#that was a myth made up in the 19th century

[lesbianrecorderplayer]

"No School Like the Old School

You probably have Opinions on Gregorian Chant and parallel fifths. You can name at least three Pre-Baroque composers, and you are upset that I didn't include Hildegard von Bingen at some point in the quiz."

I made a classical music uquiz because I hadn't found one yet

[lev1hei1chou]

Gossip Girl

Gojo x reader Genre: Fluff Synopsis: Gojo judges people at a party Masterlist

"Do you think he actually believes that comb-over is fooling anyone?" Gojo whispered, leaning down to your ear, his breath tickling your neck.

You giggled, trying to stifle the sound with your hand. "I know, right? It's like the hair is trying to escape his head."

Gojo snorted, straightening up and taking a sip of his drink. "And look at her over there," he continued, nodding towards a woman in a neon pink dress that hugged her in all the wrong places. "I swear, Barbie called and she wants her dress back."

You nearly choked on your drink, doubling over in laughter. "Stop it! You're going to get us caught," you managed between breaths, wiping away tears of mirth.

Gojo grinned, his eyes sparkling with mischief. "Hey, we're just here to observe the high society in its natural habitat. Think of it as research."

"Research, huh?" you replied, raising an eyebrow. "And what exactly are we researching?"

He looked thoughtful for a moment, then flashed you a brilliant smile. "The limits of human taste and the fascinating ways people choose to ignore them."

You nudged him playfully. "You're terrible, you know that?"

"I try," he said with a wink. "But seriously, look at that guy over there. Is he wearing socks with sandals?"

You turned to see a middle-aged man obliviously chatting away, indeed sporting the offensive footwear combination. "Oh my god," you whispered. "I thought that was just a myth."

"Nope, living proof right there," Gojo said, shaking his head in mock despair. "It's like witnessing a rare bird."

"A rare, fashion-challenged bird," you agreed, trying to keep a straight face.

As the evening wore on, the two of you continued your undercover mission, providing commentary on everything from questionable dance moves to over-the-top makeup choices. Gojo was in his element, his quick wit and sharp observations making you laugh harder than you had in weeks.

"Okay, new game," he announced suddenly. "Who do you think has the most scandalous secret here?"

You scanned the room thoughtfully. "Hmm, I'd say Mrs. Hikaru over there," you said, pointing discreetly to an older woman with a suspiciously young man hanging on her arm. "She looks like she's hiding something."

Gojo followed your gaze and nodded sagely. "Good choice. I'm going with Mr. Moustache over there," he said, indicating a man with a magnificent handlebar moustache. "No one grows a moustache like that without hiding some deep, dark secrets."

"Or a penchant for 19th-century fashion," you added, smirking.

Gojo laughed, then turned serious for a moment, looking at you with an intensity that made your heart skip a beat. "You know, I'm really glad we're here together. Makes this whole thing bearable."

You felt a warmth spread through you at his words. "Me too," you admitted, smiling up at him. "It's way more fun with you."

He grinned, slipping an arm around your shoulders. "Of course it is. Who else could provide such witty banter?"

You leaned into him, feeling content and happy. "Well, you do have a gift," you teased.

"I know, right?" he said, pretending to be smug. "But don't sell yourself short. You're a pretty amazing partner in crime."

"Partner in crime, huh?" you repeated, liking the sound of it. "I think I can live with that."

"Good," Gojo said, giving you a quick squeeze. "Because I don't plan on letting you go anytime soon."

You looked up at him, your eyes meeting his, and for a moment, the noisy party faded away. It was just the two of you, in your own little world.

Then the moment was broken by a loud crash from across the room, where someone had knocked over a table full of drinks.

Gojo sighed dramatically. "And the award for the most graceful exit goes to..."

"That guy," you finished, both of you dissolving into laughter again.

[penny-anna]

another thing w ancient history is like. high school classes WILL sometimes tell you things that are not correct. I remember being explicitly told that the textbook we used for classical art was out of date but since it was on the syllabus everything it said was considered 'right' for the purposes of the exam.

once when i was in uhh middle school i think? a teacher told us the 'the Romans sowed the fields of Carthage with salt' thing which i later found out is a myth that was fully debunked in the 1980s (no ancient source mentions this, it starts cropping up in the 19th century). i've seen the 'Caligula made his horse a senator' myth crop up a lot in pop history sources (the primary source on this one is actually Suetonius saying it never happened). & like that's not even getting into things ancient sources say did happen but are disputed by historians lmao.

[marzipanandminutiae]

Wanna be horrified with me?

I had to watch a document about white colonizers in Canada for class and there was a throwaway line about a young woman travelling out to the "Northwest" (basically the prairie provinces of Canada) to get married and having ALL HER TEETH PULLED and replaced with dentures before the move.

Take me out behind the barn and shoot me first. That made me cringe so hard.

I just looked this up to see if it was a Thing. Big mistake.

No pictures, thank god, but anecdotal evidence that it has been a Thing on and off, in various cultures- especially in Acadia, which checks out here -into the 1970s in some cases. IE people saying "oh yeah, my great-grandma had that!" It seems to have mostly been isolated, not mainstream. Not that that's stopped myth-makers from claiming that ALL VICTORIAN BRIDES HAD THEIR TEETH REMOVED!!!! I hardly need to say that I've found no evidence of this- indeed, I've never read anything about an adult woman with healthy teeth having needless extractions in the 19th century until today (primarily reading publications and letters from urban or suburban areas of the US and UK, and sometimes France). And plenty of married or simply older women discussing tooth problems- one letter I read from 1820s Boston had a married fortysomething lady complaining about a toothache, for example

Actually, I'm finding more early-mid 20th century sources about it, now I really poke around. Interesting. I almost wonder if it didn't gain in popularity as infection became less of an issue, rather than being an older practice.

The idea, apparently, was that you couldn't have tooth problems if you didn't have teeth. Which is. Interesting and highly flawed logic, because now you have Got All My Teeth Extracted In A Pre-Antibiotics Era problems. Plus potential bone loss in your jaw, over time, which causes other issues.

Yeesh. I need to go brush and floss 15 times, brb

[thethirdromana]

LGBT+ Victorians

Since it's Pride Month and Dracula Daily is going to be pretty quiet for most of June, I thought it might be good timing for a little 1890s queer history. Plus I wanted to give a bit more fuel to everyone's queer headcanons for Dracula characters!

Popping this under a cut because it's long.

The start of queer identity This is a massive generalisation, but for most of British history, being queer was about action and not about identity. The idea that people who wanted to have gay sex belonged to a specific group that was different to other people didn't exist for the most part, at least not at a societal level. (This was also true - more generalisation - for much of the western world. It was very much not true for large swathes of the rest of the world who thought about this in entirely different and varied ways).

By the second half of the 19th century, that was starting to change. People like Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in Germany (on the left), and John Addington Symonds (middle) and Edward Carpenter (right) in the UK started to think of themselves as homosexuals - Ulrichs coined the term "Urning" which became "Uranian" in English. This period marked the beginning of organised campaigning for LGBT rights in the UK, though specific campaigning for lesbian and trans rights came later.

This means that in the 1890s setting of Dracula, any characters might think of themselves as "Uranian" or "Sapphic", or they might not yet have picked up that way of thinking. At a guess I'd expect Seward or van Helsing to be particularly aware of the new theory around homosexuality.

LGBT rights in law It was a mixed time for the legal position of LGBT people. The death penalty for sodomy was abolished in 1861 in England, Wales and Ireland (1889 in Scotland), and replaced with minimum 10 years hard labour. In 1871, two amab people, Boulton and Park, were tried for dressing as women, but the judge ruled that this was not an offence under English law (though he also said that he thought it should be).

On the left: Fanny Park and Stella Boulton; on the right, the Illustrated Police News' depiction of their arrest.

And in 1885, the Criminal Law Amendment Act reduced the minimum sentence for gross indecency from 10 years' hard labour to two.

