#medieval mules

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Doublethink sump linkdump

On OCTOBER 23 at 7PM, I'll be in DECATUR, presenting my novel THE BEZZLE at EAGLE EYE BOOKS.

Trigger warning for #eikositriophobia: this is my 23d linkdump (Hail Discordia!), an erratic Saturday purge of the open tabs I haven't managed to blog this week; here's the previous 22:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

When I was a kid, I idolized Harlan Ellison. I loved his prose styling, his stage presence, the way he blended activism and fiction, and the way he mixed critical nonfiction with fiction. As a 17 year old, I attended a writing workshop that Ann Crispin was giving at a local science fiction convention and she told me that I had the makings of a great writer, just as soon as I stopped trying to be Harlan Ellison.

But Harlan was a complicated figure. I attended the Clarion Workshop in 1992 specifically because he was our instructor, and came away bitterly disillusioned after he targeted one of my fellow students for relentless, cruel bullying, a performance that was so ugly that the board fired the director and permanently barred him from teaching the workshop.

Later on, Harlan became the kind of copyright maximalist who called for arbitrary internet surveillance and censorship in the name of shutting down ebook piracy. During a panel about this at a sf convention, he called one of the other panelists a "motherfucker" and threatened to punch him in the face. He took to badmouthing me in interviews, painting my position – whose nuances he certainly understood – in crude caricature.

But Harlan and I had many friends in common, people I really liked, and they were adamant that Harlan's flaws were not the whole story: if Harlan liked you, he would do anything to stand up for you, no matter the cost to himself. Famously, when Harlan taught Octavia Butler's Clarion, he demanded to know why she wasn't writing full time, and she replied that there was the inconvenient matter of making rent and groceries. He replied, "If that's all that's stopping you, come live in my guest house for as long as it takes, eat my groceries, and write." Which she did.

Which is great, but also: one of my own Clarion students told me about when his then-teenaged mother met Harlan at a sf convention and told him that she dreamed of becoming a writer, and he propositioned her. She was so turned off that she stopped writing forever (her son, my student, is now an accomplished writer).

So Harlan was a mixed bag. He did very, very good things. He did very, very bad things. When Harlan died, in 2018, I wrote an obit where I grappled with these two facts:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/06/28/rip-harlan-ellison/

In it, I proposed a way of thinking about people that tried to make sense of both Harlans – and of all the people in our lives. There's an unfortunate tendency to think of the people that matter to us as having their deeds recorded in a ledger, with good deeds in one column and wicked deeds down the other.

In this formulation, we add up the good deeds and the bad deeds and subtract the bad from the good. If the result is a positive number, we say the good outweighs the bad, and therefore the person is, on balance, good. On the other hand, if the bad outweighs the good, then the person is bad, and the good deeds are irrelevant.

This gets us into no end of trouble. It means that when someone we admire slips up, we give them a pass, because "they've earned it." And when someone who's hurt us does something selfless and kind and brave, we treat that as though it doesn't matter, because they're an asshole.

But the truth is, no amount of good deeds can wipe away the bad. If you hurt someone, the fact that you've helped someone else doesn't make that hurt any easier to bear. And the kindnesses you do for other people make their lives better, no matter what bad things you've done to others.

Rather than calculating the balance of our goodness or badness, I think we should just, you know, sit with our sins and virtues. Let all the harm and joy exist in a state of superposition. Don't cancel out the harm. Don't wave away the good. They both exist, neither cancels the other, and we should strive to help more, and to do less harm. We should do everything we can to help those we harm. No one owes us a pass because of the good we've done.

That's the lesson Harlan taught me, and he taught it to me by absolutely failing to live his life this way – a fact that exists alongside all of the good he did, including the great art he made, which I love, and which inspired me.

Not long after Harlan's death, I got a phone call from J Michael Straczynski, Harlan's literary executor. As part of his care for Harlan's literary legacy, Joe was editing a new anthology of short stories, The Last Dangerous Visions, and did I want to contribute a story?

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/harlan-ellison-last-dangerous-vision-1235117069/

Of course I did. Harlan edited Dangerous Visions in 1967: a groundbreaking anthology of uncomfortable science fiction that featured everyone from Philip K Dick to Samuel Delany. The followup, 1972's Again, Dangerous Visions, was, if anything, even more influential, including Le Guin's The Word For World IS Forest, as well as work by Joanna Russ, Kurt Vonnegut, David Gerrold, and James Tiptree, Jr.

Though some of the stories in these books haven't aged well, together, they completely changed my view of what science fiction was and what it could be. But The Last Dangerous Visions was a different (ahem) story. For complicated reasons (which all cashed out to "Harlan being very difficult to work with, sometimes for damned good reasons, other times for completely petty ones), TLDV was, at the time of Harlan's death, fifty years behind schedule. It was "science fiction's most famous unpublished book." Harlan had bought early work from writers who had gone on to have major careers – like Bruce Sterling – and had sat on them for half a century.

Then Joe called me to tell me that he was starting over with TLDV and did I want to contribute a story – and of course I did. I wrote a story for him with the title "Jeffty Is Five," part of my series of stories with the same titles as famous works of sf:

https://locusmag.com/2012/05/cory-doctorow-a-prose-by-any-other-name/

Joe liked the story, but not the title. He thought Harlan wouldn't have approved of this kind of appropriation, and he wanted to do right by the memory of his old friend. My first reaction was very Harlan-like: this is supposed to make you mad, it's my art, and if it offends you, that's your problem.

But I remembered the most important lesson I learned from Harlan, about good deeds and bad ones, and I thought about Joe, a writer I admired and liked, who was grappling with his grief and his commitment to Harlan's legacy, and I changed my mind and told him of course I'd change the title. I changed the title because Harlan would never have done so, and that's rather the point of the story.The story is (now)) called "The Weight of a Heart, the Weight of a Feather" (a very Harlanish title), and it's about the legacy of complicated people, whose lives are full of noble selflessness *and careless or deliberate cruelty. It's about throwing away the ledger and just letting all those facts sit together, about lives that are neither washed of sin by virtue, nor washed of virtue by sin.

