#phenomenology of religion

[thewordenreport]

Krishna in the Gita: Compromising Transcendence?

The god Krishna's centrality in Hinduism's Bhagavadgita eclipses even the grounding of Hinduism: Brahman. As "being" itself and consciousness of being, Brahman is utterly transcendent, whereas Krishna and the other (subordinate?) deities have forms that we can recognize. Even though Krishna is transcendent as well as immanent in the Gita, is transcendence itself compromised or cut short in the anthropormorphizing of the divine? See https://thewordenreport-religion.blogspot.com/2025/02/lord-krishna-in-bhagavadgita.html

[soupedepates]

nah yeah about hymen restoration project i misread smth and i may be sleep-deprived but yk

the hyperfixation on stein and weil is so strong i am reading weil's Gravity and Grace to get the genius idea i am running after and i think it might be my salvation

also im hyperfixating so hard i got hit by grace and became christian in the process wtf i dont understand my life anymore

i need to sleeeeeeep

but

phenomenology

[knoxvillerose-blog]

Colin Henry Wilson (26 June 1931 – 5 December 2013) was an English writer, philosopher and novelist. He also wrote widely on true crime, mysticism and the paranormal. Wilson called his philosophy "new existentialism" or "phenomenological existentialism", and maintained his life work was "that of a philosopher, and (his) purpose to create a new and optimistic existentialism".

Vintage Book available now at KnoxvilleRose on Etsy!

[starry-ace]

Religion is insane because these people can say yes I acknowledge the existence of a god that’s mere essence creates all and no things and those creatures are unable to perceive god because if they were to perceive god they must perceive what god’s but got has no “nots” because god is everything that encompasses all things, all things inherently encompassing nothing. But they look at that and say god is a white man who hates gay people.

[eesirachs]

For a school assignment, I'm assembling an anthology around the theme of queer divinity and desire, but I'm having a hard time finding a fitting essay/article (no access to real academic catalogues :/ ), do you know of any essays around this theme?

below are essays, and then books, on queer theory (in which 'queer' has a different connotation than in regular speech) in the hebrew bible/ancient near east. if there is a particular prophet you want more of, or a particular topic (ištar, or penetration, or appetites), or if you want a pdf of anything, please let me know.

essays: Boer, Roland. “Too Many Dicks at the Writing Desk, or How to Organize a Prophetic Sausage-Fest.” TS 16, no. 1 (2010b): 95–108. Boer, Roland. “Yahweh as Top: A Lost Targum.” In Queer Commentary and the Hebrew Bible, edited by Ken Stone, 75–105. JSOTSup 334. Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim, 2001. Boyarin, Daniel. “Are There Any Jews in ‘The History of Sexuality’?” Journal of the History of Sexuality 5, no. 3 (1995): 333–55. Clines, David J. A. “He-Prophets: Masculinity as a Problem for the Hebrew Prophets and Their Interpreters.” In Sense and Sensitivity: Essays on Reading the Bible in Memory of Robert Carroll, edited by Robert P. Carroll, Alastair G. Hunter, and Philip R. Davies, 311–27. JSOTSup 348. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002. Graybill, Rhiannon. “Yahweh as Maternal Vampire in Second Isaiah: Reading from Violence to Fluid Possibility with Luce Irigaray.” Journal of feminist studies in religion 33, no. 1 (2017): 9–25. Haddox, Susan E. “Engaging Images in the Prophets: Feminist Scholarship on the Book of the Twelve.” In Feminist Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Retrospect. 1. Biblical Books, edited by Susanne Scholz, 170–91. RRBS 5. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2013. Koch, Timothy R. “Cruising as Methodology: Homoeroticism and the Scriptures.” In Queer Commentary and the Hebrew Bible, edited by Ken Stone, 169–80. JSOTSup 334. Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim, 2001. Tigay, Jeffrey. “‘ Heavy of Mouth’ and ‘Heavy of Tongue’: On Moses’ Speech Difficulty.” BASOR, no. 231 (October 1978): 57–67.

books: Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Bauer-Levesque, Angela. Gender in the Book of Jeremiah: A Feminist-Literary Reading. SiBL 5. New York: P. Lang, 1999. Black, Fiona C., and Jennifer L. Koosed, eds. Reading with Feeling : Affect Theory and the Bible. Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2019. Brenner, Athalya. The Intercourse of Knowledge: On Gendering Desire and “Sexuality” in the Hebrew Bible. BIS 26. Leiden: Brill, 1997. Camp, Claudia V. Wise, Strange, and Holy: The Strange Woman and the Making of the Bible. JSOTSup 320. Gender, Culture, Theory 9. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000. Chapman, Cynthia R. The Gendered Language of Warfare in the Israelite-Assyrian Encounter. HSM 62. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2004. Creangă, Ovidiu, ed. Men and Masculinity in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond. BMW 33. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2010. Eilberg-Schwartz, Howard. God’s Phallus: And Other Problems for Men and Monotheism. Boston: Beacon, 1995. Huber, Lynn R., and Rhiannon Graybill, eds. The Bible, Gender, and Sexuality : Critical Readings. London, UK ; T&T Clark, 2021. Guest, Deryn. When Deborah Met Jael: Lesbian Biblical Hermeneutics. London: SCM, 2005. Graybill, Rhiannon, Meredith Minister, and Beatrice J. W. Lawrence, eds. Rape Culture and Religious Studies : Critical and Pedagogical Engagements. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2019. Graybill, Rhiannon. Are We Not Men? : Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets. New York, NY: Oxford University Press USA, 2016. Halperin, David J. Seeking Ezekiel: Text and Psychology. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. Jennings, Theodore W. Jacob’s Wound: Homoerotic Narrative in the Literature of Ancient Israel. New York: Continuum, 2005. Macwilliam, Stuart. Queer Theory and the Prophetic Marriage Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible. BibleWorld. Sheffield and Oakville, CT: Equinox, 2011. Maier, Christl. Daughter Zion, Mother Zion: Gender, Space, and the Sacred in Ancient Israel. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2008. Mills, Mary E. Alterity, Pain, and Suffering in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. LHB/OTS 479. New York: T. & T. Clark, 2007. Stökl, Jonathan, and Corrine L. Carvalho. Prophets Male and Female: Gender and Prophecy in the Hebrew Bible, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Ancient Near East. AIL 15. Atlanta, GA: SBL, 2013. Stone, Ken. Practicing Safer Texts: Food, Sex and Bible in Queer Perspective. Queering Theology Series. London: T & T Clark International, 2004. Weems, Renita J. Battered Love: Marriage, Sex, and Violence in the Hebrew Prophets. OBT. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1995.