That said, before that act was introduced, there had to be a witness to any sodomy or gross indecency for it to be prosecuted. The Criminal Law Amendment Act changed that, so all private acts, arguably even love letters, could be prosecuted. So despite the reduction in sentences, this change to the law made life harder for queer men in the 1880s and 1890s. From a Dracula perspective, this means that people would be much more careful about what they wrote down - significant for a novel made up of documents.

Lesbian sex has never been illegal in the UK. (The idea that this was because Queen Victoria didn't believe in lesbianism is a myth). But in the 18th century there were a series of prosecutions of afab people who lived as men and married women. They were prosecuted for fraud when their birth sex was discovered, because they were perceived as having defrauded their wives. There were far fewer such prosecutions in the 19th century, possibly because of the belief that it was better not to create the publicity of a trial.

Victorian WLW There are HEAPS of notable Victorian lesbians and bisexual women, including a lot in the suffragette movement. So I've chosen a few examples based on there being good images on Wikipedia.

From left to right:

Margaret Benson and Janet (Nettie) Gourlay were Egyptologists who met at the excavation of the Precinct of Mut. Almost all of Benson's family preferred same-sex relationships.

Louisa Baring, Lady Ashburton, was briefly married to a man, but when she was widowed, began a 25-year relationship with American sculptor Harriet Hosmer. Harriet described herself as Louisa's "hubby".

Matilda Hays was a mixed-race writer and actress who had a relationship with American actress Charlotte Cushman, with whom she's pictured. Hays aimed to use her writing to improve the condition of women.

Victorian MLM Again, I've chosen people to highlight through the very representative method of good photos.

From left to right:

Edward Carpenter was a socialist, poet, philosopher and early gay rights activist who met his partner George Merrill on a train. The two men came from very different backgrounds: Carpenter from privilege, and Merrill from the Sheffield slums. Their 40-year relationship inspired the ending of EM Forster's novel Maurice.

Charles Ricketts and Charles Haslewood Shannon were artists who met as teenagers and lived together for more than 50 years. In the Times' obituary for Ricketts in 1931, their relationship was described as being "as remarkable as any of the great historic friendships, or the finest Darby and Joan examples of wedded felicity".

Ned Warren and John Marshall were art collectors who together were largely responsible for the Roman and Greek Art Collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Marshall married Warren's cousin, Mary Bliss, but only on the condition that the marriage would not be consummated. All three lived together until they died and were buried in the same tomb.

Trans Victorians I wrote last year about Dr James Barry, a Victorian trans man, in the context of whether Jack Seward could be trans. (The post is from October, but spoiler free).

Eliza Edwards was an actress who died in 1833 at the age of 24. Her body was autopsied, and discovered to be - in the words of the autopsy - "a perfect man", which had apparently not been known to any of her friends or colleagues.

Harry Stokes was a bricklayer in Manchester, who was outed as trans in newspaper articles during his divorce 1838 and again after his death in 1859. He became something of a figure of fun after being first outed, but met another woman who lived with him as his life, and was broadly accepted by the local community as a trans man.

It was only through chance that James, Eliza and Harry were outed (and in James Barry's case, despite considerable efforts on his part). There might well have been hundreds or thousands more people like them.

And Boulton and Park, who I mentioned above, have usually been treated as transvestite men by historians, but could equally - had they had the terms themselves - be identified as trans women. Some contemporary newspaper articles even used she/her pronouns for them.

Asexual Victorians Asexuality is tricky to spot in history, though even in 1896, German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld was identifying it as a distinct phenomenon. What we do know is that more than 10% of women and a little under 10% of men in the 1890s never married, and in some cases that may well have been because they were asexual or aromantic.

From a Dracula perspective, family rumour held that Florence Stoker declined sex with her husband after the birth of their child. That may or may not have been true (and there's a ring of aphobia to some of the family's claims) but it shows how asexual people might also be found in apparently conventional marriages.

Sources British Library: A Short History of LGBT Rights in the UK British Library: A timeline of LGBT communities in the UK Girlfriends of Dorothy: A Timeline of Lesbian Rights UK 1601 - 2020s (note: the site intends to be trans-inclusive, but genders John Barry as female.) Open University: Lesbianism and the criminal law of England and Wales “Constant Companions” and “Intimate Friends”: The Lives and Careers of Maggie Benson and Nettie Gourlay Sapphic sexuality: lesbian myth and reality in art and sculpture British Library: Transgender identities in the past Warp and Weft: The extraordinary life of Harry Stokes British Academy: Happy Families? Coitus Interruptus: Sex, Bram Stoker, and Dracula 'Missing person' Florence Stoker added to DIB

[bestiarium]

The Erkigdlit, the three heroes, and the origin of Europeans [Inuit mythology]

These mythical creatures have a human upper body but the lower half and legs of a dog. They were skilled archers and were also known for their craftmanship, as they were capable of crafting high quality tools. The Erkigdlit lived in inland villages of tents, but they were feared among the Inuit because they hunted and ate humans.

The singular of Erkigdlit is erĸileĸ, in which the 'ĸ' is a unique shortened ‘k’ sound, so a good transliteration might be Erqileq.

Once, there were three cousins, and each greatly respected the other two. Asalok and Merak shared both a home and a little boat while the third, Kumagdlat, lived together with an old woman and had his own boat.

Kumagdlat was not happy with his situation however, and one day he crossed the line and threatened to kill the woman because he didn’t want to share his house with an old hag. But the old woman did not forget this incident and plotted to drive the three cousins apart. She kept telling Kumagdlat that she pitied him, because Asalok and Merak were actually plotting to murder him.

Kumagdlat believed the lie, and grew suspicious of his companions, until at last he collected his things and left the village in his kayak, intending to leave forever.

When Asalok and Merak found out what happened, they set out to bring him back, for they deeply missed their cousin and wanted to clear up that they never intended to harm him.

The two passed a coastal village and a man told him that he had indeed seen a kayak pass by. The other villagers, however, told them that the man was an idiot, and that the boat had actually been a swimming seal. But Asalok and Merak suspected that the village idiot was right, for they knew that Kumagdlat kept a seal-head ornament on the prow of his kayak. Their cousin must have passed this village.

When at last they caught up with Kumagdlat, they were deep into Erqileq territory. The three cousins made amends and came upon a village of tents, inhabited by the man-hunting dog people whom the Inuit so greatly feared.

But the three heroes were highly skilled hunters and snuck into one of the tents, where they saw a male and female Erqileq having dinner.

Kumagdlat shot the woman with an arrow and killed her on the spot, but the man got away and alerted the other villagers. The three hunters ran away and found a hiding spot while the dog monsters gathered in a large crowd to find out what had happened. When the Erkigdlit spotted the trio, they launched a rain of arrows at the intruders, but the three cousins were clever and laid down on the ground in their hiding spot. One arrow managed to pierce Merak’s neck, but Kumagdlat knew a bit of magic and used a powerful spell to remove the arrow and bring his cousin back from the brink of death.

Soon, the monsters were all out of arrows and the three heroes pelted them with rocks and their own arrows. Their aim was amazing, and all the monsters were dead before they could get close enough to maul their assailants. The cousins then returned to the tents to stab the children, so that no man-eating monsters remained.

They looked through the Erkigdlit’s belongings and found boxes of high quality metal knives with beautifully carved handles, and took as many as three men could carry.

And so the three cousins returned home with their loot and were hailed as heroes. The people could now build far better boats, for the tools they had stolen from the dog monsters were much better than their own.

In the 19th century, Heinrich Rink speculated that these monsters might actually have been the Native American people of the Coppermine and Mackenzie river areas.

Stories in which the Inuit won conflicts with them could have evolved over several centuries until the opponents were no longer human, but dog-like maneater monsters whose demise is a heroic tale.

