, and having adopted so much of Jewish thought and practice, Muhammad appealed to the Jews of Arabia to recognize his role and to adopt Islam as the culmination of Judaism. "Even Luther," the late renowned philosopher Walter Kaufmann wrote, "expected the Jews to be converted by his version of Christianity, although he placed faith in Christ at the center of his teaching and firmly believed in the trinity. If even Luther...could expect that, how much more Muhammad, whose early revelations were so much closer to Judaism?" Muhammad's deep desire for Jewish recognition reflected the similar needs of Jesus and his followers. No group could validate Muhammad's religious claims as could the Jews, nor could any so seriously threaten to undermine them.

The Jews rejected Muhammad's claims as they had Jesus', holding in both cases that what was true in their messages was not new, and that what was new was not true. Islam may have served as a religious advance for Arabian pagans, but for the Jews it was merely another offshoot of Judaism.

One major factor that rendered Muhammad's prophetic claims untenable to Jews was his ignorance of the Bible. In large part because Muhammad never read the Bible, but only heard Bible stories, his references to the Jews' holy text were often erroneous. In Sura 28:38, for instance, he had Pharaoh (from Exodus) ask Haman (of the Book of Esther) to erect the Tower of Babel (which appears at the beginning of Genesis).

Another obstacle to Jewish acceptance of Muhammad was the moral quality of some of his teachings. They did not strike the Jews, or the Arabian Christians, as equaling, let alone superceding, the prophetic teachings of Judaism or Christianity. In 33:50, for example, Muhammad exempts himself from his own law limiting a man to four wives, and in 4:34 he instructs men to beat disobedient wives. Walter Kaufmann notes that "there is much more like this, especially in the 33rd Sura," and that "it must have struck the Jews as being a far cry from Amos and Jeremiah, and the Christians as rendering absurd the prophet's claim that he was superseding Jesus."

Finally, Muhammad's suspension of many Torah Laws invalidated him in the Jews' eyes.

For these and other reasons, the Jews rejected Muhammad's prophetic claims and refused to become Muslims. This alone infuriated Muhammad. But it was even more infuriating that the Jews publicly noted the errors in Muhammad's biblical teachings and may have even ridiculed his claims to prophecy. Goitein concludes, "it is only natural that Muhammad could not tolerate as a neighbor a large monotheistic community which categorically denied his claim as a prophet, and probably also ridiculed his inevitable blunders."

As a result Muhammad turned against the Jews and their religion, and never forgave them for not becoming his followers. And just as early Christian hostility to the Jews was canonized in the New Testament, so Muhammad's angry reactions to the Jews were recorded in the Koran. these writings gave Muslims throughout history a seemingly divinely-sanctioned antipathy to the Jews.

In the Koran, Muhammad attacked the Jews and attempted to invalidate Judaism in several ways. First, and most significantly, he changed Abraham from a Jew to a Muslim: "Abraham was neither Jew nor Christian. [He] surrendered himself to Allah....Surely the men who are nearest to Abraham are those who follow him, this Prophet" (3:67-68).

Second, he condemned the Jews and delegitimized their law by advancing a thesis similar to Paul's, that the many Torah laws had been given to the Jews as punishment for their sins: "Because of their iniquity we forbade the Jews good things which were formerly allowed them" (4:160).

Third, Muhammad charged the Jews with falsifying their Bible by deliberately omitting prophecies of his coming. For example, in the Koran (2:129), Muhammad has Abraham mouth a prophecy of his (Muhammad's) coming. Muhammad charged that the Jews "extinguish the light of Allah" (9:32) by having removed such prophecies from their Bible.

Fourth, Muhammad asserted that Jews, like Christians, were not true monotheists, a charge he substantiated by claiming that the Jews believed the prophet Ezra to be the Son of God. "And the Jews say: Ezra is the son of Allah...Allah fights against them. How perverse are they." (9:30).

These anti-Jewish fabrications, articulated by Muhammad as reactions to the Jews' rejection of him, have ever since been regarded by Muslims as God's word. Though originally directed against specific Jews of a specific time, these statements often have been understood by succeeding generations as referring to all Jews at all times, and thus form the basis of Islamic antisemitism.

One common example is 2:61: "And humiliation and wretchedness were stamped upon them and they were visited with wrath from Allah. That was because they disbelieved in Allah's revelations and slew the prophets wrongfully.j That was for their disobedience and transgression." This Koranic description of the Jews of seventh-century Arabia has often been cited by Muslims to describe Jews to this day. *

(* In a speech before his army officers on April 25, 1972, the late Egyptian President Anwar as-Sadat cited this Koranic verse, and then added: "The most splendid thing our prophet Muhammad, God's peace and blessing on him, did was to evict them [the Jews] from the entire Arabian peninsula...I pledge to you that we will celebrate on the next anniversary, God willing and on this place with God's help, not only the liberation of our land but also the defeat of the Israeli conceit and arrogance so that they must once again return to the condition decreed in our holy book: 'humiliation and wretchedness were stamped upon them'...We will not renounce this.")

Muhammad and the Koran thus laid the basis for subsequent antisemitism just as the early Christians had - and for basically the same reason: Jews remaining Jewish constituted a living refutation of Islamic beliefs. Thus, under Islam, just as under Christianity, Jew-hatred was ultimately Judaism-hatred. Any Jew who converted to Islam was accepted as an equal.

Christians under Muslim rule fared little better. Muslims and their laws generally dealt harshly with both Christians and Jews.

As long as Christian communities survived in the Muslim world, discriminatory legislation also applied to them as well. However, whereas Jewish communities often flourished as vibrant Jewish communities, Christian communities for the most part did not survive the intense Muslim hostility. Under the yoke of MUslim laws against Jews and Christians, hundreds of thousands of people in some of the oldest and strongest Christian communities in the world converted to Islam.

No fact better underscores the intensity of Muslim persecution of dhimmis (non-Muslim monotheists) than this disappearance of so many Christian communities under Islam. The fact that under similar conditions many Jewish communities flourished bears witness to the Jews' tenacious commitment to Judaism, not to Muslim benevolence toward them. This is often lost sight of when favorably comparing Muslim antisemitism with Christian antisemitism. Yet the conversion to Islam of nearly every pre-Islamic Christian community in the Muslim world (the Copts of Egypt constituting the most notable exception) eloquently testifies to what Jews had to endure in their long sojourn through the Muslim world.

The two guiding principles of Islam's treatment of Jews and Christians are that Islam dominates and is not dominated, and that Jews and Christians are to be subservient and degraded. Nonmonotheists were usually given the choice of conversion to Islam or death.

The Muslim legal code that prescribed the treatment of Jews and Christians, or dhimmis as they are both referred to in Islam, was the Pact of Umar, attributed to Muhammad's second successor, but assumed to date from about 720. Its key characteristic was the requirement that dhimmis always acknowledge their subservient position to Muslims. Jews and Christians had to pledge, for example, "We shall not manifest our religion publicly nor convert anyone to it. We shall not prevent any of our kin from entering Islam if they wish it." The subservience that dhimmis were required to show publicly to Muslims is analogous to the behavior once expected of Blacks in the Jim Crow American South: "We shall show respect...and we shall rise from our seats when they [Muslims] wish to sit." They also had to pledge "not to mount saddles," since riding a horse, or, according to some Muslims, any animal, was considered incompatible with the low status of a dhimmi. The dhimmis also had to vow "We shall not display our crosses or our books in the roads or markets of the Muslims nor shall we raise our voices when following our dead."

Anti-dhimmi legislation did not end with the Pact of Umar. In the Koran, Muhammad had urged Muslims, "Fight against such of those who have been given the Scripture...and follow not the religion of truth, until they pay the tribute readily, being brought low" (9:29). Accordingly, Muslim officials often insisted that when paying tribute, dhimmis must be "brought low," that is, humiliated.