It's a good story, I think, and I'm proud of it, and I'm interested in what the rest of you think now that the book is out:

https://www.blackstonepublishing.com/products/book-fyhm

Harlan was the writer who made me want to get good at reading my stories aloud. I was a charter member of the Harlan Ellison Record Club, as you can see for yourself from the time Harlan (accidentally) doxed me:

http://harlanellison.com/text/paladin.txt

After nearly 20 years of podcasting, I'm actually pretty good at this stuff. I'm going to be podcasting a reading of this story – eventually. I am nearly done "de-googling" my podcast feed, ripping it out of Feedburner, a service that I started using nearly two decades ago to convert a WordPress RSS feed to a podcast feed. In the intervening years, WordPress has come to support this natively and Feedburner has become a division of Google, so I've been methodically removing Feedburner's hooks from my feed, which is now proudly available here, without any surveillance or analytics:

https://craphound.com/feeds/doctorow_podcast

I'll be writing up the process eventually. In the meantime, I'm about to embark on another podcast fiction project, serializing my novella Spill, a "Little Brother" story that Tor's Reactor just published:

https://reactormag.com/spill-cory-doctorow/

The first part of "Spill" will go out tomorrow or Monday. Reactor also just published another "Little Brother" story, "Vigilant," which I read in last week's podcast:

https://craphound.com/littlebrother/2024/09/29/vigilant-a-little-brother-story/

One of my long-running beefs with Harlan was his insistence that the answer of copyright infringement online was to create an obligation on intermediaries – like ISPs – to censor their users' communications on demand from anyone claiming to have been wronged by a post or upload.

This would be bad for free expression under any circumstances, but it's an especially dangerous vision for ISPs, who are among the worst-run, most venal businesses in modern society ("We don't care, we don't have to, we're the phone company" -L Tomlin).

It's hard to overstate just how terrible ISPs are, but even in a field that includes Charter and Comcast, there's one company that rises above the pack when it comes to being grotesquely, imaginatively awful: Cox Communications.

Here's the latest from Cox: they sell "unlimited" gigabit data plans that cost $100 for the base plan and $50 to add the "unlimited" data. But – as Jon Brodkin writes for Ars Technica – Cox uniquely defines "unlimited" as severely limited:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/cox-slows-internet-speeds-in-entire-neighborhoods-to-punish-any-heavy-users/

Now, you're probably thinking, ho-hum, another company that offered unlimited service and then acted like dicks when a customer treated it as unlimited, ::laughs in American Airlines::

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesasquith/2019/11/13/unlimited-first-class-flights-for-lifehow-american-airlines-made-the-most-expensive-mistake-in-aviation-history/

But that's not the Cox story! Cox doesn't just throttle "unlimited" customers' internet to 2006-vintage DSL speeds – they slow down the entire neighborhood around the unlimited customer to those speeds.

As Brodkin writes, every Cox customer in the same neighborhood as an "unlimited" customer named "Mike" had their upload speeds reduced by more than two thirds, from 35mbps to 10mbps, to punish Mike. And they're not the only ones!

https://www.reddit.com/r/GNV/comments/gkicjg/comment/fr670cx/

Cox confirmed they were doing this, saying "performance can be improved for all customers in the neighborhood by temporarily increasing or maintaining download speeds and changing upload speeds for some of our service tiers."

Cox has been on a roll lately, really going for the shitty-telecoms-company gold. Back in August, 404 Media published a leaked pitch deck in which Cox promised advertisers that they were secretly listening to their customers' smart devices, transcribing their private conversations, and using them to target ads:

https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-listening-ad-targeting/

This isn't just appalling, it's also almost certainly fraudulent. As terrible as "smart" devices are (and oh God are they terrible), the vast majority of them don't do this. That's something a lot of security researchers have investigated, doing things like hooking up a protocol analyzer to a LAN with a smart device on it and looking for data transmissions that correspond to ambient speech in earshot of the gadget's mic.

My guess is that Cox has done a deal with a couple of the bottom-feedingest "smart TV" companies (as a cable operator, Cox will have relationships with a lot of these companies) to engage in this conduct. Smart TVs have emerged as one of the worst categories of consumer technology, on every axis: performance, privacy, repairability. The field has raced to the bottom, hit it, and then started digging to find new lows to sink to. This is just my hunch here, but I think it's highly likely that if there's a class of devices that are bugging your living room and selling the data to Cox, it's gonna be a smart TV (top tip: buy a computer monitor instead, and use your phone or laptop to stream to it).

Ask a certain kind of very smooth-brained, Samuelson-pilled economist about the enshittification of smart TVs and they'll tell you that this is a "revealed preference":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference

As in, sure, you may say that you don't want your TV to secretly record your private conversations and sell them to Cox, but actually you quite like it, because you have a TV.

While this is a facially very stupid argument, it's routinely made by people who think they're very smart, a point famously made by Matt Bors's "Mr Gotcha":

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

Comics turn out to be a very good medium for stringing up the revealed preferences crowd on their own petards. This week, Juan Santapau's "The Secret Knots" added to the Mr Gotcha canon with an equally brilliant webcomic, albeit one with a very different vibe, entitled "Remind Me Later":

https://thesecretknots.com/comic/remind-me-later/

Santapau really catches the zeitgeist with this one, which is more of a slow burn than a zinger, and which shows how online "revealed preferences" nonsense grooms us for the same bullshit in every corner of our lives, even our psychotherapist's office. Highly recommended – an instant classic.

"Revealed preferences" comes from the Chicago School of Economics, a field that decided that a) economics should be a discipline grounded in mathematical models; and b) it was impossible to factor power relationships into these models; so c) power doesn't matter.

Once you understand this fact, everything else snaps into focus – like, why the Chicago School loves monopolies. If you model an economy dominated by monopolists without factoring the power that monopolists wield, then you can very easily assume that any monopoly you discover is the result of a lot of people voluntarily choosing to spend all their money with the company they love best.

The fact that we all hate the monopolists we have to deal with is dismissed by these economists as a mirage: "sure, you say you hate them, but you do business with them, therefore, your 'revealed preference' shows that you actually love them."

Which is how we end up with absolutely outrageous rackets like the scholarly publishing cartel. Scholarly journals acquire academics' work for free; get other academics to edit the work for free; acquire lifetime copyright to those finished works; and charge the institutions that paid those "volunteer" academics salaries millions of dollars to access their publications:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/16/the-public-sphere/#not-the-elsevier

These companies don't just lock up knowledge and tie an anchor around the scientists' and scholars' ankles, dragging them down. Their market power means that they can hurt their customers and users in every way, including through rampant privacy violations.

A new study from SPARC investigates the privacy practices of Springerlink, and finds them to be a cesspit of invasive, abusive conduct that would make even a Cox executive blush:

https://zenodo.org/records/13886473

Yes, on the one hand, this isn't surprising. If a company can screw you on pricing, why wouldn't they scruple to give you the shaft on privacy as well? But The fact that a company as terrible as Springer can be the dominant firm in the sector is still shocking, somehow.

But that's terminal-stage capitalism for you. It's not just that bad companies companies thrive – it's that being a bad company is a predictor of sky-high valuations and fawning coverage from the finance press.