The origin of the Erkigdlit is a well-known myth about a girl who refused to marry, much to the disappointment and anger of her father. He repeatedly told her ‘if you keep refusing every men, I will have you marry the dog!’ upon which she eventually replied ‘if you keep saying that, I might do just that!’ until at last, she did.

The girl and her canine husband lived happily, and eventually she became pregnant (best not to think about it, myths are seldom intended to be taken literally).

The father was unhappy with this development and drove them away from the settlement, with the help of the other villagers. But the girl escaped to an island and was kept alive by her dog, which kept her safe and brought her food in a little bag.

The father, not wanting these freaks to remain alive, attempted to drown the dog by filling its bag with rocks, but the dog was exceptionally strong and managed to reach the coast alive. When their children grew up, their mother ordered them to kill the resentful grandfather, and they devoured him without mercy.

Inuit tradition has it that this woman gave birth to the human-dog hybrids, but also to the first Europeans, who sailed to Scandinavia in a magic ship and built a civilization there.

Sources:

Kroeber, A. L., 1899, Tales of the Smith Sound Eskimo, The Journal of American Folklore, 12(46), pp. 166-182.

Rink, H. J., 1875, Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo, with a sketch of their habits, religion, language and other peculiarities, William Blackwood and Sons, 472 pp.

(Image source 1: Romain Gondy)

(Image 2: source unknown, sorry. Taken from Joan Gallardo on Colapisci)

[yamayuandadu]

Sorry If i am bothering you but i want to know what role did the wilderness and its animals play in Mesopotamian mythology?

I like answering questions about Mesopotamia which indicate genuine interest, so no need to worry.

The most straightforward answer would be that the wilderness was generally perceived negatively (see ex. Wiggermann’s Scenes From the Shadow Side). The steppe in particular was usually portrayed as a place where one can get robbed at best and as the dwelling of ghosts, demons and the like - or just straight up the underworld -  at worst. The mountains were frequently viewed as a site of confrontations between gods and their opponents but more neutral or even positive portrayals pop up in literature too. It’s also important to note that the marshlands were viewed pretty firmly positively. As for wild animals: by far the best overview of Mesopotamian zoology is offered by Jeremiah Peterson in his dissertation A Study of Sumerian Faunal Conception with a Focus on the Terms Pertaining to the Order Testudines. Niek Veldhuis’ Religion, Literature, and Scholarship: the Sumerian Composition Nanše and the Birds, with a Catalogue of Sumerian Bird Names is really good too. There’s also quite recent Entomological Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia by Vazrick Nazari but you should bear in mind the author is an entomologist, not an assyriologist, so some sections are… less than reliable and sources as old as from the 19th century, and as questionable as Paropola’s phantasmagoric visions,  are employed once the focus shifts away from identification of insects.

More under the cut.

Animals were generally seen as an essential part of the world outside human dwellings. Positive comparisons to certain taxa - wild and domestic cattle and lions - are very common in myths, royal hymns, and other genres. The bovine analogies are so popular in Mesopotamian texts that even scorpions could be metaphorically described as a sort of bull.

Demonic traits could be attributed to some animals viewed as dangerous: snakes, scorpions and dogs in particular. Additionally, omen texts indicate that ants were seen as messengers of Ereshkigal, presumably because their burrowing lifestyle made the Mesopotamians assume they could move all the way down to the underground land of the dead. Finding ants while digging foundations for a new building was therefore an ill omen; seeing flying red ants above a house, meanwhile, was a sign the owner is at the risk of being killed. Due to such risks, behavior of ants was sometimes observed by religious specialists, and some of the namburbi protective rituals specifically deal with them. Locusts were a bad omen too, but that’s a given. On the other hand, moths were viewed as bringers of good omens.

Some deities were associated with the wilderness, and broadly with animals dwelling there. Most notable examples are Ninkilim (addressed as “lord of the creatures”; his name was at times confused with ninka, “mongoose”, leading to the development of the idea that he was a deified mongoose himself), Sumugan (though he was associated with domestic animals too) and to a smaller degree Numushda, arguably. Ennugi, a minor courtier of Enlil, could be addressed as the creator of grubs, though a similar role is also attested for the mythical king Alulim; attestations are limited to incantations against field pests, though. For more context see here.

A special case is Nanshe. Two of the major literary texts focused on her focus on interactions between her and animals - Nanshe and the Birds and Home of the Fish. These belong to the subgenre called “enumeration literature”: while there is an actual plot, and deities are involved, the goal is mostly to fit as many terms from a single category into a single composition. As a result, Nanshe sounds… unusually passionate (fixated, even) on the core topics. I think it makes for really unique characterization but alas, as a major Mesopotamian deity who fits neither into questionable Bible takes nor into the madonna-whore complex she’s not getting anywhere in popculture. Something that’s generally missing from the Mesopotamian repertoire are myths involving anyone turning into an animal. There are two notable exceptions, Enlil and Namzitarra, which involves Enlil turning into a raven to test a devotee, and Dumuzi’s Dream, in which Dumuzi asks Utu to turn him into a gazelle to escape underworld gendarmes pursuing him.

Major gods were not theriomorphic, and with some small exceptions (Tishpak, whose skin is in one case described as green and scaly; Ishtaran, who might have been depicted with the lower body of a snake) didn’t even have any animal body parts. However, deified animals are nonetheless also attested - multiple examples of divine bulls are the main example, obviously (for instance Indagara, Buru, the borrowed Hurrian Sheri and Hurri, possibly Magiru, “obedient”), as expected divine lions also pop up every now then, but that’s not all.

There’s a number of deified birds, though most of them occur only in Early Dynastic sources which do not provide any real insights about their character. One example that comes to mind is the deity Kiki or Ninkiki (“lady of the kiki); we have no clue what sort of bird the kiki was though, other than that it was loud enough to be compared to the storm. Nirah is a deified snake.

Deified invertebrates are much less common but it’s still worth bringing up Eḫ, a member of the court of Nungal whose name is pretty semantically similar to English “bug” (though it might also specifically refer to a louse. There is also an either divine or demonic centipede, Ḫallulaya. Among the numerous ancestors of Enlil there is a pair named Engiriš and Ningiriš, “lord butterfly” and “lady butterfly”. It is often claimed that Uttu, the goddess of weaving, was portrayed as a deified spider, but the evidence is at best limited, see here and here for details. Peterson doesn’t list her among deified animals.

A mythical creature listed in enumerations of Ninurta’s enemies, kulianna (“friend of heaven”), might be a supernatural dragonfly, though it’s also possible it was imagined as something else altogether and the link to dragonflies is just the result of homophony with Akkadian kulīlu, “dragonfly”. For more detail see here, p. 89. In art there’s a fair number of depictions of animals behaving like humans, but the full context of such works remains poorly known. There’s a brief overview here from p. 237 onward. 

Especially in Assyria wild animals were customarily hunted by kings, and trophies acquired this way served as a way of showing off the extent of their dominion. It has been suggested that they could eventually acquire apotropaic qualities, as evidenced by the preparation of protective statues  of the apsasîtu, the burḫiš and the nāḫiru, sometimes interpreted as water buffalo, yak and whale. However, the meaning of these three terms remains uncertain, for some recent considerations see here.

[owlservice]

Four myths of smell

Because our grasp of smell is so poor, a number of myths and misunderstandings have accumulated around this sense. Clearing them up at the outset will help you on this journey to the centre of scent.

Myth 1: You smell with your nose. Although we can indeed smell by inhaling through our nostrils, we detect odours using neurons that are directly connected to the brain, which dangle down through the base of the skull, at about eye level [...] Really, you are smelling with your brain.