An early Muslim regulation precisely prescribed how to humiliate Jews and Christians when they pay tribute: "The dhimmi, Christian or Jew, goes on a fixed day in person to the emir, appointed to receive the poll tax, who occupies a high throne-like seat. The dhimmi stands before him, offering the poll tax on his open palm. The emir takes it so that his hand is on top and the dhimmi's underneath. Then the emir gives him a blow on the neck, and a guard, standing upright before the emir, drives him roughly away The same procedure is followed with the second, third, and the following taxpayers. The public is admitted to enjoy this show." The public was not merely "admitted" to this humiliating spectacle, but as Baron observes, "Public participation was, indeed, essential for the purpose of demonstrating, according to the Shafi'ite school, the political superiority of Islam."

In the course of time Muslim rulers developed additional ways to humiliate dhimmis. Baron describes one of them: "Equally vexatious was the tax receipt, which in accordance with an old Babylonian custom, was sometimes stamped upon the neck of the 'unbelieving' taxpayer. This ancient mark of slavery...expressly prohibited in the Talmud under the sanction of the slave's forcible emancipation, occasionally reappeared here as a degrading stamp of 'infidelity.'"

These humiliating and painful procedures had a terrible effect on the Jews: "An Arab poet rightly spoke of entering the door with bent heads 'as if we were Jews.'"

Another law designed to humiliate dhimmis required them to wear different clothing. The purposes of this law were to enable Muslims to recognize Jews and Christians at all times, and to make them appear foolish. In 807, the Abbasid Caliph Haroun al-Raschid, legislated that Jews must wear a yellow belt and a tall conical cap. This Muslim decree provided the model for the yellow badge associated with the degradation of Jews in Christian Europe and most recently imposed by the Nazis.

A Jew living in Baghdad in the days of Al-Muqtadir (1075-96) described additional measures passed by the vizier, Abu Shuja, to humiliate Jews: "each Jew had to have a stamp of lead...hang from his neck, on which the word dhimmi was inscribed. On women he likewise imposed two distinguishing marks: the shoes worn by each woman had to be one red and one black. She also had to carry on her neck or attached to her shoe a small brass bell...And the Gentiles used to ridicule Jews, the mob and children often assaulting Jews in all the streets of Baghdad.

During the same century in Egypt, the Fatimid Caliph Hakim ordered Christians to wear a cross with arms two feet long, while Jews were ordered to wear around their necks balls weighing five pounds, to commemorate the calf's head that their ancestors had once worshiped.

These clothing regulations were not only enforced in the Middle Ages. Until their departure from Yemen in 1948, all Jews, men and women alike, were compelled to dress like beggars.

In fact, Yemen offers us a unique opportunity to understand Muslim attitudes toward the Jews. For it was the one Muslim country with a non-Muslim minority (Jews) that was never ruled by a European power. It was therefore able to treat its Jews in the "purest" Muslim manner, uninfluenced by non-Muslim domination.

In 1679, Jews in most of Yemen were expelled from their cities and villages. When allowed to come back a year later, they were not allowed to return to their homes, but were forced to settle in Jewish settlements outside of the cities. During their expulsion the synagogue of San'a, the capital, was converted into a mosque, which still exists under the name Masjid al-Jala (the Mosque of the Expulsion).

Among the many indignities to which the Jews of Yemen were constantly subjected was the throwing of stones at them by Muslim children, a practice that was religiously sanctioned. When Turkish officials (the Turks occupied Yemen in 1872) asked an assembly of Muslim leaders to see that this practice be stopped, an elderly Muslim scholar responded that throwing rocks at Jews was an Ada, an old religious custom, and thus it was unlawful to forbid it.

The greatest recurrent suffering that Yemenite Jews experienced was th e forced conversion to Islam of Jewish children whose fathers had died. This was practiced until the Jews fled Yemen in 1948, and was also based upon Islamic doctrine. Muhammad was believed to have said, "Everyone is born in a state of natural religion [Islam]. It is only his parents who make a Jew or Christian out of him." Accordingly, a person should grow up in the "natural religion" of Islam.

When a Jewish father died, there was often a "race" between Jewish communal leaders who sought to place the man's children with Jewish parents and the Muslim authorities who wanted to convert the children to Islam and place them in Muslim homes (in the Yemenite Islamic culture it would appear that the surviving mother was regarded as irrelevant). The Jews often lost. Goitein reports that "many families arrived in Israel with one or more of their children lost to them, and I have heard of some widows who have been bereaved in this way of all their offspring."

Yet as persecuted as the Yemenite Jews were, they were also denied the right to leave the country.

By the nineteenth century, the Jews' situation under Islam went from degradation to being recurrent victims of violence - as these examples from Jewish life in Egypt, Syria, and Palestine illustrate.

Egypt

In his authoritative book, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyyptisns, Edward Lane wrote that, at the time of his study (1833-35), the Jews were living "under a less oppressive government in Egypt than in any other country of the Turkish Empire." He added, however, that the Jews "are held in the utmost contempt and abhorrence by the Muslims in general." Lane explained: "Not long ago, they used often to be jostled in the streets of Cairo, and sometimes beaten merely for passing on the right hand of a Muslim. At present, they are less oppressed; but still they scarcely ever dare to utter a word of abuse when reviled or beaten unjustly by the meanest Arab or Turk; for many a Jew has been put to death upon a false and malicious accusation of uttering idsrespectful words against the Kuran (sic] or the Prophet. It is common to hear an Arab abuse his jaded ass, and after applying to him various opprobrious epithets, end by calling the beast a Jew.

That this was the Jewish situation in Egypt, "a less oppressive government" than elsewhere in the Muslim Arab world, tells us a great deal about Muslim antisemitism in the nineteenth century - prior to the Zionist movement.

Syria

In 1840, some French Catholics introduced the blood libel into the Arab world. After a Capuchin monk in Damascus vanished, Ratti-Mention, the local French consul, told police authorities that the Jews probably had murdered him to procure his blood for a religious ritual. Several Damascus Jews were then arrested, and under torture, oneo f them "confessed" that leaders of the Jewish community had planned the monk's murder. Many other Jews were then arrested, and under torture more such confessions were obtained. French officials pressured Syria'sruler, Muhammad Ali, to try the arrested men, and it was only after an international protest organized by Jewish communities throughout the world that the Jews who survived their tortures were released.

The blood libel immediately became popular among Muslims, who attacked Jews as drinkers of Muslim blood in Aleppo, Syria, in 1853, Damascus again, in 1848 and 1890, Cairo in 1844 and 1901-2, and Alexandria in 1870 and 1881.

The blood libel played a decisive role in unsettling the lives of nineteenth-century Syrian Jews, and since then it has been repeatedly utilized in Arab anti-Jewish writings.

Palestine

Jews have lived continuously as a community in Palestine since approximately 1200 BCE. The only independent states ever to exist in Palestine have been Jewish. After the destruction of the second Jewish state in 70 CE and the suppression of the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 CE, Jews always maintained a presence in Palestine, awaiting the reestablishment of the Jewish state. But these Jews often had to live under degrading conditions.

In nineteenth-century Palestine, which was under Ottoman Muslim rule, Jews had to walk past Muslims on their left, as the left is identified with Satan, and they always had to yield the right of way to a Muslim, by "stepping into the street and letting him pass." Failure to abide by these degrading customs often provoked a violent response.

In Palestine as elsewhere, Jews had to avoid anything that could remind Arabs of Judaism; therefore, synagogues could be located only in hidden, remote areas, and Jews could pray only in muted voices. In addition, despite the widespread poverty among Palestinian Jews, they had to pay a host of special protection taxes (in actuality, a form of extortion). For example, Jews paid one hundred pounds a year to the Muslim villagers of Siloam (just outside Jerusalem) not to disturb the graves at the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives, and fifty pounds a year to the Ta'amra Arabs not to deface the Tomb of Rachel on the road to Bethlehem. They also had to pay ten pounds annually to Sheik Abu Gosh to to molest Jewish travelers on the road to Jerusalem, even though the Turkish authorities were already paying him to maintain order on that road.

