I occasionally do the Texas pride thing, but the truth is that the hugeness and diversity of Texas means my actual sense of regional loyalty belongs to a far smaller section of the state, with a very idiosyncratic history.
Story time
This was when he finally escaped the torture of the elite school system and was sent to live with a tutor William T. Kirkpatrick.
On meeting him, the man made Lewis justify the statement that it was a nice day. Lewis considered this heaven.
Dude was right, Lord of the Rings isn't Catholic.
Most of the first book is about a council meeting which resolves to establish a committee.
Lord of the Rings is Presbyterian.
Two Assyrian soldiers forcing Elamite captive to grind bones of his family, 7th - 6th c. BCE. This wasn't an act of random cruelty...This was making someone from a culture based on ancestor cult commit an act of worst sacrilege...From:
The Coming of the Bow
Few things are so closely associated with the pop culture image of "the Indian" as the bow and arrow.
Yet the bow is a relative latecomer to North America.
#3
is the most annoying trope in D&D. You're telling me we've tossed out not just Christianity, but the idea of a transcendent God, replaced Him with a patchwork pantheon of limited deities, but somehow we still have medieval Europe's knights and monks and social structure?
1. Most authors create gods, almost none create religions.
2. Modern writers completely sidestep how deeply state & religion are intertwined, specially in faux medieval fiction.
3. Most polytheist religion fiction is just hidden Christianity.
They say Odin used to wander about, disguised as a traveler, testing the hospitality of men.
Just so, there may be Big Accounts who walk among us, disguised as 8-follower reply guys, testing the souls of the unwary.
My Crackpot Lancelot Theory
In the bloom of my youth, I got deep into the hunt for the real history behind King Arthur.
One huge difference between the early legends and the high medieval romance is the existence of Lancelot.
The Iron Crown of Lombardy
This thread is not so much history as it is legend. The legends that grow up around real events often tell us as much about human nature as the events themselves.
Did Druids Exist?
Since at least the Romantic period in art and literature, druids have been a staple of our cultural vision of the British, and broadly Celtic, past.
The Dark Tent Ritual
It is night in the taiga of the frozen north. The shaman has been bound and left alone inside a tent. You gather around it in the darkness. Sounds emerge.
Animal sounds.
They want to talk.
Over the first two centuries of America's independence, we built a series of canals running parallel to the coast from Maine down to Florida, around the bend, and across the entire Gulf to Brownsville.
He describes this kind of lifestyle as "selfish," not in the sense that he was thinking about himself, because he almost never did. He was entirely focused on the work.
It's that he spent no time contributing to society. It was a contemplative life, not an active one.
A Greek study session involved, if I remember correctly, first having Kirkpatrick read a chunk in Greek, pausing to make minor grammar notes, and then allowing Lewis to translate as much as he could, consulting his books.
They didn't read the entire Iliad, though, just the parts more directly concerning Achilles.
Where many classical schools separate languages and classics, this is how Lewis got them both, and he loved it.
If he could have spent his whole life this way, he would have.
Today is
#SamiNationalDay
!
The Sami are the EU’s only indigenous people. Since time immemorial, they have lived in an area stretching across parts of four countries: Finland, Norway, Sweden and Russia. This area is called Sápmi.
This, not wild partying or fabulous wealth, is what Lewis would have considered Epicureanism, or hedonism.
Pilgrim's Regress is the more intellectual version of his journey to faith, and you can see that a little more explicitly there.
This is not to say thay they *only* studied.
Lewis went on walks.
Kirkpatrick, an apostate Presbyterian, spent Sundays gardening in his nicer clothes. He also smoked, saving leftover scraps of tobacco from the bottom of the pipe bowl.
I have always assumed this to be a psyop by lascivious and diabolical Fr*nch.
Lancelot as pure myth, no root in history whatsoever.
(Pictured: the eternal foe of all Britannic nations, of civilization, and of common decency, the Fr*nchman)
A major typical error of Science Bros™️ is to rely on facts™️ from science books™️ without any attention to the real world actual scientists are studying to reach their conclusions.
Case in point: the Beast of Gevaudan
I have received word from the Secret Chiefs that the proto-Celtic Hallstatt and La Tene cultures had woven plaid textiles as early as 1000 - 500 BC. Advanced technology!