Myth 2: You smell molecules in the air. The molecules we smell are carried on the air, but we do not directly detect airborne odours. If your olfactory neurons were in contact with the air they would shrivel and die; instead, these neurons, which are found in a thin layer of skin called the olfactory epithelium, are protected by a layer of mucus. A similar thing happens with insects—their olfactory neurons bathe in liquid housed in their sensory hairs. For obvious reasons, aquatic organisms can only sense odours in water. (Yes, fish, crabs, lobsters, and so on all smell, too.) Any airborne molecule you want to smell has to get through that protective liquid barrier. For this to happen, there are special molecules called odorant binding proteins (OBPs) that are found in that mucus—effectively on the outside of your body. Their role seems to be to transport smell molecules through the mucus and deliver them to the receptors on the olfactory neurons.

Myth 3: We have a poor sense of smell. For a long time, scientists agreed with this claim, but in 2017, the neuroscientist John McGann of Rutgers University highlighted the real situation in an article entitled ‘Poor human olfaction is a 19th-century myth’. He summarized the key evidence and concluded that ‘human olfaction is excellent and impactful’. While it is generally the case that your sense of smell might be diminished if you are aged, or if you smoke, and you will generally be better at smelling if you are female (overall, women have a more acute sense of smell than men), in reality we all have an atomic nose [...] Your sense of smell can distinguish between molecules that differ in size by a single atom of carbon—people describe heptanol (an alcohol made of seven carbon atoms) as smelling ‘violet, sweet, woody’, while octanol (just one carbon atom more) smells ‘sweet, orange, rose’. Caraway—one of the components of curry—smells different from spearmint; the two smells have exactly the same atomic composition, but their structure is different. The molecules are mirror images of each other, like two gloves. The difference in our perception of those two odours is due to the way our olfactory neurons respond to the different molecular orientations.

So fine is our sense of smell that the number of odours we can distinguish may be near-infinite. For decades, researchers repeated that the average human could distinguish about 10,000 odours, but this figure had no scientific basis. In 2014 researchers in the laboratory of my good friend Leslie Vosshall at Rockefeller University tried to estimate how many smells we might be able to tell apart, based on mixtures of molecules. They came up with the astonishing figure of over a trillion. Although this mathematical model has been challenged, it seems probable that there is no real limit to the number of odours we can detect. The same will apply to many other animals.

Myth 4: We do not use smell much. Your sense of smell and your sense of taste are intimately connected. If you try eating something tasty while pinching your nose, making sure your mouth is shut, you will find that there is little flavour; but when you take your fingers away, you should get a sudden rush of sensation as volatile compounds from the food you are chewing whoosh up your nasal cavity and flow over your olfactory neurons, high in your head. [...] Our sense of taste is relatively rudimentary, divided into a small number of classes (the traditional salt, sour, bitter, and sweet, together with the more recently identified umami (meaty), fatty, hot/spicy, metallic, and the taste of carbon dioxide), while our perception of flavour is a mixture of the simple world of taste and the rich, multiple dimensions of smell. In many languages, flavour is colloquially called ‘taste’ even though smell may be the dominant sense giving flavour its subtlety. [...]

Smell has long been a powerful aspect of human culture. Fragrances have been used in rituals and ceremonies down the ages, while perfumes—often based on animal sources, such as musk from the scent glands of deer, or from plants—have been a significant part of many cultures. The modern perfume industry is perpetually creating new scents that promise glamour and excitement for both genders, in a way that other products cannot. Smell has even been used to tell the time—from the 11th century onwards, Chinese temples used aroma clocks, containing powdered incense that burned at a particular rate, to release different scents at different times. [...]

Smell is not just a mysterious biological phenomenon, with fascinating examples from across the animal kingdom, it is also a key part of our social existence that often goes unrecognized. 

Smell (AVSI) by Matthew Cobb

[centrally-unplanned]

Very happy to see someone do a write-up of this! Its one of my go-to "you are wrong about x" facts if that is called for...not that, that is, uh, ever called for, I would never do that in a conversation. Probably why I never did a write-up myself.

But yeah the idea of the immigrants to America being essentially "undocumented masses" is a myth, 19th century European people had documented identities and were paying for passage via legal contracts - changing their name on arrival would have been a huge headache honestly, its a story that never made sense. I agree with Tabarrok that the Godfather was a big part of this becoming a 'known thing', but it did not originate the story; I have I believe seen versions of this story from the 1950's, bundled in the general mythologization of Ellis Island. And its in a lot of media - Don Bluth's An American Tail has an example of it, it was pretty much a go-to trope for any story of 19th century immigrant New York City. I would be interested in tracing out its origin! Maybe someone has done that somewhere, I will take a look.

[whencyclopedia]

Kiowa Death-Origin Myth: Two Versions

The Kiowa nation has at least two different versions of their origin myth concerning death: How Death Came into the World and Why the Ant is Almost Cut in Two. Both explain the origin of death but differ significantly in characterization, especially concerning the sympathy shown by the central character of the trickster Saynday.

Red Sandstone Cliffs in the Black Hills, Wyoming, Former Kiowa Territory

Walter Siegmund (CC BY)

The Saynday tales of the Kiowa are similar to the Wihio tales of the Cheyenne or the Iktomi tales of the Lakota Sioux (and many those of other Native peoples of North America) in that they deal with the adventures of a supernatural trickster figure, Saynday in this case, who takes on different roles depending on the focus, plot, and final message of the tale. Sometimes Saynday stands in for the Creator God, sometimes he is a wise man, other times he is a hero, a rogue, or a clown. In every Saynday tale, however, there is an element of transformation, either of the central character, of another, or of the world.

The Kiowa & Death-Origin Tales

The Kiowa are an indigenous nation of the Great Plains Indians who famously allied themselves with the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Comanche to defend their lands from Euro-American invasion in the 19th century. Their name is usually translated from the Kiowa language as "Principal People" though sometimes as "Coming Out People" or "Coming Out Rapidly" in reference to one version of their Creation Story in which they came up out of the ground quickly to the earth's surface until a pregnant woman became stuck; and so some Kiowa are understood as still living below the earth of their ancestral lands, remembered and honored by those who live above them. Scholar Adele Nozedar briefly describes their migration to the Great Plains:

Originally from the western part of Montana, the Kiowa gradually migrated south in the 17th and 18th centuries, finally arriving in the Southern Plains in the 19th century before being relocated to a reservation in the Indian Territory of Oklahoma in the 1860s. (245)

As they traveled, they carried their stories with them, tales of the past and of supernatural entities which helped define their culture. Among the more popular stories are the Saynday tales, including those dealing with the origin of death.

How Death Came into the World and Why the Ant is Almost Cut in Two not only explain the origin of death but also clarify how the ant came to look as it does today. The death-origin myths of many Native American nations follow this same model of providing multiple messages along with the central focus. These myths and legends also always include at least two characters arguing over the nature of death and what part it should play in the operation of the world.

One character will always advocate for death as a temporary state while the other claims it must be permanent. The one arguing for death's permanence is then usually faced with great personal loss, but, because the decision has been made, it cannot be reversed and so they must live with their choice of death as a permanent state.

Although the death-origin tales of North American Native peoples share similarities, especially the above-noted, they are significantly different. The Modoc nation has its own death-origin myth with the same title as the Kiowa – How Death Came into the World – but it is a very different kind of story with significantly varied detail. In many of these tales, if not all of them, animals and insects play a vital role and so it is with the Kiowa myths when Saynday encounters Red Ant.

Continue reading...

[fitz-higgins]

How medical literature could help or hurt queer people of the past

Although studies of homosexuality in the end of the 19th and early 20th century gave rise to many hurtful stereotypes and ridiculous myths, they could be helpful for queer people or their families. 

For example, Magnus Hirschfeld recalled a case of two elderly parents whose son was a homosexual. The father was a doctor and at first he got upset. His colleagues could only offer useless advice. Then the man read literature on homosexuality, came to terms with the fact that his son was born this way, and decided that there was nothing wrong about it.

Furthermore, he blessed his son’s union with another man (who came from a poor family), and both parents accepted the partner. Before his death the father made sure to say goodbye to “his two children”.