[friend-of-wisdom]

93/100 days of productivity

Wednesday, September 4th 2024

Although I did not sleep much during the night, I managed to wake up at 6:30am to go to class. I explained to my professor that I've been dealing with health issues etc and he was very understanding, thankfully! Since his classes are so early, it is even harder to have strengh to go than other classes. But I'm enjoying the class a bit, it's okay. We're diving a bit into phenomenology, so it's worth it, even though the religion part does not interest me. Anyways, here's my day:

went to Philosophy of Religion class

studied phenomenology from the beginning cus I want to understand it very well

re-read a few pages of the book on Philosophy of Religion and annotated it

went grocery shopping

Now I'm watching The Umbrella Academy newest episodes and I might continue studying later, or maybe I'll continue reading Rousseau's On The Social Contract.

[handweavers]

"the skin of religion" by s. brent plate is one of my favourite pieces of writing on art & spirituality, i always go back to it. such a foundational work for me tbh

["The skinscape of religion stands at the crux of the matter, the heart of religion: it happens at in-between, mediated places. From this focal point, it unfolds outward to become the foundation stone in the construction of social-sacred space. Recall Lefebvre's comment: "Within the body itself, spatially considered, the successive levels constituted by the senses [...] prefigure the layers of social space and their interconnections." To understand religion and its places, we cannot merely operate through third or fourth order disembodied hermeneutics regarding texts, doctrines, or previous relatable experiences. Neither can we submit that so-called "mystical" and "im-mediate" experiences occur without the mediation incurring through one's cultural environment. Neither is it enough to iconographically study the visual arts, or phenomenologically investigate ritual movements and extract from them a system, disregarding sensual encounters with the works. Finally, to suggest that the new cognitive sciences can describe everything for us is also bound to fail for it often lacks the ways cultural environments shape cognitive processes; hard wiring is always a little bit soft.

Unpacking the chart more, in the first instance the skin (a synecdoche for the senses in general) is to human cognition as the medium is to the message. (And I am here conjuring McLuhan's hyperbole that the medium is the message.) The senses are the media of the body, the channels through which understanding occurs. The senses do not merely influence cognition, but become the thought itself. Beliefs, and conceptions of super natural/transcendent higher powers are not possible to be disentangled from sense perceptions, nor from the media in which religious conceptions occur. If, as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have observed, there is a bodily basis to metaphor, there is likewise a bodily basis to mythology, to the stories and proverbs and ethical commands of sacred texts, and to sacred symbols. The sensual body is not relegated merely to the ritual and behavioral aspects of religious life, as is commonly posited. Rather, the body pervades all aspects of religion."]

[rosesteeth]

day 28/100 | 100 days of productivity✮⋆˙

05/06/2024 // my last final examination for the second semester is tomorrow, and i am quite nervous since there was not a lot of preparation time and any student of abnormal psych knows the hassle of learning the numerous diagnostic criteria without mixing them up.

— what i did today :

studied the diagnostic criteria for sleep wake disorders + somatic symptom and related disorders

read a paper on culture bound syndromes

revised a paper on media portrayals of disorders

read about sexual and gender related disorders

studied about methods in making therapy more multiculturally sensitive

went through the process of conducting a clinical interview

revised notes on phenomenological social psychiatry, culture & mental illness, and religion/spirituality and mental care

[alchemy-fic]

Bibliography:

Alchemy and the Occult:

Western:

Alchemy Unveiled, Johannes Helmond (Translated into English and Edited by

Gerard Hanswille and Deborah Brumlich); (1963)

Practical Alchemy, A Guide To The Great Work; Brian Cotnoir (2006)

The Black Arts (50th Anniversary Edition); Richard Cavendish (1968)

Alchemy & Mysticism: The Hermetic Cabinet; Alexander Roob (2009)

The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structures of Alchemy (2nd Edition); Mircea Eliade (1962, 1978)

History of Alchemy; M. M. Pattison (1902)

Alchemy (Revised Edition); E. J. Holmyard (1990)

Dictionary of Symbolism, Cultural Icons and the Meanings Behind Them; Hans Biedermann, Translated by James Hulbert (1994)

The Encyclopedia of Witches, Witchcraft, and Wicca; Rosemary Ellen Guiley (1989)

The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits; Rosemary Ellen Guiley (1992)

Levantine:

The Jewish Alchemists: A History and Source Book; Raphael Patai (1994)

Ancient Magic and Divination, A Microhistorical Study of the Neo-Assyrian Healer Kiṣir-Aššur; Troels Pank Arbøll (2017)

Fuck Your "Magic" Antisemitism: A Lesser Key To The Appropriation Of Jewish Magic & Mysticism; Ezra Rose (2022)

“His wind is released” - The Emergence of the Ghost Ritual of passage in Mesopotamia; Dina Katz, Leiden (2014)

Cursed Are You! The Phenomenology of Cursing in Cuneiform and Hebrew Texts; Anne Marie Kitz (2014)

Egyptian Magic; E.A. Wallis Budge (1901)

Mesopotamian Planetary Astronomy-Astrology (Cuneiform Monographs); David Brown (2000)

Astrology in Ancient Mesopotamia: The Science of Omens and the Knowledge of the Heavens; Michael Baigent (July 20, 2015)

Ancient Jewish Magic: A History; Gideon Bohak (2008)

PERFORMING DEATH: SOCIAL ANALYSES OF FUNERARY TRADITIONS IN THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST AND MEDITERRANEAN; Nicola Laneri, Ellen F. Morris, Glenn M. Schwartz, Robert Chapman, Massimo Cultraro, Meredith S. Chesson, Alessandro Naso, Adam T. Smith, Dina Katz, Seth Richardson, Susan Pollock, Ian Rutherford, John Pollini, John Robb, and James A. Brown (2007)

Mesopotamian Conceptions of Dreams and Dream Rituals; Sally A. L. Butler (1998)

Forerunners to Udug-Hul: Sumerian exorcistic incantations; Markham J. Geller (1985)

Šurpu. A Collection of Sumerian and Akkadian Incantations; Erica Reiner (1958)

Mesopotamian Protective Spirits: The Ritual Texts; F. A. M. Wiggermann (1992)

The Alchemist's Handbook- Manual for Practical Laboratory Alchemy; Frater Albertus (1960)

Licit Magic: The Life and Letters of al-Ṣāḥib b. ʿAbbād (d. 385/995); Maurice A. Pomerantz (09 Nov 2017)

Further Studies on Mesopotamian Witchcraft Beliefs and Literature; Tzvi Abusch (2002)

The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture; Francesca Rochberg (2004)