These anti-Jewish laws, taxes, and practices had a rather intimidating effect on the Jews. The British consul James Finn, who lived in Jerusalem in the 1850s, described in his book Stirring Times how "Arab merchants would dump their unsold wares on their Jewish neighbors and bill them, safe in the knowledge that the Jews so feared them that they would not dare return the items or deny their purchase."

Muslim antisemitism continued to be brutally expressed through the twentieth century. Albert Memmi, the noted French-Jewish novelist, who grew up in North Africa, cites a few examples:

"In Morocco in 1907, a huge massacre of Jews took place in Casablanca, along with the usual embellishments - rape, women carried away into the mountains, hundreds of homes and shops burned, etc....In 1912 a big massacre in Fez...In Algeria in 1934, massacre in Constantine, twenty-four people killed, dozens and dozens of others seriously wounded....In Aden in 1946...over one hundred people dead and seventy-six wounded, and two-thirds of the stores sacked and burned....In June, 1941, in Iraq, six hundred people killed, one thousand seriously wounded, looting, rapes, arson, one thousand houses destroyed, six hundred stores looted....[In Libya]: November 4th and 5th, 1945, massacre in Tripoli; November 6th and 7th in Zanzour, Zaouia, Foussaber, Ziltain, etc: girls and women raped in front of their families, the stomachs of pregnant women slashed open, the infants ripped out of them, children smashed with crowbars....All this can be found in the newspapers of the time, including the local Arab papers."

Memmi summarizes the Jewish status under Islam in the twentieth century: "Roughly speaking and in the best of cases, the Jew is protected like a dog which is part of man's property, but if he raises his head or acts like a man, then he must be beaten so that he will always remember his status."

It is the Jews' refusal to accept an unequal, inferior status that lies at the heart of the Arab-Muslim hatred for Israel. (It is this, not the Palestinian refugee issue, that has been the basis of Muslim antisemitism. Without minimizing the personal difficulties of the Palestinians, as Memmi notes [on page 35 of his book Jews and Arabs]: "The Palestinian Arabs' misfortune is having been moved about thirty miles within one vast Arab nation.") As Yehoshafat Harkabi, a leading scholar of the Arab world's attitude toward Israel, put it: "The existence of the Jews was not a provocation to Islam...as long as Jews were subordinate or degraded. But a Jewish state is incompatible with the view of Jews as humiliated or wretched." The call for a Palestinian Arab state in place of Israel is for a state in which once again 'Islam dominates and is not dominated."

This hatred of Jewish nationalism was so intense that during World War II, most Arab leaders were pro-Nazi. Among them was the head of the Muslims in Palestine, the mufti Haj Amin el-Husseini (who in 1929 had helped organize the large-scale murders of the ultra-Orthodox, non-Zionist Jews of Hebron).

An ardent supporter of Hitler, the mufti spent much of the war in Nazi Germany; on November 2, 1943, at a time when the Nazis were murdering thousands of Jews daily, the mufti declared in a speech: "The overwhelming egoism which lies in the character of Jews, their unworthy belief that they are God's chosen nation and their assertion that all was created for them and that other peoples are animals...[makes them] in capable of being trusted. They cannot mix with any other nation but live as parasites among the nations, suck out their blood, embezzle their property, corrupt their morals....The divine anger and curse that the Holy Koran mentions with reference to the Jews is because of this unique character of the Jews."

Though many Arab nations formally declared war against Germany in 1945, when German defeat was imminent, in order to be eligible for entry into the United Nations, extensive Arab sympathy with the Nazis continued even after Germany's surrender. The Egyptians and Syrians long welcomed Nazis to their countries, offering them the opportunity to further implement the "Final Solution," by assisting in their efforts to destroy Israel and wipe out the Jewish community living there.

Among many Arabs the Holocaust has come to be regarded with nostalgia. On August 17, 1956, the French newspaper Le Mongde quoted the government-controlled Damascus daily Al-Manar as observing, "One should not forget that, in contrast to Europe, Hitler occupied an honored place in the Arab world....[Journalists} are mistaken if they think that by calling Nasser Hitler, they are hurting us. On the contrary, his name makes us proud. Long live Hitler, the Nazi who struck at the heart of our enemies. Long live the Hitler [i.e., Nasser] of the Arab world."

On June 9, 1960, after Israeli agents captured Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official who had supervised the murder of six million Jews, the Beirut daily Al-Anwar carried a cartoon depicting Eichmann speaking with Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Said Ben-Gurion: "You deserve the death penalty because you killed six million Jews." Responded Eichmann: "There are many who say I deserve the death penalty because I didn't manage to kill the rest."

On April 24, 1961, the Jordanian English-language daily Jerusalem Times published an "Open Letter to Eichmann," which concluded, "But be brave, Eichmann, find solace in the fact that this trial will one day culminate in the liquidation of the remaining six million to avenge your blood." At the UN sponsored "Conference Against Racism" in September 2001, an Arab pamphlet displayed at the Durban Exhibition Center featured a picture of Adolf Hitler with the caption, "If I had won the war there would be no...Palestinian blood lost."

Arab Jew-hatred also has brought about the resurrection of the blood libel. In 1962, the Egyptian Ministry of Education reissued Talmudic Sacrifices by Habib Faris, a book originally published in Cairo in 1890. The editor notes in his introduction that the book constitutes "an explicit documentation of indictment, based upon clear-cut evidence that the Jewish people permitted the shedding of blood as a religious duty enjoined in the Talmud."

On April 24, 1970, Fatah radio, under the leadership of Yasir Arafat, broadcast, "Reports from the captured homeland tell that the Zionist enemy has begun to kidnap small children from the streets. Afterwards the occupying forces take the blood of the children and throw away their empty bodies. The inhabitants of Gaza have seen this with their own eyes."

Even more disturbing, the blood libel accusations have been made by the most prominent figures within the Arab world. In November 1973, the late King Faisal of Saudi Arabia said that it was necessary to understand the Jewish religious obligation to obtain non-Jewish blood in order to comprehend the crimes of Zionism. A decade later, in 1984, the Saudi Arabian delegate to the UN Human Rights Commission Conference on religious tolerance, Marouf al-Dawalibi, told the commission, "The Talmud says that if a Jew does not drink every year the blood of a non-Jewish man, he will be damned for eternity." In The Matzah of Zion, a book that has remained in print since its publication in 1983, Mustafa Tlas, the Syrian Defense Minister since 1972, wrote, "The Jew can kill you and take your blood in order to make his Zionist bread." A 2000 article about Tlas's book in Al-Ahram, Egypt's largest, and government-controlled, newspaper, reported, "The Bestial drive to knead Passover matzahs with the blood of non-Jews is [confirmed] in the records of the Palestinian police where there are many recorded cases of the bodies of Arab children who had disappeared without being found, torn to pieces, without a single drop of blood. The most reasonable explanation is that the blood was taken to be used in matzahs to be devoured during Passover." As one American journalist commented: "If this is 'the most reasonable explanation," can you imagine an unreasonable one?" The Al-Ahram article went on to report that an Egyptian movie company is planning to shoot a multimillion dollar film version of The Matzah of Zion, which will retell, as truth, the story of the Damascus blood libel.