Take Openai, a company that the press treats as a heptillion-dollar money-printer whose valuation will eventually exceed the rest of the known universe. Openai has a lot of problems – a mass exodus of key personnel, a product that doesn't work for nearly all the things it's claimed as a solution to – but the biggest one is that it's a bad business.

That's the theme of a fantastic, characteristically scathing-but-deep Ed Zitron article called (what else?) "Openai is a bad business":

https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai-business/

Zitron does something that no one else in the business press does: takes Openai's claims about its business fundamentals – its costs, its prices, its competitors, and even its capabilities – at face value, and then asks, "Even if this is all true, will Openai ever turn a profit?"

The answer is a pretty convincing "no." Zitron calls it a "subprime AI crisis" in a nod to Tim Hwang's must-read 2020 book about the ad-tech bezzle, Subprime Attention Crisis:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/06/surveillance-tulip-bulbs/#adtech-bubble

The fascinating thing about both Zitron and Hwang's analysis isn't that there are big companies that suck – it's that they are able to suck up so much money and credulous excitement, despite how badly they suck.

That's where power – the thing that neoliberal economists say doesn't matter – comes in. Monopoly power is a self-accelerating flywheel, as Amazon's famous investor pitch explains:

https://vimeo.com/739486256/00a0a7379a

Once a monopolist or a cartel wields market power, they can continue to dominate a sector, even though they're very bad – and even if they use their power to rip off both their customers and very powerful suppliers.

That's the lesson of Michael Jordan's lawsuit against NASCAR, as Matt Stoller explains in his latest BIG newsletter:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/michael-jordan-anti-monopolist

Jordan is one of the most famous basketball players, but after retiring from the game, he became a NASCAR owner, and as such, has been embroiled in a monopoly whose abuses are both eerily familiar to anyone who pays attention to, say the pharmacy benefit manager racket:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/23/shield-of-boringness/#some-men-rob-you-with-a-fountain-pen

But on the other hand, the fact this is all happening to race-cars and not pharmacies makes it very weird indeed. As with, say, PBMs, NASCAR's monopoly isn't just victimizing the individuals who watch racing, but also the racecar teams. These teams are owned by rich, powerful people (like Jordan), but are "almost always on the verge of bankruptcy."

Why is that? NASCAR rips them off. For example, teams have to buy all their parts from NASCAR, at huge markups, and the purchase contract prohibits them from racing at any rival event. There are a million petty schemes like this, and NASCAR carefully titrates its bleed-off to leave its victims almost at death's door, but still (barely) solvent enough to keep racing.

NASCAR also bought out all the rival leagues, and most of the tracks, and then locked the remaining tracks to exclusivity deals. Then the teams all had to sign noncompetes as a condition of competing in NASCAR, the only game in town – forever.

Hence Michael Jordan, a person who steadfastly refused to involve himself in politics during his basketball career, becoming a firebreathing trustbuster. Stoller cites Jordan's transformation as reason to believe that the anti-monopoly agenda will survive even in the event that Harris wins but bows to corporate donors who insist on purging the Biden administration's trustbusters.

That's a hopeful note, and I'd add my own to it: the fact that the NASCAR scam is so similar to the pharma swindles, academic publishing swindles, and all the other monopoly rip-offs means that there is a potential class alliance between university professors, NASCAR owners, and people with chronic health conditions and big pharmaceutical bills.

That high note brings me to the end of this week's linkdump! And here's a little dessert in case you've got room for one more little link: Kitowares "Medieval Mules", a forthcoming clog styled as trompe l'oeil plate armor:

https://www.kitowares.la/

Pair with old favorites like lycra armor leggings:

https://loricaclothing.com/collections/leggings-1/products/the-augsburg-legging

And a DIY crotcheted knight's helmet:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/590854477/knights-helmet-w-detachable-visor

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER s tories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; a nd SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/05/farrago/#jeffty-is-five

[lunegrimm]

Walpurga's night - the birth of the summer sun marking to beginning of the summer equinox ☀️

[beyblader]

Morgan Bible Folio 41r, 13th c. / Add MS 35166 Folio 8r, 13th c.

Antoine Vérard's Grandes Chroniques de France, 15th c. / Benozzo Gozzoli's Procession of the Youngest King, 15th c.

[tablefourtyone]

Silly Game Time: What would your monarch-style, descriptor title be if you were given the choice? (And it doesn't have to be in English, by the way.)

For example, I would be "the Eccentric". But some kings of France have been "the Great", "the Good", "the Pious", and "the Universal Spider" (yep, that one is real and belonged to Louis XI in the 1400s).

It would have to be "the Isosceles". My three face moles are a connect the dots game, almost like a right triangle if one of them would just move again. My subjects would do well to remember their ruler with an almost perfect triangle. 👸🏻

[hero-israel]

#4 sounds like white people at the end of slavery… “we didn’t want to end it because what if there’s retaliation? There have already been slave riots. Imagine what would happen if we gave them freedom or if we became the minority?” It’s not speculative it actually happened the fears had basis. That’s what number four sounds like. It also feels like you only care about one view point like you expect me to believe y’all are perfect victims that did one thing in retaliation?

#4 sounds like that to you because you are an American who thinks the whole world is America and all history must be the same as yours. So you should start by asking yourself what it is in your cultural upbringing, and what in the media you consume, that has you automatically believing the worst possible claims against Jews, to the point of seeing it as understandable for us to be mass murdered.

Jews did not - and do not - want to live in an Arab or Muslim majority society not because of any issues related to "slave uprisings" you are teleporting into this discussion, but rather because Jews had already been brutally oppressed, persecuted, and genocided by Arabs and Muslims for 1,000+ years before Israel or political Zionism were ever invented. Mohammed himself got his hands dirty with this, wiping out the Jews of Yathrib and renaming the gore-drenched rubble into something called "Medina." No less a source than Maimonides wrote in 1172 "God has entangled us with this people, the nation of Ishmael, who treat us so prejudicially and who legislate our harm and hatred…. No nation has ever arisen more harmful than they, nor has anyone done more to humiliate us, degrade us, and consolidate hatred against us... We bear the inhumane burden of their humiliation, lies and absurdities, being as the prophet said, ‘like a deaf man who does not hear or a dumb man who does not open his mouth’.... Our sages disciplined us to bear Ishmael’s lies and absurdities, listening in silence, and we have trained ourselves, old and young, to endure their humiliation, as Isaiah said, ‘I have given my back to the smiters, and my cheek to the beard pullers.’”

Because there is a long history of this, there is much you can read about it, if you care.