Greco-Roman:

Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in Greek and Roman Worlds: A Sourcebook; Daniel Ogden (2002)

Far East Asia:

I Ching; Fu Xi (~1000 BCE)

Myths, Legends, Religious Texts And Folktales

Levantine:

The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion; Thorkild Jacobsen (1976)

Persian Myths; Jake Jackson (2022)

Myths of Babylon; Jake Jackson (2018)

The Epic Of Gilgamesh (2nd Edition); Anonymous, Andrew George (????, 2000)

The First Ghost Stories; Dr. Irving Finkel (2021)

On Jewish Folklore; Raphael Patai (1983)

Sumerian Mythology, a Deep Guide Into Sumerian History and Mesopotamian Empire and Myths; Joshua Brown (2021)

Sumerian Mythology, a Study of Spiritual and Literary Achievement in the Third Millennium B.C. (Revised Edition); Samuel Noah Kramer (1961)

Sumerian Liturgies; Anonymous, Stephen Langdon (1919)

Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart, Poems of the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna; Enheduanna, Betty De Shong Meador (1989)

Ninurta's Journey to Eridu; Daniel Reisman (1971)

A Sumerian Proverb Tablet in Geneva With Some Thoughts on Sumerian Proverb (2006)

Enki's Journey to Nippur: The Journeys of the Gods; Al-Fouadi, Abdul-Hadi A. (1969)

The Arthur of the Welsh: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval Welsh Literature by Rachel Bromwich (1991)

Encyclopedia of American Folklore; Linda S. Watts (2006)

Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion; Joshua Trachtenberg (1939)

Amulets and Talismans; E.A. Wallis Budge (The copy I have was published in 1992 but he died in 1934. Not sure when the original work was created.)

Ashkenazi Herbalism: Rediscovering the Herbal Traditions of Eastern European Jews; Deatra Cohen, Adam Siegel (2021)

Encyclopedia of Catholicism; Frank K. Flinn (2007)

As Through a Veil: Mystical Poetry in Islam; Annemarie Schimmel (1982)

You Will Have Other Goddesses in Addition to Me: Polytheism Among Ancient Israelite Women; Liora Finke (2022)

Gods That Travel: On The Ritual Aspects of Divine Journeys And Processions; Klaus Wagensonner (2014)

NINURTA AND ENKI; A new divine journey of the warrior god to Eridu; Klaus Wagensonner (2013)

Jewish Music in Its Historical Development; Abraham Zevi Idelsohn (1929)

The God Enki in Sumerian Royal Ideology and Mythology; Peeter Espak (2010)

The Encyclopedia of Jewish Myth, Magic & Mysticism: Second Edition; Geoffrey W. Dennis (2007)

Book of Jewish Knowledge: An Encyclopedia of Judaism and the Jewish People, Covering All Elements of Jewish Life from Biblical Times to the Present (03 May 1948); Nathan Ausubel

Encyclopedia of Judaism (Encyclopedia of World Religions); Sara E. Karesh & Mitchell M. Hurvitz (2006)

Aboriginal Australia: 

Gadi Mirrabooka: Australian Aboriginal Tales from the Dreaming; Pauline E. McLeod, Francis Firebrace Jones, June E. Barker, Helen F. McKay (2001)

The Two Rainbow Serpents Travelling: Mura Track Narratives from the 'Corner Country'; Jeremy Beckett, Luise Hercus (2009)

Mixed or Other:

Egyptian Myths & Tales; Japanese Myths & Tales, Aztec Myths & Tales, Scottish Folk & Fairytales, Viking Folk & Fairytales, Chinese Myths & Tales, Greek Myths & Tales, African Myths & Tales, Native American Myths & Tales, Persian Myths & Tales, Celtic Myths & Tales, Irish Fairy Tales; Anonymous, Flame Tree Publishing

Tales of King Arthur & The Knights Of The Round Table (Le Morte D’Arthur); Thomas Malory

The Encyclopedia of Celtic Mythology and Folklore; Patricia Monaghan (2004)

Academic (Science including Psychology)

Stellar Alchemy: The Celestial Origin of Atoms, Michel Cassé, Stephen Lyle (2003)

Aboriginal Suicide Is Different: A Portrait of Life And Self Destruction; Colin Tatz (2005)

Fruit Domestication in the Near East; Shahal Abbo, Avi Gopher & Simcha Lev-Yadun (2015) 

Astronomical Cuneiform Texts: Babylonian Ephemerides of the Seleucid Period for the Motion of the Sun, the Moon, and the Planets (Sources in the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences, 5); Otto E. Neugebauer (1945)

Studies in the History of Science;  E. A. Speiser; Otto E. Neugebauer; Hermann Ranke; Henry E. Sigerist; Richard H. Shryock; Evarts A. Graham; Edgar A. Singer; Hermann Weyl (Compiled In 2017)

Studies in Civilization;  Alan J. B. Wace; Otto E. Neugebauer; William S. Ferguson (Compiled In 2016)

Astronomy and History: Selected Essays; Otto E. Neugebauer (Compiled In 1983)

The Encyclopedia of the Brain and Brain Disorders; Carol Turkington (2002)

The Encyclopedia of Poisons and Antidotes; Deborah R. Mitchell & Carol Turkington (2010)

The Encyclopedia of Suicide; Glen Evans, Norman L. Farberow, Ph.D. & Kennedy Associates (1988)

Academic (History)

Western:

Encyclopedia of Native American Tribes; Carl Waldman (2006)

Levantine:

Sounds from the Divine: Religious Musical Instruments in the Ancient Near East; Dahlia Shehata (2014)

Gender and Aging in Mesopotamia: The Gilgamesh Epic and Other Ancient Literature; Rivkah Harris (05/12/2003)

House Most High: The Temples of Ancient Mesopotamia; A. R. George (1993)

The Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East; Michael Roaf (1990)

The Meaning of Color in Ancient Mesopotamia; Shiyanthi Thavapalan (2020)

The Loss of Male Sexual Desire in Ancient Mesopotamia; Gioele Zisa (2021)

Materials and Manufacture in Ancient Mesopotamia: The evidence of Archaeology and Art. Metals and metalwork, glazed materials and glass; P. R. S. Moorey (3/1/1985)

Collections; Bendt Alster, Takayoshi Oshima (2006)

Political Agency of Royal Women; Paula Sabloff (2019)

Studies in Sumerian Civilization: Selected Writings Of Miguel Civil; Miguel Civil, edited by Lluís Felu (2017)

A study on the natural heritage and its importance in the Sumerian civilization in southern Iraq; Al-Hussein Nabeel Al-Karkhi, Isam Hussain T. Al-Karkhi (2021)

