#so basically the idea of it came around when the bible was still in latin right

[trickarrows-bishop]

ava ghostwrote this

bro stained glass is fucking LIT tbh

[random2908]

Ok, it's time for my crack Locked Tomb interpretation that I've promised... the two people I've been reading these books with. I will say first, the theory isn't itself a crack theory--in its general form I actually stand by it as a serious prediction. But some of the textual evidence I'm going to use is way out there, so don’t take this too seriously--I certainly don’t. Spoilers for Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth behind the cut. Sorry it’s long.

Ok, first, the theory, simply put: I think Alecto/AL is a Resurrection Beast. Personally, I found this "insight" fairly uncontroversial the moment the thought occurred to me, but one of my two friends who've been reading these books with me disagrees on the basic evidence; the other friend has embraced it wholeheartedly, though. So, ymmv, I guess.

The basic evidence starts with: well, what the hell else could she be? She's not human. The older Lyctors call her a monster. There is a missing Resurrection Beast: nine were born, five were killed, three are loose, and the narrative actually calls attention to this numeric discrepancy while glossing others (e.g. the number of Lyctors, which does eventually get explained). John presumably can't just kill Resurrection Beasts himself, or he would have (maybe?? who the hell even knows what his abilities or grand plan are at this point). There aren't really other monsters that have been presented other than revenants (of which Resurrection Beasts are the biggest) and heralds (which are spiritually part of Resurrection Beasts), and the third book of a trilogy isn't really the time to introduce them. (This, by the way, is also my argument that it wasn't aliens who destroyed the solar system in the first place--even though everyone else seems to have come to that interpretation (where by “everyone” I mean my two friends who have read this book). Being Doylist, it's kind of a cheap, lazy argument on my part, but whatever, I still stand by that as a prediction: no aliens.) And Alecto must be something much more powerful than a human because John is so much more powerful than a Lyctor. Finally, the stoma opens for John, and it only opens for Resurrection Beasts--it opens for him because he holds part of Alecto's soul and she is a Resurrection Beast.

The potential counter-evidence is the older Lyctors are confident they know her origins (but that doesn't necessarily make her not a Resurrection Beast), and the [other] Resurrection Beasts are drawn to her as much as to John according to Mercy (although in that case why haven't they attacked the Tomb? and also, again, that doesn't preclude her being a Resurrection Beast--we don't know their relationships with each other, and anyway, their attraction to her might have something to do with the Lyctorification process).

Ok, all that's fair enough. Let's delve into the crack interpretations now. I'm going to start with an irrelevant introduction, though, to explain my frame of mind when I came up with this. In the Appendices of Gideon the Ninth, Muir mentions that Isaac is named as foreshadowing for Gideon's sacrificial death, as in the Christian interpretation of the Bible, the Biblical Isaac foreshadows Jesus. My copy of the e-book did not have the Appendices, but my best friend's did, and she shared screens with me. It's slightly embarrassing that my best friend and I, reading this together, did not even guess from this, not even as a joke, that Gideon's father might be God. I mean, it's not... generally embarrassing--no one reading this should be embarrassed for themselves--it's only embarrassing if you know the two of us, know how good my best friend is at this sort of thing (she guessed the entire murder mystery in GtN a little more than halfway through, including that Dulcinea was dead and had been replaced by a Lyctor in disguise who had philosophical problems with God and was rebelling), and know what sorts of in-jokes and ridiculous speculation we tend to bandy around with each other--know just how often we, respectively and together, joke that some character or other is Jesus. And here it was right on the page, we read it out loud to each other and discussed it, and we didn't even see it. We were both completely taken in by the Gideon Episode One red[-haired] herring (as was, to be fair, Gideon himself). This speculation that I'm about to present came right on the heels of the two of us debriefing over this, because I was primed to read way the hell in too much into Biblical references.

The key line is something my best friend caught, not me. She wasn't even done with the book yet, but the line was bothering her (I'd completely glossed and then forgotten it--never let it be said that my bad grades in English Lit were undeserved). Page 327 (and I'm so glad to have an ebook so I can do word searches), Teacher is talking to Harrow in the dream bubble...........

To their silence, [Teacher] added: “I believe we are now being punished for what they did. Even the devil bent for God to put a leash around her neck … and the disciples were scared! I cannot blame them! I was terrified! But when the work was done—when I was finished, and so were they, and the new Lyctors found out the price—they bade him kill the saltwater creature before she could do them harm … Oh, but it is a tragedy, to be put in a box and laid to wait for the rest of time.

"Saltwater creature" stuck with my best friend. She had no idea what it meant, other than that nearly every mention of saltwater (or salt water, two words, the text is inconsistent) in Harrow the Ninth is alluding to Alecto in some capacity (we confirmed this by searching--again, I love ebooks for this kind of thing). But I was like... wait, I might know! This is my favorite Bible lore!

Muir is working from the King James Bible (based on the quotation at the end of Gideon the Ninth) which is impenetrable and also is a translation of the Latin Vulgate, which is mostly a translation of the Septuagint, which doesn’t even have an extant Hebrew version, so ugh all around. But for this purpose it’s close enough, so I guess that's what I'll use for my English version. Here is how the KJV starts:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

Ok, that word there, "the deep." What it says in the Masoretic text (the Hebrew Bible used by both Jews and Protestants) is "tehom," which is not quite a hapax legomenon, but neither is it a word that shows up very often, and importantly it only shows up in very few contexts that reference each other. It is certainly not the usual Hebrew word for sea, and importantly, in the Hebrew there is no "the"; it actually says "darkness was on the face of Tehom" like it's a proper name [capitalization mine for illustration, since Hebrew doesn’t capitalize]. Notice also how on the second day basically the only thing God accomplishes is cutting this thing, this "Deep" made of water, in half, sending one half up into the sky. This is a quick retelling of the defeat of Tiamat (linguistically cognate with Tehom) in the Enuma Elish. Tiamat, the Goddess of the Saltwater Deeps, Mother of Monsters and Dragons, is justifiably angry with the other gods and sets out to kill them; Marduk, the aspiring new head of the Pantheon, cuts her in half. Half of her he leaves on Earth to create the oceans (or just the Earth itself? been a while since I read it), and half of her he throws up into the air and it becomes the sky.

There is a lot of old Jewish writing, some of it predating Christianity, that just starts to touch on this, without daring to delve too deep (...as it were) and pull on the pan-Middle Eastern polytheistic roots of Judaism. (They had enough problems with people still worshiping Asherah, who in southern Canaanite tradition was the sea-and-mother goddess who was the wife of Yahweh the storm god, and who gets mentioned in the Bible a whole lot, without also bringing Tiamat into it.) The Gnostics really latched on, though. They said that this "deep" obviously in the text there predates God's creation, and used that as the foundation of quite a lot of their theological argument: that God (who they call the Demiurge) didn't create the universe ex nihilo (out of nothing) but rather that there was a being even more powerful that came before. And they named this more powerful, older being Bythos (among other things), which means "depth" in Greek. They changed the gender, but they brought Tehom the saltwater goddess back as the most primordial and powerful of all beings.

Bringing this back to Harrow the Ninth... Insofar as it's Biblical allegory (which isn't much--less than Narnia and even Narnia doesn't strictly adhere to Biblical narrative), I think we should take the Resurrection committed by John to be the Biblical Creation not the Biblical Resurrection. First of all, John becomes God by performing the Resurrection, which is a much better parallel to Genesis than to Isaiah or Revelations or whatever. Second of all, after the Biblical Resurrection, everyone who gets to be resurrected is supposed to live in eternal peace in Eden. In contrast, in Genesis, after the creation, people start out in Eden but are quickly expelled and then bad things happen. This matches the story much better, where the expulsion from Eden is due to Lyctorhood--the Resurrection Beasts come for the Lyctors and they have to leave Eden; in this respect, I guess John is really the snake as much as he's God, lol. (Worth noting that in some parts of Christian tradition--although I can't remember about Catholicism specifically--the snake is supposed to be Satan. This also ties back to Gnosticism where the Demiurge is malevolent; John, insofar as he did not actually create the universe on his own, is a much better match for a demiurge than a true god.)

So, anyway, taking John's act of Resurrecting all those people as the initial Creation rather than the Resurrection (the fact that Augustine doesn't remember his pre-Resurrection self, is effectively a new person, also points to this being effectively an initial Creation), the Resurrection Beasts actually come before Creation. They come from the dying of the planets. They predate John becoming God. Furthermore, Alecto is a “saltwater creature,” and she keeps her body after she's Lyctorified, meaning she's split in some way between John and her old body; she is Tehom. Back to the Gnostic idea, Tehom is a more-powerful being who predates God, and the only creatures predating God in Harrow are the Resurrection Beasts who must be comparable to him in power to create such fear: Alecto, then, must be a Resurection Beast.

The problem with this theory is it's a little Jewish and it's very Gnostic but it isn't Catholic. In the Gideon and Harrow, Muir draws references in her language from practically everywhere. But as far as I can tell she only draws allusions and allegory from two mythologies: Greco-Roman and Roman Catholic. And although Jews and Gnostics are drawing on a lot of the same source text, the  understanding is different, and the expansive side stories are different. Although, then again, who am I to say that Muir isn't also drawing on Gnosticism and this isn't our big clue; I've half convinced myself as I wrote this, with the whole John-as-Demiurge thing. It's a fun theory, anyway, and so I thought I'd share it.

(I'm aware that I've completely ignored any connection to Greek mythology, despite her name being Alecto.)

[gdelgiproducer]

Speculation about an unusual birth

(Because “‘tis the season” and all that.)

In today’s episode of “Never Ask a Knowledgeable Atheist What He Thinks Really Happened”...

If the story of the birth of Jesus Christ has any truth to it, and if he really was the result of Mary getting pregnant without Joseph’s help, then it stands to reason that somebody had to be the daddy. Being an atheist, I rule out the presence of God, so the question is obvious: is there another candidate? Funnily enough, non-Christian sources from the second century do record an alternate father for the figure we call Jesus. 

Now, granted, those sources were looking to counteract the already-popular “virgin birth” story, and they were often virulently anti-Christian, so they went for the most shameful possible alternatives in that day and age: stating that Mary was either assaulted by, or had an adulterous affair with, a soldier named Pantera, and that Jesus was the result. 

 This was so persistent that it leaked into the Talmud and medieval Jewish writings. Some sources, such as the Toledoth Yeshu, garbled this story a little, combining Pantera with Joseph and giving Mary another husband altogether who abandoned her after the baby daddy’s deception led to conception, but everybody ultimately comes down on 1) there was another father, and 2) his name was Pantera.

Christian Response

Christian apologists have had answers for this story almost since it began. Many otherwise reliable scholars argue that pantera is a pun on the Greek word parthenos (“virgin”) and not a real name; in other words, detractors were making fun of the idea of Jesus being the “son of a virgin” by called him the “son of a panther,” or a lusty animal. But it has zero historical or linguistic basis. As far back as 1906, Adolf Diessmann showed conclusively that the name “Pantera” is a real name, not unusual, and further that it was favored by Roman soldiers, who used it fairly commonly.

Other much earlier sources, Church Fathers apparently unaware of the parthenos pun hypothesis, decided that rather than ignore Pantera, whose story was evidently already very widespread, they’d hide him somewhere in Jesus’ genealogy and claim anti-Christian sources were mistaken. Epiphanius claimed that Joseph’s father’s surname was Pantera, which -- by his own admission -- would preserve the “virgin birth” he himself believed in and still make “Jesus, son of Pantera” technically accurate by that day’s standards. Someone else claimed Mary’s grandfather bore the name of “Pantera.” While either is certainly possible (the discovery of an ossuary with the name “Pentheros” in a Jewish first century tomb in Jerusalem by Clermont-Ganneau in 1891 has given us additional evidence that the name was in use in Palestine by Jews at the time), this smacks more -- at least to this reader -- of two attempts to make a square peg fit a round hole.

At the end of the day, we are left with “Jesus, son of Pantera.” This would be enough by itself, but we even have an existing candidate for exactly which soldier named “Pantera” laid the pipe. (And I say candidate only because the evidence is circumstantial at best; definitive proof does not exist.)

A Grave in Germany

In October 1859, during the construction of a railroad in Bingerbrück, Germany, tombstones for nine Roman soldiers were accidentally discovered. Among them was the memorial marker of one Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera, a soldier of 40 years, former standard bearer for the First Cohort of Archers, who had died at the age of 62. (Presently, the marker resides at the Römerhalle museum in Bad Kreuznach, Germany.)

The Roman names speak for themselves -- both may have been given in recognition of serving in the army as he obtained Roman citizenship, with the particular significance of Tiberius being that Tiberius was the Caesar on the throne when Pantera was discharged, and so he’d have added the emperor’s name to his own when granted citizenship -- but “Abdes” is especially interesting. It seems to be the Latin form of an Aramaic name. (You know, the language Jesus and his fellow Jews spoke?) According to etymologists, Abdes comes from Ebed, which means “servant of God” in Aramaic.

I know what you’re thinking: “Why would a Roman have an Aramaic name?” Well, a lot of poor Jews and other impoverished men of Near Eastern cultures in that day, who for whatever reason could not find viable alternatives in their native place, would hire themselves out as mercenaries. Sometimes even to the hated Roman occupiers -- after all, if you hung around long enough, you got Roman citizenship and a pension in addition to your wages, which was no small reward in the days of the Empire.

Lending credence to this theory that Pantera wasn’t strictly Roman, according to his epitaph, he came from Sidon, on the coast of Phoenicia just west of Galilee (where, you’ll recall, Jesus is reported to have lived most of his life). More than that, based on the known movements of the First Cohort of Archers, they transferred from Palestine to Dalmatia in 6 AD, and to the Rhine in 9 AD. So Pantera was not only in Palestine at the right time for Jesus to be conceived, but he wasn’t Roman by birth; he enlisted locally, from an area close enough geographically that it’s even more possible he and Mary could have met.

Tiberius ruled from 14 AD to 37 AD. Pantera’s 40 years of service would therefore have started between 27 BC and 4 BC. As Pantera would probably have been about 18 when he enlisted, it means he was likely born between 45 BC and 22 BC. He could have been as young as 15 at the probable time of Jesus’ conception, which is worth noting because, from what we know of Jewish society back then, a boy would have been learning his trade by age 10, engaged at 13 (girls would typically be 12), and married by 14 (girls, 13); precocious and unconscionable by today’s standards, no doubt, but nonetheless the reality.

