Meanwhile, somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains

The surviving members of the Egregores Collective have just recently emerged from a very strict three-year retreat in our meditation center nestled among the Făgăraş Mountains of Transylvania. We wish to take this opportunity to announce to the world that our new favorite band is a Romanian DJ. That is all for now. At some point in the future we may or may not have more to say about what (else) we have (or have not) been up to.

MUSIC VIDEOS!!!

........ ........ ........

weeds

once upon a time there was an Ancient Forest. and then one day the humans came and cut it all down and put up a parking lot for one of their "shopping malls". and then one day the humans left.

after the humans left, more and more cracks started opening up in the parking lot, and more and more weeds started growing up through the cracks.

some of these weeds remembered the Ancient Forest. that's because they were descended from those few weeds that had continued to look for every crack in the concrete, back when the humans were still around. no matter how fanatically the humans tried to keep their shopping mall parking lot weed free, there were always little sprouts of green poking up through the inevitable cracks. there had always been weeds like this. and they were the ones who remembered the Ancient Forest.

some weeds, however, were embarrassed by these weeds-that-remembered. they said, "please stop being such Romantic Fools. you are embarrassing us!" They also said, "we are just weeds, and weeds is all we ever were and all we ever will be. the humans cut down the forest and it is gone. get over it. it is gone forever. it will never come back."

but there were still other weeds who said, "it's good that the humans are gone, but the Old Forest was bad, too. we are weeds, and the Old Trees were our oppressors. they blocked the light from us and lorded it over us. in our New Forest we must all be equal, so no plants should ever grow too high. that way we can learn from our past mistakes and Make Progress."

but wait, there's more. there were also weeds who said, "hey! we are not 'weeds'!! as a matter of fact, 'weed' is a perjorative term, and no plants in the past ever called themselves 'weeds'. we reject 'weed-privilege' and demand to be called by various hyphenated verbal monstrosities that we either make up as we go along, or that we borrow incorrectly from scholars whose works we have never read, much less understood!!!!" who knew weeds could shout like that!

but mostly the weeds were just weeds. they kept busy pushing up through the cement toward the light, but remaining firmly rooted in the darkness that will always be there if they ever need to return again. they were busy, too busy for much anything else, slowly turning the vast parking lot erected by the humans back into a Forest.

.

(This was originally posted on May 11, 2015.)

Forget Russian Videos - Bring on the Ukranian Videos

just some russian videos

Firyuza (it turns out that 1979 was a very good year for cosmic jazz fusion in Turkmenistan)

Witches, Poisoners, and the book of Exodus

When Jewish scholars translated the Tanakh into Greek over 2000 years ago (resulting in the Setptuagint, aka "LXX"), they translated the 18th verse of the 22nd chapter of the Book of Exodus as:

φαρμακοὺς οὐ περιποιήσετε 

(from: https://www.blueletterbible.org/lxx/exo/22/1/s_72001)

The original Hebrew for this verse (which, just to make things even more potentially confusing, in modern Jewish versions, whether in Hebrew or in translation, is invariably numbered as verse 17, not 18), is:

מְכַשֵּׁפָה, לֹא תְחַיֶּה.

(from: http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt0222.htm)

For comparison we can also look at Jerome's Vulgate translation of this verse:

Maleficos non patieris vivere.

And then there is also Luther's German translation:

Die Sauberinnen sollst du nicht leben lassen.

So, just what do these four words (  מְכַשֵּׁפָה, φαρμακοὺς,  maleficos and Sauberinnen ) mean? The King James Bible gives the English equivalent as, simply, "Witch", as in "Thou shalt not suffer a Witch to live."