A Sumerian Riddle Collection; Bendt Alster (1976)

SUMERIAN “CHILD”; Vitali Bartash (2018)

The civilizing of Ea-Enkidu an unusual tablet of the Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic; Andrew R George (2007)

Celibacy in the Ancient World: Its Ideal and Practice in Pre-Hellenistic Israel, Mesopotamia, and Greece; Dale Launderville OSB (07/01/2010)

House and Household Economies in 3rd Millennium B.C.E. Syro-Mesopotamia; Federico Buccellati ,Tobias Helms & Alexander Tamm (2014)

The Harps That Once… Sumerian Poetry In Translation; Thorkild Jacobsen (1987)

The Divine Origin Of The Craft Of The Herbalist; Sir E. A. Wallis Budge (1928)

Disease in Babylonia; Edited by Irving Finkel and Markham (Mark) Geller (2007)

Royal Statuary of Early Dynastic Mesopotamia; Gianni Marchesi and Nicolo Marchetti (2011)

Myths of Enki, The Crafty God; Samuel Noah Kramer, John Maier (1989)

Household and State in Upper Mesopotamia; Patricia Wattenmaker (July 17, 1998)

Assyrian Rulers of the Early First Millennium; Albert Kirk Grayson (1987)

Gudea's Temple Building: The Representation of an Early Mesopotamian Ruler in Text and Image (Cuneiform Monographs); Claudia E. Suter (January 1, 2000)

Reading Sumerian Poetry (Athlone Publications in Egyptology & Ancient Near Eastern Studies); Jeremy Black (2001)

Handbook to Life in Ancient Mesopotamia; Stephen Bertman (2002)

Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East; Amanda H. Podany (2022)

History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-Nine Firsts in Recorded History; Samuel Noah Kramer (1981)

A History of the Animal World in the Ancient Near East; Edited by Billie Jean Collins (2002)

The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character; Samuel Noah Kramer (1963)

The Ancient Near East in Transregional Perspective: Material Culture and Exchange Between Mesopotamia, the Levant and Lower Egypt from 5800 to 5200 ... Sudan and the Levant; Katharina Streit (11/10/2020)

Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine; Laura Robson (September 1, 2011)

Poetic Astronomy in the Ancient Near East The Reflexes of Celestial Science in Ancient Mesopotamian, Ugaritic, and Israelite Narrative; Jeffrey L. Cooley (2013)

Hasidism, Haskalah, Zionism: Chapters in Literary Politics (Jewish Culture and Contexts); Hannan Hever (October 17, 2023)

Mourning in the Ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible; Xuan Huong Thi Pham (1999)

Medieval Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Egypt; Joachim J.M.S. Yeshaya (2011)

The Land that I Will Show You: Essays on the History and Archaeology of the Ancient Near East in Honor of J. Maxwell Miller; J. Andrew Dearman & M. Patrick Graham (January 9, 2002)

Jerusalem in Ancient History and Tradition; Thomas L. Thompson (2003)

Prisons in Ancient Mesopotamia, Confinement and Control until the First Fall of Babylon; Dr. J. Nicholas Reid (2022)

Prophets Male and Female: Gender and Prophecy in the Hebrew Bible, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Ancient Near East; Jonathan Stökl & Corrine L. Carvalho (2013)

The Calm before the Storm- Selected writings of Itamar Singer on the late Bronze Age in Anatolia and the Levant; Itamar Singer (2012)

"Holiness" and "purity" in Mesopotamia;  E. Jan Wilson (1994)

The Material Culture of the Northern Sea Peoples in Israel; Ephraim Stern (2013)

Family and Household Religion in Ancient Israel and the Levant; Rainer Albertz and Rüdiger Schmitt (2012)

Scribal Education in Ancient Israel: The Old Hebrew Epigraphic Evidence; Christopher A. Rollston (11/2006)

Neanderthals in the Levant- Behavioural Organization and the Beginnings of Human Modernity; Donald O. Henry (10/2003)

Suddenly, the Sight of War- Violence and Nationalism in Hebrew Poetry in the 1940s; Hannan Hever (2016)

Gender and Law in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East; Victor H. Matthews, Victor H. Matthews, Bernard M. Levinson, Tikva Frymer-Kensky (1998)

The concept of fate in ancient Mesopotamia of the 1st millennium: Toward an understanding of 'simtu'; Jack N. Lawson (1992)

The Myth of the Jewish Race; Raphael Patai, Jennifer Patai Wing (01/01/1975)

The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492; Peter Cole (01/22/2007)

Encyclopedia of Jewish Folklore and Traditions; Raphael Patai (2013)

Hebrew Myths; Robert Graves and Raphael Patai (2005) 

Vast as the Sea - Hebrew Poetry and the Human Condition; Samuel Hildebrandt (12/05/2023)

Sex & Eroticism in Mesopotamian Literature; Gwendolyn Leick (1994)

Far East Asian:

Encyclopedia of Ancient Asian Civilizations; Charles Higham (2004)

Aboriginal Australia:

Aboriginal Peoples: Fact and Fiction; Pierre Lepage, Maryse Alcindor, Jan Jordon (2009)

Visions from the Past: The Archaeology of Australian Aboriginal Art; M.J. Morwood, Douglas Hobbs, D.R. Hobbs (2002)

Mixed or Other:

Early Civilizations of the Old World: The Formative Histories of Egypt, The Levant, Mesopotamia, India and China; Charles Keith Maisels (May 20, 2001)

20,000 Years of Fashion: The History of Costume and Personal Adornment; Francois Boucher (1967)

Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam; Chouki El Hamel (2012)

The Birth of Science: Ancient Times to 1699; Ray Spangenburg & Diane Kit Moser (2004)

The Architecture of Castles: A Visual Guide; Reginald Allen Brown (1984)

Encyclopedia of War Crimes and Genocide; Leslie Alan Horvitz and Christopher Catherwood (2006)

Linguistic

Cuneiform; Irving Finkel, Jonathan Taylor (2015)

An Introduction to the Grammar of Sumerian; Gábor Zólyomi (2017)

Learn to Read Ancient Sumerian: An Introduction for Complete Beginners; Joshua Aaron Bowen, Megan Lewis (2020) Learn to Read Ancient Sumerian: An Introduction for Complete Beginners, Volume 2; Joshua Aaron Bowen, Megan Lewis (2023)

The Sur₉-Priest, the Instrument giš Al-gar-sur₉, and the Forms and Uses of a Rare Sign; Niek C. (1997/1998)