So... even absent definitive evidence, we have a viable candidate for the baby daddy -- right place, right time, right name, right age for things not to be icky, the kind of background where he and Mary could conceivably have met. But what about the stories of assault and illegitimacy?

Possible Explanations

Well, let’s look at what we know about Jewish culture at the time and speculate a little based on that:

This was a patriarchal culture where, as Fiddler on the Roof puts it, marriage was decided by the papas.

Sex outside of marriage was frowned upon. Shit, women were called whores just for getting divorced. (An echo of this exists even in Jesus’ own Sermon on the Mount, where divorce for any reason other than marital unfaithfulness is considered blameworthy.)

When tax collectors were being excoriated as traitorous collaborators by their fellow countrymen, imagine how much worse you’d get it if you slept with a Jew who went on to become a soldier in the Roman army. Why, the man himself, regardless of any lover or wife, might be disowned, a practice whereby parents considered their child dead and observed the traditional seven days of mourning.

Continuing on that seeming tangent from the last bullet point, if a man died without having children, Mosaic law held that his brother was responsible for marrying his widowed sister-in-law and continuing the family line in his brother’s name. So if a disowned son “died” without having children, well... maybe his brother had to pay for that choice.

Based on that, and sprinkling in a little long-standing Catholic tradition which portrays Joseph as an old widower (bearing in mind that many people in Jesus’ day didn’t live past 40, so even approaching one’s late thirties was considered “old”), I think I have an interesting idea about what went down. 

All of it is speculation. Every single bit of it. But isn’t it funny how it basically aligns with recorded tradition, even in the Bible and apocrypha, when you strip out the supernatural elements? (Okay, that’s a little strong, but, I mean, it’s not a huge stretch. It lines up.)

My Interesting Idea

Meet Miriam. a young teen by today’s standards. Like any other young teen at any time in recorded history, she’s a force of nature, with hormones and with emotions so powerful they shock even her. (Healthy teenage development can look pretty irrational. A minor annoyance can turn into an emotional earthquake that knocks everyone in the house off balance. Not much has changed.)

Meet Ebed. Maybe he and Miriam have known each other their entire lives; maybe he’s new in town and just cute enough to catch her eye. He has ambition. He feels he isn’t destined to stay in some obscure backwater, and he wants to make something of himself. More than that, he’s hungry. But odd jobs aren’t cutting it. If he puts his foot forward to betroth Miriam, her father will laugh in his face. In their time and place, marriages are arranged, and he has nothing to offer.

If anything, Miriam’s father is more interested in his older brother, Yosef, a widower. Being a tekton (often translated as “carpenter,” but more accurately a stonemason or architect) making decent money from Herod and Rome reconstructing Palestine in their image, he’d be a sound choice for her future. So she wants the brother, big deal -- what say does she have in the matter? It’s the same family. She’ll see him all the time!

One day, Ebed -- whose name I’ll remind you means “servant of God” (those Christian mystics do say the Lord works in mysterious ways, don’t they) -- visits Miriam with his usual flattering words. She knows something’s up. He tells Miriam that he’s found a way out, a way to make his mark on the world, but while it can provide for the two of them, it will expose them to shame and disgrace forever, and there’s even less chance her father will think their betrothal is a good idea. Namely, he’s joining the First Cohort of Archers. Knowing what this will mean for their relationship, even though she has known no man in the biblical sense (which makes her reluctant at first), she ultimately accepts a “proper goodbye.” Unfortunately for Miriam, in her time, place, and circumstance anyway, she was left with a reminder of his love. And the minute she knows she’s pregnant, she runs off to hang with her cousin, who just got pregnant herself under equally unusual circumstances. Running to visit a cousin in the same shape? Sounds like someone who was scared, or needed advice or time to think about what to do.

(Note that all of the above, once you strip out the supernatural angle and added frippery, is exactly what’s in the Gospel of Luke: a servant of God visits Mary with words of flattery, “tells her she’ll have a child” [I mean, he even says the Holy Spirit will “come upon her,” and don’t criticize me for my dirty mind, men considered it a divine mandate to spread their seed based on the early chapters of Genesis, whether they were consciously setting out to do that or not], she is reluctant at first but ultimately accepting of this “news,” and she immediately goes to visit her mysteriously pregnant cousin. Honestly none of this is especially different from the Bible when you remove your rose-colored glasses.)

While Miriam is off with her cousin Elisheba, her father makes the choice he’d already set his mind upon anyway, especially in light of Ebed running off to join the Romans, being disowned, and permanently taking himself out of the game (as it were): she will be pledged to Yosef. Since Ebed is now “dead,” maybe he can use his word -- the final word -- to persuade Miriam that her marriage fulfills the Law, and her children with Yosef will be Ebed’s. It’s technically not true in the least, but men thank God in prayer every morning that they were not born women and a common saying is that the Law should sooner be burnt than placed in female hands, so she won’t know the difference anyway, and if she shoots her mouth off, no one will pay it any mind, as she’s a woman.

As for Yosef’s feelings on the subject, arranged betrothals are just the way things are done. He knows his brother loved Miriam, and he feels bad, but honoring him by marrying her is what tradition dictates. He’s getting older (at least by that day’s standards), he’s been around the block once; even if he never truly loves this woman, at least there will be someone to come home to.

Word arrives at Elisheba’s: “You are betrothed to Yosef. Get back here. It’s been three months.” Now, what does Miriam do in that situation? Deciding never to return wouldn’t just disgrace her; it would put Yosef in the middle of things and leave a black mark on his reputation. Whatever she feels about him, she knows he doesn’t deserve that. So naturally, with no other choice, she goes home.

Imagine Yosef’s reaction when she turns out to be with child (from, y’know, a “servant of God,” which tradition may later call the Holy Spirit to obscure things), and throws herself on his mercy. I’d say what the Gospel of Matthew (1:18-19) says happened next wouldn’t be exactly inaccurate: “His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant [...] Joseph her husband was faithful to the law, and yet did not want to expose her to public disgrace...”

Morally torn, Yosef thinks to himself, “The Law calls for her to be stoned, but I’ve already lost one wife to Sheol. If all men call me cursed, that could hurt my chances if I ever put myself on the line for betrothal again. I could break the engagement quietly, but if I didn’t marry her, people would speculate. She might bear shame and disgrace anyway. This isn’t worth the mishegas, for either of us.”

And the angel in him, if you will, won out. Maybe he’d never be what Ebed was to her; maybe he could never ask her to love him. But the child would need a father, and she would need someone to care for her, even if only to cover her shame. Who knows? It could be a blessing in disguise.

In Miriam’s shoes, I’d be grateful. Maybe even have at least four other kids with him down the line (see Mark 6:3).

It’s all just speculation, but what if...?

[valnune]

An Ordinary Party (Asmo + Wine Mom)

Based on the chat of the same name, you’re invited to a party after school that has perfectly normal things. I had already written this and finished yesterday but it’s perfect for the start of Asmo Appreciation Week that @milas-imaginarium​ posted. Since it’s his birthday week, I will have to finish that Asmo Angel outfit I’ve been sitting on. Look forward to it! For those who haven’t gotten the chat yet, it’s called “Ordinary Party” and is just Asmo, and for some reason the demon’s name you’re gonna have a house party at is called  Lucifugus. Which is the taxonomy name of a small brown bat.  Also. Warning. Prepare for a Feels Trip. Word Count: 6347 ---------------------- Asmo had said that a little party was being thrown at Lucifugus’s house after class today. The text came just before lunch and after inquiring what sort of party it was, it was described as “nothing special.” Eating, drinking Demonus, and gossiping. However, as he said he’d pick Althea up after class, he mentioned the prospect of finding a new partner at the end of it. Complete with a heart emoji at the end. Since coming to the Devildom, Althea had been dragged about on various trips and escapades by the demon brothers. Normally she was the unwilling participant in many of these  because they wouldn’t leave her alone and the effort to get them to stop was not worth the trouble but sometimes it was not the worst thing. Initially, she found it enjoyable because being invited out allowed her to get familiar with the place, this is what the upper echelons of demon society found most valuable, right? So it must be important. Yet. More and more she just realized it was demonic versions of mundane things. Hell was just another Earth, just with a different coat of paint. 

Today would be no different than the day before and the next day after. After all, this wasn’t the first time Asmodeus sprung plans on short term notice, and it wasn’t even the first time that he’d invited her out to a party. Normally, if he was to take her out, it would be to Majolish or other stores he liked, seeing as she was someone who knew a fair bit about fashion and prided herself on her presentation. It was one of the things she seemed to bond over well with him, and decently enjoyed. So, when Asmo met up with Althea at the end of classes, the standard thoughts were going through her mind. They were going to someone’s house, drink, gossip, and he’d probably drag her to The Fall after. While she always allocated time to study, such things could be done past midnight. It wasn’t as if she lived off of four hours of sleep every night anyway.

“Ooh, aren’t you so excited? I know I am, I mean, who wouldn’t want to spend their time with me. Ahahah.” Linking his arm around her own, Asmo gave his signature head inside laughter, trying to be cute as he beamed a smile up to Althea. Normally, she’d be stoic and unamused but, with Asmo, she tended to lighten up a bit, after all, she did enjoy indulging herself on occasion.

“Yes, yes. Once more, it is of the utmost privilege to bask in your glory, Asmodeus. Your radiant smile, your glowing eyes, why, who needs the Sun when you shine more brilliantly?”  Swaying her hips from side to side, the click of her heels upon the stone floor of the Academy was muffled by the sounds of the various demons  getting ready to leave. The idea that demons still had to go to school despite being supernatural creatures was still confusing. Did that man there was school in Heaven as well? While she did enjoy learning, it made her question the economy of the Devildom if the education system took so long. 

“More! More! Shower me with more praise or even better, why don’t you prove it with a kiss. You would if you really felt that way about me.”  Releasing her arm and stepping in front of her, Asmo curled a finger in his hair and pulled it, letting the curl bounce as he struck a pose.

“Flowers wither and die, dry in the heat of the sun, or shrivel from the cold, their petals yellow, their leaves wilt, but your lips shall stay as an eternal Spring, blossoming forever in a garden that envies the scent of your nectar.”  Althea leaned in, cupping a hand under his chin ever so slightly, but just smiled, releasing the expectant demon and sauntered off without him.

“Come along then, we need to pick up a gift for the host. It’s terribly rude to arrive at a house party empty handed.” A hand waved back and forth as she waited for Asmo to catch up.

“Ugh! You can’t just say something like that and not follow through! You always do this!”

Leaving the academy grounds and visiting the market, Althea and Asmo picked up a bottle of Demonus, even though she clearly wanted to get a bottle of wine, human world commodities were rather hard to come by. It was unfortunately out of her price range. She was still looking for a way to convert her human world funds into Grimm, though she heard the exchange rate was quite lucrative as human money itself as a commodity for its novelty. Still, despite her Devilgram name being: Wine Mom, she was without wine for another week. Mammon said he made headway in that direction but  was still waiting to hear back from a few people.Something would need to be done to incentivise him, otherwise she’d be waiting for a hundred years. If she was lucky.

Lucifugus was one of Asmodeus’ many, many, many acquaintances and for this house party there were about eight others there. It seemed not everyone was as courteous to bring a gift and just showed up, and it seemed that Lucifugus was expecting Asmo to do the same. He was pleasantly surprised. As his name suggested, he did have some bat-like features, and was rather short compared to other demons she had met.Well. She actually took the time to find out that Lucifugus was Latin for a kind of brown bat. She learned that most demons had references to Latin or Greek words, if they weren’t directly from the Bible. This was no different. It seemed that many demons preferred to use their human forms outside of school as well, however most had loosened up their uniforms a bit to relax. Yet, as the two just greeted the host, handing off the gift, a voice caught her attention as a pair appeared from the side.

“So, this is the exchange student,  hmm? Can’t say I’ve seen them up close before. One of your brothers is usually lurking about.”

“Oooh. Look how tough they’re trying to be. Just because they have a few pacts.You’re sure we can’t take a few bites, Asmo~baby?”

These two looked slightly familiar, as if she had seen them at the school but never had interacted with them. Both of them carried an androgynous look, but the sharpness in their eyes, on their teeth, and their nails… they were succubi and incubi, though which was which was hard to tell. The first had slick back hair and shaved sides making it look like waves on sand while the one who addressed Asmo as baby had an angled dramatic bob cut.They hung off each other and leered in her direction. The way they moved, the shifting of their shoulders, their stride, their gait, it was clear they were a bit more primal, perhaps true demons that never fell. Regardless, they reminded her of eels.

“Oh hey lovelies, I’m glad you could make it! Oooh. Ooh. I want to introduce you guys to each other. These two are Amaurós, and Ophidia, only like, two of the biggest gossips in the Devildom, as well as two of the biggest sluts. Ahaha.”

Asmo slid over to the pair and circled around them like the queen he was, standing behind them now as if to present her to the pack. This seemed like a sort of initiation into a clique, being evaluated by those who thought themselves above the rest. It was something she was familiar with. Oh, there most certainly were cliques in a Catholic school,  perhaps not quite the same as public school, but it was mostly the social status and hierarchy that formed between wealth groups. That’s what this feeling was. She was back to being judged by others. Well. She still remembered the steps to this dance.

“You’re one to talk, Asmo. I’ll have you know that I am the classiest of demons, thank you very much.” Flicking their eyelashes at Asmodeus, the one on the left, Amaurós,  feigned offense.

“Oh please. I am a connoisseur of assets, not a slut.  Amaurós, Ophidia, this human here is Althea, she’s basically like… Hm. Oh. You’ll see what I mean. I’m sure you’ll get along great!”

Parading himself about, Asmodeus made sure to wave to the others who were invited, making sure he was seen. That left her in front of these two eels that now ungulated forward, giving a circle about her. Althea remained still, arms crossed over herself as she raised a brow at what they were doing. Not reacting even when she felt a nail glide  over the arm of her blouse, Althea had opted to keep her jacket with her as opposed to hanging it up. Her coat was long and under it was a pencil skirt that the spruce green shirt was tucked into, but she kept the gold tie clasped and firm with the buttons still tight around her neck.

“Aren’t you going to speak? This IS a party after all, or are you just going to stand there all night and be a coat rack?”

“Ugh. Come on then, don’t be such a buzzkill. Do something human-! Unless you want us to make the first move, hmm?”