And still the blood libel goes on. A 2001 cartoon in the Jordanian newspaper Al-Dustour depicts an Israeli soldier presenting his mother with a Mother's Day gift of a bottle containing the blood of a Palestinian child. At about the same time (November 2001), Abu Dhabi Television depicted a caricature of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon preparing to drink a cup of blood taken from a Palestinian. A March 10, 2002, article in Saudi Arabia's Al-Riyadh, the government-controlled newspaper, by Dr. Umayma Ahmad Al-Jalahma of King Faisal University, creates a new twist to this ancient libel, claiming that Jews use blood for Purim pastry and not just for Passover matzo: "Let us now examine how the victims' blood is spilled. For this, a needle-studded barrel is used; this is a kind of barrel, about the size of the human body, with extremely sharp needles set in it on all sides. [These needles] pierce the victim's body, from the moment he is placed in the barrel. These needles do the job, and the victim's blood drips from him very slowly. Thus, the victim suffers dreadful torment - torment that affords the Jewish vampires great delight as they carefully monitor every detail of the blood-shedding with pleasure and love that are difficult to comprehend."

Arab Muslims have also reached back to classical themes of Islamic antisemitism to attack the Jews and Israel. Many Arab speakers and publications echo Muhammad's charge in the Koran (5:82) that the Jews are the greatest enemies of humankind. For example, an Egyptian textbook, published in 1966 for use in teachers' seminars, taught that Jews (not only Israelis) are the "monsters of mankind [and] a nation of beasts."

Perhaps the favorite antisemitic publication in the Arab world for over fifty years has been The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.. In an interview with the editor of the Indian magazine Blitz, on October 4, 1958, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt praised the Protocols: "I wonder if you have read a book called 'Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.' It is very important that you should read it. I will give you an English copy. It proves clearly, to quote from the Protocols, that 'three hundred Zionists, each of whom knows all the others, govern the fate of the European continents and they elect their successors from their entourage."

The late King Faisal of Saudi Arabia gave copies of the Protocols to the guests of his regime. When he presented the Protocols, along with an anthology of antisemitic writings, to French journalists who accompanied French Foreign Minister Michel Jobert on his visit to Saudi Arabia in January 1974, "Saudi officials noted that these were the king's favorite books."

Article 32 of the 1988 Palestinian Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement) Covenant claims that the Zionist "scheme" foe takeover of the Arab world "has been laid out in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and their present [conduct] is the best proof of what is said there." Hamas literature repeatedly accuses Jews of controlling the world's wealth and its most important media, and using them to promote Jewish and Zionist interests, even of having established the League of Nations in the 1920s "in order to rule the world."

Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, the official newspaper of the Palestinian Authority (and therefore supposedly less extreme than Hamas), regularly contains references to the Protocols. Thus, even during the height of the Oslo peace process the paper published the following: "It is important to conduct the conflict according to the foundations which both are leaning on...particularly the Jews...such as the Torah, the Talmud, and the Protocols...This conflict resembles the conflict between men and Satan." At about the same time in Egypt, Al-Ahram, the country's largest newspaper, reported, "A compilation of the investigative' work of four reporters on Jewish control of the world states that Jews have become the political decision-makers and control the media in most capitals of the world (Washington, Paris, London, Berlin, Athens, Ankara)." As the journalist Andrew Sullivan comments, "It is worth noting that every word Al Ahram prints is vetted and approved by the Egyptian government, a regime to which the United States - i.e., you and I - contributed $2 billion a year."

It is perhaps no surprise that, as of 2002, over sixty editions of the Protocols are being sold throughout the Arab world, and this libelous "warrant for genocide" is probably more widely distributed today than at any other time in its history. In 2002, the New York Times, in a front-page story, reported that a major Egyptian television station was about to launch a forty-one-episode TV series based on the Protocols (complete with Jewish villains dressed in black hats, side curls, and beards) to run before and during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

The Islamic world today has combined antisemitic motifs from Nazism and medieval Christendom, as well as from its own tradition. This potent combination has made the Arabs the major source of antisemitic publications in the world today. And as in other forms of antisemitism, in the words of Yehoshafat Harkabi, "the evil in the Jews is ascribed not to race or blood, but to their spiritual character and religion." Thus, when Pakistani Islamic terrorists kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in January 2002, they forced Pearl to say, "I am a Jew," (and videotaped him doing so) before slitting his throat.

Only through an understanding of the deep theological roots of Muslim antisemitism and an awareness of its continuous history can present-day Muslim hatred of Israel be understood. Only then does one recognize how false are the claims of Israel's enemies that prior to Zionism, Jews and Muslims lived in harmony and that neither Islam nor Muslims have ever harbored Jew-hatred. The creation of the Jewish state in no way created Muslim Jew-hatred; it merely intensified it and gave it a new focus.

So long as the Jews acknowledged their inferior status among Muslims, they were humiliated but allowed to exist. But once the Jews decided to reject their inferior status, to become sovereign after centuries of servitude, and worst of all, to now govern some Muslims in a land where the Jews had so long been governed, their existence was no longer tolerable. Hence the passionate Arab Muslim hatred of Israel and Zionism, a hatred that entirely transcends political antagonisms. Hence the widespread Muslim call not merely for a military defeat of Israel, but for its annihilation.

As so often in Jewish history, it is the Jewish nation's existence that arouses hatred and needs to be ended. Despite peace treaties between Israel and Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994), for most Muslims the source of their hatred remains the Jewish sate's existence, not its policies, nor even its borders.

The Muslim and Arab claim that the issue is anti-Zionism rather than antisemitism really means that so long as the Jews adhere to their dhimmi status in Arab Muslim nations, their existence as individuals is acceptable. But for a Jew to aspire to equality among Muslims, for a Jew to aspire to a status higher than "humiliation and wretchedness," is to aspire too high."

- Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism, Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin, chapter nine

#joseph telushkin #rabbit joseph telushkin #dennis prager #antisemitism #history #jewish history #jumblr #why the jews the reason for antisemitism

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spacelazarwolf · 2 years ago

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i keep seeing non jewish atheists talk about jewish atheists as if they're some sort of weird "best of both worlds" where you still get to acknowledge their marginalized status as jews (which means you can't be antisemitic!) but you also don't have to engage with the inherent and complex spirituality of jewish culture — because in your mind, a jewish atheist will have rejected anything religious, spiritual, or mystical and Embraced Western Logic — and tbh it's really pissing me off.

gentiles have actively tried to eradicate our culture (which is inherently tied to things like religion, spirituality, and mysticism) for centuries, including non religious people, so to watch especially white gentiles create this Ideal Jew in their mind who has no connection to jewishness other than Things Gentiles Can Relate To Too like food and commercialized/christianized versions of our holidays feels uh. a little familiar! and honestly it also feels like a way for gentiles who are uncomfortable with non western cultures to get out of actually learning about jews and our culture on a deeper level than just latkes and candles. it's lazy and tbh i'm kinda sick of it.

basically, if you’re not jewish, please stop talking about jewish atheists and atheism, religion, and spirituality within jewish culture with any sort of authority, because you just don’t have the cultural literacy to do so.

#jewish #jumblr

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pissmoon · 3 months ago

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3 types of tumblr christians:

- picrew icon with 20 ships listed in their bio talking about how jesus was a relatable queer bean in some youth pastor manner

- qanon traddie/libertarian instagram reels comment section reject from bumfucksville ohio who converted to orthodox christianity/catholicism because wojacks told him to

- dasha wannabe lana stan pro ana girlies whose entire identity is 'problematic tumblrna' and are like 'christianity is so countercultural' (possibly pickmes for type no 2 but wont admit it)

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skaldish · 1 year ago

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People who say Loki isn't real because there's no evidence he was worshiped are really annoying. How do I rebuttal?

By understanding this is not a proper argument to begin with.

This argument in its entirety typically goes something like this:

Loki isn't a god because he wasn't worshipped in ancient times. If he was, he would have had locations named after him (place-names), people carrying his namesake, and the presence of a cult following. Since Loki wasn't a god in pre-Christian Norse society, it would be inappropriate to consider him one now.