For gay men and lesbians themselves studies of homosexuality were a reassurance first of all. Many of them have lived for years with the belief that they were alone in their “wrong tendencies” (like one priest who, according to Havelock Ellis, had lived with this belief for 64 years), so it was a relief to know that there were other people like them. 

Interestingly, those who had never read about homosexuality weren’t always the miserable lot. Some didn’t see their sexuality as an anomaly and easily accepted it or even thought that they were better than heterosexual peers.

And while literature could bring some relief, most of the studies were hardly favourable. It is no wonder then that queer people often got depressed after reading about their “condition”. One man read Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis and, as the author himself wrote, came to the conclusion that his sexuality was abnormal. This led to intense anxiety and fears of getting caught. The man tried to avoid other men altogether, but ended up with neurasthenia and needed medical help. Another young man in a similar situation tried to kill himself.

Finally, medical studies caused rebellion in certain people. Ellis wrote of a Ms. M who had lived at peace with her sexuality for 28 years until she read Krafft-Ebing and learned that homosexuality was “unnatural” and was condemned in society. She could not agree with this and said she wanted “to help to bring light on the subject and to lift the shadow from other lives”:

“I emphatically protest against the uselessness and the inhumanity of attempts to ‘cure’ inverts. I am quite sure they have [the] perfect right to live in freedom and happiness as long as they live unselfish lives. One must bear in mind that it is the soul that needs to be satisfied, and not merely the senses.”

[autumnmobile12]

Felt like sharing some speculation today:

All right, so we know My Hero Academia has the something of the same premise as X-Men in the sense that select a group of humans were suddenly born with powers, the whole 'evolution leaps forward’ deal.

We see in My Hero how the First Generation of people with Quirks, especially the ones who appeared non-human or semi non-human, were originally ostracized like the mutants of X-Men are, but then more people were born with powers and then more people had powers until it became a widespread phenomenon and ‘normal’ people became the minority and society had to restructure itself to accommodate the new normal.

But have you read The Resurrectionist: The Lost Work of Dr. Spencer Black?

The plot is a 19th century doctor who theorizes that mythical creatures like the minotaur, harpies, sirens, and the like all existed millions of years ago but slowly interbred with humanity and eventually died out altogether.  So he believed that when someone was born with extra fingers, limbs, a tail or otherwise didn’t have the typical human shape, it wasn’t so much a mistake in genetic coding as it was the extremely recessive genetics of those ancient creatures trying to reoccur in the modern day.

...

Definitely an interesting premise, so now I’m wondering if the My Hero world has a cult, conspiracy theorists, or even some scientists/historians that have similar views regarding mythology.

If this whole Quirk thing happened back in the Stone Age where no one had the benefit of science or awareness of DNA, anyone born with an otherworldly power would have been worshipped as a deity. Or the ones born with a non-human appearance would have been reviled as monsters.

So following the idea of The Resurrectionist, maybe the sudden appearance of superpowers did lead people to take a closer look at the old myths and consider the stories of the gods/goddesses of old were originally stories of people with 'Quirks' who rose to power.  Humans with meta-powers ruled the world for a few centuries, then those powers inexplicably died off. For a variety of reasons or maybe unknown reasons, humanity lost that history but remembered the old stories and chalked them up to just myth until the powers that made it possible began to reappear full force several millennia later.

Some myths began as historical events but in being handed down hundreds of generations, the multiple tellings and retellings exaggerated them into the realm of impossibility.

Lightning/electricity powers:  Zeus, Thor, Hinon

Fire powers:  Hephaistos, Surtr, Hestia, the phoenix

Foresight:  Any seer, prophet, or oracle that appears in any myth ever

Ice powers:  Yuki-onna, Skadi, Morana

Water powers:  Poseidon, Chalchiuhtlicue, Anuket, Tlaloc

Plant-related Quirks:  Demeter

Gigantification Quirks: Giants, titans, nephilim

Ryukyu:  Is a dragon.  ‘nuff said.

All Might:  Herakles

Tokoyami having a bird head but otherwise appearing human is pretty reminiscent of the old Egyptian gods.

Hawks:  Any winged creature; take your pick.  Personally, the one that comes to mind for me is Hermes.  He only had wings on his sandals, sure, but the trickster archetype resonates.

Tsuyu: Naiads, nymphs, rusalki, any kind of water fae

Momo: Sedna (created sea life from her finger bones), Ukemochi no Kami (produces food from her own body)

Best Jeanist: This one's a bit of a reach, but the fabric thread thing coupled with the long, spider-like limbs kinda brings to mind the story of Arachne the weaver.

We do get a nod to Ancient Greek mythology with the prison Tartarus.  What better place to lock away beings with god-like powers than the prison of the Titans itself?

Obviously an incomplete list, but you see my point.

Personally, I'm leaning toward cultist ideology with this one as I find it hard to believe every civilization would have forgotten about a previous appearance of Quirks. But civilizations die off, civilizations are overrun by others and their histories are suppressed, maybe this hypothetical 'previous Quirk phenomenon' wasn't as widespread as the current one and so fewer people were affected and therefore fewer people were alive to verify the truth of facts, maybe this hypothetical time was from an age of oral history and nothing was documented properly, so not impossible just really, really improbable.

Still, I love mythology and I find it an interesting headcanon to think about.

[irelandseyeonmythology]

Hey, I know you focus more on Irish material than Welsh, but I was wondering if you knew any good books/articles about the mabinogion and its composition, especially the supposed influence of pre christian elements? I often see it brought out as clearly pagan mythology in circles I'm in, which from what I know is... problematic, but I never have enough context to challenge it much.

To be clear, no worries if not, but I figured I'd ask in case there's some edition or monograph that treated that heavily that you knew of.

I do! I don't do as much with Welsh, you're right, and I talk about it on here even less, but this is actually something that I am equipped to handle.

So, mandatory "if anyone who reads this worships, venerates, or otherwise has a connection to the figures I reference here, my job is NOT to dictate anyone's religious beliefs, to make fun of them, belittle, etc. etc. etc. My job is to give my own personal impressions of the material, which is shaped by the current scholarly understanding."

Alright, now that that's out of the way.

So, your instincts are right, the tl;dr is that, while there are still some scholars (including people I deeply respect) who do work with the Mabinogi as a source for Pre-Christian beliefs, and that approach was very popular up until the 1990s, but that number is dwindling, and the current general scholarly consensus is that the Mabinogi is a thoroughly medieval text. You'll get even fewer Welsh experts who are willing to consider pre-Christian elements than you will Irish experts. There are a few who will say that MAYBE there is something going on beneath the surface, but the problem is whether it would even be possible to undergo that kind of excavation and whether...you lose more than you gain when you try it.

Like, Howard Shliemann, when he excavated Troy, was so eager to find the OLDEST, most ANCIENT part of the city, that he took dynamite to it, which blasted away significant parts of the city. He didn't care about anything else but finding his idealized version of Priam's city, and as a result, he wasn't able to appreciate it when it was right in front of him and, not only that, damaged it. While no one is (I HOPE???) asking to put a lit match to the Red Book of Hergest, we have started to believe that, maybe, by constantly focusing on the pre-Christian elements of the Mabinogi, writing everything else off as a corrupted form of a myth written by later authors who were too stupid to understand what they were dealing with...perhaps we were overlooking a genuinely great work of medieval literature, and that it was time for us to change that.