Sumerian Grammar (Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section One, the Near [And] Mi) (English and Sumerian Edition); Dietz Otto Edzard (2003)

A Late Old Babylonian Proto-Kagal / Nigga Text and the Nature of the Acrographic Lexical Series; Niek VELDHUIS -Groningen (1998)

Learning To Pray In A Dead Language, Education And Invocation in Ancient Sumerian; Joshua Bowen (2020)

Aboriginal Sign Languages of The Americas and Australia: Volume 1; North America Classic Comparative Perspectives; Garrick Mallery (auth.), D. Jean Umiker-Sebeok, Thomas A. Sebeok (eds.) (1978)

 The Literature of Ancient Sumer; Jeremy Black, Graham Cunningham, Eleanor Robson, Gabor Zolyomi (2004)

Sumerian Lexicon: A Dictionary Guide to the Ancient Sumerian Language; John Alan Halloran (2006)

A Sumerian Chrestomathy; Konrad Volk (1911)

Online Articles, Dictionaries And Other Resources:

https://nationalclothing.org/middle-east/305-traditional-clothing-of-mesopotamia-what-did-it-look-like.html 

https://www.getty.edu/news/meet-the-mesopotamian-demons/ 

https://factsanddetails.com/world/cat56/sub363/ 

https://ehistory.osu.edu/articles/marriage-ancient-mesopotamia-and-babylonia 

https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section5/tr561.htm 

http://psd.museum.upenn.edu/nepsd-frame.html 

https://www.britannica.com/place/Africa/Trade 

https://www.worldhistory.org/article/2185/festivals-in-ancient-mesopotamia/

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/25/well/family/cutting-out-the-bris.html 

http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/amgg/listofdeities/nannasuen/ 

https://phys.org/news/2023-08-idea-imprisonment-prisoners-earliest-texts.html 

http://www.mathematicsmagazine.com/Articles/TheSumerianMathematicalSystem.php 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ooHEYR30oNCdI4Xxop9qBjKQGnqTPwLHQzT8cvv5oxA/edit Sumerian Grammar Made Easy! (2022 Edition)

Historians, linguists, etc:

https://sumerianlanguage.tumblr.com/ aka http://www.jamesbarrettmorison.com/sumerian.html

https://sumerianshakespeare.com/

https://www.youtube.com/c/DigitalHammurabi aka https://www.digitalhammurabi.com/

https://twitter.com/digi_hammurabi and https://twitter.com/DJHammurabi1 

Podcasts and online-exclusive documentaries, video essays, etc

8. The Sumerians - Fall of the First Cities (2020)

13. The Assyrians - Empire of Iron (2021)

The Complete and Concise History of the Sumerians and Early Bronze Age Mesopotamia (7000-2000 BC) (2021)

The Royal Death Pits of Ur (2022)

Gilgamesh and the Flood (2021)

The Birth of Civilisation - Rise of Uruk (6500 BC to 3200 BC) (2021)

The Earliest Creation Myths - Mythillogical (2022)

Enuma Elish | The Babylonian Epic of Creation | Complete Audiobook | With Commentary (2020)

 Eridu Genesis | The Sumerian Epic of Creation (2021)

 Irving Finkel | The Ark Before Noah: A Great Adventure (2016)

Cracking Ancient Codes: Cuneiform Writing - with Irving Finkel (2019)

Ancient Demons with Irving Finkel I Curator's Corner S3 Ep7 #CuratorsCorner (2018)

 How to perform necromancy with Irving Finkel (2017)

 Mesopotamian ghostbusting with Irving Finkel I Curator's Corner + #CuratorsCorner (2018)

Video Games

Sonic The Hedgehog Encyclospeedia; Ian Flynn (2021)

Direct Inspiration

The Golden Compass (1995), The Subtle Knife (1997); The Amber Spyglass (2000); Philip Pullman

The Last Unicorn; Peter S. Beagle (1968)

The 13 and ½ Lives Of Captain Bluebear: A Novel; Walter Moers (1999)

Allerleirauh; Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (1812)

The Epic of Beowulf; Anonymous (c. 700–1000 AD)

The Writing In The Stone; Irving Finkel (October 10, 2017)

[the-perfect-wagnerite-again]

I want to preface this by saying I intend this as an actual real question, I'm not trying to judge or criticize. How do you reconcile being gay and Christian? I'm curious about how people in other religions handle this.

To be perfectly frank, I can't reconcile them entirely, I just have to be honest about myself and my state.

I have a rather eccentric theory of human sexuality that mainly comes from my Kantianism (specifically the preconditions for Kant's categorical imperative), but it otherwise slots nicely into the Christian theory of human sexuality (which I consider to be the otherwise healthiest in the modern world), give or take a few specifics here and there.

The short version is that I think a healthy sexuality is one in which sexual desire is experienced as a desire for knowledge of our beloved as an incarnate person, and when we lose track of that focus, sexual dysfunction is the result. All sexual deviance (pornography, bestiality, pedophilia, prostitution, paraphernalia, and especially rape) is the manifestation of this dysfunction. That list is not exhaustive, and the Church calls these manifestations of the sin of lust.

Sexual desire must be bidirectional; we see in our beloved an embodied subject that we want to fully possess and know, but in the process we have to expose ourselves to them too, because they want the same knowledge from us. This vulnerability is most distinctly felt between man and woman, who have both different geographies of the body and of the mind. The Church calls this phenomenon sexual complimentarity.

It's the person as an end, the subject-oriented part of sexuality that delineates sexual virtue from vice. The easiest way to conceive this would be to imagine being seen with your wife, and then being asked, "Why don't you trade her out for Samantha or Caroline? They'll do just as well, right?" You'd think the question was insane. It's not your wife as an object that you feel desire for, but your wife as a person. The pedophile, the rapist, the pornography addict, etc doesn't care about the personhood of the objects of his lust, and indeed has no problems swapping between new objects to satisfy his urges. They're just a means to him. This is the real meaning of objectification, and the basis for almost all of what the Church considers sexual sin.

I believe that one can live in sexual virtue as long as one holds to the categorical imperative as it applies to sexual ethics. It's clear that (male) homosexuals are especially susceptible to deviance and more likely to fall into sexual dysfunction, though whether this is an effect of nature vs nurture is hard to say. That said, I feel it's entirely possible for homosexuals to rebuff such dysfunction.