The origins of this argument are Asatru Folk Assembly. The full argument made by Stephen McNallen goes like this:

There was no devotion given to Loki in ancient times. No place-names marked ritual sites for him; no human bore names related to him; there were no priests or priestesses of Loki. Some modern practitioners of Asatru have apparently considered this an oversight, and one occasionally hears toasts to Loki at Asatru gatherings today. However, I strongly discourage this in the Asatru Folk assembly, and I do not permit horns to be raised to him in my presence. My experience is that Loki-toasts are followed by discord all-around bad luck.

Believe it or not, this is not a valid argument.

Logical argumentation is a kind of math, and an argument will always be invalid if it follows an invalid formula, no matter how true its predicates are.

Here's an example:

Some people are pagans, and some pagans are white nationalists. Therefore, some people are white nationalists.

This is an invalid argument because it follows an invalid formula. We can see this by reframing it:

Some people are herbivores, and some herbivores are deer. Therefore, some people are deer.

The "Loki wasn't worshipped" argument is riddled with these kinds of flaws, and not just ones that follow this particular formula. There's also issues of rocky facts, unfair standards, and general argumentative fallacies:

Heimdallr also doesn't have place-names, and is considered a god.

The absence of developed, structured cultus is not the litmus test of "worship" within the context of Old Norse religions.

The argument is predicated on the idea that the Old Norse people conceptualized "gods" the same way that the Greeks and the Romans did, in that this term applies only to high beings with widespread followings.

Same applies to how the Old Norse people conceptualized "worship." We have no idea how they defined it.

The argument's evidence does not consider all possible data, i.e. attestations found in extant Scandinavian oral traditions.

I can go on, but basically the argument is predicated on assuming the Old Norse people did polytheism according to what we think polytheism should look like.

But honestly? All of this actually doesn't matter, because the ultimate goal of this argument isn't to win the debate of whether Loki's a god or not.

It's to get people to associate "Loki's followers" with "degenerate behavior."

By painting Loki-worship as both factually incorrect AND superstitiously unlucky, it implies that anyone worshipping Loki is not right in the head somehow; that the can't think or reason correctly.

Many of Loki's followers correlate with the political and social Left. They're often queer/gnc and/or neurodivergent, and support socialist policies and rejection tradition. If worshiping Loki is deemed irrational and dangerous, then it stands to reason that these things are also irrational and dangerous, and therefore all of this must be a sign of degeneracy. Or so the argument would suggest.

The fallacies in the argument are there by design, because that is how cryptofascist writers radicalize reasonable people.

The best way you refute these arguments is to deny them a platform. Delete them from your inbox. That doesn't mean you have to ignore them though. You can always speak up about them on your own time. Personally, I try to make sure that whatever it is I bring up about them will be useful to the community at large, as opposed to being an angry hate-letter to those provoking conflict. (It's a philosophy I use regardless of what the motivations of an issue are, simply because devoting my attention to the community makes for a better online experience and is ultimately more effective in the long-run.)

#answered #lokean #norse paganism #lokideity #heathenry

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waitmyturtles · 2 months ago

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Love In The Big City: An Homage to the Best Queer Show I Watched This Year*

(*that actually aired this year, because I watch a lot of old shows.)

(TW: suicide attempt)

The time I spent reading the novel and watching the television drama series of Love In The Big City by Park Sang-Young was some of the very best time I invested in art this year.

(credit: @/khunkinn)

I wanted to try to keep up with the amazing LITBC Book Club (click the tag below to see all the club's meta!) earlier this year, but I couldn't on my mom schedule. So here's a wrap-up homage to my overall thoughts about this amazing book and its equally amazing drama adaptation, and hopefully I won't repeat anyone's points from earlier meta.

Earlier this fall season, as the drama was just released, I noted my overall thoughts on Park Sang-Young's 2021 novel. What's so great about the moment in time when a book and its drama adaptation meet the same levels of excellence in art, is that you get to see what each artistic medium can really offer by way of its specific ability to penetrate and dissect certain emotional states. With the drama adaptation, we got a more in-depth sense of the visual and behavioral whimsy of Go Young's T-aras friend group. We got a living, breathing sense of the simultaneous quiet and frantic pulse of the Seoul that Young occupied. We could almost taste and smell the sweat, the tequila, the apple martinis of the nightclubs that Young danced in at all hours.

I happened to love the novel, as I wrote in my previous piece linked above, because I love to cringe at really well-written, pathetic narrators. Like Proust's narrator, like Karl Ove Knausgard in his hefty autobiographical series, "My Struggle," you can read the internal musings of these narrators, and you squirm and cringe, being all like.... "really, bro? I know I have trouble getting it together -- emotionally, physically, sexually, everything -- but, dude, YOU are taking the CAKE."

The reason for the squirm is because excellently-written narrators like Proust's narrator, like Knausgard himself (okay, we can argue about "excellently written," but that's for another piece), are emotional pathologists, dissecting every minute whim of a feeling into words, cutting words that account for every last iota of mental anguish that these narrators feel at every given moment.

It's a brutal accountability test for us readers to weather. And, of course, as the very best art does -- it forces us, the readers, to face our own recognition of the kinds of emotions these narrators are detailing, and asks us to relate to them, vis à vis how we ourselves understand these emotions. Thus, a resulting squirm and cringe, as we reckon with our own emotional accountability in that very moment.

I had so many of these wonderful moments when I was reading the novel version of Love In The Big City. Go Young was so cringe. So pathetic.

(credit: @/my-rose-tinted-glasses)

And while the novel delved brutally into the reasons WHY Go Young was so pathetic and cringe, I enjoyed the drama's ability to sensually and holistically take me into that WHY place as well.

For me, Go Young's journey into the adulthood he ends up in begins with the intergenerational trauma and the avoidant attachment he must have with his mother. I say "must" because he's all she's got, and Go Young, to his misfortune, knows this, and must deal with it, and with her.

This is despite her utterly rejecting his identity, his sexuality, and forcing him at a young age to face conversion therapy in as abusive a situation as possible, literally being kidnapped into the therapy. We know from the novel that his therapists end up realizing that his sexuality is not his "issue," and that the "issue" is his actually deranged, Christian-devoted mother.

The drama doesn't get into that level of details. I will absolutely estimate that it COULDN'T get into that level of detail due to potential censorship, and the portrayed meaning of such a comparison as to show a devout Christian mother as a neglectful, bigoted mother.

But what the drama showed me, in real time, were the spontaneous movements and moments that punctuated Young's life, that were totally derived from the low self-esteem, the lack of internal love and respect he had for himself for most of the series. The emptiness, the lack of BELIEF that he had in himself, that stemmed from the refusal of his mother to accept him lovingly and holistically. I'd recommend LITBC to any potential parent as a guide on how to NOT parent your kid.

As someone trained in the social services, and as a steadfast lover of intergenerational trauma in shows -- and how dramas demonstrate the long-term impact of intergeneration trauma unto their characters -- Love In The Big City is utterly SUPERLATIVE in this category.

And this kind of neglect that young queer people so very often face in their families NEEDS to be depicted in art, so that we can see the risks of what these young people could, and will, grow up to be, without nurturing love in their life.

So. Man. Go Young goes fucking ham on fucking hipster doofus Yeong Su in a restaurant. Yeong Su, who himself deals with a kind of internalized homophobia that results in him producing bigoted "research" on homosexuality. And Go Young, unconsciously hoping that he could find love with a most unlovable man, subsequently attempts suicide.

Go Young breaks up with Gyu Ho minutes before Gyu Ho is to depart to China. I saw that moment as Go Young "releasing" Gyu Ho from the burden that Go Young assumes himself to be -- emotional baggage, Kylie, and all.

Go Young cavorts with Habibi, a man escaping just about everything by way of luxury hotels and unfulfilling work. After his real relationship with Gyu Ho, Go Young follows Habibi on Habibi's orders, having little to no agency in the coupling until the absolute end, as he leaves Habibi with a note. Habibi, who himself is also a subject of clear internalized homophobia, another example of the absolute wrath that social bigotry can lay waste on a queer individual.

