#dubious scholarship with annie

[annies-scrapbook]

if you think about it, the Great Oxidation Event and the castration of Ouranos are basically the same thing

[annies-scrapbook]

hot take: Aristasian video games occupy the same ecological niche as Shaker furniture

My job on the commune is to be the guy who actually knows something about intentional living settlements, that even if you could pull it off farming only works as an economic base if you can produce something that sells for a premium over what would otherwise be grown on the land and keep costs tight – consider existing organic farms that do farmer's market and farm-to-table production by burning out a steady supply of hippieish college grads.

Really you want a collective high value-added enterprise that everyone can play some role in and turns profit on a commune-wide basis, like the Shakers and their furniture

Working in the neighborhood and returning wages to the commune can work, especially starting out and on the margins, but over time without mechanisms to bind the community suffocatingly close this tends towards centrifugal dissolution according to individual earning capacity

[annies-scrapbook]

tired: syncretizing jesus with attis and adonis

wired: syncretizing jesus with persephone and inanna

[annies-scrapbook]

half-formed thealogical idea: the Horned God and Triple Goddess as the respective deities of natural selection and symbiosis

[annies-scrapbook]

so in Sappho fragment 102 (the one where she can’t focus on her weaving because she’s distracted by her crush), she refers to the person she’s swooning over with the gender-neutral term paidos. most English translations have rendered this word as “boy”, because heteronormativity. my favorite translation -- the one by Diane Rayor that we all know and love -- has it as “girl”, in keeping with Sappho’s other love poems to women. however, since the word in question

a) is gender neutral

and b) originally comes from a word for “child”, but is used between adults in a romantic context (without, as far as I can tell, any creepy connotations)

I would propose that the most culturally accurate English translation is “babe”

[annies-scrapbook]

the more i learn about the history of both ancient and modern paganism, the more i realize that both of the conventional narratives around the origin of wicca (to wit: either that it's the original, primordial form of european paganism, handed down in secret from mother to daughter since the stone age; or that it's something gerald gardner pulled out of his ass in the 1940s) are pretty inaccurate. on the one hand, gardner was almost certainly the creator of wicca, or at the very least he was no more than a generation removed from its actual creator. on the other hand, gardner (or his predecessor) didn't create it out of whole cloth; all the pieces that went into it were already floating around in the zeitgeist waiting for someone to scoop them up and assemble a religion out of them. and while wicca doesn't bear a close resemblance to any mainstream tradition of ancient paganism, i'm starting to think it actually seems pretty standard-issue for the initiatory mystery religions that flourished in the greco-roman world in the late arietian/early piscean age, aside from its extensive use of british folklore and the fact that it's displaced from its predecessors by about a zodiacal age.

relatedly, i can't find the post now but i remember someone on here (i think it was either @maddiviner or @creature-wizard, but i'm not positive) pointed out that if christianity had never existed, another of the mystery religions would probably have ended up filling the same historical role. i was wondering what sort of religion we'd have ended up with if wicca had actually been one of the mystery religions from that era and if it had taken the place of christianity, and then i realized that would probably just be madrianism/filianism.

currently reading apostolos n. athanassakis's translation of the orphic hymns, along with his extensive notes on them. i'm struck by how many extremely specific syncretisms that i'd thought were original to modern paganism, particularly to wicca, actually have a precedent several centuries earlier in orphism. i wonder if gardner and valiente, or any of their contemporaries, were aware of this, or if the parallels were entirely due to coincidence/revelation (pick your preferred narrative)?