Before we can reckon with its history, we have to familiarize ourselves with what came before: the atlatl, or spear-thrower.
This handheld dart launcher used enough force to punch a hole in Spanish armor. Used rightlt, it was certainly enough to fell a buffalo.
Keep this in mind when you read That Hideous Strength, Till We Have Faces, and Narnia.
He is always giving us a thinly disguised Kirkpatrick, a philosopher, who stretches towards the faith, but is not actually inside it.
This was the man who delivered him from a childhood hell.
Eventually, as modern Italy formed, as monarchy was abolished, the crown ceased to be used.
But it remains in Monza Cathedral, the crown of emperors, a relic of the True Cross.
Waiting.
Ten years ago I was living across the country, as alone and cut off from my roots as I've ever been, & utterly failing at life.
Just passed the county road intersection my great grandpa used to live on and saw my nephew out feeding the hogs. On the way to dinner with the in laws
Tom Bombadil is Ortho.
Hobbits are old school Church of England.
Gondor is Episcopalian.
Rohan is Lutheran.
Beornings are Baptist.
Ents are Presbyterian.
Remember that Lewis was trained in philosophy. He recounts a friend reminding him that philosophy was *more* than just a subject. He thought that was important, and should be included in his conversion story in Surprised by Joy.
Kirkpatrick was, for him, philosophy.
"One North American tribe regards surveyors with awe, as a kind of black magician. A very powerful 18th century 'sorceror' drew a line around which there are taboos to the present day. Natives, when presented with the idea of crossing it, respond with outrage, fear, & disgust."
This is an excellent diagram. Note that these mounds were built in stages, with structures being replaced with each new stage.
I suspect the old structures were burnt down, and this may have sometimes been connected to a specific myth of conflagration.
An Ocean of Grass
As you drive west through the rolling hills and river valleys of northern Texas where Caddoan plains villagers once lived, you will come upon a sudden uplift.
This ridge stretches for 200 miles, and at places rises a thousand feet above the land below
The Mississippian Cosmos
The Mississippians had many familiar things in their cosmos: a firmament above, a world tree or axis mundi, an underworld. But some aspects were also very distinctive.
While never totally abandoned, the atlatl was replaced by the bow in many areas.
Studying this is rendered difficult by the fact that atlatl dart points and arrowheads look very similar, and can overlap in size.
Taking this into account, what might Lewis have *felt* about rationalists? When he addresses himself to atheists, what does he *feel* about them?
And what does this say about the character of his own faith?
Words for Rule
Today let's take an etymological journey and discover how apparently separate worlds may be more tightly interwoven than we think
We will begin with "kshatriya"
Conan the Barbarian is not an action movie. It is philosophical. But it is a philosophy of steel and flesh. It must be watched with a taste for such a riddles, and the knowledge that if you cannot answer them, Crom will cast you out.
Blitz concludes by emphasizing that the spread of the bow wasn't due to its advantages in hunting, but instead driven by war and in-group rivalry: social factors mattered more than environmental ones.
Good pulpy adventure movies in the vein of the Indian Jones trilogy or the good The Mummy?
Kid is out of the house tonight, so we're doing an at home movie date
The bow remained in the Arctic for a long period of time, before seeming to spread south along with our old friends, the Na-Dene speakers. In this case, it seems associated closely with their largest subsection, the Athabascans.
Traces of the Great Serpent
In Mississippian lore, the Great Serpent or Horned Serpent was master of the Below World, the land beneath the waters and beneath the earth where dark spirits dwell
Hugh Jackman will star as Robin Hood in ‘THE DEATH OF ROBIN HOOD’ alongside Jodie Comer.
The film follows Robin Hood grappling with his past after a life of crime & murder whilst in the hands of a mysterious woman after being badly injured.
Directed by Michael Saronski.
John Blitz notes that the spread of the bow precedes the spread of defensive fortifications in many areas.
It marked a revolution in warfare, a revolution calling for other revolutions.
There are more chickens in my county than people in China.
This is not hyperbole. The math has been done.
There are mansions and dude ranches out here built on America's love of chicky nuggies
Archeologists have been able to work their way around the problem, however, and the result is that we have identified the bow as appearing in the western Arctic around 3,000 BC.