Love In The Big City balanced these brutal moments of internalized trauma, bigotry, and homophobia with LIFE as it could be lived: life spent working, writing, drinking, partying, sucking dick and moving mattresses, catching up with old friends, supporting engagements, comforting friends after break-ups, BEING PRESENT for yourself and your family and your friends.

There was a shift of growth and responsibility in Go Young's life when his cancer-addled mother sank her head down on his lap in the sunlight of a park at the end of the second chapter of the drama. But what was so OUTSTANDING about the drama version of Love In The Big City, is that the drama didn't assume that that shift would be a great dramatic moment. Go Young certainly got into a relationship with Gyu Ho afterwards.... but he damn fucked it up at the end.

AND IT WAS OKAY. Even though we viewers were fucking heartbroken, IT WAS OKAY....

... because I believe Love In The Big City was communicating to us that it's perfectly okay to stumble in one's continued growth, in the movement forward of one's life. Go Young gets a new apartment, new light in his windows and his life, and celebrates the move (and the end of Eun Su's engagement) on his rooftop with his besties.

The novel ends a bit more brutally than the drama. In the drama, we do very much get to see Go Young doing a moving-forward thing. I was screaming and pacing at @lurkingshan when I finished the novel, and I felt slightly more uplifted when I watched the drama.

I love that I felt those two ways about my experience with each medium. Again, it shows what I GOT from the experience of reading and watching this story separately. And the drama very much played up the T-aras group more for kicks and lights (especially in the hospital), but I still got such a brutal sense of Go Young's internal mishegoss, that maybe I needed those gworls, too, the way Go Young always did.

The other best queer show that I watched this year did not actually air this year. That one is 2022's The Miracle of Teddy Bear from Thailand, which I will review soon for my Thai QL Old GMMTV Challenge project. The Miracle of Teddy Bear was rooted in anger and accountability against parents, adults, and society, for the wreckage that bigotry and abuse can render, internally and externally, on the bodies and minds of young queer people. It was an utterly exacting exercise in a brutal breakdown of queer pain.

Love In The Big City, in comparison, was a visual meditation on the mundanity of an individual's life -- depicting all the cringe and the pain associated with it -- vis à vis broken and incomplete love from family and lovers. But Love In The Big City also had LIFE, LIFE LIVED, woven through it all. Go Young kept clubbing with his friends, because he needed it, because he needed his friends, because his FRIENDS needed the club, and because his friends needed HIM.

While I felt a broken heart for his relationship with Gyu Ho at the end of the drama, what I had for Go Young was hope -- a hope that, while I knew the man, in fiction, would still experience hurt while moving forward, would still very much move forward nonetheless, on his own accord.

(credit: @/khunkinn)

(tagging @neuroticbookworm for awareness <3)

#love in the big city #litbc #litbc book club #tw: suicide #tw: suicide attempt #park sang young #sang young park #nam yoon su #nam yoon soo

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transmutationisms · 1 year ago

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In what way are phrenological principles still foundational to research psychology & neurology, and science in general? Asking out of ignorance and wanting to know more.

so, phrenology throughout the 19th century was a broad program of research principles, self-help advice, and social-hygienic prognostication. we tend to think of it now as being reducible to a craniometric chart and a crank trying to divine personality traits from a person's skull shape—this did happen, but phrenology encompassed much more than that. it was a driving force in the increasing acceptance of ideas like brain localisation (that the brain did not act as one, but had distinct parts that could behave differently and independently to one another), the related position that human psychology and personalities could be classified / taxonomised / measured (like, 'attention' as being a faculty distinct from 'judgment' or 'reason' or so forth), and the belief that organic derangements of the brain accounted for a person's individual social / economic / intellectual success, as well as social phenomena like crime, delinquency, or addiction.

by about the 1890s, the word "phrenology" had become more or less dismissed in mainstream french and british scientific circles, and it was portrayed as a pseudoscientific perversion of respectable craniometry / anthropometry. this happened for many reasons, including that british and french medicine were professionalising over the course of the 19th century and that phrenological practitioners were often unlicensed and operating more in a marginal self-help space (akin to many of today's astrologers) than in institutionally sanctioned scientific circles. additionally, after world war ii, phrenology's association with eugenics made it even more unpalatable; it was now seen to be politically dangerous even to those who had previously endorsed eugenics. the same happened to many other theories and disciplines of social-hygienic or degeneration-theory ideas.

however, the rejection of phrenology that began in the late 19th century and intensified in the late 20th has been largely superficial, and 'modern' science has never really grappled with the phrenological roots of so much neuro-deterministic and anthropomentric thinking, from psychiatry to a great deal of moralistic public health to the incredibly deeply entrenched, yet blatantly prejudicial in every way, idea that a person's appearance is indicative of their character or morality. fundamentally phrenology was a major driver in the acceptance (in many different fields) of scientific 'naturalism', a general rejection of prior christian teleological thinking and search for universally deterministic scientific laws instead. rendering mental action into the category of 'natural thing governed by natural laws' was foundational, for example, to darwin's conception of evolution and his effort to distinguish his own theory from the teleological evolutionary theory of robert chambers.

none of this is to say that scientific naturalism ought to be inherently rejected, or replaced with christian metaphysics; however, failing to grapple with the fuller legacy of phrenology, and eugenics more generally, because we don't want to upset what philosophical boundaries we think we've erected between religion and 'modern' science allows such eugenic thinking to retain its centrality in current scientific practice.

it is also always worth emphasising that phrenology, like a lot of scientific theories of self-improvement, has frequently been employed as a vehicle of liberal ideology, particularly in britain. although phrenological practitioners have at various times tried to ally themselves with a superficially radical sort of 'common man's' rejection of the élite scientific institutions, phrenology has at the same time followed a general trajectory whereby it emphasises more and more an idea of personal responsibility for one's own neuro-biological traits and associated character flaws. this is often seen as more palatable than outright hereditarian thinking because, rather than tacitly endorsing the expurgation of the biologically 'unfit', the liberal phrenologist affirms that people simply need to overcome, tame, or temper their own neurobiological defects in order to live productive, socially desirable lives. cf. 'negative' versus 'positive' eugenics.

if you're interested in this i would recommend roger cooter's 'the cultural meaning of popular science: phrenology and the organisation of consent in 19th-century britain' (1984) and philip rehbock's 'the philosophical naturalists: themes in early 19th-century british biology' (1983). cooter was an avowed marxist and his account of phrenology, science, and their relationships to industrial capitalism—while not flawless—is markedly different from any other prior literature on the topic. rehbock's book is less politically daring and less focussed on phrenology specifically, but clarifies some aspects of scientific naturalism and what is meant by distinguishing a 'modern' scientific episteme from earlier practices and principles.

#hps

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sky-scribbles · 1 month ago

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I did Taash’s second personal quest today. And every single gender-related aspect felt right. I cried in real time as Taash talked about feeling how their mother had limited their ideas of what they could be. But then when Taash needed advice on handling their gender journey, the dialogue option came up to tell them to ‘embrace Qunari culture’ or ‘embrace Rivaini culture,’ and… what the hell?

It's not just the obvious. Taash clearly should not have to choose between two aspects of their heritage and identity. That is ridiculous. But what really, really gets to me is that to ask Taash what they want when it comes to their gender, I had to encourage them to ‘choose’ being Rivaini over being Qunari.

Here’s the thing. I’m a queer author who’s spent the last year and a half talking to queer people about their experiences (specifically in the aspec community, but these issues are by no means limited to ace and aro folks). And so many queer people of colour, and those from non-Christian religions, have told me the message they keep getting from white, culturally Christian queers is 'If you're not being accepted, just leave your religion/country/community/etc so you can be yourself!' As if their heritage is something that stops them from being themself, rather than being a part of them.