The two hissed as they returned to each other's side, Ophidia, draping their arms over Amaurós’ shoulders and making that final jab at her, while Amaurós themselves seemed to stand there and sneer a bit. All the while, Althea saw that Asmodeus was watching the three from the corner of his eyes. Catching the glint in his gaze, she saw that he was expecting a bit of a show. Very well. Her arms unhooked from themselves slowly. Placing a hand upon her hip, Althea cocked them to the side, coat hanging over the arm while her hand flipped through her hair.

“Well, excuse me for reserving the right to speak. I thought I’d save you the embarrassment, after all, it appears you two share the same brain as you can’t think or act independently.” With a scoff, Althea tilted her chin up high, eyes glaring down at the two. Let the game begin.

“Ooh. Tough talk from the thirty year old virgin. So what if you’re book smart if you don’t know how to get any. That’s where true power lies. You can control someone from between their thighs.”  It was Ophidia who was on the attack once more, the one who called Asmo, Asmo~baby with that cutesy voice.

“You’ve had crows-feet for over a thousand years, it’s a wonder you can get any at all. But I suppose if you put enough makeup on, you can still look half as decent as I do.” Althea turned her head off to the side and huffed a bit in response. Like a dragon she moved, purposely, strong angles, don’t give them an inch. Don’t back down.

“As if! I am only seven hundred, thank you very much and I-”

“Hmph. Well you clearly fooled me, but then again. You seem to play the part of a fool quite well. Just how many centuries of practice have you with that?” Althea’s sharp tongue struck again but cut short by the other demon, Amaurós.

“Haha! Well, done human. You’ve got a bit of a mouth on you. I wonder what else it can do.” They didn’t seem to be nearly as uptight as Ophidia who was pouting and clinging onto the other, but it seemed to be an act as they were back to smiling again, or grinning. Sneering. It was hard to tell with sex demons. 

“Oh, I know! Isn’t she just so fun to play with?” Asmo had returned holding a glass filled with a rich burgundy shade. Hooking an arm around Althea’s, he pressed his head to her shoulder and smiled back.

“Come on, the real fun’s about to start. Lucifugus found some human games and we wanna try them out. You’ll give us the real, authentic treatment, won’t you Althea?” Batting his long eyelashes up at her, Althea glanced down and chuckled ever so slightly.

“How could I say no to you?” Her voice lush and low in return, a finger extending out to brush the hair from his face.

“You say no plenty, unless that’s an invitation-”

“Just lead on, Asmo.” Cutting him off, Althea, however did the leading. She had watched where he came from anyway, and had Asmodeus point out where to turn. This particular dorm was not nearly as robust as the House of Lamentation, but it still housed a few individuals so it was sizable enough. The basement was spacious and seemed that everyone else, aside the two she was speaking with, were downstairs.

Other than the host, there were four others. That meant there were nine total. It was a cozy amount of people, something she could handle. There was a table with various drinks on it, bottles of demonus and still, nothing she could get the slightest bit intoxicated off of. This was fine. She didn’t drink to feel effect anyway, well. Not mostly. As for food things as Asmo mentioned there would be, along with cupcakes and other dainty sweets, there were “party” foods, which consisted of things like scorpion and giant centipede skewers, cream puffs which- looked normal but the cream was made from pigeon milk. It seemed that Hell was abundant with strange foods. One thing she would not miss once left.

“So, I heard about this game called Truth or Dare, you’ve heard of it right?” Lucifugus looked at her expectantly as he took a seat on the sofa. Settling down with a drink, everyone took their respective seats. Althea picked a solitary arm chair so she could see everyone and, of course, Asmo sat with the pair he introduced her to. It was clear what his intentions with them were with the way they were snickering and giggling to each other was.

“That’s right. Typically, you ask someone the question, truth or dare. That person then responds with which one they’d rather do or say. If you pick dare, you perform an action, and truth is obviously answer the question truthfully. If you don’t want to do it, you typically have to do a punishment or take a shot of something. Alcohol. Hot sauce, until they will say or do something. Depends on house rules.” Althea kept her eyes focused on the host as she spoke, out of politeness.

“Oooh! That sounds like great fun! There are SO many things I can finally get you to do and say, Althea!” Asmo was giddy like a schoolgirl, his expression changing from sweet to sinister in a quick flash. This was going to be a long night…

However. The night wasn’t terribly bad. Several of the demons had to answer what their biggest regrets were, or had to make out with each other- dares Asmo specifically asked, or had to send text messages to people they hated. At least three people were guaranteed detention the day after. Asmo had the audacity to ask her what would get her on her knees, clearly referring to sexual actions, however she avoided the question saying she only gets on her knees when praying at Mass or confessing sins. A few more rules were added as people weren’t drinking enough, including if you didn’t do the dare within a minute, you had to take a shot, or if you avoided the truthful statement, another shot. If the others guessed what the truth was to your question but were wrong? Shot. That one ended up getting a few people drunk. After Althea refused to kiss someone, he dared another demon to kiss her, which resulted in her slapping them across the face until they gave up.

Among the things that people did, sitting in each others laps, drinking disgusting things, taking pictures and texting them to others, a few times people had to leave and return with others because, of course Asmodeus would dare someone to do something sexual, Althea made certain to avoid those kinds of dares, or at least only pick truth when Asmodeus asked her the dreaded. Truth or Dare.

“Truth.” Althea stared towards Asmo, the time already around midnight.

“What do you have against kissing? You act like it’s such a big deal. I bet you’d like it if you just gave in a little bit. I mean. I’ve never seen someone with a body like yours so uptight. It’s SUCH a waste.” He was starting to slur his words a bit, but  he passed it off with a fake cute voice, and insisted on drinking more of course.

“Oh-! It’s because she’s a prude! I mean, just look at her, buttoned up and formal. All work and no play. But you don’t need her to have a bit of fun, Asmo~baby.” Ophidia, arm draped over Asmo’s shoulder just to get his attention, yet he didn’t look at them for more than a glance.

“No, no. I mean, yes but- I think it’s because she had a bad breakup before. Someone broke her heart and now she can’t love agaaaain. So cliche.” Amaurós was less drunk than Ophidia but still clearly intoxicated.

“Wrong on both fronts. Aside from the fact that the exchange of bodily fluids is disgusting? To me, kissing is a level of intimacy that I reserve for the eventual person I will select for courtship. It holds something of a sacredness to me.” Althea stared at her glass and then glanced to the incubi and succubi pair who just rolled their eyes and finished off their shots before standing up.

“Ugh. So it’s because you’re a church girl again? You’re in the Devildom. You should lighten up a little bit. Why are you so opposed to fun?” Asmo took a shot as well, as it was clearly not the answer he thought either.

“Truth or dare, Asmodeus.”  Althea followed it up towards him, seeing as she, one, didn’t care about getting answers from others, and two, they were in the process of leaving.

“Hmmm. Truth!” Asmo leaned forward a bit, curious to see what she’d ask.

“What was the Celestial Realm like?” Her eyes stared towards Asmo now, narrowing slightly. The unfortunateness that she was sober around a bunch of drunk demons was now starting to turn advantageous, they should have their tongues loosened to talk about what they normally wouldn’t should be available now. Or at least that’s what she hoped.

“...”

“Next question.” Asmo took a shot, a bit of an uncomfortable look on his face.

“Fine. Exactly how long ago was the Celestial War?”

“You really aren’t supposed to ask those sorts of questions, you know that.” He fingered the shot glass a bit, trading his nail along the lip before taking a second shot.

“In detail, what is your relation with Solomon?” Althea would ask as many questions as needed until she got the answers she wanted. She was waiting for this moment when he was drunk enough. The host, Lucifugus, was cleaning up but looked between the two and saw the tension grow.

“Cooomee ooooon. You know I can’t… Ugh. Just keep asking questions until there’s something I can answer. You’re as bad as Solomon, you know that, right?  Fine, fine. Keep the questions coming.”

So, Althea proceeded to ask a list of questions that were declined. They included questions about the bible, about Heaven, the afterlife, the origin of the universe, God, things that either he didn’t know, or that he couldn’t answer. About fifteen questions in, there was a final question he did answer. Or maybe he was just too drunk to care.

“What did you look like as an angel?” Althea  was just about ready to ease down but it seemed that with this question, and the way he let out an exasperated sigh, he might actually respond.

“FINALLY, a question about me! Well. I was beautiful! There was no more beautiful angel, and EVERYONE loved me. Jewel of the Celestial Realm- no one- not even Lucifer- well. Okay maybe Lucifer but- No one else was more beautiful than me! I was so stunning that it was almost a crime. Well. Hehe. I guess it did become a sin.” Strutting about the room, Asmo was swishing his drink around and then nearly tripped over an end table. As he held balance, Asmo straightened up and held his hands out like he was perfectly balanced the whole time.

“Simeon did say something similar… But, it seems like it’s time to go. Come on, you can’t walk straight. Let’s get you home.” Althea went to go wrap an arm over Asmo’s shoulder, pulling his drink away from him except Asmo stumbled back and waved a hand.

“Wait, what did Simeon say about me? Ugh, look at those shoulders, I just want him to wrap those arms of his around me, and those eyes, his smile, beautiful- I mean. Not that I’m jealous or anything.” His cheeks started to flush, but that might have been from drinking too much. A few more things were mumbled under his lips, comments on his appearance and how above everything he seemed.

Again, Althea stepped forward to take the drink away from him, using the length of her arms against him, handing it towards the host who was cleaning everything up. It was certainly past midnight now. Still, she didn’t answer his question. After all, Simeon didn’t say much on it, actually told her to ask the demons themselves as he didn’t feel right speaking about the topic while in Hell. He also made her promise to not ask Luke about it too much either. Disappointing but, she’d keep the promise.

“Althea-! One more question, the game isn’t over until I say it’s over! Truth or Dare! But- but- you have to answer Truth. Got it? Then I’ll leave.” His words still slurred, it seemed that all those shots were catching up to him now. While he didn’t have a drink anymore, he was playing keep-away, so, to indulge him, she nodded her head slightly.

“If I must. However, come over here. I’ll answer Truth as we leave.” Althea hadn’t ever declined to answer a question truthfully, and she wasn’t going to avoid answering it this time. Right now, the only thing she had was a headache from the loudness of everyone, a glass of wine could really be needed right about now.

“What do you REALLY think about me? I know you said you’re not interested in any of my brothers but- come on. You have to love me. I don’t believe you when you say you’re not interested.” Asmo was struggling to put his jacket back on, not able to find where the arm hole was. A slight sigh slipped from her lips, taking a step forward to help him do it up.

What she thought of him? Well. To say she wasn’t interested was not true. However, not the way he wanted her to be interested in him. Glancing off to the side slightly, Althea thought about the question. It would be best to answer this when they were alone. He wouldn’t like the answer.

“You don’t want to hear what I really think about you, not while you’re drunk.” Althea spoke in a solemn way, knowing that this answer was going to have some kind of emotional impact on him if she responded. While she didn’t care about saving someone’s feelings, this was going to be a problem getting him home and Lucifer already was blowing up her D.D.D. with texts. He could brush it off if he was sober, but drunk?

“Nu-uh. You gotta answer this-” He waved a hand away, getting his coat back on but then stumbled and fell down as he was trying to get up the stairs to the main level of the dorm as they exited. Narrowing her eyes at this, there clearly was only one solution.

“Fine. But I’ll answer when we’re out of the building, okay? You won’t want others to hear what I think of you.” Althea slipped an arm under Asmo’s leg, and the other behind his shoulder and lifted him clean off the ground. Looking behind her, in the same stoic, flat voice as always, she nodded to the host, thanking them for allowing them all to come over and, of course, putting up with the craziness.

“Oh, that intimate? So romantic. Is that why you’re carrying me like a princess? Does that mean that you’re my prince? Oh you shouldn’t have.” Asmo wrapped his arms behind her shoulders, kicking his feet back and forth as he was carried. He clearly wasn’t in the right headspace. When was he ever though?

“Very well… What I think of you.” Althea continued to walk as she thought how best to answer this. Asmodeus. The Avatar of Lust… An emotional, needy crybaby who would act out for attention, any attention, and demand everything of you and still want more. No. He was worse than that.

Once they had left the dormitory, Althea kept to herself on the streets, not wanting to pass by anyone to have them overhear, but also because she didn’t trust anyone, nor believe Asmo was in the proper state to defend her if they were attacked. As she knew not all demons obeyed and listened to Diavolo, she was careful not to venture too far out on her own at “night”. Asmo stared up at her with expectant eyes, he wanted to hear that she adored him, that he was her world and couldn’t live without him. He was wrong. So, without ceremony, she began speaking, eyes forward and not looking at him as she delivered her answer to, “Truth.”

“You’re a Parasite. A blight upon everyone you encounter. You feast upon the attention of others, leaving those who have the misfortune of encountering you a husk, drained of emotion after they’ve left your wake. You’re terribly selfish, thinking only of yourself, how it benefits you, how it makes you feel, and disregard the needs of others. Were I not immune to your charms you surely would have tried to sink your fangs into me. If it were not for this program, I’d avoid you like the plague. The toxic aura you spew forth is enough to choke on without even speaking to you. So… Seven out of Ten.”

Each word was left hanging in the air, each word a knife to his heart. It was the brutal honesty she felt towards him, and perhaps it would seem like insults, but to her they weren’t. She met worse, surely. However, he was a demon. This is how she viewed him and while she found his company tolerable, and sometimes fun, this was still his nature. Her eyes remained forward, focused on getting back to the House of Lamentation. Yet, despite what she said, all of her words, he went silent instead of crying loudly. His arms slipped off of her neck and crossed over themselves loosely.

It was a quiet walk back…

Rising up the stairs to the second level, Althea just side-glanced whomever she passed to ensure they didn’t start speaking or ask why the two were so quiet. As soon as she brought him back to his room, he was gently eased down upon his bed and he promptly turned away, pouting, curled up, a slight hunch to his shoulders. It was hard to tell how much of this was the not-alcohol was catching up with him or if he just wanted attention, but there was a bit of sharpness in her chest. Was she feeling back about telling the truth and hurting him?

“Asmo... “ Althea reached a hand out to his shoulder, he turned a bit to smack it away, and turned further around, sharply as the fringe of his hair fell forward, shadowing a bit of his face.

“Don’t touch me! D- Don’t you dare touch me. I’m just a parasite to you.” He pulled away again, this time sitting up and giving a sharp glare at her. There was a hint of light within his eyes, almost like it was glowing. He seemed to be so close to shifting into his demon form with how he was unstable right now.

“I mean- how can you call me that? I’m the Avatar of Lust. People WANT me. I am literally everyone’s type. Seven out of ten? That’s an insult. How dare you! You’re lucky you know. Mhm. If I was allowed to, I’d carve out what little heart you have and hold it beating in my hand. Then you’d see how beautiful I am! Then you’d love me, right?”