This is, of course, a purely philosophical take on human sexuality (and it's also highly abbreviated for the sake of a tumblr post - elaborating fully on the topic from start to finish would likely take hundreds of pages), it's not a theological one. I can't make it commensurate with the Church's stance on homosexuality any more than I can make Transcendental Idealism commensurate with a personal God. I know when I look into the eyes of my beloved, I'm not doing it from a place of mere lust, because it's the person revealed in his eyes that I feel desire for. I'm not a fool though, I know a philosophical exploration of the phenomenology of sex isn't going to make contact with the vast majority of people. For them, moral strictures from religious institutions (preferably Christian) are more effective.

[dreams-of-mutiny]

MORTIMER ADLER’S READING LIST (PART 2)

Reading list from “How To Read a Book” by Mortimer Adler (1972 edition).

Alexander Pope: Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man

Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu: Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws

Voltaire: Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary

Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones

Samuel Johnson: The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets

David Hume: Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile, The Social Contract

Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy

Adam Smith: The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations

Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace

Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography

James Boswell: Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D.

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier: Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry)

Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison: Federalist Papers

Jeremy Bentham: Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust; Poetry and Truth

Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier: Analytical Theory of Heat

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History

William Wordsworth: Poems

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poems; Biographia Literaria

Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice; Emma

Carl von Clausewitz: On War

Stendhal: The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love

Lord Byron: Don Juan

Arthur Schopenhauer: Studies in Pessimism

Michael Faraday: Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity

Charles Lyell: Principles of Geology

Auguste Comte: The Positive Philosophy

Honore de Balzac: Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative Men; Essays; Journal

Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter

Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America

John Stuart Mill: A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography

Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography

Charles Dickens: Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times

Claude Bernard: Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine

Henry David Thoreau: Civil Disobedience; Walden

Karl Marx: Capital; Communist Manifesto

George Eliot: Adam Bede; Middlemarch

Herman Melville: Moby-Dick; Billy Budd

Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov

Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary; Three Stories

Henrik Ibsen: Plays

Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales

Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger

William James: The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism

Henry James: The American; ‘The Ambassadors

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals; The Will to Power

Jules Henri Poincare: Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method

Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

George Bernard Shaw: Plays and Prefaces

Max Planck: Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography

Henri Bergson: Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion

John Dewey: How We Think; Democracy and Education; Experience and Nature; Logic; the Theory of Inquiry

Alfred North Whitehead: An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World; The Aims of Education and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas

George Santayana: The Life of Reason; Skepticism and Animal Faith; Persons and Places

Lenin: The State and Revolution

Marcel Proust: Remembrance of Things Past

Bertrand Russell: The Problems of Philosophy; The Analysis of Mind; An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth; Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits

Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain; Joseph and His Brothers

Albert Einstein: The Meaning of Relativity; On the Method of Theoretical Physics; The Evolution of Physics

James Joyce: ‘The Dead’ in Dubliners; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses

Jacques Maritain: Art and Scholasticism; The Degrees of Knowledge; The Rights of Man and Natural Law; True Humanism

Franz Kafka: The Trial; The Castle

Arnold J. Toynbee: A Study of History; Civilization on Trial

Jean Paul Sartre: Nausea; No Exit; Being and Nothingness

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The First Circle; The Cancer Ward

Source: mortimer-adlers-reading-list

[haggishlyhagging]

Jan - Jun 2023 Reading List:

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Dear Ijeawele, or, A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017.

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. We Should All Be Feminists. New York: Vintage Books, 2014.

Bartky, Sandra Lee. Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Bittel, Carla. Mary Putnam Jacobi & The Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Bolen, Jean Shinoda. Goddesses in Everywoman: A New Psychology of Women. Perennial Library, n.d.

Brownmiller, Susan. Femininity. New York: Open Road Media, 2013.

Chesler, Phyllis. Women and Madness. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2018.

Christ, Carol P., and Judith Plaskow. Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979.

Daly, Mary. The Church and the Second Sex. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1975.

Davis, Elizabeth Gould. The First Sex. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971.

Doyle, Sady. Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers. Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing, 2019.

Dworkin, Andrea. Intercourse. New York: Basic Books, 2007.

Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1978.

Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1970.

Gowrinathan, Nimmi. Radicalizing Her: Why Women Choose Violence. Boston: Beacon Press, 2021.

Hawthorne, Susan. In Defence of Separatism. Mission Beach: Spinifex Press, 2019.

Jeffreys, Sheila. Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution. Spinifex Press, 1990.

Jeffreys, Sheila. The Spinster and Her Enemies. Chicago: Spinifex Press, 1997.

Johnson, Sonia. Going Out of Our Minds: The Metaphysics of Liberation. Freedom: Crossing Press, 1987.

Johnson, Sonia. Wildfire Igniting the She/volution. Albuquerque: Wildfire Books, 1989.

Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Love Your Enemy? The Debate between Heterosexual Feminism and Political Lesbianism. London: Onlywomen Press, Ltd., 1981.

Miles, Rosalind. Who Cooked the Last Supper?: The Women's History of the World. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001.

Reed, Evelyn. Woman’s Evolution: From Matriarchal Clan to Patriarchal Family. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1975.

Sjöö, Monica, and Barbara Mor. The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering The Religion of the Earth. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2013.

Smith, Joan. Home Grown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists. London: Riverrun, 2019.

Solanas, Valerie. SCUM Manifesto: With an Introduction by Vivian Gornick. London: Olympia Press, 1971.

Spender, Dale. Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them. London: Ark Paperbacks, 1983.

Srinivasan, Amia. The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.

Stone, Merlin. When God Was a Woman. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.

Ussher, Jane. Women’s Madness: Misogyny or Mental Illness? Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.

West, Lindy. The Witches are Coming. New York: Hachette Books, 2019.

[enchanted-wildflower]

100 days of productivity (1/100)

Wednesdays, September 4th

It's the first day of the new semester, my classes seem interesting so far. I thought it would be a good moment to start this challenge again.

Productivity

Selfcare

2 classes (3h)

Made dinner and washed the dishes

Started reading an article about the phenomenology of religion and taking notes (5 pages)

Set up aesthetic word documents for my new subjects

Therapy

Saw my best friend

Ate breakfast for once

Put on cosy study music

[grandhotelabyss]

What would you say is the first novel to read for the second Trump administration?

Good question. I'm really nonfiction-brained this morning. Do I actually need to read Hillbilly Elegy after all? One of the big Musk bios? (At least I've already read Thiel's book.) In 2016 we had Kantbot's tirade on Trump as completion of the system of German Idealism; now we have the last Hegelian egirl standing with her own Trump endorsement. Do I really have to read the whole Phenomenology and Kojève's commentary instead of coasting on generous excerpts from the easy-mode Aesthetics and the Philosophy of History? This was also a triumph for the Girardians, as I said when Vance was announced as VP pick, so I guess we have to keep reading Girard for a while.