There are a number of reasons why this "excavation" is difficult if not impossible, but one of the strongest is that, frankly, Wales was converted before Ireland and it became VERY thoroughly Christianized early on, as well as, in general, us not having many early examples of Old Welsh literature. (Y Gododdin is traditionally seen as the oldest, but, honestly, even though it's controversial, due to its key role as a piece of Welsh cultural history, I've had a lot of Welshicists tell me that they think it's more likely a ninth century poem at the earliest.) Even things that people often think of as being indicative of pre-Christianity in Wales, like the Mari Lwyd are...well. We have no references to them before the 19th century (though it's clearly being described as an established tradition by then) and they very likely go back no further than the 16th century. Middle Welsh literature is also very, very difficult to date unless you have some sort of external feature to help you out, it doesn't have quite the same linguistic markers of Old Irish. (A trained Celticist who has had training in Old and Middle Irish can tell you an approximate date of an Irish text with a quick look, which can then be made more exact by analyzing key features, down to the century. You cannot do that with Welsh. We still do not even know when the Mabinogi was COMPOSED beyond "very likely between the 11th-13th centuries") Additionally, we do not have a large collection of Welsh folktales, so we cannot know how these stories might have been told IN Wales and whether they had a significant oral transmission. (It does seem like there might have been a few folky Mabinogi things but it is REALLY hard to know without a unified database.) I can't emphasize enough how lucky we are to have the Irish and Scottish folk collectors, because it means we can compare oral version of medieval texts and see how things change in the oral version. This doesn't inherently mean oral=pre-Christian, but it gives us a further range of how these stories have been used.

ANYWAY, you're here for recs, not my ongoing anger at 19th century archaeologists, so here are some of the best studies of the Mabinogi as literature (a lot of them don't directly interact with the myth, more directly pointing out how deliberate the Mabinogi is as a work of literature. One thing that no English translation of the Mabinogi that I've ever read can convey is how PRECISE each word is, how...there are layers upon layers upon layers and it's *brilliant*.)

Bollard, J. K. “The Structure of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi.” THSC (1974–5): 250–76. (Considered to be one of the definitive pieces of literary scholarship around the Mabinogi.)

Davies, Sioned. ‘“Venerable Relics”? Re-visiting the Mabinogi’ in Joseph Nagy, ed. Writing down the Myths, edited by J. F. Nagy, Brepols, 2012. 157-79

Hamp, Eric P. ‘"Mabinogi and Archaism’"," Celtica 23, 1999. 96-110

Hemming, Jessica, “Ancient tradition or authorial invention? The ‘mythological’ names in the Four Branches”, in: Joseph Falaky Nagy (ed.), Myth in Celtic literatures, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007. 83–104.

Hutton, Ronald, “Medieval Welsh literature and pre-Christian deities”, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 61 (Summer, 2011): 57–86. (In general, while Hutton isn't a Celticist by training, we do consider him One of Us because he is VERY good.)

McKenna, Catherine, “Revising Math: kingship in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi”, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 46 (Winter, 2003): 95–118.

McKenna, Catherine, “The colonization of myth in Branwen ferch Lŷr”, in: Joseph Falaky Nagy (ed.), Myth in Celtic literatures, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007. 105–119.

McKenna, Catherine. ‘"Reading with Rhydderch: Mabinogion Texts in Manuscript Context", in: Anders Ahlqvist and Pamela O'Neill, eds., Language and Power in the Celtic World: Papers from the Seventh Australian Conference of Celtic Studies, The University of Sydney, September-October 2010. University of Sydney, 2011. 205-30

Rodway, Simon. "The Mabinogi and the Shadow of Celtic Mythology" Studia Celtica 52(1) (2018). 67-85. 10.16922/SC.52.4.

Sims-Williams, Patrick, Irish Influence on Medieval Welsh Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. (It's interesting because you do have figures from medieval Irish literature, like Cú Roí, popping up in a way that suggests that medieval Welsh authors were highly familiar with them...which also throws a wrench in the old "Celtic or an example of medieval cultural exchange" problem.)

Wooding, Jonathan. Tyrannies of Distance? Medieval Sources as Evidence for Indigenous Celtic and Romano-Celtic Religion’ in Ralph Haeussler and Anthony King (eds.), Celtic Religions in the Roman Period: Personal, Local, and Global, University of Aberystwyth, 2017. 57-70

As for what I personally think....some of these sources are going to be softer than I would be and some of these sources are going to be harder on the concept than I would be. I don't HATE the idea of Pre-Christian elements existing in medieval texts, I just think it should be done carefully, cautiously, and with full knowledge of the limits of such an inquiry, without ALSO being disrespectful to the medieval context while ALSO not, in our attempt to right past wrongs, fall into the pitfall of thinking that Christianity = sophisticated elements, pre-Christian elements = unsophisticated. It's a delicate tightrope to walk, but I do want to see a day when we can have these conversations in the field without either ridicule or ad hominem assumptions of ill intent. We could do so much more if we would just listen to one another instead of leaping to prove one another's wrong. I don't believe there's evidence to suggest that Pre-Christian myths have been substantially preserved in the Mabinogi, and I think we should be wary and aware of the possibility of cultural exchange. I think that past scholars did the medieval writers a great disservice when they made the Mabinogi out to be some sort of corrupted, derelict scrapbook instead of one the greatest works of medieval prose narrative in Europe. I also think, for that matter, that the assumption that we are dealing with a mythic text that prescribes proper behavior that mortals are meant to follow has negatively impacted literary criticism of the text, particularly with regards to the female characters, whose abuse by men is justified as just punishment as opposed to something that is FRAMED as being horrific. Still, there are some things, such as a Donegal folktale (collected by Jeremiah Curtin) in which Lugh has to get Balor to give him a name and arms, similar to Arianrhod...I have never found a satisfying explanation for, from either side of the aisle.

What should be clear, from how many qualifiers I'm having to put up, is that it is even more difficult to assign FUNCTION to the Welsh figures than the Irish, not the least because, while the Tuatha Dé are explicitly supernatural....the Mabinogi is about a bunch of people who have superpowers but are also fundamentally human. We do not have the little signposts saying "BTW THESE GUYS ARE GODS!" that the Irish so nicely provide to us. If someone feels called to worship Arianrhod as a moon goddess, it isn't like I can stop them, nor would I *want* to, but I will say that there is no evidence for it FROM the Mabinogi. Or that Blodeuedd is a goddess of springtime (despite the unusual circumstances of her birth...she isn't really supernatural) or love. Or GOD FORGIVE ME, that Rhiannon is the goddess of forgiveness and understanding, which I saw one time. (Normally I do not judge people for how they view these figures, see all of the above disclaimers, but I do with that one. Just a little. Because I think that might be a tiny bit sexist to reduce her entire role in the Mabinogi to her abuse and then make her story one of forgiveness instead of one of a woman who is put into a horrific situation by the laws of the society she has married into.) I wish that there was a convenient listing of pre-Christian Welsh and Irish deities out there with their functions, but they don't fit that cleanly, and I doubt they ever did. It's one more reminder that they really, really aren't like Greek Mythology, and you can't go into this like Greek Mythology. (Though arguably, Greek Mythology isn't like Greek Mythology, but I digress.)

Anyway, thank you for sending me this; I do love the Mabinogi dearly and it's been ages since I've had the chance to talk about it.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Mike Luckovich

* * * *

“It’s lies all the way down.”

October 9, 2024

Robert B. Hubbell

Oct 10, 2024

“It’s lies all the way down.”

An apocryphal story tells of a skeptical audience member who challenged a 19th-century astronomer after a lecture in which the astronomer asserted that the Earth is round and suspended in space. The skeptic told the astronomer that the Earth rests on the back of a giant turtle (a myth with an ancient heritage). The astronomer patiently pushed back, asking, “On what does the giant turtle stand?” The skeptic replied, “On another giant turtle.” The astronomer persisted, “And on what does the second turtle stand?” The skeptic responded, “You aren’t going to trick me! It’s turtles all the way down!”

So, too, with Trump world’s cascade of lies. It’s lies all the way down. It is impossible to disprove lies that disappear into a bottomless cesspool of falsehoods. Trump’s self-replicating lies are a virus compounded by the absolute lack of shame or remorse when the liar is caught in the lie. The last forty-eight hours have given us the textbook example of Trump's “respond to disproven lies with bigger lies” strategy.