The way he spoke, how it flared up, the sharpness, the venom he was spitting, it was as she said. Parasitic. The way his shoulders rose and sank, the primal movement. It was similar to how those two were from the party earlier, clearly more in touch with his demonic side at the moment. Yet, there was something else there. The wounded animal. It came with the break of his voice as he started to settle down, no longer a fire, but a crackling cinder, dim in the night. A mournfulness filled his voice.  

“Then… Then you’d love me, right?”

When once his anger settled down from the snarl, the snap, the  visceral, a tormented sort of sadness filled his expression as he crawled towards her on the bed. Reaching a hand out, Asmo dragged it down her arm until he was holding her hand. It was not a touch of seduction, but one of longing. Cupping his cheek with her hand, Althea remained silent, watching what was he was doing, if it was a show or genuine response. She knew that whatever was consuming his thoughts, it was likely mixed and veiled as well. After all, demons weren’t truly capable of expressing true human emotion. Theirs was far more complex. So, sitting herself down upon the edge of the bed, Althea would be the emotional rock he needed right now.

“Asmo… You are still beautiful, but beauty isn’t love. You know this.” Her hand then started to brush against his cheek gently, seeing as he was still holding onto it, thumb rubbing back and forth, fingers curled to the side of his face. Something to calm him down. He seemed to like this action, nuzzling against her hand  as he was hungry for affection of any kind.

Asmodeus was slow to respond, perhaps he was deciding on if he should answer, or if he was just too tired to respond. It seemed as if he was just content to hold her hand against his cheek, the warmth of her touch, even if it wasn’t as intimate as he wanted. Searching his eyes for truth, watching his gaze, the light still flickered within. But- a sharp tug caught her attention, Asmo pulled on her hand, toppling her off balance in surprise as his other hand pushed her shoulder down to the bed. Though she was sitting on the edge, he had overtaken and was now sat atop her hips, leering down with an intense glow in the burning hues of his gold and coral coloured eyes.

“... Nothing..” His voice was low, a lush whisper that trembled off his lips.

“...Not even now do I see a hint of desire in your eyes… Am I impossible to love? Truly love? I, who was once loved by all, now nothing. To look upon me was to know the Beauty of God. What am I now? A parasite…”

The demonus on his breath was just as bad as any alcohol. It lingered in the air and hung off every word, hot as it practically dripped upon her cheeks. Drawing closer, his face was mere inches from hers but even then, Althea did her best to hold back any sort of reaction. To not recoil, to not withdraw. Even if she wanted to react, he needed the emotional stability right now. She couldn’t feed into his energy, else he’d consume anything she gave off and it would be dangerous for the both of them.

“I may not love you, but that does not mean you’re impossible to love. When I look at you, yes, I see a parasite, but I also see all of that beauty within you. The glow upon your skin, the radiance of your eyes. All of this is true when I speak it, but you look most beautiful like this. This vulnerable scorpion, fighting with his nature. You wish to sting me even now, don’t you?”

With how low her words were, that bare whisper between their lips, the heat of her breath upon his skin, it was the closest physically she had ever been with Asmo. Still, he remained holding onto her wrist and shoulder, staring towards her but not making any movements. As his grip tightened, she also felt his hands trembling and then it released, tears welling and falling from his eyes to her cheeks before he lowered his head down to her chest, arms tightly wrapping behind the small of her back.

“Love me… Love me, please. Tell me I’m beautiful, that I am the most beautiful person you’ve met. Whisper sweet nothings to me and devote yourself to me. I…” Asmodeus clutched on tighter, arms holding onto her waist more as his face started to burrow into her. If she didn’t unwrap from him now, she’d end up sleeping here and who knew how he’d behave once the drunkenness wore off. Yet. She didn’t want to leave him alone. Not like this.

Sitting up slowly, Althea would gently shift in position and unhook his arms, even if he so desperately wanted to remain clung to her, it was the only way. Removing his shoes and setting them on the floor, she tucked him into bed. Fighting with his clingy hands, she had to constantly pull them off and tighten the sheets over him. Changing him out of his uniform was asking for problems so that was out of the question, but she did remove his jacket and loosen his shirt. Yet still, as Asmodeus lay there, looking sleepy, and pitiful, not even she could deny the bit of warmth that was nestled within her heart, the small bit of empathy she felt for him.

It was at this moment, looming over Asmodeus, staring into his eyes as he so often desperately wanted, Althea realized something. For all his age and history, for his time as an angel, then as a demon, he was like a child emotionally. This poor, frail creature, fallen from God’s Love that was hurt so. Yes, the rebellion that happened was likely something he didn’t regret, and something she didn’t blame him for, but to change so fundamentally from who you were from birth, to what you were now. It wasn’t as if she was the best Catholic, nor thought she was going to heaven when she died but still. He was an angel once. They all were angels. Except Satan. Yet Asmodeus, he who was loved by all, how desperate he had become in his moments of depravity. 

“I care about you too much to lie to you like that, Asmo. Right now, this crippled, wounded creature you are before me, a parasite, a fallen angel, who you are, there’s nothing more beautiful in this world to me than to see someone like this...but I take no joy in it. Your inner self is exposed to me, and I want nothing more than to play with it, to manipulate it and abuse it for as much worth as I can extract but… It seems I’ve grown a fondness that prevents me from doing so.” It was her confession time now. The delicate way she spoke such harsh words, it was the nature of her internal conflict ions, so sure and not remorseful of those she hurt but fully aware of how toxic she was to others. At least, how she was to other humans. Normally, what she would do to others is manipulate them in this state, make them dependent upon her so that they can’t get away. Just as narcissistic as he, if not more so as she did it by choice. It was not in human nature to hurt others this much. It was a learned behaviour that she carefully cultivated over time and yet. Perhaps that is why she felt such respect towards demons? It was their nature, that any of them behaved civilly was a feat unto itself. How troubled her heart was at this moment. She should feel nothing for these creatures that strayed from God, but at times they were more human than she was. Asmodeus was about to sit up, stirred by what she said but Althea cut him off.

“Hush dear... You need your rest. If you truly want to, we can discuss this in the morning.” As she was leaning over Asmo on the bed, Althea stared down to his amber eyes, her hair draped over a shoulder like a curtain as she made sure his eyes closed. He seemed a bit reluctant to, but the lushness of her words, the soft lullaby melody she spoke, and quite a helping hand of the drink taking effect, he closed his eyes fully.

Slowly, her hand lowered to cup ever so gently atop his lips as her face drew close to his own. Careful not to touch him too heavily, her lips pressed delicately on the back of her hand. This indirect sign of affection wouldn’t be remembered in the morning, not by Asmo anyway. As her lips pulled away, her own eyes lingered upon his face, and she could not deny he was beautiful. He was like the golden child of a family, an Adonis if you will, something that others would want to remain in the company of. Yet she felt no hint of desire towards him, something he said so himself. Pulling away from Asmo who was now safely asleep, Althea quietly slipped out of the room.

He, who had seen and bore witness to the eternal light of Heaven, to bask within the Celestial Realm and to be called the Jewel of it, he must truly have been glorious, beyond beautiful. The way he looked at Simeon, with eyes of distant longing but not lust, she should have seen it sooner. Was he embarrassed about being a demon? Was he so fraught with melancholy that he’d never be as beautiful as he was as an angel? Perhaps. All she knew, however, was that in his moment of weakness, when she had been caught off guard, he could have followed through on his threat, he didn’t. Instead, he bore his heart out to her, held it shriveled and bleeding in his hands, and she didn’t break it...

Leaning against the back of his door, arms crossed behind her, thought started to betray her once more. Why didn’t she lie to him? She could have told him all he wanted to hear and he’d believe it. It would have been so easy to twist his desperation around her finger and have him depend upon her. So pitiful he was at that moment. So pitiful she was becoming that pulling away and leaving him to sleep alone, awake alone, started to gnaw away at her.

“Asmodeus…”

His name fell from her lips, eyes forlorn as she pulled off the door. The short walk back to her room was just as silent, heels clicking through the corridor. A lonely sound in the middle of the night.

“Please don’t make me love you…”

[confrontingbabble-on]

After Jesus was crucified, everyone had a different understanding of what Jesus had wanted them to do...even those who had never met or heard Jesus’ teachings, like Paul. Christianity is the result of those who thought Jesus wanted them create a religion...to collect money, and side with murderous/immoral political rulers...so they could gain status and political power (to cover up their immorality and avoid legal punishments)...legally steal pagan temples and property...and replicate pagan ceremonies...

“When it comes to religious history, the list of Catholic Church transgressions makes for pretty uncomfortable reading. Despite exalting virtue and kindness in its teaching, Church leadership has spearheaded a long history of outright unforgivable Catholic actions...

Though Vatican violence goes way back, there are a number of disturbing episodes from recent history. Some of this repugnant behavior comes from Popes, some was Church-endorsed, and some, most unsettlingly, was just straight-up regular Church practice.

Dark Church history contains scandal after scandal rife with every vice and taboo you can imagine. When the Church was at the height of its power (at which point it was the most powerful organization in the Western world), it's safe to say everything went to its head. Combine that with the fact that Church leaders seem to stubbornly resist adapting to changing(improving) morality...and you've got a whole lot of unforgivable moments on our hands.

** Systemically Covering Up Tens Of Thousands Of Cases Involving Sexual Misconduct:  Remember the time there was a systematic cover up of abuse, molestation, and rape at the hands of priests that went all the way to the top of the Church? A conservative estimate says there were 17,200 victims in the US alone, and this type of mistreatment happened world-wide. When complaints came in, priests and other offenders were transferred, rather than punished. The extent of their actions will probably never be fully understood, because of the decades of cover up. But the Church isn't denying it anymore. The archdiocese of Milwaukee acknowledged the severity of the issue and agreed to pay a $21 million settlement to 300 victims. But these types of settlements are few and far between.

The molestation of children is still happening at the hands of priests, 15 years after the Boston Globe broke the story. In fact, in August 2018, a grand jury reported that internal documents from six Pennsylvanian dioceses noted that over 300 "predator priests" were "credibly accused"...of harming more than 1,000 child victims; the alleged violations go as far back as 1947.

Due to statute of limitations, only two priests were charged with abusing minors. In February 2019, however, Pope Francis publicly acknowledged the systemic maltreatment and vowed to combat the problem. He said, "I think that it’s continuing because it’s not like once you realize it that it stops. It continues. And for some time we’ve been working on it."

** The Crusades...Or, Incapacitating Jews And Muslims For 300 Years:  In 1095, when Pope Urban II made a plea for war with Muslims, armies of Christians in Western Europe took up the charge. The pope promised serfs freedom if they went, galvanizing the masses. In the First Crusade, an army of peasants led by Peter the Hermit was massacred by the Turks. When an army of knights went after them and captured Jerusalem, it was said they massacred Muslims until the streets ran with blood.This was only the beginning. Waves of the Crusades continued until 1396, marking three centuries of warfare, and incalculable human suffering. "Taking the heads of slain enemies and impaling them upon pikes appears to have been a favorite pastime among crusaders. Chronicles record a story of a crusader-bishop who referred to the impaled heads of slain Muslims as a joyful spectacle for the people of God. When Muslim cities were captured by Christian crusaders, it was standard operating procedure for all inhabitants, no matter what their age, to be summarily killed. It is not an exaggeration to say that the streets ran red with blood as Christians reveled in church-sanctioned horrors. Jews who took refuge in their synagogues would be burned alive, not unlike the treatment they received in Europe."

** Pretty Much Everything Done By Pope Boniface VIII:  Boniface VIII (1230 -1303) was guilty of many horrible crimes that, sum total, make him seem like a sadistic Roman emperor. Among other things, he oversaw the complete destruction of Palestrina, a city that peacefully surrendered. Palestrina was completely razed, and Boniface ordered a plow driven over it to prove it had been reduced to nothing but earth and rubble.  You know priests take a vow of celibacy, right? Apparently, Boniface VIII didn't take his too seriously. He once had a three-way with a married woman and her daughter, but was even more well known for saying that having sex with young boys was as natural as rubbing one hand against the other. So, obviously, he was raping (or at least fornicating with), children. To celebrate his many great accomplishments, Boniface VIII just loved erecting statutes of himself. So add hubris to his list of sins.

** Burning Joan Of Arc For Dressing Like A Man:  You may know Joan of Arc as a saint, but the Church didn't always hold her in such high esteem. In fact, at one time, she was pretty much the Catholic Church's public enemy number one. In 1429, 17-year-old Joan of Arc, believing God had spoken to her, instigated an uprising to get the English out of France, but some high-powered Catholics who sympathized with the English weren't pleased. French king Charles VII wisely accepted Joan's help in his fight against the English, and together, they won some major battles.

When Joan was captured, Charles VII, unsure of whether he trusted her as an emissary of God, handed her over to the Church, which did what Catholics do best, put her on trial for heresy with no evidence. To make things one step more ridiculous, Joan was denied counsel, which was against Church rules. Despite this, she is famed for remaining cool, calm, and dripping with integrity throughout the trial. Because there was no evidence of heresy, Joan was found guilty of one of the 70+ other charges brought against her, wearing men's clothes (shirt and pants, like every country girl today!) , for which she was burned at the stake in 1431 in front of a crowd of thousands. In 1456, Charles VII ordered an investigation into Joan's trial. The result? She was declared innocent and made a martyr. The Church followed suit and, in 1920, canonized her. Talk about a change of heart. Maybe since all male Church officials wear dresses they pretend are robes, they decided it was okay for Joan to dress a little (country!). 

** Burning William Tyndale For Making A Vernacular Bible For The Masses You'd think the Church would make the mass distribution of its core text a main priority. As it turns out, in the 16th century, this was the last thing powerful Catholics wanted.  Scholar William Tyndale, on the other hand, wanted this so badly he went into hiding to translate the Bible into English, so lay people could read it for themselves. The Church was not happy about this, and when copies were smuggled around Europe, Catholic authorities demanded they be burned. And what of Tyndale? He was captured, tried for heresy for daring translate the bible, and burned at the stake. When Church authorities decided printing Bibles in English was okay, they borrowed a whole lot from Tyndale's translation. And never apologized.