And I see the shadow of this in that dialogue wheel. This suggestion that Taash embracing their nonbinary identity means that they have to reject their Qunari identity. If they want to be out and proud and queer, they have to pull away from a part of the heritage that made them. It's especially uncomfortable to me considering that Bioware have explicitly referred to the Qunari as being Muslim-coded.

Portraying a character with mixed heritage as needing to choose or favour one or the other is bad enough. But that 'choice' should definitely not be conflated with them being able to embrace their queerness. Because that is fucked. Up.

#i'm not going to say more about this because #I haven't lived this and can only pass on what my interviewees have said #people who've lived this can speak for it better than I can. but I still feel a responsibility to call it out #dragon age #da:tv #veilguard spoilers #da:tv spoilers #I'll tag #veilguard critical #just in case

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ragde890 · 2 months ago

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HxH chapter 408 commentary and pseudo-analysis

There's a lot to say about this chapter, so let's analyze the information we've got bit by bit:

Heil-Ly and the Spider

The paralelisms between Heil-Ly and the spider are way too many not to be intentional.

Nobunaga states that Heil-Ly reminds him of the begginings of the Spider, when they were driven by rage

Both groups are made out of outcasts and people who have been rejected by society. Both the Carnival Children and the Meteor City inhabitants are "non-existant" according to official records.

Both groups are murderous, with Heil-Ly maybe being more chaotic

Both have specialists as their leaders. Both Morena and Chrollo have christian symbolism in their character designs and both isolate mentally from other human beings.

The human trafficking backstory. We'll get to that later.

This makes the incoming meet-up between the spiders and Heil-Ly more interesting. Not only that, but it also makes some improbable events possible. For example, what if Morena has the ability Chrollo is looking for? This chapter has established that Morena knows about Chrollo. What if there's a team-up between the spiders and Heil-Ly? Again, this is improbable, but it's possible given the context we're in right now.

About Contagion

This is unlikely, but the Card Game could be a new ability that Morena developed by reaching level 20 of Contagion. This would mean that Contagion can awaken abilities in people that already know nen. Again, this is very unlikely. But not completely nonsensical.

A less farfetched theory is that Contagion can keep up to 22 members because that's the time that happened between her "class" and the most recent (22 years). Therefore, the more Kakin's evil continues, the more powerful Contagion becomes.

Who killed Risnorth?

Let's start by saying that, in this chapter, we've learned just how isolated Kakin is from the rest of the world. With this in mind, if Risnorth, the one responsible for Sarasa's murder, is being talked about in the boat's news, we can ascertain that he's from Kakin. The panel with the news about Risnorth and Chrollo giving it his back seems to indicate that they were the ones to kill him. However, we don't know this. In fact, if the Spider killed him, then why was there no revenge note, unless with the Kuruta clan? Why hide themselves, if it goes against their whole shtick?

Both the Ryodan and Morena have backstories related to human trafficking, with Heil-ly being involved in the latter. Going back to the van scene where we see the kidnapped children at the back and Risnorth and the tattooed man (who could be Tserriednich's) in the front, there was also a third criminal sitting where the children are, whose face was hidden. Who could he be? A young Tserriednich, maybe, as he's the one who funds Heil-Ly? We don't know. But if he's related to this plot, damn, it's gonna get very bloody. And, anyway, it would mean that Morena and the Spider would have a common enemy — which doesn't necessarily mean they'll become allies. Who knows, maybe their backstories intertwine even more (with Sheila being related to Heil-Ly or Kakin somehow or something like that).

Tserriednich and the Carne Levare

Do the princes know about Carne Levare? Obviously Wobble, Marayam, Fugetsu and Kacho are too young to be in the know. But what about the others? What does "royals" refer to? Obviously to Nasubi, but he can't be the only one. His half-siblings? Followers? If Tserriednich knows about the Carne Levares and, thus, has participated, then why keep his "hobbies" a secret to his family? It doesn't make sense. It's not like these Carne Levares are top secret: if Borksen knows about "Carnival Children", then it must be an open secret.

As a side note, the act of separating festival orphan's in Meat and Track Fakers is similar to how Tserriednich wants to segregate people into two bins: useless trash and useful trash. When we add his nen beast, the "inside face" of which has a two slash mark reminiscent of the second class faker's, it looks like we've got a connection (specially considering that Tserriednich funds Heil-Ly).

Some people said that, going by interval and occurance of the carnivals, it might happen each time a new legal prince is born. Not much to speculate about this, but worth mentioning.

The real Morena Prudo

This chapter revealed that Morena doesn't belong to the royal family. This creates the mystery of what happened to the real Morena Prudo: why is she in Fake-Morena's grave? The fact that we don't even know Fake-Morena's real name really accentuates her dehumanization. In any case, exactly what happened to Morena Prudo (was she Fake-Morena's friend? Did Fake-Morena kill her?) might remain a mystery.

What we know is that Fake-Morena occupied Morena's placed and then murdered the Heil-Ly boss, a real Fake Tracker (who was maybe, following the pattern of the other mafia bosses, Tserriednich biological father).

Martial Law

The martial law announcement was sublime. Despite having built up to this for several chapters now, it still felt unexpected. I see Togashi wanted to convey the surprise and impact of martial law being suddenly imposed without warning, just like a random citizien from the ship would experiment it.

Martial Law actually benefits Borksen here: with a curfew, Dogman can't move around, so he can't search for specialists. This means Borksen can now stall time (unless Feitan and Phinks show up).

Also, we still don't know why was Martial Law enacted. The possibilities are:

Benjamin saw through Halkenburg's trick.

One of the mafia benefactors was murdered (unlikely).

Halkenburg took over Benjamin and declared it himself (very unlikely).

Something else entirely.

Borksen's and Morena's ideologies

Borksen's line of reasoning is very human. She knows about Kakin's depravity and crimes, but she hasn't experienced it first-hand. She can sympathise with Morena, but her main concern is her mundane life not being affected. She doesn't want no violent revolution. And, on the one hand, it's understandable: she's not out of line for refusing something so extreme, specially considering Morena's misanthropic and chaotic goals, which wouldn't solve anything. But, on the other, it's because people like Borksen exist, who are not monsters but will not do anything about them (so that they can mantain their relatively privileged quiet life), that things have become the way their are. It's the reason Kakin hasn't changed.

On the other side of the spectrum, we've got Morena's radicalized ambition, so big that it has become hypoctricial in itself. One of Morena's followers, Baconte, is a human trafficker. Does she not care about this? Have her motivations blinded her to the point that she accepts to collaborate with the kind of person that caused her to experience all that suffering if it's for revenge? Don't take me wrong: I'm not criticising her character for this. In fact, I think her whole deeply contrasting and contradictory character is very well written. I also love the way Togashi portrayed her more "human" side: her reactions to Borksen's actions, her fixation on games... It all shows the kind of person she could have been if Kakin didn't steal that from her. It makes her very easy to sympathise with.

Miscellanious Stuff

Morena never explained to Borksen the punctuation system (normal people = 1 point, princes = 50 points etc.). She might have omitted this so that Borksen doesn't suspect that Morena's real intention (maybe) is to use her to kill Tserriednich. The specialist talk was not a lie: she merely omitted some information, which is different. If she's omitted this, it's likely she's also hiding key details about her past and motivations.

Some people are confused about specialists not following normal affinity rules, although this is something we've already seen before (Pitou's abilities would make no sense if they were restricted to standard affinity rules). Basically, specialists can master any given category via training, but that doesn't mean that they have full eficiency on them: that's unique to Kurapika's emperor time.

The panel with the binary code background has multiple interpretations. It could be a reference to Matrix, with Morena considering her followers have "awakened" from the simulation that is Kakin/the world. It could also be another RPG reference meant to symbolize their detachment (like the "grinding area"), or just refering to how "binary" their reasoning is ("either you're with us, or you're against us").