Some very random examples:

The "badge of shame" was invented in medieval Baghdad, only later migrating to Europe

Life for Jews in Yemen: The Jews of Yemen were treated as pariah, third-class citizens who needed to be perennially reminded of their submission to the ruling faith…The Jews were considered to be impure, and therefore forbidden to touch a Muslim or a Muslim’s food. They were obliged to humble themselves before a Muslim, to walk on his left side, and to greet him first. They were forbidden to raise their voices in front of a Muslim. They could not build their houses higher than the Muslims’ or ride a camel or horse, and when riding on a mule or donkey, they had to sit sideways. Upon entering a Muslim quarter, a Jew had to take off his footgear and walk barefoot. No Jewish man was permitted to wear a turban or carry the Jambiyyah (dagger), which was worn universally by the free tribesmen of Yemen. If attacked with stones or fist by Islamic youth, a Jew was not allowed to defend himself. Further, the Jews were forced to wear sidelocks or peots. The wearing of such long and dangling peots “was originally a source of great shame for the Yemenites. It was decreed by the imams to distinguish the Jews from the Muslims”. More degrading and insulting decrees to the Jews were the Atarot (Headgear) and Latrine Decrees. The former was a seventeenth-century decree forbidding the Jews to wear a headcovering or turbans. The Latrine Decree was a nineteenth-century edict in which the Jews were forced to clean out public toilets and remove animal dung and carcasses from the streets. Another discriminatory edict was the Orphan Decree which gave the Zaydis the right to convert to Islam any child under the age of thirteen whose father is dead. Further, evidence by a Jew against a Muslim was invalid and a “Jew was forbidden to pass a Muslim to his right, and whoever did so, even unwittingly, could be beaten without trial; the Jews were forbidden to make their purchases before the Muslims had completed theirs; a Jew entering the house of an Arab or the office of an official was only allowed to sit down in the place where the shoes were removed” . Tudor Parfitt summarizes some of these laws in the following: [the Jews] were required not to insult Islam, never strike a Muslim, or to impede him in his path. They were not to assist each other in any activity against a Muslim…They were not to build new places of worship or repair existing one…They were not to pray too noisily or hold public religious processions. They were not to wink. They were not to proselytize. They were not to bear arms. They were required to dress in a distinctive fashion in order not to be mistaken for a member of the Muslim occupying forces. In other words dhimmis had all the times to behave themselves in an unostentatious and unthreatening manner, one appropriate to a defeated and humbled subject people. They were to avoid the slightest show of triumphalism and they were forbidden any activity that could lead to proselytization. Yemenite Jews were “excluded as it almost always…from affairs of state, and from the great institutions of the country”

1941 Farhud pogrom (Iraq)

1929 Hebron Massacre ("They cut off hands, they cut off fingers, they held heads over a stove, they gouged out eyes. A rabbi stood immobile, commending the souls of his Jews to God – they scalped him. They made off with his brains. On Mrs. Sokolov’s lap, one after the other, they sat six students from the yeshiva and, with her still alive, slit their throats. They mutilated the men. They shoved thirteen-year-old girls, mothers, and grandmothers into the blood and raped them in unison....")

1921 Jaffa Riots

1920 Nebi Musa Riots

1910 Shiraz Blood Libel (Iran) ("In the middle of the 19th century, J. J. Benjamin wrote about the life of Persian Jews: "…they are obliged to live in a separate part of town…; for they are considered as unclean creatures… Under the pretext of their being unclean, they are treated with the greatest severity and should they enter a street, inhabited by Mussulmans, they are pelted by the boys and mobs with stones and dirt… For the same reason, they are prohibited to go out when it rains; for it is said the rain would wash dirt off them, which would sully the feet of the Mussulmans… If a Jew is recognized as such in the streets, he is subjected to the greatest insults. The passers-by spit in his face, and sometimes beat him… unmercifully… If a Jew enters a shop for anything, he is forbidden to inspect the goods… Should his hand incautiously touch the goods, he must take them at any price the seller chooses to ask for them... Sometimes the Iranians intrude into the dwellings of the Jews and take possession of whatever please them. Should the owner make the least opposition in defense of his property, he incurs the danger of atoning for it with his life... If... a Jew shows himself in the street during the three days of the Katel (the start of Muharram)…, he is sure to be murdered")

1840 Damascus Blood Libel (Syria)

1839 Allahdad Pogrom (Iran)

1834 Hebron Massacre

1834 Looting of Safed

1700 Jerusalem oppression / apartheid: ("Muslims are very hostile to Jews and inflict upon them vexations in the streets of the city… the common folk persecute the Jews, for we are forbidden to defend ourselves against the Turks or the Arabs. If an Arab strikes a Jew, he (the Jew) must appease him but dare not rebuke him, for fear that he may be struck even harder, which they (the Arabs) do without the slightest scruple...")

1679 Mawza Exile (Yemen)

1660 Destruction of Safed

1500s Iran: ("After the ascension of Shah ‘Abbas II the Jews of Isfahan faced a lot of persecution. Most communities were forced to convert to Islam. Furthermore those who refused to convert would have most of their inheritance taken away as the inheritance laws at the time allowed for those who converted to Shia Islam to inherit the property of non-Muslim family members. Some communities did not convert and were thus forced to wear a special badge to show that they were Jewish. The maltreatment of the Jews weakened their community ties and influence throughout the region. By 1889 there were only around four hundred Jewish families left in Isfahan and most very poor.... by the middle 20th century 80% of the Jews of Isfahan lived on the verge of poverty.")

There's so much more I really don't know where to start or where to end. Afghanistan revoked all Jewish citizenship in 1933. Turkey banned all Jewish names and held massive antisemitic pogroms in 1934. Iraq banned Hebrew schools and Hebrew names in 1936, pogroms throughout Libya 1945, Syria fired all Jewish government employees 1946. Tripoli pogrom 1785. Algiers 1805. Cairo 1844. Istanbul 1870. Safed 1517 and 1799. Jerusalem 1665 and 1720. Granada Massacre 1066. Fez Massacre 1033. How many Wiki links do you want, how many textbooks?

This is an old, old conflict, and the Americanized "colonizer / slave plantation" frame is off-topic.

[fuckyeaharthuriana]

Arthurian non fiction recommendation list

I don't talk much about non fiction arthuriana because I usually don't read much of it but I have an immense love for some specific arthurian non fiction books.

I am not really interested in historical Arthur, but I love to see the evolution and addition of arthurian elements in literautre through time and space. For this reason, my absolute favorite is the series "The Arthur of the..."

Here are some:

Arthur of the Welsh (the one I always take with me! It has information of the triads, early Welsh texts and poems, Culhwch and Olwen and the Mabinogion arthurian texts)

Arthur of the French (in particular has a section about Arthur in modern French movies and fiction!)