** Slaying Countless Women As Witches Because Pope Innocent VII Was Paranoid: The Catholic Church wasn't the only group involved in witch hunts, but it kicked things off with Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), a doozy of a book written in 1487, after Pope Innocent VIII declared, by papal bull, witches were real and a threat (due to their involvement with Satan). He wanted that sh*t investigated stat, so clergymen Johann Sprenger and Heinrich Krämer (using his Latin name, Henricus Institoris) took up the call and literally wrote the book on witches, Satanists (which were invented for this book), and hunts thereof. And boy, was it a success. It was so popular that, for 200 years, it was second only to the Bible on the sales charts. The problem? Well, for one, the book was hugely sexist and focused almost only on women, promoting burning them at the stake,  a common punishment for heretics. So who knows how many deaths it inspired; its influence was too huge to quantify. The book is also filled with somewhat dubious information, such as the following facts about witches and Satanists: they stop cows from giving milk; they rode through the air on broomsticks on their way to forest orgies; they ate infants.

** Absolving Sins For Cash Payments, Including Sins Not Yet Committed:  If one bit of Catholic Church history got drilled into your mind in high school, there's a good chance it was the selling of indulgences and Martin Luther's reformation. Now synonymous with money-grubbing, the idea of an indulgence isn't so bad in theory. According to Church doctrine, "[an] indulgence is a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven, which the faithful Christian who is duly disposed gains under certain defined conditions through the Church’s help when, as a minister of redemption, she dispenses and applies with authority the treasury of the satisfactions won by Christ and the saints." A little wordy, but potentially inoffensive.

In the 16th century, however, indulgences got out of hand. Pope Leo X had expensive taste and wasn't above using shady means to satisfy it. Indulgences were peddled as "pay X to absolve you of Y." Basically, money gets you into heaven. To give some indication of how crazy things got, Dominican friar John Teztel was named Grand Commissioner of indulgences in Germany (so, overseeing indulgence was his only job), where he sold absolution for future sins. So: "Hey, give us some gold, it's all good if you kill that dude next week."

If you were poor and ignorant, as most poor people in the period probably were, you basically just believed you were hopelessly f*cked and did your best to prepare for an eternity spent frolicking in the torments of hell. So what happened? Martin Luther, none too pleased, wrote his 95 Theses, effectively kick starting the Reformation.

** Orchestrating The Fall Of The Knights Templar To Appease A Broke King:  ...the Knights Templar, a stateless military fraternity assembled to protect Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land, were the subject of gossip a long time ago. They were endorsed by the Roman Catholic Church in 1129, and were famous valorous service in the Crusades. They were also really good with money, which shouldn't have been a problem, but King Philip IV of France owed them (and others) a whole lot of it. Philip took advantage of growing fear of the Knight Templar's power and pressured the Church into dropping the mighty anvil of god down on them. What the Church did next wasn't great. In 1307, Pope Clement V had members arrested and tortured, gaining false confessions of heresy. In fact, he got enough such confessions to justify disbanding the order in 1312. Various Knights confessed to spitting on the cross, fraud, and secrecy (which was apparently a crime?), and nobody cared the confessions arose from torture and were recanted afterward. Archbishop of Sens Philippe de Marigny, who ran an investigation into the Knights, had dozens burned at the stake. A fine repayment for all of that fighting in the crusades. In 2007, a secret document showing Pope Clement V absolved the Knights before later deciding to disband them was published. Historians believe this document provides essential proof that the Church caved under King Phillip's pressure. Good news for the Knight's integrity, bad news for the Church's.

** Burning Someone 43 Years After He Passed Because He Upset Some Important Catholics:  As if having your enemies killed wasn't enough, Catholics gotta burn the corpses, too. What gives? Trying to outdo what the Romans did to JC and John Wycliffe (1320 – 1384), famous English theologian and vocal critic of the Church, was a forerunner of the Reformation. Among his many criticisms was a belief the Church should give up its worldly possessions. As you can imagine, not an idea the church was happy to have spread around. Wycliffe also promoted and worked on the first English translation of the Bible, hoping to give people direct access to the word of god. Again, not a fun idea for the Church, which liked its monopoly on power.

William Courtenay, Archbishop of Canterbury, made moves against Wycliffe after retiring (gotta stay busy). Wycliffe's writings were banned in certain areas, but it didn't end there. It didn't even end when Wycliffe died of a stroke in 1384. Instead, in 1415 (31 years after he died), the Council of Constance declared Wycliffe a heretic. Not only did they order his books burned, they ordered his body exhumed and burned. And it took them 12 years to do that. So, 43 years after Wycliffe died, his corpse was torched and his ashes thrown in the River Swift. So much for resting in peace.

** Executing Jan Hus For Working Out Some Tricky Theological Philosophy: The Church tends to be pretty brutal with its critics, of which the treatment of Jan Hus, born 1372, is one of the best (or worst) examples. A Czech priest, Hus felt the Church, run by humans, who are by nature flawed, must necessarily also therefore be flawed, while the Bible, the direct word of God, had no flaws. He was, therefore, openly critical of Church practices, especially the papal schism and indulgence sales. So, not very happy with Hus, the Church convened the Council of Constance and invited him to join them. Nothing to worry about, just a wee chat. Or so they said. Instead of having that wee chat, the Council arrested Hus and put him on trial (and then in jail) for, you guessed it, heresy. He was kept in a dungeon and, when he refused to recant his teachings, was sentenced to death. The Church even refused him his last rights before burning him at the stake. And to think they said they just wanted to talk.

** The Joust Of Whores Organized By Pope Alexander VI: The Joust of Whores is just one example of the corrupt and ridiculous popes of yore. In 1501, Pope Alexander VI (a Borgia, if that rings any bells), who was known to have some pretty refined hobbies, like watching horses fornicate, took things way over the top. According to historian Tony Perrottet, he invited 50 women to strip at the pope's table. Then things got weird.As Perrotet writes: "Alexander and his family gleefully threw chestnuts on the floor, forcing the women to grovel around their feet like swine; they then offered prizes of fine clothes and jewelry for the man who could fornicate with the most women."It's rumored Alexander VI was killed by his son, Cesar. Just to show how truly f*cked up Alexander was, his body was expelled from the basilica of Saint Peter. Why? He was considered too evil for sacred soil.

** The Roman Inquisition, During Which Judaism And Love Magic Were Serious Crimes: The level of the Church's involvement in various inquisitions can be argued. It's important to remember Pope Innocent IV (ironic name, that) explicitly condoned torture as an Inquisition interrogation technique in his papal bull Ad extirpanda in 1252 (which bull probably deserves its own place on this list). The Spanish Inquisition, most famous of these murder orgies, was carried by Spanish royalty and friars, who were Catholic, but not working directly for, or under direction of, the Vatican.

But wait, kids! Don't forget the Roman Inquisition, or the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition, which was 100% the church's doing. In 1542, as part of a Counter-Reformation against Protestantism (seriously, didn't these people have anything better to do than overreact to other Christians who pissed them off?), the Spanish Inquisition's gentle cousin, the Roman Inquisition, was born. Galileo and Copernicus were among those questioned. While Church staple heresy was a popular dish during the Inquisition, the menu had a number of options, including blasphemy, Judaism (which is a crime how?), immorality, witchcraft, love magic (yes please), and anything else wrathful Papists could shoe-horn in. John Bargrave, a  contemporary English writer, described how he was questioned in Latin (rather than Italian) to prevent uneducated guards from understanding what was being said. He was also prevented from carrying books "printed at any heretical city, as Geneva, Amsterdam, Leyden, London, or the like." Not as bad as the Spanish Inquisition, sure, but very much related and equally dogmatic, close minded, and power-mongering. A Church specialty

** Imprisoning Galileo In His Home For Years Because He Suggested Science Was Greater Than God:  The Church and science have a complicated relationship, to put it nicely. In 1633, Galileo Galilei, the father of, like, all science, was put on trial by the Church for saying the sun is the center of the universe and the earth moves around it, rather than the other way around. Which is, you know, true for the most part (sure, okay, the sun isn't the center of the universe, but still, he was onto something). But that didn't matter. Pope Urban VIII was having none of it, seeing Galileo's statement as horrific heresy. So, 10 cardinals sat in judgment of Galileo, who was threatened with torture, imprisonment, and even being burned at the stake. Galileo, 69 at the time and in a "pitiable state of bodily indisposition," eventually renounced his beliefs. Because of this, the church went easy on him and, rather than torture, he was subjected to house arrest until he died. What a way to treat the father of modern of science. And what does the church have to say on the subject now? "We today know that Galileo was right in adopting the Copernican astronomical theory," Paul Cardinal Poupard, the head of an investigation into the matter said in 1992. So, only 350 years too late.

** Cutting Funding For Immigrants Because Of Their Connection To The LGBTQ+ Community:  Not all Catholic faux pas come from the past; there's been some dodgy stuff in modern times, as well (see priest rape bonanza), and the church's relationship with the LGBTQ+ community continues to be a source of frustration. But here's a humdinger: For years, the Church gave thousands of dollars to Compañeros, a nonprofit helping Hispanic immigrants access healthcare, understand laws, and meet other basic needs. That is, until the Church found out Compañeros teamed up with a gay and lesbian rights group, at which point Nicole Mosher, executive director of  Compañeros, was informed their funding was in danger. Compañeros is but one example of organizations the Church threatens for not falling in line with the most strident dictates of Catholicism. The New York Times explained in 2002, "Since 2010, nine groups from across the country have lost financing from the campaign because of conflicts with Catholic principles."On the one hand, of course it's okay for the Church to withhold money from causes in contradiction with its beliefs. Like, say, an abortion clinic. But cutting off funding to aid the needy simply because of an association with the LGBTQ+ community seems extreme and unfair, especially given Church doctrine on helping the needy and feeding the poor. What's more, members of the LGBTQ+ community can identify as Catholic and go to church, but can't be helped by that Church? This is all the more more difficult to swallow when considering the Church's $1.6 billion stock portfolio...”

From https://m.ranker.com/list/most-unforgivable-things-the-catholic-church-has-done/lea-rose-emery

[sciencespies]

Ten Surprising Facts About Everyday Household Objects

https://sciencespies.com/history/ten-surprising-facts-about-everyday-household-objects/

Ten Surprising Facts About Everyday Household Objects

SMITHSONIANMAG.COM | April 3, 2020, 8 a.m.

Throughout the world, from the humblest abode to the most lavish mansion, our homes have always been a respite from the world. For many of us, our daily lives now upended by quarantine, our homes have suddenly become our world.

When we think of the technology that makes our homebound life bearable, we call to mind those electronic devices that allow us to remain connected to the outside world. However, it might surprise us to know that, for our ancestors, many of the objects we take for granted, like napkins, forks and mattresses, were also once marvels of comfort and technology—available to only the few. Our temperature-controlled homes filled with comfortable furniture and lights that turn on at the flick of a switch are luxuries unfathomable to the kings and queens of the past. Those things that were once only the purview of royalty—chandeliers, comfortable seating, bed pillows—have become such a part of our everyday lives that we forget that all but the basic necessities for survival were once out of reach for all but the upper echelon of society. Our homes are castles beyond what they could have ever imagined.

Perhaps, like me, you’ll find yourself grateful for our ancestors who suffered with stone or wooden headrests, stiff-backed chairs and cold nights before feather-stuffed pillows and fluffy duvets were part of everyday life (and appreciative of those who imagined that things could be better). In The Elements of a Home: Curious Histories Behind Everyday Household Objects, from Pillows to Forks, I’ve uncovered the stories behind the objects that fill our homes and our lives. They all come with stories. What follows are a few of my favorites.

In some homes, fireplaces remained lit for generations.

While contemporary fireplaces are used mostly as a design focal point, for thousands of years the fireplace was a necessary source of both heat and light. All medieval homes, whether a hut or manor, were built around a simple open hearth—very much like building a campfire in the center of a home (talk about smoke inhalation!). Families throughout Europe would gather around the fireplace to cook and eat, tell stories and sleep. It was so essential to everyday life that the hearth fire was rarely allowed to die out.

The fork was once considered immoral, unhygienic and a tool of the devil.

Forks

(Illustration by Alice Pattullo)

In fact, the word “fork” is derived from the Latin furca, which means pitchfork. The first dining forks were used by the ruling class in the Middle East and the Byzantine Empire. In 1004, Maria Argyropoulina, niece of the Byzantine emperors Basil II and Constantine VIII, was married to the son of the Doge of Venice. She brought with her a little case of two-pronged golden forks, which she used at her wedding feast. The Venetians were shocked, and when Maria died three years later of the plague, Saint Peter Damian proclaimed it was God’s punishment. And with that, Saint Peter Damian closed the book on the fork in Europe for the next four hundred years.

The chopstick predates the fork by about 4,500 years.

Chopsticks from China’s Tang Dynasty (618-907)

(Metropolitan Museum of Art)

The ones you encounter with the most regularity might be waribashi, disposable chopsticks made of cheap wood found at many Japanese and Chinese restaurants. These aren’t a modern invention. Waribashi were used in the first Japanese restaurants in the 18th century. There is a Shinto belief that something that has been in another’s mouth picks up aspects of their personality; therefore, you did not share chopsticks, even if they had been washed.

Keys weren’t always pocket-sized.

Keys

(Illustration by Alice Pattullo)

The greatest luxury is not high thread count sheets or the quality of your crystal, it’s the feeling of security and sanctuary that comes when you click the lock to the door of your home closed behind you. However, the ones that opened the wooden locks of the massive marble and bronze doors of the Greek and Egyptians could be three-feet in length, and so heavy that they were commonly carried slung over the shoulder—a fact that is mentioned in the Bible. The prophet Isaiah proclaimed, “And the key of the house of David will lay upon his shoulder.”

Ancient Romans, who lived extravagantly in most other aspects of their lives, were surprisingly spartan when it came to their bedrooms.

The poor slept on a straw mattress set in a simple wooden frame. If your purse allowed, the frame was cast in bronze or even silver, topped with a mattress stuffed with wool or down. The bed—and only the bed—resided in a room called a cubiculum (from which we get the word cubicle), a small space with tiny windows that let in little light.

The first proto-napkins were lumps of dough called apomagdalie.

Used by the Spartans—those residents of the military powerhouse city in ancient Greece—the dough was cut into small pieces that were rolled and kneaded at the table, deftly cleaning oily fingers and then thrown to the dogs at the meal’s end. Eventually, raw dough became cooked dough, or bread. Since there weren’t any utensils on the Greek table, bread also served as both spoon and fork (the food would have been cut into bite-size pieces in the kitchen) so using bread to discreetly keep your fingers clean before taking a smear of hummus wasn’t just delicious, it was convenient.

Plates were once made out of bread.