#hunter x hunter #hxh #hxh 408 #hunter x hunter analysis #hxh succession war

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mariacallous · 25 days ago

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When the American Jewish Committee began working with U.S. bishops years ago to educate Catholics about antisemitism, they didn’t anticipate a global spike in the hatred they were trying to combat.

Nor did they know that just weeks before they would ultimately publicize their work, Pope Francis would suggest that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza.

But when Rabbi Noam Marans and Bishop Joseph Bambera came together last week to launch a glossary of antisemitic terms, annotated by Catholic commentary, that was the context. Marans described the glossary as a “milestone” ahead of the 60th anniversary of the church’s landmark declaration that Jews did not kill Jesus. And he noted that while relations between Catholics and Jews have massively improved from centuries past, they’re facing new stresses.

“It’s easy to lose perspective on an event like this, which was surely unimaginable to my grandparents in Bialystok, Poland,” Marans said at the launch event on Wednesday. “This has been a complete transformation in the relationship that has benefitted both communities.”

Referring to the Jewish blessing to mark significant occasions, he said, “It’s a shehechiyanu moment.”

Then he added, “And even shehechiyanu moments have flies in the ointment.”

In the document published last week, the AJC’s “Translate Hate” ongoing glossary — which has around 60 entries on antisemitic terms — has been appended with Catholic commentaries on 10 of those entries. The commentaries were written by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, which Bambera chairs.

The entries with commentary range from “Blood libel” to “From the river to the sea,” a common chant at pro-Palestinian rallies that the AJC and other Jewish groups say is a call for Israel’s annihilation.

For example, in the entry on “Blood libel,” the canard that Jews kill Christian children and use their blood for ritual purposes, the Catholic gloss notes that the church has long rejected the idea, but that it still pops up in some Catholic discourse.

“Today, this charge may disguise itself in less traditional forms that must also be disavowed, such as the idea that the Jewish people support abortion as a means of ritualistic child sacrifice, or that Jews are intent on spilling the blood of their enemies for its own sake,” it says.

The entry on “From the river to the sea” says the church endorses the two-state solution and “encourages Catholics to understand and respect the deep religious connection Jews feel towards Israel.”

And in the entry on “philosemitism,” the Catholic commentary notes that the church has advised against seders that appropriate Jewish tradition. “The best way for Christians to experience the Seder meal is to observe it by invitation from a Jewish family or organization that welcomes non-Jews to this central celebration of Jewish life,” the commentary says.

The guide comes at a time when, perhaps awkwardly, the topic of Catholic antisemitism could hardly be more topical.

The adherence of J.D. Vance, the U.S. vice president-elect, to a strain of traditional Catholicism has renewed attention to varieties of Catholic belief. (Vance has weighed in on church debates, saying, for example, that while he is “not a big Latin Mass guy,” he did not support the church’s recent effort to restrict the traditional liturgy that prays for Jews to convert to Christianity.) Both Marans and Bambera said antisemitism exists in the traditionalist wing of the church but portrayed it as a fringe attitude.

Meanwhile, a series of recent statements by Pope Francis has provided a case study in the way Catholic values and scriptural citations can grate on Jewish ears.

Last month, Francis cited experts saying “what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide,” and called for the charge — which Israel strenuously rejects — to be “carefully investigated.” Then, this month, he attended the inauguration of a nativity scene at the Vatican that positioned baby Jesus on a keffiyeh, or Palestinian scarf — a nod to activists who have identified Jesus, a Jew born in Roman times, as a Palestinian. Both incidents drew outcry from Jewish groups, and the nativity scene has since been removed.

Earlier, in a letter to Middle Eastern Catholics on Oct. 7, the one-year anniversary of the Hamas attack, Francis denounced “the spirit of evil that foments war,” and quoted a passage from the Gospel of John to call it “murderous from the beginning” and “a liar and the father of lies.” The quote raised eyebrows because, in the New Testament, it is spoken by Jesus to a group of Jews, whom he calls children of the devil.

The word choice drew criticism from Philip Cunningham, a theology professor specializing in Jewish-Catholic relations at St. Joseph’s University.

“It is perilous to cite polemical words out of context, particularly words that have consistently sparked enmity toward Jews for centuries,” he wrote in America, a Jesuit magazine. “There is also something peculiarly surreal about this in a letter dated Oct. 7.”

A considerable portion of Wednesday’s event was taken up with Marans and Bambera discussing — and not quite seeing eye to eye — about Francis’ recent comments. (The pope has also issued statements condemning antisemitism, including during the current Gaza war.) Marans, AJC’s director of interreligious affairs, said in an interview that Francis has demonstrated his opposition to antisemitism — but added that his conduct has precipitated a “crisis” borne of “a lack of proper attention to Catholic-Jewish relations.” The genocide accusation, Marans said, was the most problematic.

“Whimsical use of the word ‘genocide’ against the Jewish people is dangerous because it characterizes the only Jewish state in a way that is grist for the mill of Jew-haters — which Pope Francis is absolutely, unequivocally not,” Marans said. “How does one rationalize those disappointments in speech and action with that overwhelming commitment to opposing antisemitism?”

For Bambera, the pope’s statements are simply expressions of the Catholic emphasis on the value of peace and human life. Francis’ statements stem from his concern for “the dignity of the human person,” the bishop said, including both Palestinians and Israelis.

“When he reflects upon the suffering of people who are victimized by terrorism and war, whether it be the Jewish people or countless others around the world, he will always speak of the value of human life and the need to preserve and protect it,” Bambera said at the event. He also reiterated Francis’ opposition to antisemitism.

But while Bambera and Marans read Francis’ words differently, they agreed on the path forward: more dialogue.

“I absolutely understand and appreciate the reaction of the Jewish community, the concern, perhaps the hurt, perhaps a worry about what this says about our relationship,” Bambera said in an interview. “One of the most significant things about the relationship that we have established, and that quite frankly Pope Francis supports and encourages, is the fact that we Jews and Catholics alike can talk candidly about this.”

The AJC has promoted Catholic-Jewish dialogue for more than half a century. It was active in shaping the 1965 church declaration that rejected antisemitism and said the Jews did not kill Jesus, called “Nostra Aetate” and adopted as part of Vatican II. The group consulted on the document, bringing on Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel as an adviser.

Marans said the relationship has only improved since then. He added that — even in light of the pope’s statements on Israel — Catholic attitudes toward Israel are in a better place than those of some liberal Protestant denominations that have weighed divestment from Israel.

“It is a different universe on the Catholic side because there is such commitment to Catholic-Jewish relations,” he said. “It is a given of the Catholic Church today that it is supportive of Catholic-Jewish relations wholeheartedly.”

The AJC touted plans to translate the Catholic edition of its glossary into more languages, including Spanish and Polish, and hopes to use it as a model both for Protestant denominations and other religions. Holly Huffnagle, the AJC’s U.S. director for combating antisemitism, said the group’s core goal is to teach people what antisemitism is and how to recognize it.

“People are more likely to listen to those they know, those they trust,” she said. “If you are Catholic, you’re more likely to listen to your priest than a Jewish leader.”

Working with interfaith partners, she said, has become especially important as those ties have frayed recently, in a moment where protest of Israel’s actions, and antisemitism, have been on the rise.

“The Christian space is a natural partnership,” she said. “What does it look like to go to other faiths and figure out how to do this project jointly? We have to take a step back in this moment, as we’ve seen real relationships decline.”

Both Bambera and Marans said the key to success in this project would be Catholic leadership using the glossary and imparting its message to the rank-and-file. Bambera said the archbishop of a major American archdiocese asked if he could distribute it to his clergy — which he took as a good sign.

He added that he hopes to have “more conversations about hard questions” between Catholics and Jews.

“Those hard questions shouldn’t stop the dialogue,” he said. “They should be able to grow because the dialogue is rooted in mutual respect and understanding.”

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