On Tuesday, multiple outlets reported that Trump sent Vladimir Putin an early Covid testing machine. Putin instructed Trump to keep the transaction secret because it would prove embarrassing to Trump. (In fact, as noted below, the transfer was probably illegal.)

The story of the Covid testing machine gift to Putin was met with a furious, unequivocal denial by Trump and his spokesperson. Trump told ABC News, “That’s false. He [Bob Woodward] is a storyteller. A bad one. And he's lost his marbles.

Trump's shameless campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, dismissed the stories, saying,

None of these made-up stories by Bob Woodward are true and are the work of a truly demented and deranged man who suffers from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

On Thursday, a Kremlin spokesperson made a liar out of Trump, confirming that Trump did send a Covid testing machine to Putin during the early days of the pandemic. See Axios, Kremlin refutes Trump denial on sending Putin COVID testing equipment. The original report of the Kremlin statement is here, behind a paywall: Bloomberg, US Elections: Kremlin Confirms Trump Sent Putin Covid Tests While President.

To recap: Trump and his campaign issued a flat-out denial of Woodward’s report. The Kremlin confirmed the report, proving that Trump was lying about a matter that posed the risk of blackmail by the Kremlin.

How can this man be president?

And, just as importantly, why is the story of this blatant lie not the leading story on every newspaper and website, accompanied by a red-flashing siren graphic? But as of Thursday evening, that outrage—or even news coverage—was missing from major media.

This isn’t just any lie. It is a lie about an action by Trump that likely violated the US sanctions embargo in effect at the time. See Lucian K. Truscott IV, Kremlin confirms that Trump sent COVID testing equipment to Putin (substack.com). (“Russia was under strict sanctions by 2020, which were imposed under the Obama administration after Moscow invaded and seized the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine.”)

The media is reporting that Trump has been caught lying. But those stories lack the analysis of “So what?” and “Why does it matter?” No other candidate caught in such a lie would survive the press firestorm that would follow.

But here, the response is “crickets.” Nothing. Nada. Zip. The press spilled tankers of ink over whether Tim Walz and his wife used “IVF” versus “fertility treatments” twenty years ago. I hope that major editorial boards are furiously working on opinion articles that say, “Trump is a liar who is unfit to be president.”

The second part of Woodward’s story will likely prove true, as well. On Wednesday, JD Vance said, “I haven’t talked to Trump about this, but even if he did talk to Putin, what’s the big deal?” See HuffPo, JD Vance Scorched For ‘Grotesque’ Defense Of Trump’s Reported Chats With Putin.

In case you missed the point, Vance’s comments are a set-up for the revelation that Trump did, in fact, speak to Putin on a half-dozen occasions after leaving office—in direct contradiction to Trump's denials.

Why do those conversations matter? Because the DOJ has accused Russian interests of actively interfering in the 2024 presidential election. The fact that Trump is holding secret discussions with Putin at the very moment that Russia is interfering in our elections creates the strong implication that Trump and Putin are coordinating those efforts. The burden lies on Trump to rebut that logical inference.

The problem with Trump's constant lies is that they are not limited to his treachery. He lies about immigrants, elections, the economy, and natural disasters. Trump has managed to create distrust between victims and first responders. He has encouraged potential victims to ignore evacuation warnings because they wrongly believe FEMA will seize their homes if they leave. He has caused his followers to believe that the government can control and direct the weather to “red states” or “red counties” in purple states.

Marjorie Taylor Green tweeted that hurricanes are striking “red” states because “they” control the weather. She also famously claimed that wildfires in California were caused by “Jewish space lasers.” It is always only one step from any conspiracy theory to antisemitism. (Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo has an important story about antisemitic texts being sent to Florida voters connecting disaster relief lies and US support for Israel. See TPM, The Text Campaign Underworld and the Florida Anti-Semitism You Can Find There. This article may be behind a paywall.)

It has become so bad that President Biden took to the airwaves on Wednesday to deny that the US government controls the weather. See Talking Points Memo, Biden Forced To Remind Everyone He Doesn’t Control The Weather.

When the media ridiculed Marjorie Taylor Greene’s ludicrous lie, her response was to double down with more lies. See The Independent, Marjorie Taylor Greene doubles down on weather control conspiracy theory despite experts rubbishing ‘hurricane modification’.

Marjorie Taylor Greene expounded,

“Everyone keeps asking, ‘who is they?’ Well, some of them are listed on NOAA, as well as most of the ways weather can be modified . . .” Greene also attached screenshots of “weather modification project reports” from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [NOAA] website.

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s attack on NOAA is consistent with the goals of Project 2025. Project 2025 proposes the “commercialization” (read: privatization) of NOAA’s weather forecasting function.

Per PBS, Project 2025 “describes NOAA as a primary component “of the climate change alarm industry” and said it “should be broken up and downsized.”

Republicans are institutionalizing lies. For example, in Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill in May that removes the term “climate change” from state law and “deprioritizes” efforts to fight global warming. See NPR Florida Gov. DeSantis signs bill that deletes climate change from state law. DeSantis said when he signed the bill that “I am not a global warming guy,” but 90% of Floridians believe climate change is happening now. After Hurricane Milton, that percentage is likely to increase.

The attack on NOAA and the institutionalized lies in Florida bring us full circle to Hurricane Milton and Trump's “lies all the way down” strategy of undermining trust in the government. That strategy seeks to reduce the size and presence of the federal government in our lives. However, Hurricanes Helene and Milton highlight the federal government's irreplaceable role in natural disasters that quickly overwhelm the resources of any individual state.

Trump's lies matter. It should be big news when he lies, not a collective yawn in the media and among elected officials. Lying about the federal government's response to natural disasters and his own violations of US embargo sanctions against Russia are disqualifying for the presidency. The media needs to say so. As do we—with an overwhelming repudiation of Trump at the polls.

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

[evilwickedme]

Hey, next time we can ask you questions for free - you reblogged something about how people don't understand what Zionism is. I thought I did, but now I'm pretty sure I don't, and for obvious reasons I am having trouble finding reliabe information on it on the internet. What IS modern Zionism?

There were several rounds of foreign powers conquering and colonizing ancient Israel, causing several rounds of diaspora to match.

The history of the Jewish people goes back 3500+ years. Our creation myth, if you will, starts with Abraham, but our existence as a people starts with the story of exodus. Returning to the place where Abraham and his descendants made their home. That is where we start.

From then on, there has always been an Israelite, later Jewish, presence in our ancestral home. And yet so many of us were spread across the world. Over 2000 years ago we were settled in Italy and in Persia; some of us made it all the way to China and Ethiopia. We were no strangers to religious persecution - from Haman to the inquisition. Christians hated us, Muslims either tolerated us or persecuted us. And always we prayed, prayed to return to rebuilt Jerusalem.

In the 19th century, following the enlightenment, countries began to emancipate Jews. They lifted nearly every law that forced us to live apart, to look different. Many Jews took the opportunity to join western society, becoming indistinguishable from Christians. During this same time period was the rise of race science. The fear of Jews didn't go away. We were among them.

This is how racialized antisemitism was born. No longer could you stop being a Jew by converting to another religion; being Jewish was in your blood.

Frankly, Jews have always believed this to some degree. But this is what leads us, eventually, to the Holocaust.

It was already before this that we saw the signs. Racialized antisemitism was spreading throughout the world - not just in Europe, but in the US and MENA as well. Nationalist movements were popping up all over the place. It became clear that these nationalist movements excluded Jews. Thus was born Zionism: the natural result of thousands of years of yearning for our homeland, the natural result of antisemitism, the natural result of 3500 years of history.

Zionism initially wasn't necessarily about returning to Israel, strangely enough. But that aspect was rather quickly abandoned. As it was, throughout our history whenever there was a pogrom some groups of Jews would leave for Israel. Following the rise of racialized antisemitism, pogroms were happening throughout eastern Europe, and as Zionism spread, more and more Jews were doing aliyot - traveling in large groups to Israel. The Arab population - then still considered simply one part of the ottoman empire - did not approve, and several pogroms were committed against the local Jewish population, whether they were new arrivals or, like my own recent ancestors, had been living in Israel the entire time. And yet they kept coming.