Arthur of the Italians (this I did not check as I read the texts in Italian, but I know it has information on the Rustichello da Pisa text, the Tavola Ritonda and i Cantari, the ones with Gaia as a character)

Arthur of the Low Countries (one of my favorite because it has full summaries of some Dutch texts that are impossible to find in English like Walewein, Moriaen, Walewein ende Keye, Roel Zemel)

Arthur of the North (has some summaries of some really hard to find stuff arthurian like Ívens saga, Erex saga, Parcevals saga, various Nordic ballads, Hærra Ivan Leons riddare)

Arthur of the Germans (another good one! It has info on a bunch of German texts that are hard to find like Wigamur, various fragments, Tristan traditions)

Arthur of Medieval Latin literature (for the older stuff, like Geoffrey of Monmouth, Nennius and Life of Saints)

Arthur of the English (if you are really into Malory)

Arthur of the Iberians (I have not fully delved into this, but the chapters seem to be about the reception of arthurian matter in Spain and Portugal)

Basically, different authors tackle the arthurian traditions (more or less obscure) from different areas and time periods.

In general, if you like Welsh arthuriana anything written by Rachel Bromwich will be your friend, especially "Trioedd Ynys Prydein: The Triads of the Island of Britain".

For general information:

The Arthurian Name Dictionary (Bruce) - this used to be online, not anymore, but you can still access it through the archive here

The Arthurian companion (Phyllis Ann Karr)

The Oxford Guide to Arthurian Literature and Legend (Alan Lupack)

The Arthurian Encyclopedia (Lacy)

The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Arthurian Legends (Coghlan)

If you are looking for more translated texts you can check here for free downloads, but if you would like books, here are some:

The Romance of Arthur: An Anthology of Medieval Texts in Translation (Wilhelm)

This book contains translations of:

Culhwch and Olwen Roman de Brut Brut Some Chretien de Troyes Some Parzival excerpts The saga of the mantle Beroul's Romance of Tristan Thomas of Britain's Romance of Tristan Lanval The Honeysuckle Cantare on the Death of Tristan Suite du Merlin Prose Merlin Sir Gawain and the Green Knight The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle De ortu Waluuanii nepotis Arthuri

The Book of Arthur: Lost Tales From the Round Table (Matthews John)

This book contains translations of:

(Celtic Tales) The Life of Merlin The Madness of Tristan The Adventures of the Eagle Boy The Adventures of Melora and Orlando The Story of the Crop-eared dog Visit of the Grey Ham The Story of Lanval

(Tales of Gawain) The rise of Gawain Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle The adventures of Tarn Wathelyn The Mule without a bridle The knight of the Sword Gorlagros and Gawain

(Medieval texts) The knight of the parrot The vows of King Arthur and his Knights The fair unknown Arthur and Gorlagon Guingamor and Guerrehes The story of Meriadoc The story of Grisandole The Story of Perceval Sir Cleges The Boy and the Mantle The lay of Tyolet Jaufre The story of Lanzalet And some final notes

[literaryvein-reblogs]

I have no clue if you've done this already, but I would love some royal-related vocabulary!! I write about a royal family (one in the middle ages) and it gets tiring looking for all the correct terms😅

Some Medieval Vocabulary

Amercement - financial penalty imposed by the King or his justices for various minor offences. The word comes from the fact that the offender is said to be ‘in mercy’.

Assize - meeting of feudal vassals with the King, and the edicts issued from it. It comes to have a legal context of court; but then in the early days the king’s court was just that – a place where law was made and justice executed. Hence the double meaning of the word court.

Borough - town with the right of self government granted by royal charter

Chamber - the financial office of the royal household

Chamberlain - officer of the royal household, responsible for the Chamber. He was therefore responsible for administration of the household and the private estates of the King.

Chancellor - officer of the Royal Household who originally served as the monarch’s secretary or notary, managing the Chancery, filled with clerks who produced writs and written instructions and records.

Chivalry - the knightly class of feudal times. The primary sense of the term in Europe in the Middle Ages is “knights,” or “fully armed and mounted fighting men.” Thence the term came to mean the gallantry and honour expected of knights. Later the word came to be used in its general sense of “courtesy.”

Constable - the title of an officer given command in an army or an important garrison. Also the High Constable was the officer who commanded in the King’s absence and commanded the King's army.

Destrier - warhorse; so called because it would be led using the right hand

Diadem - a royal crown

Eyre - the king and his justices would traditionally travel through the kingdom to deliver justice. As the king became more centred at Westminster, justices would continue to travel – and were called Justices in Eyre. From the French errer, "to travel".

Heir apparent - the declared heir to the throne, normally the king’s eldest son

Heir presumptive - the presumed heir to the throne in the event of the king dying without an heir apparent

Justiciar - head of the royal judicial system and the King’s viceroy during his absence from the country

League - somewhere between 1½ to 3 miles. Traditionally, the distance a person or horse can walk in one hour.

Mark - money, worth thirteen shillings and four pence, i.e. two thirds of £1

Mead hall - in the Middle Ages in Northern Europe and Scandinavia, a large building with just one room that was used as a central place for entertainment and as a living place for a lord/king

Minstrel - a traveling musician and singer common between the 11th and 15th centuries

Ordeal - a method of trial in which the accused was given a physical test which could be met successfully only if they were innocent (e.g., ordeal by fire)

Purveyance or prise - in early medieval days, the lord had the right to be entertained by his followers, at their expense. And of course this applied to the greatest lord of all – the king. Over time, the king travelled less, but still wanted the benefit of being able to have him and his household live at someone else's expense – and so he exercised the right to take goods and food in lieu of being there. It was the policy to pay – but payment was often small and late.

Saga - a long story about Scandinavian history, written in the Old Norse language in the Middle Ages, mainly in Iceland

Steward - man responsible for running the day to day affairs of the manor or castle in absence of the lord

Subinfeudation - in medieval Europe, the process by which a vassal (i.e., a man who lived on land given to him by a powerful land owner in exchange for agreeing to fight for him) allowed someone else to use or live on part of their land

Sumpter - packhorse, pony, mule or other animal

Thegn - military companion to the king

Sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6

Here's what I found for you. Hope this helps! Would love to read your work if it does—sounds like the kind of writing I enjoy :)

More: Medieval-Related Vocabulary ⚜ Word Lists

[herecirmsims]

Horses & Carriage

Occasionally I'll come across some CC that really inspires me, and that's why I dropped everything I was supposed to be doing and obsessively made a bunch of poses for this GORGEOUS carriage instead. 😅 I've been needing something like this for ages!!