If you’ve ever slurped clam chowder out of a bread bowl, then you’ll appreciate the medieval trencher. These “plates,” used throughout Europe and the United Kingdom, were cut from large round loaves of whole wheat bread that were aged for four days, then sliced into two three-inch rounds. Partygoers would rarely eat the trencher; once supper was finished, those that were still in one piece were given to the destitute, or thrown to the dogs.

Playing cards came from the only nation with the paper-making technology to pull it off: China.

Playing cards

(Illustration by Alice Pattullo)

The first known cards, developed in the ninth century A.D. were the size of dominoes. In China, card games became popular as an activity that was good for the mind—meditative, yet challenging, as well as social. In 969 A.D., when Emperor Muzong of Liao capped off a 25-day drinking binge by playing cards with his empress, it’s doubtful he had any idea that his favorite pastime would travel the Silk Road through India and Persia before igniting a frenzy for the game in Europe.

In Ancient Egypt, pillows were more like small pieces of furniture than stuffed cushions.

A wooden (circa 2125-1975 B.C.E.) headrest carved in the shape of a cupped hands

(Ashmolean Museum/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

For those of us who spend half the night folding, turning or fluffing our pillows in an effort to find the perfect sleep position, it’s difficult to imagine that softness hasn’t always been a priority. For many living in ancient Africa, Asia and Oceania, pillows were stiffer than the stuffed cushions we have come to rely on for a good night’s sleep. These early pillows, some dating as far back as the Third Dynasty (around 2707-2369 B.C.E.) look a bit like child-sized stools with a curved piece resting upon a pillar. These stands supported the neck, not the head, perhaps to safeguard the elaborate hairdos that were en vogue.

Eating on a bare table was once something only a peasant would do.

Medieval diners would be horrified at our casual attitude toward table linens. For knights and their ladies, good linen was a sign of good breeding. If you could afford it (and maybe even if you couldn’t), the table would be covered by a white tablecloth, pleated for a little extra oompf. A colored cloth was thought to impair the appetite. (The exception to the white-only rule was in rural areas where the top cloth might be woven with colorful stripes, plaids or checks.) Diners sat along one side of the table and the tablecloth hung to the floor only on that side to protect guests from drafts and keep the animals from walking over their feet.

The Elements of a Home

The Elements of a Home reveals the fascinating stories behind more than 60 everyday household objects and furnishings. Brimming with amusing anecdotes and absorbing trivia, this captivating collection is a treasure trove of curiosities.

Buy

Amy Azzarito is a writer, a design historian, and an expert on decorative arts. Her design work has been featured in a wide range of publications, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Whole Living magazine, the Wall Street Journal, Architectural Digest and Design Milk. Chronicle Books just released her new book, The Elements of a Home.

#History

[kenjkats]

ES Endgame thoughts dump

By no means is this actually a theory post. Like I said I’m bad at those bc I’m too impulsive with my thoughts to go through detailed checking three times and so on. I warn you, this is A MESS. Take it as a thoughts dump of certain eye catching details in ES that are still loose ends, and a handful of different crack theories as an attempt to be a theory person lol.

So theory people please definitely add/correct me. Help me put the pieces together :D

So something that’s been bugging me since book one is this phrase and the idea of the Alpha and the Omega. It’s thrown in here and there in little details. Like  this. You see Rourke here mentioning it in the bonus scene at the end of the recent chapter. He wants to remake the world by messing with time and space. Wants to be a God. 

*I copy pasted the entire part of Revelation that’s cited in this wiki at the end of this post, for anybody who might want to draw parallels. It’s interesting.

An interesting thing to note is that the dossiers of the ES gang all have them with clearance level Epsilon, with Jake at Gamma, then Estela at Alpha (beginning) and MC at Omega (end). I have no idea what those directly translate to in terms of clearance, but the fact that they differ from the rest shows their importance/threat to Rourke.

Things to note about Estela: 

A lot of her history is blacked out. Even her first and middle names, which now gives me this idea that Estela might not even be her birth name.

In light of the Estela is Rourke’s daughter theory, maybe Olivia renamed her once she got Estela off the island.

The assessment focuses a lot on her determination and skills. Noting them as “exceptional”. Rourke remarks in the bonus scene that his daughter is “strong” and “worthy.”

The fact so much of her past here is blacked out leads me to think it’s PB letting themselves have wiggle room to fuck it up in the finale by revealing a twist. Maybe Rourke IS her last family. Maybe Nicolas is a close friend to Olivia and not really her uncle, and was tasked to protect Estela from Rourke who would want her as an asset. 

Things to note about MC:

Rourke doesn’t really KNOW about them. He remarks in Book 2 that it’s interesting they exist. And it’s implied that MC is something that could/could not exist at this point in time. 

The fact that Rourke does not know who MC is... hello giant WHO IS S/HE???, puts points into the “MC is not Rourke’s child” theory.

So what?

What catches my eye is their clearance levels. On one hand it could totally mean nothing. Crack theory, it’s a subtle foreshadowing of their roles.

The Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. Rourke references this idea twice in the recent bonus scene as he talks to Lundgren.

Estela and MC have always been connected somehow. They dream about each other. In book 1, MC sees Estela going after the crab, and Estela dreams about MC too. In all other instances of MC’s powers connecting with people, it’s usually just MC who experiences it (time resetting when they die, the idols their Endless version created). The others only share in MC’s experience during the Embers from Vaanu, but this may be because it’s from Vaanu and not something from MC. Point is, there’s something more to Estela given that she can experience weirdness on her own, not just take part in it.

@lovemesomesnark mentioned to me that in Book 2 when they go back through time to find the heart, that if MC messes up the timed choices, it’s Estela who fixes it. She did time voodoo. 

Conclusion: These two have an important role in the endgame. Either together or against each other.

Working crack theory: Estela is Rourke’s daughter, he plans to use her to help further Project Janus (could he program her like Mike somehow?) and therefore bringing about a new beginning (Alpha) in his crazy image. MC on the other hand could be the key to ending it (Omega) by helping Vaanu find the last piece. Which everyone thinks is MC. I’d buy it. Lots of angst.

This Janus nonsense:

Short thing about Janus in mythology: 

In ancient Roman religion and myth, Janus (/ˈdʒe��nəs/; Latin: IANVS (Iānus), pronounced [ˈjaː.nus]) is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, and endings. He is usually depicted as having two faces, since he looks to the future and to the past.

Rourke tells Lundgren and IRIS that this is just the beginning and

Yeah he’s trying to remake the world to suit him, by messing with space and time. Smart plan, what could go wrong.

Uhh interesting thing, it seems like Rourke needs some sacrifice/missing piece to pull off this plan. Because IRIS says:

Cloning, having a subject sounds vital to the plan. So Aleister was the first draft, they had this second, new one in the works, but it looks like Rourke abandons both for his daughter (Estela?)

Crack theory time: I’m going to assume with all the time craziness on the island that this didn’t necessarily take place just before the wedding and Rourke appearing with a vortex above his head. This could be farther in the past as he plans to mess things up and go after the heart. I don’t know. I’m bad at this lol. 

But if it issss farther in the past, that second clone could either be 1. Yet another Aleister with new “Hostile DNA” as IRIS says, or 2. MC? A lot of the fandom sees the signs that MC was just an experiment or some other thing from the island because of their lack of memory of the past, and their file stating they were born on La Huerta. 

Probably overthinking but this crack theory exists because IRIS mentions that the second clone has Hostile DNA. Hostiles = the Vaanti? And MC has shown to share a lot of funky powers and similarities with the Vaanti that an old crack theory floating around was that MC is part Vaanti.

Maybe it’s this command to terminate this clone, or some other event we’ll soon see that results in Rourke succeeding or failing to destroy MC, is also why he comments to MC that “Oh, you exist.”

This time looping is not a new thing. It just happened in the last chapter, where we got to see the gang take the group selfie that led Rourke to go on this crazy mission in the first place.

Interesting thing if you’re a Final Fantasy nerd: this popped into my head when Rourke said “to be as we are now, forever”, when IRIS mentions disrupting spacetime when initiating Project Janus, and knowing that Janus is this god of time that is the duality of past and present, and travels through it. If you ever played Final Fantasy 8, this reminded me of that. The villain in that game basically tries to travel through time to make it into one single moment and live on forever, ruling it. What if Rourke wants to do something similar in his lust for power or to try to save his wife? 

Confused?

Told you I wouldn’t make sense lol. But yeah, take all of this with a grain of salt. It’s crack theory and jumping to conclusions. Just listing down loose ends with no effort to tie them together. Yall can try because I do not have the brain cells to lol. But to conclude, I basically think all of these details point to

1. Estela/MC as endgame. Things are gonna get angsty.

2. Rourke needs something from one or both of them to put his plans in motion.

3. His plans to be a god in a new world are crazy. It needs the heart and a subject to complete. Which used to be Aleister but now could be Estela. Or MC. Or Estela and MC as the Heart/Vaanu and Cloned Subject combo needed.

4. Whatever the hell it is the finale is going to be wild and I’m going to cry over something/someone.

-----

Here’s that passage from the Bible btw: (Revelations 21:6 - 22:13, New International Version):

Some interesting parallels over one read: 

1. The Alpha and Omega stuff as mentioned. Rourke wants to be a god, make a new world etc.

2. 12 apostles, 12 gates to the Holy City. 12 is recurring theme in ES. 12 Catalysts, idols, embers, zodiacs etc.

3. John and the Angel remind me of the Endless and Uqzhaal idk

Revelation 21

6 He said to me: “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life. 7 Those who are victorious will inherit all this, and I will be their God and they will be my children. 8 But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.”

The New Jerusalem, the Bride of the Lamb

9 One of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues came and said to me, “Come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb.” 10 And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and showed me the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. 11 It shone with the glory of God, and its brilliance was like that of a very precious jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal. 12 It had a great, high wall with twelve gates, and with twelve angels at the gates. On the gates were written the names of the twelve tribes of Israel. 13 There were three gates on the east, three on the north, three on the south and three on the west. 14 The wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them were the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.

15 The angel who talked with me had a measuring rod of gold to measure the city, its gates and its walls. 16 The city was laid out like a square, as long as it was wide. He measured the city with the rod and found it to be 12,000 stadiac in length, and as wide and high as it is long. 17 The angel measured the wall using human measurement, and it was 144 cubitsd thick.e18 The wall was made of jasper, and the city of pure gold, as pure as glass. 19 The foundations of the city walls were decorated with every kind of precious stone. The first foundation was jasper, the second sapphire, the third agate, the fourth emerald, 20 the fifth onyx, the sixth ruby, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth turquoise, the eleventh jacinth, and the twelfth amethyst.f21 The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each gate made of a single pearl. The great street of the city was of gold, as pure as transparent glass.

22 I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. 23 The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. 24 The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. 25 On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there.26 The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it. 27 Nothing impure will ever enter it, nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life.

Revelation 22:

Eden Restored

1 Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2 down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. 3 No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. 4 They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. 5 There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.

John and the Angel

6 The angel said to me, “These words are trustworthy and true. The Lord, the God who inspires the prophets, sent his angel to show his servants the things that must soon take place.”

7 “Look, I am coming soon! Blessed is the one who keeps the words of the prophecy written in this scroll.”

8 I, John, am the one who heard and saw these things. And when I had heard and seen them, I fell down to worship at the feet of the angel who had been showing them to me. 9 But he said to me, “Don’t do that! I am a fellow servant with you and with your fellow prophets and with all who keep the words of this scroll. Worship God!”

10 Then he told me, “Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this scroll, because the time is near. 11 Let the one who does wrong continue to do wrong; let the vile person continue to be vile; let the one who does right continue to do right; and let the holy person continue to be holy.”

Epilogue: Invitation and Warning

12 “Look, I am coming soon! My reward is with me, and I will give to each person according to what they have done. 13 I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.

[ramrodd]

Who Wrote Mark's Gospel? Part 1 of the new Mark series

COMMENTARY:

Well, if boldness in the search of Truth is what you seek, I'm the answer to your prayer at 52:47.  

Cornelius, the centurion featured in Acts X, Matthew 8 and Luke 7 is the author of The Gospel According to Mark. As you know, Tertullian reports that Tiberius proposed to elevate Jesus to a legal deity status to the Senate based on intelligence he received from Pilate in Palestine. That intelligence was prepared by Cornelius as Pilate's Administrative COS. Pilate and Cornelius were both members of the Italian Cohort (aka The Praetorian Guards) and they prepared the report regarding Resurrection up the chain of command on what would be a "FLASH" message status, although the actual status was the Roman military and diplomatic language for "Tidings of Joy" regarding a military success. In Greek, that was εὐαγγελίου (aka: euangel)

Of course, as you know, the Roman Senate rejected the proposal because of their dislike of Tiberius in much the same way Moscow Mitch McConnell denied Piresident Obama a seat on SCOTUS and POTUS Pencil Prick is trying to destroy all things Obama. 

Tertullian also mentions that this was the first time "Christian" was officially introduced into the common idiom in Rome. Tertullian was Roman lawyer from Carthage and a stout defender of the faith. He created the ontologyof the Trinity. 

It's hard to say when this was, but we know the Jews and Gentiles on The Way first heard themselves described as "Christians' in Acts 11:25, around CE 44. Tiberius died in 37 and Pilate was recalled in 36 for reasons unknown. It's possible he was discovered as being part of the Sajanus plot and liquidated. I think he was called back to brief Tiberius this whole Resurrection thing in connection with Tiberius' proposal to the Senate regarding Jesus and then died without resolving any clear policy in regards to "Christians" and Pilate disolves into the mythos.

Cornelius, on the other hand, remained at Caesarea. This was a climax duty station for him as it was and it is not unlikely that he was retired by the time Peter catches up with him in CE 40, but I think it is more likely he continued to serve as the Administrative chief of the governor's staff in Caesarea until Paul shows up in 59 and Luke has a chance to interview both him and Peter in regards to the creation the Gospel According to Mark.

Before the Gospel According to Mark, there was the Q source and before it became the Q source, it was a routine military intelligence surveillance file on a potential insurgent that appeared above the Roman military horizon when He was baptized. A great deal of the pericopes in Mark that suggest an eyewitness (as you point out in your own commentary) was reported by the Roman spy system before Jesus was arrested and has NO oral tradition content Bart Ehrman likes to cite in his sophistry. It's police blotter data collected along a rigid military timeline.  Your apologetics are really pretty weak shit when people like Richard Carrier and Richard Dawson are able to basically debate any Solo Scriptura pilgrim to a draw.