(Somebody said this was a defeat earned by Democrats for their use of recondite academic theory, but that's not correct. Rather, this was the right wing of French Theory defeating the left wing. What can I say? Americans, those of us who still read I mean, are united in our love of French Theory.)

Anyway, novels, novels...I've been planning to go deep on Bret Easton Ellis for various reasons, so his whole oeuvre moves up the list, but maybe Less Than Zero, which I read and enjoyed last year, would be a good first neo-Trump-era novel for its bleakly beautiful Reagan '80s vibe, as Ellis's generation voted overwhelmingly for Trump. "Disappear here" indeed. It's too soon to pick a Trump novel on the idea rather than emotional level; let's see what he plans to do. I assume the big story is the rise of the Silicon Valley right, so something at the intersection of tech and religion.

Also, I allow myself one pettiness. I know some people thought it was frivolous or beneath me somehow to focus on the strange things that young people were writing in this decade, but I'd say my interest, largely the academic interest of someone with an eye out for neo-modernisms, has been vindicated by the youth vote. Give Ellis's fellow Bennington alum Honor Levy another try if you want to understand the word on the street right now, the "Trumpian affect," to quote someone I rarely quote, Masha Gessen, in our own time and not in the '80s.

[nietzschey]

Complete Works

Franz Kafka

Before the Law

An Imperial Message

Description of a Struggle

Wedding Preparations in the Country

In the Penal Colony

The Judgement

The Metamorphosis

The Village Schoolmaster

Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor

The Warden of the Tomb

- Continue when read

Dostoevsky

The Brothers Karamazov

Crime and Punishment

The Idiot

Demons

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

- All works

Philosophers:

Nietzsche

The Birth of Tragedy

The Gay Science

The Genealogy of Morals

The Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ: Or How to Philosophize with a Hammer

Thus Spoken Zarathustra

Beyond Good and Evil

God is Dead. God Remains Dead. And We Have Killed Him.

Schopenhauer

The World as Will and Representation

The Wisdom of Life

The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics

Studies in Pessimism

Camus

The Myth of Sisyphus

The Stranger

The Fall

The Plague

The Rebel

The First Man

Between Hell and Reason

Kant

Introduction to Logic

Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals

Critique of Pure Reason

Religion Within the Bounds of Bare Reason

Dreams of a Spirit-Seer

What is Enlightenment?

Hegel

Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics

Phenomenology of Spirit

Absolute Spirit

Science of Logic

Lectures on the Philosophy of History

William James

The Principles of Psychology

The Varieties of Religious Experience

Essays in Radical Empiricism

Philosophies

Moral Nihilism

The Moral Fool

The Evolution of Morality

Ethics of Ambiguity

Beyond Morality

Essays in Moral Skepticism

Abolishing Morality

Morality: The Final Delusion?

Metaphysical Nihilism

The Overcoming of Metaphysics

Metaphysics and Nihilism

Existential Nihilism

Existentialism is a Humanism

Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre

Macbeth

Being and Nothingness

Political Nihilism

An Introduction to Political Philosophy

Political Philosophy: Responding to the Challenge of Positivism and Historicism

Positive Nihilism

The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos

A Tale for the Time Being

John Dies at the End

Epistemological Nihilism

Nihilism's Epistemology, Ontology, and Its God

Absurdism

The Trial

Nausea

Slaughterhouse Five

Waiting for Godot

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Fatalism

Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Wide Sargasso Sea

No Longer Human

Sapiens

Cat’s Cradle

Antinatalism

The Denial of Death

The Human Predicament

Every Cradle a Grave

Better Never to Have Been - The Harm of Coming into Existence

Misc.

Medieval Philosophy

Classics

The Catcher in the Rye

The Grapes of Wrath

The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Great Gatsby

The Crucible

The Bell Jar

The Yellow Wallpaper

A Clockwork Orange

A Room of One's Own

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

One Thousand and One Nights

Of Mice and Men

As I Lay Dying

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Where the Red Fern Grows

Flowers for Algernon

Lolita

Lord of the Flies

Wuthering Heights

Moby Dick

Little Women

Death of a Salesman

Beloved

Don Quixote

Diary of a Madman

Jane Eyre

Pride and Prejudice

I, Robot

Catch 22

Religious

The Apocrypha

The Summa Theologica

The Divine Comedy

The Epic of Gilgamesh

City of God

Angelology

-

The Occult

-

Books to reread

The Odyssey

The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

The Scarlet Letter

The Time Machine

The Invisible Man

The Secret Garden

To Kill a Mockingbird

Ten Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Alice in Wonderland

Gulliver's Travels

Dracula

Frankenstein

Books I’ve completed - Sept. - Dec. 2024

Lord of the Flies

American Psycho

A Clockwork Orange

Blood Meridian

The Black Farm

The Stranger

Fahrenheit 451

Of Mice and Men

The Catcher in the Rye

The Great Gatsby

1984

Animal Farm

And Then There Were None

Murder on the Orient Express

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

God is Dead, God Remains Dead, and We Have Killed Him

[cmrosens]

Worldbuilding a Hellscape: Workshop

My most popular posts here seem to be my worldbuilding ones, so I thought I should let people know that I'm opening an online conference marking 200 years since the publication of James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner, with a creative writing "Building a Hellscape" workshop as a way of engaging with theology in SFF.

My workshop kicks off 09:30AM UK TIME - if you can't make that, it should be recorded so you should get the whole pack of recordings in your conference pack, post-conference when they are all uploaded and accessible.

It's a paid gig for me but as Romancing the Gothic is a project run entirely by one, very overworked person, and exists solely on donations, I've waived the fee.

I'll be getting you to think about some aspects of what a hellscape could be in a SFF context, using prompts like the ones I've posted here, and seeing what people come up with in the hour we have to dig in!

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE: Romancing the Gothic presents its fourth annual online conference over two days - 24th and 25th August. The conference celebrates 200 years of James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner with a series of talks, events and workshops.

The conference is designed to cover different time zones so the days are long. People are recommended to come for as long as they want. The talks and sessions are recorded so that you don't miss anything even if you can't be there in person for specific times/sessions.

Early Bird Tickets, Concessions and Free Tickets

There will be early bird discounts on tickets until 24th June 2024.

Concession tickets are for students, the unwaged, retired people or anyone whose economic situation makes it necessary.

You can donate a ticket for those who are unable to afford to come.

You can donate directly to a person you know providing their name and email, or, for a random donation to help someone attend, enter the name "Sam Hirst" or "AN Other" in the name fields and email the donation ticket to sam[at]romancingthegothic[dot]com to help cover the cost of a free space for someone who needs one. 