The earliest stuff about King Arthur comes from sources like the 9th century Historia Brittonum, the maybe-10th Annales Cambriae, & assorted Welsh Poetry.
Then Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote the wildly embellished Historia Regum Britanniae, & Arthur became an international sensation
Not one of these mentions Lancelot.
He doesn't show up until Chrétien de Troyes's "Lancelot, Knight of the Cart" in around 1180, where the adulterous plotline is already befouling the good names of Guinevere and Arthur.
What stands out to me is not only that the bow is basically a Medieval introduction to North America, but that once again the Na-Dene seem to be involved.
We looked at their likely introduction of the Dark Tent Ritual to North America here:
The Dark Tent Ritual
It is night in the taiga of the frozen north. The shaman has been bound and left alone inside a tent. You gather around it in the darkness. Sounds emerge.
Animal sounds.
They want to talk.
But let's rewind. What does this have to do with Anguselus and Lancelot? Let us consult Goodrich.
She argues that L'Ancelot is exactly how Old French would render "Anguselus"
In the time period when any historical Arthur existed, Scotland did not. Part of it belonged to the post-Roman British ancestors of the Welsh that
@ActualAurochs
had written so much about. Part belonged to the Picts, and part to... the Irish?
So, if you dig into Celtic languages at all, you notice that both Irish and Scottish are called Gaelic, and are more closely related to each other than to Welsh.
In post-Roman Britain, "scoti" was a synonym for the Irish, especially those among them who were pirates.
For Christians, human nature reaches its high point in Jesus Christ, who is fully God and fully man, and entirely perfect.
Moderns sometimes imagine gentle Jesus, meek and mild. Medievals knew Him as Christ the King, Ruler of All, the Anointed of Psalm 2.
The Science Bro™️ generally downplays the aberrant or unusual in favor of generalized facts™️ which he treats as ironclad laws rather than descriptions of what is normal.
He has a low awareness of where these facts actually come from and what they mean--you know, actual science.
Predators tend not to eat other predators because, occupying the highest trophic levels in an ecosystem, they accumulate higher levels of toxic compounds and parasites. This is true of many species, but manifests in humans as a reflex of revulsion.
But "the Angus?" What's the deal with that?
The Senchus fer n-Alban, an old Irish text with genealogies for Dal Riada, lists one of their subdivisions as the kin of Oengus. If he existed, it was at about the right period.
I've seen people throwing around the "ackshually, the Jooz are Khazars" thing. Sometimes they limit this specifically to the Ashkenazi, rather than Jews in general.
A few genetics links pushing back:
But an American scholar of Fr*nch literature, going by the name "Norma Lorre Goodrich," dipped her toe into Arthuriana and provided a novel theory:
Lancelot was in the earlier material, but he went by a different name.
In this case, the fact that this creature was aggressive has little bearing on whether or not it might have been a wolf-dog hybrid. If the species is predatory at all, the only thing you need to explain unusually aggressive behavior is "something was wrong with this one."
There is an arcane, forbidden art that allows you to peer into forgotten aeons to discover how things "would have been throughout history."
It's called "history."
Thinking about how many single moms there would have been throughout history as war and battle would have claimed the lives of so many fathers. I think there are likely far fewer single moms today than most periods of history in most places.
This is all wild speculation, of course. Goodrich's Arthur stuff is not well received by the scholarly community, Angus is in a fairly weird place, & there's no direct evidence whatsoever
But it does make some sense of both Anguselus of Scotland and Lancelot's sudden appearance
Monmouth refers to a king of Scotland named Anguselus, sometimes rebranded as Angusel, Anguish, or Anguishance.
One problem? Please find Scotland for me on this map.
My general attitude to "Homer is hard" is about the same as to "Shakespeare is classy"
Sure, you have to get used to epithets and long similes, but the Odyssey is about cyclopses and witches slaughtering suitors. The Iliad is detailed descriptions of knocking eyes out of sockets
But the part of me that prefers a good story to rooting out the truth will always like the idea of Lancelot as a Gaelic clan chief, ally of Arthur, tasked to invade and occupy part of the territory of the wild and bloody Picts
@Treeo_of_one
Japan definitely is the closest analogy, thought it has its own quirks. But does any dnd setting have something that plays the role Buddhism did in premodern Japan?