Jesus is exactly who He says He is but your apologetics concedes that the Gospel narrative is basically a fairy-tale you really, really want to be able to demonstrate logically is true. Part of my Christian commission is to convince people like you that the entire Bible is like Sgt, Joe Friday on Dragnet: Just the Facts, Ma'am. Another part is to promote the Holy Ghost as a capitalist tool and the quickest solution to global warming, thanks to NOAH and the Weather Channel.

But that's a story for another day.

The connection you make between Jesus walking on the water and Job is very important in understanding the sublime natue of the literature of the Bible in constrast to the arid wasteland of the post-modern dialectical deconstruction historical methods of  the Solo Scriptura business model of Pro-Life Evangelical spiritual warriors and Campus Crusade for Christ survivors.

The Book of Job existed before Moses had a jock strap and it sets the Bible as an epic narrative in motion that comes to its dramatic climax at John 11:35, when the sin-debt of the human condition came due and Jesus realized He had lost the wager He had made with The Satan in the Wilderness that He could free the Children of Moses from the chains of the Talmud with argument and logic. Mark 15:34 is a literary bankshot into the Book of Job.

As Tertullian points out, John Mark is the publisher of The Gospel According to Mark. He establishes the first Christian publishing house in Alexandria and mass produces manuscripts of anything that came out of Alexandria before 400. Dan wallace observes that 90% of the manuscripts we can currently inventory came out of Alexandria. John Mark was always known by the pet name Jesus called him as "the Beloved Disciple". John Mark is the young man who runs away naked in Gethsemane and he is also and editor and constributor to the larger narrative (Mark 7:19: parenthetical phrase; Mark 15:27; and Mark 16:9 - 20). John Mark is also the author of The Gospel of John, which Pappias had encouraged him to compose to capture Peter's experiences.

The Gospel of John is a companion narrative to The Gospel According to Mark and provides the nature of the argument and logic Jesus expected to free the Children of Moses from the chains of the Talmud. It has a very flexible timeline that begins at the same point as Cornelius in the Q source, but the marriage at Cana is the first time he meets Jesus and becomes the Beloved Disciple. There is a certain ambiguous quality to the relationship between Jesus and the Beloved Disciple/John Mark that could be misconstrued as homoerotic in nature, but Jesus died a virgin.

If John 4 is any indication, Jesus (and the Holy Spirit) had a number of Love Children everywhere He went. The woman with the chronic flow in Mark 5:25 blind-sides Jesus because He has no carnal knowledge of woman qua woman. In this, He is a very typical Jew, in this regards, and all that plumbing hit Him in some spiritual blind side that sucked the Spirit of the Lord out of Him and fixed her parts. After that, Jesus may have made any number of women pregnant by immaculate conception, such as the Samaritan woman at Jacob's Well, a pericope with an obvious allusion to Tamar and Judah.  And it is possible that John Mark is one of these Love Children Jesus sowed with John Mark's mother, Mary of Jerusalem who own the Upper Room.

The narratives of Mark and John converge, chronologically at the feeding of the 5000 in Chapter 5 of both books and then again at Chapter 11 with a final convergence at the Cross with the other two Gospels.

The Gospel According to Mark is a result of the debriefing Cornelius conducted with Peter in Acts X and become a follow-up intelligence report about the Christians and Jesus up the chain of command to Theophilus in the Praetorian Guards. For clarity, I assume that Theophilus is the author of Hebrews and has a role in the Emperor's intelligence services similar to George Smiley in MI6: the desk officer for a certain intelligence porfolio and strategic intelligence project: the idea of Resurrection never occurred to the Romans: it is a purely Jewish concept. along with the Jewish notion that history was going someplace. It turns out the common denominator between the republican experiment in secular government and Jesus is Melchizedek by way of Socrates.

But this the important thing; The Gospel According to Mark wasn't written in Rome for a Roman audience by John Mark, but in Caesarea by a Roman centurion as a part of his professional responsibilities for his superiors in the Praetorian Guards in Rome. Bart Ehrman is exactly correct: Cornelius really didn't know much about Jewish matters: he had never been to a Seder, for example, and he knew just enough not to force Jesus to become unclean by entering his home, but Romans and Jews didn't mix that much in Jerusalem except at the whore houses/taverns that inevitably sprout around military occupation garrisons. Personally, as a combat veteran, I am far more comfortable with the publicans and sinners than the saints and self-righteous of the MAGA hat nation.  

I'm an Army brat. I was raised by centurions and grew up, preparing to become one, myself. I've had a working relationship with the Holy Ghost since 1954 and, as I say, he and I are working on a project to remove the log from your eye in regards to the author of the Gospel According to Mark so that the Truth of the Cross becomes a moral certainty: the object of the exercise from Genesis 1:1 to Mark 15:39 is to validate the God Hypothesis.

The Gospel According to Mark was being written when John the Baptist still had his head before CE 29. Before the Cross came the Q source. The reason why no other gospels are contained in the Canon is because they had no access to the Q source: it was entirely an intellectual property of the Praetorian Guards.

Here's one last thing to consider: The Gospel According to Mark employs εὐθὺς (immediately) 41 times. Mark was originally written in Latin, the language of the Roman bureaucracy and legions and the crudeness of the Greek (as I understand from qualified scholars) is a result. The use of  εὐθὺς is an apparatus of the narrative and acts like a * that designates both the boundaries of Peter's testimony (Mark 1:10 and Mark 15:1) and those pericopes that are verified by multiple eye-witness sources. As Luke observes in Acts 24:22, the Romans were well informed regarding the Christians in Palestine.

And none of it has anything to do with the oral tradition.  Bart Ehrman seems to mistake the Gospels for the Muslim hadiths.

[samleheny]

Jedi and Lutherans: what Rey and Martin Luther might have in common

When I was a kid, I was a massive Star Wars nerd. How massive? I read the books. THE BOOKS! That’s when you know you’re lost!

One day I stopped, looked at my bloated belly, and decided that between the film, games, dolls, books, TV shows, legos, bed sheets, death star shaped ice cube trays, and Shakespeare reinterpreted to involve Star Wars characters,  I’d consumed enough Star Wars to last several life times, and even without actually going all that ham personally on all the merchandise and expanded lore, merely living in a world saturated in such an omni-present franchise had rendered the Star Wars universe a fairly mundane setting for me. And growing up didn’t help, because as your tastes refine it becomes harder and more thankless to spot the one or two good things about the Prequel trilogy, which was ‘my generation’s’ Star Wars. And I didn’t have any industrial strength nostalgia goggles lying around.

So when Lucas Films was snapped up by the equally omni-present Disney Corporation and a new line of Star Wars films was announced, my reaction was “Neat... I’m going back to bed.” I still haven’t seen the Force Awakens nor Rogue One (Is Rogue One a code name? Or is it like “The one who is rogue”?) but just recently a mistaken click on some click-bait rumour article about the upcoming instalment The Last Jedi saw me stumble upon a fan theory that turned out to be the most I’ve been intrigued by Star Wars in over a decade. It started in the article with ‘Grey Jedi’ and ended in my head with the Vatican and the Protestant Reformation.

Strap in.

The rumour is that Rey, the main protagonist of this new line of films, is the first canonically recognised Grey Jedi. “What on Earth is a Grey Jedi?” I wondered. It’s a fan made term, or maybe one initiated in the obscure expanded lore which has apparently now been declared non-canon by Disney (it’s all very confusing) and its meaning is a little vague, but is usually given one of two definitions. The first is just a Jedi who’s a bit of a bad boy, and who has some trouble following the rules of being a Jedi. So I guess by that logic any Jedi who becomes an evil Sith Lord by definition has to have transitioned from Jedi, to Grey Jedi, to Sith Lord (the Black Jedi by the naming convention suggested by “Grey Jedi”). Fans have suggested that Qui Gon Jin was a Grey Jedi simply because he was a bit of an arsehole who never agreed with anything the Jedi Council said. That makes sense I guess. I recall Count Dookoo suggesting that Qui Gon had been fertile for conversion to the Dark Side.

But the second definition - the one I find interesting – is simply one who is in balance with the force (much like a Jedi) but who is not a Jedi. Does not subscribe to the force related teachings of the Jedi Order. Following the Order’s teachings has long been depicted in the series as synonymous with being ‘in balance’ with the Force, the only alternative being to make the force one’s figurative bitch, which seemingly defines one as belonging to the evil Sith. Basically the anti-Jedi. But the very existence of Grey Jedi calls that dichotomy into question, which means nothing if Grey Jedi are just a figment of the fandom’s imagination, but if the current makers of Star Wars are indeed planning on taking this idea and running with it, I could see that being very interesting and somewhat daring.

Here’s the thing. The now long extinguished Jedi Council were a bunch of idiots. That’s not how they were deliberately depicted, it’s just a result of George Lucas’ horrendously amateurish plot and character writing throughout the prequel trilogy that many Star Wars fans have this unofficial idea that the pre-Luke Skywalker Jedi weren’t as wise as the story would have us believe.

What? The guy who’s been acting like a Sith Lord all this time and has benefited from every bad thing that’s gone down to which he’s always had a super obvious connection turned out to be the Sith Lord? Oooooh nooooo, who could have figured that out except anyone?

Suppose that notion was also picked up by the film makers and officially recognised. If they don’t have the onions to just add the prequels to the increasingly crowded bin of Non-Canon, then they could at least acknowledge that the Jedi’s old fashioned mindset and rigid insistence that the Force moves in mysterious ways was partially responsible for them getting outsmarted and all but wiped out by the Sith.

But if Grey Jedi are a real thing now and one can officially be not only force-sensitive, but also successfully wield the force as a partner (like a Jedi) and not as a slave (like the Sith) without giving a toss about shunning emotion, or never hooking up with anyone, or wearing your hair in a stupid braid until the council tells you you can stop, or any other silly little rule from the How To Be Awesome Jedi handbook, then how much or how little authority do the Jedi as an institution actually have on the subject of the Force?

The reason this intrigues me is because I have an affection for internet history videos (how did my high school manage to make history seem so boring?!) and this potential ‘Force Schism’ reminds me of a medieval figure whose story I recently got pretty big into. Martin Luther.

His is the story of the Protestant Reformation, which was a huge goddamn deal for Christians and consequently anyone who happens to share a planet with them. I am an agnostic atheist; I don’t believe in the divine, but I don’t for a second claim to know that the divine does or does not exist. I typically don’t get on well with organised religion, but even I have to admit that I like a lot about the way this Martin Luther guy thought.

Who was he? He was a German law student turned monk born in 1483 and who by 1517 had grown increasingly frustrated with the Catholic Church’s corruption and abuse of authority over people’s immortal souls, authority which he believed it didn’t actually have. This came to a head one day when a friar arrived in town selling ‘indulgences’ which were basically little slips of paper absolving you of some of your sins.

Yes, you could buy that. As far as the Catholic church was concerned, redemption in the eyes of God was quite literally for sale. If you think that sounds a little messed up, Martin Luther agreed. He wrote Ninety Five Theses decrying the custom and famously nailed them to the church door before the eyes of the public.

From here his ideas became increasingly radical (and increasingly awesome) generally attempting to expose the Church’s rituals like the priesthood as being mere formality, entirely of human design, possessing no actual spiritual power. High ranking church officials were seen as holy, and having authority to dictate the will of God to the masses, and priests were often the only ones in each town or village who could read, or at least who could read Latin, which conveniently was the only language in which scripture was available. “God has a thing about condoms. You can’t read the bible, but trust me, that’s totally what it says!” But Luther denounced even the pope himself as imperfect and fallible like any other human being. At the core of Luther’s system of belief was “Sola fide” - “Only faith”. The belief that everything one needed to attain salvation in the eyes of God was their own faith, and not the outside help of anyone specially authorised to admit God’s approval.

In addition to spreading the idea that people didn’t need priests and as individuals already had everything they needed to practise their faith, Luther translated the bible to common, everyday German and used the new technology of the printing press to distribute it to the people on a massive scale. Now everyone could read the bible for themselves, breaking up the church’s tidy little monopoly on salvation. And when a monopoly gets broken up, the previous holder of that monopoly suddenly finds them self facing actual pressure to perform well in the face of new competition. The Vatican’s officially sanctioned interpretation of scripture was no longer automatically the correct one by simple virtual of being the only available interpretation.

This was a massive, massive deal because the Catholic church had been - without hyperbole – the most powerful institution in Europe, and that power was based on having built a necessity for themselves and their man-made traditions into what was the dominant form of the dominant religion throughout the entire continent. And Luther’s insistence that soul authority (har har) over what God says and wants was not held by anyone here on Earth led to massive fracturing in the church. Suddenly everybody had their own interpretation of scripture and everybody was going off to start their own church.

This wasn’t just a spiritual schism, it was a continental political revolution.

So what if the Jedi’s authority over matters of the Force is also assumed and has been gradually born of hubris and vanity? You might think “What?! But the Jedi are the good guys! The way of the Jedi has been at the centre of every mainline Star Wars story!”

Well… Not only have the Jedi failed spectacularly in their role as galactic, Force fueled peacekeepers at least twice, but I’d argue their methods have led to a repetitive loop of stale events and plot lines in the Star Wars films. I’ve always felt this weird inconsistency in the spirituality of Star Wars. A clashing between Western philosophical themes of dichotomy - of good vs evil, and Eastern philosophical themes of balance in all aspects of life and nature. The overarching goal of the Jedi throughout Star Wars history has been to “bring balance to the force”. Balance implies harmonious existence of two opposing forces, but the Jedi usual speak of this balance in terms of defeating and eliminating once and for all their long time counterparts, the Sith. And twice now within the films they’ve thought to have finally achieved this only for the Sith to pull the rug out from under them and reveal just how distant this dream of balance still is.

Well what if that’s because the Jedi have been going about it all wrong? What if this Western style dichotomy in pursuit of Eastern style balance never works because the dichotomy itself is a perversion of the Force? Is being an emotionless, celibate hippy like being a Jedi requires really what brings balance to the force? Or is this insistence on what are actually arbitrary, man-made ideals what causes force users to become frustrated and seek emotional freedom as Sith, seeking conflict with the Jedi allegedly being the only force sensitive alternative to being a Jedi?

Maybe the Jedi’s authority over matters of the force has become muddied and misused. Maybe all that pomp and ritual can be thrown off for what it is - meaningless. ‘Sola vis’ if you will. “Only the Force”.