(We offer a limited number of free tickets for those who cannot pay the ticket price, please email sam[at]romancingthegothic[dot]com for more information.)

Accessibility

We have live auto-generated captions. We provide slides and, where possible, scripts before the conference with alt-text for images. We have regular breaks and encourage people to take part in ways that are most comfortable for them. There is no forced participation.

If you have any accessibility needs, please get in touch at sam@romancingthegothic.com and I will do my best to make sure these accommodations are provided.

Book your ticket below:

PROGRAMME

(All times are UK time, BST. Please check your local timezone so you don't miss you chosen events)

Saturday 24th August

9am - Greetings and conference set up

9.30 - 10.30 - Writing Workshop with author CM Rosens - 'Create a Hellscape: Using Theology in World-Building'

10.30 - 10.45 - BREAK

10.45 - 12.30 - Panel 1 - James Hogg: Work and Legacy

Nick Smith - I have since been induced to look to you as my guardian angel': Hogg's Highland Journeys and their influence on the Jusfitied Sinner

Mizuki Tsutsui - An analysis of Ian Rankin and James Mavor's draft of the film script of James Hogg'sJustified Sinner:Demon, Union and Adaptation

Martina Jauch - Masculinities, Mania, and Modes of Religion - ETA Hoffman's and Goethe's impact on James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

Laila Sougri - The parallax of Evil: Phenomenological Encounters with the Uncanny in the Works of James Hogg, Daphne du Maurier, and Mark Z. Danielewski

12.30 - 13.00 - BREAK

13.00 - 14.00 - Cooking Workshop and lunch with Allie Pino (co-author of The Gothic Cookbook) - 'Whistle While You Cook: Arepa-Making and Venezuelan Demonic Folklore with 'El Silbón' and the 'Dancing Devils of Yare'

14.00 - 14.15 - BREAK

14.15 - 15.45 - Panel 2 - Demonic Politics

Javier Mosqueda - Building the devil: indigenous and Christian elements in Jeronimo de Mendieta's concept of the demon

Jarrod DePrado - “A God is Not So Glorious As a King”: Religion as a Demonic Political Tool on Stage

Jan Marvin A. Goh - "holy mysteries/by the eyes of the dead': Exploring the Gothic in Divine Concept in Nick Joaquin's The Mass of St. Sylvester

Amy Coles - She has to be hammered into shape: Religion-Related Abuse and Female Suppression in Ray Russell's The Case Against Satan

15.45 - 16.00 - BREAK

16.00 - 17.45 - Women and the Demonic

Maria Belén Caparrós - ‘I’m not going to kill you. I’ m going to sacrifice you’: Patriarchal Spectrality, expressive violence and structural demons in Argentinian Contemporary Representation of Femicide

Vale McComb - WhatPuppet History didn't tell you: Examing a Trio of 17th cent. Possession Cases and What Happened Thereafter

Brenda Tolian - Down Into the Darkness of Anne Bannerman’s “Prologue”

Pauline Suwanban - Contemporary Devil Romances and Female Confidence (2020-2024)

17.45 - 18.00 - BREAK

18.00 - 19.00 - First Keynote - Adam Kotsko - 'Faust in the Anthropocene'

19.00 - 19.15 - Author Roundtable - The Modern Scottish Gothic

Anna Cheung, Helen Grant and further authors TBC

20.15 - 20.30 - BREAK

20.30 - 21.30 - Cocktail/Mocktail hours

SUNDAY 25th August

9.15 - Greeting

9.30 - 10.30 - Second Keynote - Martha McGill - "Evil Company": Internal and External Demons in Early Modern Scotland

10.30 - 10.45 - BREAK

10.45 - 12.15 - Panel 4 - Demons, Duality and Doubles

Gina Lyle - Literary Hauntings in Helen McClory's Bitterhall

Rowan McMonagle - 'Thrawn Janet'

Miranda Larsen - This is a merger, not a possession: Kurama's Complex Morality in Yu Yu Hakusho

12.15 - 13.00 - LUNCH BREAK

13.00 - 14.45 - Panel 5 - The Modern Demonic Imagination

Abhishek Sarkar - Religious Obsession and Murderous Zeal: The Fanaticism of the Serial Killer in Four Indian Films

Efram Sera-Shriar - From Demon World Village to Ghosts 'n Goblins: Popular Occulture, Videogame Censorship, and Satanic Panic in the 1980s

Máireéad Casey - Demon Possession, Sexual Grooming, and Resistance in We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021)

Kyria Van Gasse - I see his face but he's not me: the mental and emotional effect of playing the demonic and the monstrous in Live Action Role Play

14.45 - 15.00 - BREAK

15.00 - 16.45 - Panel 6 - Vampires and the Demonic

Mary Going - I Will not Lie Below: Demons, Vampires, and Contemporary Iterations of Lilith

Madhuchhanda Ray - At the Crossroads of the Hindu Demon and the Western Undead: Reading Satyajit Ray’s Quirky Vampire

Anca Simina Martin - The first Romanian Vampire Novel: The Case of the Vampire-priest Antagonist

Hayley Smith - Welcome to God's Army: Religion and Religious Extremism in Netflix's Midnight Mass

16.45 - 17.00 - BREAK

17.00 - 18.30 - Writing Workshop - Samantha Miles - Playwriting as Ritual: Summoning Demons and Constructing Hellscapes

18.30 - 19.00 - BREAK

19.00 - 20.45 - Panel 7 - Imagining Hell

Susan Vanderborg - "Hell is only a word": The Imperfect Demonic Translations of Event Horizon

Ruth-Anne Walbank - This deep hell of ills: Hellscapes and the Gothic in Lancashire Cotton Famine Poetry (1861-5)

Morgan Daimler - Tenants of Hell: Fairies, the Devil, and Folk Belief in Early Modern Scotland

Rebecca Marks - Blotting and Blurring Demons: Blake's Last Judgement

20.45 - 21.00 - FINAL REMARKS

As always, there is a code of conduct for our events. Please find it here. https://romancingthegothic.com/code-of-conduct/

TICKET PRICES

Early Bird Discount available now until 24th June 2024: £17.50 Full Price ticket after 24 July 2024: £25.00 (INCLUDES BOTH DAYS)

Concession for students, retired or unwaged Early Bird Discount available now until 24th June 2024: £10.00 (INCLUDES BOTH DAYS) Concession ticket for students, retired or unwaged: £15.00 (INCLUDES BOTH DAYS)

Donate a Ticket: £15.00 (for anyone at any time! to donate one, this price stays the same) (INCLUDES BOTH DAYS)