Jumping ahead. What the Zionist dream would look like was not necessarily universally agreed on, but following the atrocities of the Holocaust and the world wide fall of the British empire an awkward decision of the holy land was proposed and agreed upon in the UN. It was understood that Zionism was not, as is presented now, racism. It was a move by an indigenous population to have self determination.

The Jews agreed to the plan. The Arab population did not. War broke out between Israel and every neighboring country, but Israel won. In 1948, a year after the UN resolution, Israel declared independence. 75 years later, we're still here.

In the 90s it looked like piece with the Palestinians would finally happen. Tragically, following terrorist actions from both Palestinians and Israelis, especially the assassination of itzhak rabin, the peace talks failed.

What is modern Zionism? That depends which Jew you ask. Some will say it's violent colonialism. Some will say it's racism. Some will say it's blind support for any action the Israeli government takes.

That is, frankly, bullshit. There are definitely Zionists who are violent, Zionists who are racist, Zionists who support the Israeli government. But there are also antizionists who are violent, who are antisemitic, who are blind supporters of Hamas. Claiming that that is representative of every Palestinian is ridiculous, as is so often parroted on this website. Practically every Israeli leftist who spent the last eight months protesting our government is a Zionist.

I will tell you what Zionism is to me. Zionism, to me, is the end of the Passover Seder, where we have, for 2000 years, called for the rebuilding of Jerusalem. It is praying at the western wall. It is Jewish existence in our homeland. It is self determination and land back for an indigenous population.

I am tired of apologizing for my existence. I am tired of saying "antizionism isn't antisemitism!!!" when so many antizionists refuse to unpack their antisemitism. I am tired of pretending Judaism wasn't always calling for our return to this homeland.

It is incredibly easy for outsiders to say that the only solution is a one state solution. But the truth is most Israelis *and* most Palestinians do not support it, because there is simply so much bad blood between us. Where did this cycle of violence begin? People who say 1948 do not understand how long the Jewish view of history is. The cycle of violence began during the first time Israel was conquered by a foreign power. The cycle of violence began when the Islamic empire colonized the entire middle east. The cycle of violence began during the rise of racialized antisemitism. The cycle of violence began when Jews illegally settled in Israel. The cycle of violence began when Arabs committed pogroms. The cycle of violence began when the war of independence broke out. The cycle of violence began when Israel conquered the west bank and Gaza strip in the six day war.

To me, the cycle of violence starts 3500 years ago, when the Israelites said, "we will not be slaves". To me, Zionism began when we spent 40 years in the desert, trying to reach what would be, for the next 3500 years, our home.

I cannot separate modern Zionism from that.

[rumbelleshowdown]

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Author: Ruklon Runarys

Group: A

Prompts: Watch me woo you. Apples, spring, evil. Grapes.

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Fruit of Life  

Belle walked among the gardens on her father’s estate. She had crossed the vineyard and had tasted a grape here and there. Letting the juices of the fruit consume the senses of her mouth, she smiled. She had outrun her governess back in the house. The older woman had gone on and on about social etiquette and Belle was over it. It was not the 19th century anymore, she thought. It was 1912 and everything was going to be different, she could feel it. Belle wanted to study at university, learn about the world. However, her father had different ideas about his only child and daughter. He needed an heir to leave his estate to. Who else was going to oversee all the fields full of fruit trees? 

For now, Belle could relax. She had taken one of her favourite books: Greek and Roman Myths. It was a beautiful day, with the sun giving a pleasant warmth on the skin. 

Belle decided to go to the apple orchard. The long rows of trees gave her a sense of safety, hidden beneath the branches like a cool embrace of shadow. 

Sitting down, she made herself comfortable on the biggest root of the tree and opened her book where she left off. She had just finished with the myth of the rites of Dionysius. If her father ever found out she had read about this, he would be appalled. He already had forbidden her to enter the library after dinner, so she would not sneak a book with her back to bed. She had been lucky to find this one in a drawer of what were once her late mother’s belongings. Belle had been very happy to discover another book her mother had loved. 

The next myth in her book was called Hades and Persephone. The spring sun shining through the leaves gave the pages an aesthetic colour, inviting her to the story. Clearing her throat, Belle started reading aloud. 

“It was a beautiful day like all the others in the land, the sun shining brightly in the sky, …” 

Belle read on about Persephone frolicking in the fields while her mother Demeter sat close and her father Zeus peered down from the sky above. 

She stared with open mouth at the page when it described Persephone picking the most enchanting flower she had ever seen, when suddenly the earth split open in two and the terrifying God of the Underworld Hades emerged from the depths of Tartarus. Feeling empathy towards the mother of the young goddess, Demeter, Belle watched how the world became cold and dark and began to feel her own hopes fade as well. Then the book described how back in the evil underworld, Hades tried to explain his actions towards Persephone and begged her to stay and be his wife. 

“Yet, Persephone longs for something more...” 

“To find purpose in her life, to be bold and wise, to feel free and bright.” 

Belle was startled by the soft voice behind her. She looked up, meeting warm brown eyes. She recognized those eyes. It was Mr. Gold, one of the caretakers of the orchard. 

“I am so sorry to startle you, Miss d’Avon. I couldn’t help overhear your reading and was curious.” 

She smiled at him. “Hello there, Mr. Gold. I didn’t see you there. I take it, you have read it? 

“Yes, I must admit it is an insightful read. The Ancient Greeks knew how to explain the metaphors for life’s mysteries well. Very inventive indeed.” 

She nodded. “Indeed they are. Although I must admit I still need to finish most of it.”

He inclined his head and gestured to the ground she was sitting on. “May I?” 

Belle felt her smile widen. “Of course!” 

Lowering himself to the ground with his cane, he stretched himself next to her. 

“If you want, “ he sucked in a breath, “I could read it with you.” 

Belle felt her heart flutter. It wasn’t proper for her to sit here in the orchard with the caretaker alone, unchaperoned. But Belle was never one to care about propriety. She had liked Mr. Gold for a while now, ever since he caught her when she fell off a ladder trying to pick an apple. 

Taking the book from her hands, he continued to read. “Watch me woo you...”

Belle listened to his rumbling voice, wanting to lay her head on his shoulder. 

When he finished reading, Belle didn’t want to give up her possibility of closeness. 

She had had many conversations with him before, and she wanted to know his thoughts about the story. 

She decided to take her chance. 

“I am happy that in the end, Persephone found her purpose in greeting the new arrivals in the underworld and help them adapt to their new life. That she could be happy, both at her husband’s side as her mother’s. Although one question remains, why do you think Hades wanted her?”

Gold looked at her, meeting her eyes. “I have always thought he consorted with her for her wisdom. She transformed from a frail and fearful Persephone into a striking and radiant Queen of the underworld. She was his flickering light amongst an ocean of darkness.” 

That was an interesting thought. Somehow, she knew he was not only talking about Persephone. 

“She knew he would approve of her search for knowledge and life’s calling.” 

He smiled. “Yes, and she didn’t let her mother or her husband stop her from what she really wanted. She decided her own fate.” 

“I do find it cruel that Zeus was the one who plotted it all along. And didn’t present his daughter with a choice.” 

He inclined his head in acknowledgement. “Indeed.” 

They were interrupted by Belle’s stomach growling. Giggling, she was reminded how little she had eaten that day. Gold laughed as well and looked up. She followed his gaze. 

The apple trees lovingly bowed their branches over them while they sat together. 

Gold stood up and used his cane to lower a branch to him to pick an apple. 

He offered her the fruit, his gaze inviting. Grateful, she took a bite while he still held it in his hand, her eyes not leaving his. 

She had tasted the fruit of life and it could not be erased. 

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