These are like add-ons rather than my usual sequential poses - they're mix and match and can be used together or separately for those traveling scenes. No inside poses yet (you can close the doors on the carriage to hide the fact it's empty) but I may make some later.

Notes: - the horses may clip with the harness depending on their build. My mules didn't clip at all but the slightly thicker cobs I made did, so just something to be aware of. - if you need an NPC driver, @notsooldmadcatlady also has a deco version in this medieval deco Sims set!

You will need: - Pose Player - Teleport Any Sim - Horse Ranch EP (if used with horses) - This carriage by @notsooldmadcatlady

TOU: please don’t paywall or claim as your own. You may adjust for personal use to avoid clipping etc., but please don’t pass them off as your own.

DOWNLOAD HERE (SFS)

Alternate download here (SFS) Both links are free with no ads, but using the CF link helps support me as a creator with no cost to you <3

You can easily browse more of my posepacks in my Ko-Fi gallery

@ts4-poses & @alwaysfreecc thank you! <3

[brucesterling]

Gray-Hawk and his last crooked gambit

The History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain Volume 1 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Volume 1 spanish history translation of 10th century book

INTERNET ARCHIVE

*If you were a bandit in Al-Andalus, the medieval Islamic Spanish territories, then your worst enemies were the heavily-armed Christians, the "followers of the crucified."

*But that wouldn't stop you from diligently robbing your own people, and getting publicly crucified yourself, that was just a minor occupational hazard. It wouldn't even slow you down in your scams and robberies.

*******

"A very entertaining anecdote is told of a famous highwayman, called Al-bdsiyu-l-ash'ab (the Grey-hawk), who lived in the time of Al-Mu'atamed, King of Seville. He was renowned for his dexterity and courage, and soon became the scourge of the country; for at the head of a small band of chosen followers he began to scour the fields, surprising the inhabitants in their farms and villages, and depriving them of their valuables.

"Long did he baffle the search of justice, and escape from every troop sent for his apprehension; but, at last, he fell one day into the hands of the king's officers, and the event being reported to Al-Mu'atamed, he was sentenced to be crucified by the side of a much-frequented path, in the midst of the very district which had been the principal theatre of his depredations.

"The sentence having been duly carried into execution, the poor man was hanging miserably stretched on the cross, when, behold ! his wife and daughters came up, and began to sob and wail around him, exclaiming, in the midst of their tears, 'Our doom is signed, and our deaths are certain; who shall provide for us when thou art no more?'

"They were thus lamenting over their misfortune when a peasant happened to pass by, riding on a mule, and having before him something like a large bundle of clothes or goods.

"'Friend,"'said the robber on the cross to the passenger, 'take pity on me, and, since thou seest me in this condition, grant me a last favour, which will prove beneficial to thee too.'

"'And what is it, pray?' said the peasant.

"'Go to yonder well,' replied the robber, 'and thou shalt find at the bottom one hundred dinars in a purse, which, as I was closely pursued by the constables, I threw therein; if thou succeed in getting them out, half shall be thy reward; the remaining half thou must give to my wife and daughters here, that they may support themselves for a while after my death. Go, hasten to the spot, and do not be afraid; my wife will assist thee in thy descent by holding a rope, and my daughters will take care of thy mule.'

"The peasant consented, upon the offered conditions, and bent his steps towards the well; there he tied a rope round his waist, and, assisted by the woman, began to let himself down, but no sooner had he reached the bottom than the robber's wife cut the rope, and the poor wretch was left in the water struggling and screaming, while his deceiver, as may easily be imagined, hastened to the spot where his mule was, seized on whatever property he carried, and quickly disappeared with her daughters.

"The poor man, in the meanwhile, finding the depth of the well, and that he had not the means of getting out, began to cry out as loud as he could, in hopes of calling the attention of some passenger; and the hollow of the wel rang with his cries of 'help! help!'

"It was summer time, and the weather very hot, so that many travellers approached the wel to draw water for themselves and their beasts; but the moment one of them came near to it, and heard the voice of the poor peasant inside, he ran away from it in great fright and consternation, not knowing what caused the pitiful lamentations and wailings that issued from the water.

"For many a long hour did the unhappy man remain in this miserable plight, until some of the passengers having acquainted each other with the circumstance, they came to the resolution of returning to the spot, and ascertaining the cause of the strange noises they had heard. Hastening back to the well, they soon discovered the peasant lying at the bottom of it, who, by means of a rope thrown him, was speedily extricated from the dangerous situation in which he lay.

"Being asked how he had come by his misfortune, he told them that he had been deceived, and pointing to the highwayman on the cross.

"'Yonder knave,' said he, 'was the cause of it, in order to give his wife and daughters an opportunity tom plunder me.'

"However, the adventure soon became known in Seville, whither the peasant directed his course, and being reported to Al-Mu'atamed, he was surprised to hear of the robber's cunning and impudence; and wishing to see him, and interrogate him on the subject, he commanded that Grey-hawk should be made to appear in his presence.

"Agreeably to his orders, the robber was let down from the cross, and brought before the King, who addressed him thus: 'Tell me, O Grey-hawk ! how couldst thou be guilty of such a crime as that now imputed to thee, and that too, being, as it were, under the clutch of death?'

"'O King!' replied the robber, 'if thou knewest how strongly nature impels me to the perpetration of such acts, and how great is the pleasure I enjoy while I commit them, I have no doubt but that thou wouldst relinquish the royal power, and embrace my profession.'

"Al-Mu'atamed could not help smiling when he heard this; he then said, after some time, 'O Grey-hawk I were I to set thee at liberty, and treat thee kindly, were I to act generously towards thee, and allow thee a pension for thy maintenance and that of thy family, tell me, wouldst thou repent of thy misdeeds, and forsake thy criminal practices?'

"'If repentance,' said Grey-hawk, 'is to be my only way to salvation, I do not hesitate to accept life under such conditions.'

"Upon which, Al-Mu'atamed, having previously made him swear to keep his engagement, liberated him, and gave him the command of a resolute band for the prosecution and detection of thieves in a particular quarter of the city."

****

*So not only do you survive being publicly crucified, the experience makes you turn intio a cop.

[inky-sun]

“The stuff of nightmare is their plain bread. They butter it with pain. They set their clocks by deathwatch beetles, and thrive the centuries. They were the men with the leather-ribbon whips who sweated up the Pyramids seasoning it with other people's salt and other people's cracked hearts. They coursed Europe on the White Horses of the Plague. They whispered to Caesar that he was mortal, then sold daggers at half-price in the grand March sale. Some must have been lazing clowns, foot props for emperors, princes, and epileptic popes. Then out on the road, Gypsies in time, their populations grew as the world grew, spread, and there was more delicious variety of pain to thrive on. The train put wheels under them and here they run down the log road out of the Gothic and baroque; look at their wagons and coaches, the carving like medieval shrines, all of it stuff once drawn by horses, mules, or, maybe, men.”

- Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

[archsarmedadvice]

Knights, Horses, and the Medieval Battlefield

This post is a focused version of a larger post, many thanks to Arch for allowing it here!

The Medieval Horse

During the middle ages, horses were not actually defined by breed. They were defined by the work the horse was suited and trained to preform. There were five main types of medieval horses.

The Destrier

Also called The Great Horse for its size, strength, and price, this horse was the renown mount of knights and kings in battle. These horses were highly trained for battle, and could be taught to do such things as striking out at soldiers in front, kicking at soldiers from the back, and even leaping all four feet in the air to protect it’s rider. They would wear the most armor, and these horses would likely be closest in appearance to the modern Andalusian.

^‘The Modern Knight’, Jason Kingsley, and his horse Warlord.

The Courser/The Charger

A lighter horse than the destrier, the courser is also a warhorse, highly trained and well-bred, but a little less expensive. A knight might not be able to afford a destrier, especially as a minor knight, but every knight should have a courser. The Spanish Jennet is the epitome of the medieval courser, and in fact was the horse used by Richard II. According to Shakespeare, the horse’s name was White Surrey, although other sources claim the horse was Roan Barbary, and was a Barb or Berber horse*.

*Bought from Spain and likely a cross of Spanish and African blood, so a Jennet. But Jennet was also a classification of a horse type in those days, so, sources are muddled.

^Barb/Berber horses in traditional garb

The Rouncey

The ‘average’ horse of the time, this horse was used mainly for riding, but could sometimes be ridden into battle if trained properly, and were the preferred horse for lower-class fighters such as archers or men-at-arms. As it described a riding horse, these horses came in all shapes and sizes, from all lineages, and in all colors. In peacetime they could be used to draw carriages or work fields. A proud and expensive destrier would never be caught pulling a plow.

The Palfrey

A highly-bred, highly trained horse, this horse is a high quality riding horse known for a specific gait, called an ambling gait. This horse had a special pattern of moving its feet that gave the rider a considerably more comfortable ride than the traditional 4 gaited horse. After the middle ages, these horses almost disappeared, only to be recovered in the Americas in the form of 'gaited’ horses such as the Paso Fino, the Rocky Mountain Horse, the Missouri Foxtrotter, and the Tennessee Walking Horse. The Icelandic horse has also retained the special Tölt gait that may* be the exact gait of medieval ambling horses.

^A fine lady on her steady palfrey

The Packhorse

This describes any kind of horse, usually a rouncey, that is used not for riding but to carry supplies. Packhorses could also be mules, donkeys, and ponies, so long as they could carry weight for long miles. These were supply horses, carrying food, weapons, tents, whatever else may be needed.

^Pack horses can be strung together in long 'strings’ of horses for transportation, or a single packhorse may follow through herd instinct. Packhorses are also rideable, if you want to give the main horse a rest.

Horses on the Battlefield

Now, if you have seen the above scene, you have probably seen The Hollow Crown, a historical drama with a few late Medieval battle scenes. In these scenes, knight clashes against knight in a furious charge, leading to pitched battles on horseback. I’m not going to say that never happened, but by and large cavalry was directed against infantry, not other cavalry, or used to conduct maneuvers requiring speed and surprise, such as a charge, a circling maneuver, a bluff retreat and most importantly, to chase down routing enemy soldiers.

A knight on horseback was most effective in close quarters against unmounted and surprised soldiers. Lances were the primary weapon, allowing a mounted warrior length to spear and batter down at enemies, and a sword was secondary, as it had a shorter length, and would be used if a mounted warrior was surrounded by infantry or in battle against another knight. Throughout the medieval period, horses sometimes were removed from the fight all together due to unfavorable land, and kept in reserve to either help the army flee or to chase down the fleeing enemy.

Somewhat realistically for facing an infantry, the Rohirrim here are wielding lances, which are a powerful tool of any charge. Unrealistically, they are instead using their horses as orc plows, which is… a choice. A charge is the cavalry’s best weapon, combining the horses’ speed, power, and training to create a wall of death and hooves. A good charge can split an infantry line, disrupt command signals, and even send the poorly-trained soldiers into a panic. A bad charge can end with the knights surrounded and pulled from their saddles to be stabbed and stomped into the ground. Such was medieval warfare.

[thesobsister]

Damn, Unca Donald about to get medieval on Huey, Dewey and Louie.

Interesting how commonplace references to corporal punishment for children are in mid-century pop culture. And not wrist slaps, either. That strap he’s about to pull off the wall looks like it could keep an ornery mule in line

from “The Rabbit’s Foot,” Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories #32 (May 1943). Words and images by Carl Barks.

[arashisenshi]

The Stones Stay Silent launches on April 14th!

Here is the official blurb:

When a deadly plague sweeps the land, the priests of the Parents accuse those deemed to have incurred the gods' wrath. Leiander, unmarried and with interests unbecoming to the woman people consider him to be, flees for his life. With the Night Demon Kevv'ach by his side and his deepest wish undiminished, he journeys to the Great Lith, said to still channel the magic of the Parents. He will beseech the gods to remake his body in the image of the Father, so the world sees him as his true self: Leiander.

And here’s what you can expect:

- A character-driven medieval-ish fantasy story; - Transgender aroace main character seeking to live his life and maybe bake; - Cinnamon roll Night Demon bestie with partial amnesia (and a sweet tooth); - Steadfast friends turned found family (and occasionally, a pair of mules); - Absent gods who left behind mysterious blue monoliths; - Strict gender roles dictating what jobs people have, what colors they wear, and what tattoos they get + a couple of fanatics hell-bent on enforcing said rules; - Extensive travel through a plague ravaged realm; - A conspicuous lack of magic; or swords; or sorcery; or monsters; - Even more giant statues; - A bunch of recipes to try for yourself, from Romanian, Austrian and... whatever cuisine baked goat cheese in walnut crust comes from; - Named chapters! Pronunciation guide! Maps for each part! Extensive content warnings! Handy reference chart for timekeeping! Cameo appearance by my cat! - Eventually, I promise, a happy end.

You can already preorder the ebook on Amazon and have it synch to your device on Friday, when the paperback will also be available there. If you’d rather support your local indie bookshop, go for it! You can ask them to order a book for you once published, by providing them the following details:

Title: The Stones Stay Silent Author: Danny Ride ISBN:  9783982494906

----

If it’s not up your alley, you don’t want or can’t afford to buy the book, you can still support - it would mean so much!