The hopelessness in the way the Jedi have always operated, and the accompanying contradiction has I think long been unintentional and the result of sloppy writing. But now is a new era of Star Wars, so why not get meta with its narrative? The writers should pull the old “Nah, we meant to do that!”. Take the nonsensicalness of the prequel Star Wars era and embrace it – recognise it as nonsensical and use it to explain why the Star Wars story keeps looping (then nobody can complain anymore that Return of the Jedi seems pointless now that we know the peace didn’t last five minutes). Just as Star Wars is recovering from a run of bad writing, let’s have the characters’ understanding of the force recover from thousands of years of flawed, fallible people assuming undue spiritual authority (Thousands? Hundreds? I don’t know, every era in Star Wars history feels pretty interchangeable).

The moral compass of the Star Wars world has traditionally been a pretty simplistic one (ain’t nothin’ wrong with simplicity): Jedi good. Jedi are awesome. Jedi know what’s up. Do you want to be absolutely sure that you’re one of the good guys and that you’re talking sense? Then make sure you’re a Jedi. So it would be quite a drastic change to the franchise to suggest that all this time the omni-present Jedi have been getting it at least a little bit wrong. But it’s also exciting to think that maybe being a Jedi is just one way of using the Force harmoniously, and that this balance will finally be possible once the Jedi finally stop and ask themselves “Huh... what is the point of all these super specific rules?”

I hope it turns out Rey does indeed reject the Jedi teachings without losing her harmony with the force and becoming a Sith. And what if Kylo Ren comes to the same realisation from the other side of the court? He seems pretty insistent that the Jedi suck, but he also seems unsure of himself as a Sith. Sounds like he should give this Grey Jedi thing a try too. Unless it turns out I’m misreading, completely, and The Last Jedi turns out to be going after something completely different and this was all a waste of time...

2020 edit: Fuck sake, Abrams. Yes, I do in fact remember my childhood. We established that with Force Awakens. But that can’t hold up an entire trilogy if you’ve nothing else on your mind!

[jurakan]

Alright time for Jurakan to bitch about grad school yay! Part 2

Alrighty time to sit down and type again because the library doesn’t have that much on gothic literature and obsession that I can find.

So also in this novel class (which I did not expect to be as annoying as all that but things happen I guess) there was a discussion about rising literacy rates, what is it that made the people of Britain want to read more, and so on. So we came to the conclusion that the printing press was one of these things, as one should probably do because we can’t underestimate the impact it had.

But another thing brought up was the Protestant Reformation. Which I agree was also a big factor, but someone phrased it as “Oh after the Reformation the Catholic Church lost power; whereas before the Church would execute you for stepping out of line.” And the professor agreed and pointed out that now we had Bibles being printed in the vernacular, the idea being “putting the power in the people’s hands.”

Alright we’re going to stop and dissect this:

1.) The English Reformation was kicked off by an overweight tyrant being unable to keep it in his pants. We’re not getting around that. Henry VIII was declared “Defender of the Faith” after refuting Martin Luther. He split with the Catholic Church after it didn’t grant his divorce with Catherine of Aragon.

2.) Now why didn’t Pope Clement VII  grant his divorce with Catherine of Aragon? Welp, there are legal reasons (being Henry’s brother’s previous wife, she had to get special dispensation from the previous Pope to allow his marriage to Henry and I don’t know if a Pope can overrule a previous Pope’s ruling like that), but if we’re going to be realistic here, it’s also because Catherine of Aragon’s nephew was the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V! And hey, Charles V also went and sacked Rome and kidnapped Clement VII!

So, uh, yeah, threat of physical violence. 

3.) And the thing is, Popes getting kidnapped? Has tons of historical precedence. We’re taught in high school history here in America that during the Middle Ages, the Pope just had to say “Jump!” and all the kings and queens of Europe would ask, “How high?” But that’s not really the case. Yes, the Papacy had more secular power than today, and yes that power was often abused; I suspect this is what happens when you decide that most of the clergy must come out the aristocracy. But the notion that the Catholic Church ruled the Christian world with an iron fist is just not supported by the evidence.

4.) The notion that the English Reformation, or any Reformation, was about putting power into “the people’s hands” is absurdist. It was certainly about taking it out of the Catholic Church’s hands, yeah, but suggesting that the people who started the English Reformation were concerned with “The People” is near lunatic historical revision. As stated above, Henry VIII was a tyrant; he grabbed Catholic Church property and money for himself and had people who disagreed with his changes executed. Some people have suggested he was the worst English monarch of all time.

5.) Before the advent of the printing press, mass literacy was not a feasible concept. If you have no way to produce a large number of books for everyone to consume, there is really not a practical reason to decide that everyone needs to know how to read. This isn’t some massive scheme by the Catholic Church to keep everyone ignorant for their own sake--that’s not history, that’s the plot of Da Vinci’s Demons. Can you imagine trying to teach a bunch of people to read from scratch without enough books in circulation to do it from? Yeah, monasteries had a bunch of books, but most of those are theological and philosophical texts. That’s not a good place to start people reading.

6.) Yes, the language of the Church is Latin. Because having a universal language is good. It makes communication easier between clergymen. And yeah, having everyone have their own way to interpret the Bible was probably seen as a bad thing; it still is for Catholics and Orthodox Christians. Because when anyone can interpret what the Bible means, then they’ll twist it to mean anything, especially if they don’t have the context of the languages and cultures it was built from. The Catholic Church, which was the institution that compiled the Bible, would naturally hold that they’re the ones who had the authority to interpret it.

7.) And yeah, guess what happens when you let anyone interpret the Bible however they want? You get war. Which is exactly what happened across Europe as the Protestant Reformation spread. Princes in the Germanies decided they didn’t like living under a Catholic ruler and used Protestantism as an excuse to break off from under Charles V’s thumb. Ireland and Scotland up until the modern era are divided by the Reformation. Yeah, Martin Luther was a smart guy, as far as theologians go (if a bit of a temperamental dude; seriously look up his insults), but other Reformers? Like I said, Henry VIII split off for his dick and purse’s sakes, and then you have guys like Zwingli, who was just an idiot (he seems confused by God’s omnipresence of all things). In the past, heretics have gone so far as to actually break up countries such as the Cathars, who basically seceded from France. You bet your bottom dollar the Catholic Church was a bit touchy about these kinds of things.

8.) Also the professor said that Bloody Mary had “thousands of people” executed for being Protestant. That’s an exaggeration; she killed people in the hundreds, as far as we can tell, which is still too many. But for as much as we’re taught that Elizabeth I was a religiously tolerant ruler, she had Catholic priests hanged, drawn and quartered under her reign. After the English Reformation, Catholics were hunted down. Here’s a list of 350 Catholic martyrs in Britain.

9.) And you know what? The whole “Catholics killed everyone who put the Bible in vernacular!” thing doesn’t hold up. Because the Bible had been translated into English before the Reformation. Saint Bede started working on it (albeit in Old English), but there were also the Lindisfarne Gospels in the early 8th century. Wycliffe and Tyndale were condemned for their English translations not because they were in English, but because they happened to speak out against the clergy and Papacy of the Catholic Church. 

But yeah, they were killed because the Church hates English I guess. And Protestants are the heroic builders of freedom and democracy.

I hate the world.

Alright I’m done for now.

[ramrodd]

COMMENTARY:

Bill Chapman

Bill's Bible Basics

The premise for your portrait of Cornelius, to wit:

The idea for this article came about as a result of someone challenging my view in which I stated that one cannot serve in the Lord's Army and man's army at the same time. One cannot follow Jesus' commandment to save lives while at the same time he destroys lives through the mandates of some Earthly government or military force.

.is mostly crap. It's your basic Campus Crusade for Christ doctrine for juveniles. Which is actually redundant. Campus Crusade for Christ is for baby Christians, who are still sucklings on the milk of Christian Stewardship. This is for people stuck, eternally, at the Four Spiritual Laws.

Cornelius is operating far beyond the horizon of Campus Crusade for Christ long before there is Campus Crusade for Christ. That's the significance of Matthew 8:10 “Not in all of Israel have I found such faith”.  

In the '60s, Campus Crusade for Christ was a draft sanctuary, like teaching school or going on a Mormon missionary.

You need to connect the dots between “Onward, Christian Soldiers”, The Battle Hymn of the Republic and the connection between “authority”,“faith”  and “duty, honor, country” in this context.

It didn't really occur to me until this instant, but the people who went on staff at Campus Crusade for Christ were pacifists and conscientious objectors. One of my best friends and fraternity bother went on staff with his wife, a sorority sister to the woman I was engaged to when I went to Vietnam.  Campus Crusade for Christ are like Quakers, but far more pernicious with your perverted Pro-Life theology and Norman Vincent Peale version of the Prosperity Gospel.

Cornelius is the only person besides Abraham to be justified by faith by the Trinity in the Bible. His justification connects the dots between Jesus and Hebrews as the establishment manifesto of what became the Vatican and Christianity anywhere you can find a Gideon Bible in a hotel bedside drawer. Speaking of Gideon, how do you disconnect the dots between Cornelius, Gideon, Joshua and Uriah the Hittite?

For one thing, Cornelius, as a centurion, represents True warfare, while Gideon, Joshua and Uriah the Hittite, as  warriors, represent Real warfare. As it stands right now, the centurion class in the US military, E-7 and above, represent the foundation of the underwriting for the US Constitution, as proposed in principle by the syndication of patriots which underwrote the Declaration of Independence by blood. Like the Amish, your pacific self-righteousness is guaranteed by the US Army, thank you very much for my service. I went to Vietnam so that sanctimonious assholes like you and Ben Shapiro can gloat from your perspective of moral superiority over the republican warrior and patriot. And it's working out pretty well for you, if your LinkedIn/Facebook trolling is any indication.

The only thing missing on your web page to help you monetize your faith are BBB MAGA hats for the true believers.

Cornelius is the author and/or executive editor of The Gospel of Mark. He is a member of the Praetorian Guard, the Italian Cohort or Regiment, that had been established by serendipity after the 7 kings as Rome invents itself as a Republic. They obviously got the general idea from Plato, but Plato is a little vague on the practical political science involved, and what evolved was the core Presbyterian structures of Federalist 10. Our Republic, everything connected with public property and its management, beginning with the Pentagon, employs the fundamental structures of the Roman republic.

The Centurion is an essential component of those structures. It is a horizontal structure, the pay grade and function, that let the Roman legions put themselves together like Lego Blocks and Latin. This is characteristic of True Warfare and a novelty in 1st Century Pax Romana.

The armies of David and the Philistines were tribal confederations, like the confederation of Nations that swallowed Custer whole and spit out his bones. Confederations are characteristic of Real Warfare.  

Cornelius is probably Pilate's administrative chief, his Chief of Staff. He is a very senior centurion in the Praetorian Guard, in his climax posting. It is possible he is retired in Acts 10, but both he and Pilate survived the purges Tiberius engineered after the Sejanus plot was exposed. Sejanus was executed in 31 and Tiberius died in 37 and Peter visits Cornelius in 39/40, during the reign of Caligula.

Cornelius, in his role as Chief of Staff, is also the head of the Roman military intelligence services and Pilate's personal spy net works. Pilateb gets a lot of bad press from Christians, but he was apparently a competent administrator. Like Julius Caesar, Pilate was on the diplomatic/military career path in the Praetorian Guard. The Praetorian Guard has evolved into the Pentagon, DOJ and the federal bureaucracy in the modern times, but, at that time, all these functions were conducted by the Praetorian Guards, the primary moving part of the public offices, separate from the Senate. A difference between the Roman Republic under an emperor and the American Republic is that the Emperor the dictator of the Roman Senate and POTUS is the chief executive of the Republic: he's hired help. We, the People, are the Emperors of America. And We, the People, organize our Athenian Democracy around the pursuit of happiness. We all live in the Yellow Submarine, 

Anyway, Cornelius runs the Roman military intelligence services in Caesarea and begins to keep a file on Jesus of Nazareth when He pops up above the military horizon as a potential insurgent. This file becomes the core journalism and time line for the Gospel of Mark and what became the Q Source. The Gospel of Mark became known as the Gospel of Mark because it was published by the scribes Mark organized  Alexandria and distributed throughout the Roman legions and Empire. 

According to Dan Wallace, 90% of all manuscripts before the 4th century came out of Alexandria. After his sojourn in Cypress, Mark set up the first Christian publishing house in Alexandria and began to copy the intelligence report Cornelius had sent to Rome after he debriefed Peter in his home in Caesarea. It was originally written in Latin, the language of the bureaucracy of the Praetorian Guards, which is why the Greek is so crude: it's a translation. Cornelius may have translated it into coine Greek or Mark did the translation when he did the editing, which is when he includes the episode of the young man escaping naked in Gethsemane.  

It is obvious that both the Gospel of Mark and Gospel of Matthew were available to Luke when Paul is imprisoned by Felix, which he uses as source material plus the Q Source plus interviews with Cornelius and Peter before Peter goes to Rome. Plus interviews with everybody still living from the Gospel of Mark.

Luke probably had a thriving OB/GYN practice among the Jewish congregations whereever he went. The stories he tells of the women are the sort of stories and legends women share in waiting rooms, today, and around the village well in the evening. Much of what an OB/GYN deals with is unclean to Hebrew men on the 1st Century, whose morning prayer was, in effect, Thank you, Lord, I am not a slave, a gentile/dog or a woman. I mean, he was doing for Jewish women what Jesus did for the woman with the chronic flow and what Planned Parenthood is doing for women today, in spite of the asshole Pro-Life Campus Crusade for Christ heresies.

You see, Ben Shapiro considers himself moral superior because he is Pro-Life, which means he really, really respects human life, and you consider yourself to be morally superior because you serm ve only God as a pacifist because you really, really respect human life and a soldier's life is not a Christian's life.

Cornelius and his household are the only people in the Bible to be baptized by the Holy Spirit before being baptized by water, including Jesus. I'm not an adoptionist, but the Holy Spirit announced his presence after John dunks Jesus in the Jordan, which is why Cornelius begins to keep a file on this potential insurgent.

There is an epistemological progression that runs straight as a laser from Melchizedek to Abraham to Moses to the Cross to Romans and from Melchizedek to the 7 Kings to the centurion to Hebrews to the National Cathedral.

In short, your portrait of Cornelius is a sanctimonious and juvenile rationalization of a Campus Crusade for Christ Pro-Life MAGA hat draft dodger. The good news is that it is clearly part of God's plan for your life that the Holy Spirit has caused our paths to cross. The Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and my military specialization has been to guide individuals through a systematic process to calibrate your Pucker Factor in relation to that metric.