- share this post - let your friends know - ask your local library to order the book for you! (you and anyone else can read it for free then!) - suggest it as reading for book clubs - add the book to your list on goodreads - mark it as to read on the story graph - upvote it on reedsy discovery - there is a detailed review there from an independent reviewer, and you can also read the first chapter for free!

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images: 1) promo material of the book featuring the book cover 2) moodboard of the seven parts and the epilogue 3) promo material showing a sample of the book interior

[thorraborinn]

Hey, do you know of any paper or something examining the Baldr myth critically besides Anatoly Liberman's paper? Also, what do you think about Dr. Crawford's Loki misconceptions video or his collab video with ReligionForBreakfast?. I know you said in one of your posts that the question to whether or not Loki was worshiped historically has not been argued successfully either way, so that's why I'm asking if you've seen it since in one of them and others he says Loki wasn't worshiped bc no place names. Sorry if this is too hard of an ask. I decided to ask you since you're the only person who I know won't make up bullshit/give moral reasons to questions about Loki historically/mythically.

A lot of scholars have written about the myth, though not necessarily in the granular detail or from the same angle that Liberman did. I think that more has been written about Loki which touches on the Baldr myth than works which are specifically about the Baldr myth. Here are some that come to mind, and they all have references to others.

John Lindow has written a lot about it, including a book, Murder and Vengeance among the Gods: Baldr in Scandinavian Mythology (which I haven't read). His article "The Tears of the Gods: A Note on the Death of Baldr in Scandinavian Mythology" can be read for free on JSTOR, which is valuable if for no other reason than his very quick rapid-fire summary of the main threads in the history of research up to that point, which also constitutes a good reading list for exactly this question. Lindow also contributed the "Baldr" chapter to Brepols' The Pre-Christian Religions of the North series (which I have also not read).

Jens Peter Schjødt mentions it throughout his book Initiation Between Worlds: Structure and Symbolism in Pre-Christian Scandinavian Religion. He's mostly concerned with looking at the relationship between the world of the living and the world of the dead, so those are the aspects of the myth he focuses on. Schjødt has more experience writing about Loki than about Baldr, but of course you can't write about one without the other.

Kevin Wanner, best known for writing Snorri Sturluson and the Edda: The Conversion of Cultural Capital in Medieval Scandinavia, wrote an article called "Cunning Intelligence in Norse Myth: Loki, Óðinn, and the Limits of Sovereignty," which is mostly about the relationship between Óðinn and Loki (including the Baldr story), and the relationship of the pair to human people, especially poets. It takes a little while to get to the point, but I think it's worth it.

Though it hardly even mentions Baldr, one of the most influential recent works on Loki is "Loki, the Vätte, and the Ash Lad: A Study Combining Old Scandinavian and Late Material” by Eldar Heide. I'm going to bring this up again soon.

Anyway, to the second part of the question, I'd rather get kicked in the solar plexus by a mule than watch a YouTube video so I'm not going to comment on what Crawford says there specifically, but the "Loki doesn't have any place-names" argument is old and usually comes in two varieties. If Crawford came up with a third, then I apologize for the oversight, but I imagine it's one of these:

(the good one): We know from the sagas that naming places for gods was a common way to show devotion, and from archaeology that many places named for gods were important ritual centers; furthermore places named for gods tend to concentrate near centers of social and political power. Therefore, if we're able to demonstrate that place-name evidence was passed down reliably from medieval or earlier times, it can be one of the strongest indicators available to us of cultic activity directed toward specific named gods and its presence allows us to make much more confident statements about worship than we can make in their absence. While this is inherently limited, because it necessarily privileges the beliefs of the people who had the social position to declare names of places and to direct the construction of ritual sites, it's one of the best pieces of evidence available to us.

(the bad one): oh yeah, no, if they don't have any places named for them they weren't worshiped. Yeah, they definitely would have named a place after him and it definitely would have been unchanged until modern times. No, there were no other forms of devotion, just naming stuff.

I don't recognize the statement "the evidence does not permit us to say that there was a cult of Loki" as equivalent to saying "we can say definitively that there was not a cult of Loki."

Moreover, I think it's a failure of imagination to think that all devotion would take the same form. I don't imagine that Loki's idol was ever on the highest platform in a major ritual site like Thor's was at Uppsala but that's also not a useful standard, and it seems to me that it's the standard that the place-name argument holds him to. If we look at the Baltic peoples for comparison, they had very different forms of worship for different gods, so the absence of evidence for worship of Žemyna in a context appropriate for the worship of Perkūnas does not mean that Žemyna was not worshiped.

Anyway these days everyone seems to be on the "Loki was just a regular house spirit for many generations before being assimilated into the gods" bandwagon, one that I have disagreements with, but one which is compatible with "Loki was worshiped but not in a way that would result in place-names." Liberman made a case for Loki being a very, very ancient god; and Riccardo Ginevra's etymology of Sígyn requires that Loki's wife already be thousands of years old by the Viking age. There's lots and lots and lots of ways to argue in favor of him having been worshiped, all of which require modification of the word "worship" from the one the place-name-arguers use, so that eventually everyone is talking past each other. At the end of the day, "We don't know" is the actual answer to most of our questions.

[sims4bradshaw]

LADY TIGRA CC CREATOR ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS all using @obscurus-sims skin n28 & @vyxated limbus eyes 1 @its-adrienpastel urban homage add ons @bokchoijo coil bangle @pralinesims geo earrings

2 @huiernxoxo julie earrings @remussirion medieval plucked eyebrows

3. left - @pralinesims playdate bodysuit + denise eyebrows @simpliciaty-cc hoops @teekalu dirtbag high tops right - @sentate natalia cuff & ayesha pants @ice-creamforbreakfast christie choker pralinesims geo earrings P.S shoes are my penelope mules :)

poses by @roselipaofficial model v.8 (i could be wrong) @joannebernice whore and model series Beom Ryeoung my memory poses THANK YOU TO EVERYONE <3 Sorry if I left someone out, sometimes hard to keep track of these things

[officeshelpdesk]

See if they dropped me in medieval times or the roman Empire or whatever and told me I need to survive I'm just gonna be making cocktails

Imagine you're some king who's never had a gin martini in your life and this random weirdly dressed guy who's been fermenting grapes and juniper berries to make wine and vermouth for the year shows up and gives you something that 1.) tastes great 2.) makes you drunk, you're adding that dude to the royal court

Then I can reserve part of the palace as a brewery, make a bunch of new cocktails, if they're not as good as they should be NO ONE WOULD KNOW. I'm slinging Moscow mules and brandy Alexander's and Jameson and Ginger Ales at the king I am invincible