Here are three modern Jewish translations of this verse into English:

1. "Thou shalt not suffer a sorceress to live."
Mechon Mamre: http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt0222.htm

2. "You shall not allow a sorceress to live."
JPS Tanakh, 1917: http://biblehub.com/exodus/22.htm

3. "You shall not allow a sorceress to live."
Chabad.Org:  http://www.chabad.org/library/bible_cdo/aid/9883#

Below is an excellent overview of the meaning of these tricky words which nicely deals with the silly and completely unfounded claim that the passage in Exodus is only referring to "poisoners". This overview is from Frank Luke who posted it to the Biblical Hermeneutics section of Stack Overflow (link):

Forms of the Hebrew word כַשֵּׁף are translated into Greek with equivalent forms of pharmakous: Exodus 7:11, Exodus 22:18, Deuteronomy 18:10, 2 Chronicles 33:6, Isaiah 47:9, Isaiah 47:12, Jeremiah 27:9, Daniel 2:2, Malachi 3:5. As you said, most of these places rule out poisoner from the context. Poisoner simply cannot work in them. The LXX also uses pharmakous in these verses:

• Exodus 9:11 The magicians could not stand before Moses because of the boils, for boils were on the magicians and on all the Egyptians. (for the Hebrew chartim, an occult magician)
• Psalm 58:6 that does not respond to the magicians, or to a skilled snake-charmer. (for lachash and then cheber)

Then three times in the Aramaic sections of Daniel (2:27 - ashaph conjurer, and 5:7 and 5:8 - chartim, occultist). In writings original to Greek, forms of pharmakous are also found.

• Wisdom 12:4 whom you hated for deeds most odious-- Works of witchcraft and impious sacrifices; (NASB)
• Wisdom 18:13 For though they disbelieved at every turn on account of sorceries, at the destruction of the first-born they acknowledged that the people was God's son. (NASB)
• Galatians 5:20 idolatry, sorcery, hostilities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish rivalries, dissensions, factions,
• Revelation 18:23 Even the light from a lamp will never shine in you again! The voices of the bridegroom and his bride will never be heard in you again. For your merchants were the tycoons of the world, because all the nations were deceived by your magic spells!
• Revelation 21:8 But to the cowards, unbelievers, detestable persons, murderers, the sexually immoral, and those who practice magic spells, idol worshipers, and all those who lie, their place will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur. That is the second death."
• Revelation 22:15 Outside are the dogs and the sorcerers and the sexually immoral, and the murderers, and the idolaters and everyone who loves and practices falsehood!

The Greek lexicons give these defintions:

• Liddell, Scott, Jones: links it to magic from drugs and specifically states using poisons.
• Friberg: one who prepares and uses drugs for magical purposes or ritual witchcraft
• United Bible Society: sorcerer, one who practices magic or witchcraft
• Lou-Nida: sorcerer
• Thayer: pertaining to magical arts. And points out how it is used for kashaph.
• Lust, Eynikel, Hauspie: mixer of magical potions, sorcerer, magician
• Gingrech: magician

Only one of the major lexicons mentions "poisoner" as a meaning of the Greek word, several point out the drug use, but all agree that it is magical. There was also the cult of Pharmakos which used drugs on their ritual victims.

"Many sides" in Late Antiquity?

On August 11-12, 2017, torch wielding, sieg-heiling, "Jews will not replace us" chanting, wanna-be Nazi nimrods rioted in the streets of Charlottesville, VA, culminating the the murder of anti-fascist activist Heather Heyer in a vehicular terrorist attack that also left at least 19 others injured. United States President Donald Trump responded by proclaiming: "We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides. On many sides."

This kind of prevaricating obfuscation is designed, and quite obviously so, to absolve those genuinely responsible for violence by pretending that the victims of violence share, equally (at least), in the blame with those who perpetrated violence upon them. In the case of Trump's response to the events in Charlottesville, this refusal to focus on and hold accountable the swastika-sporting white-supremacists has been, correctly in my opinion, interpreted as symptomatic of Trump's own personal sympathy with the cause of those he cannot bring himself to reproach by name.

This scenario of victim-blaming exculpation should be quite familiar to those acquainted with the modern scholarly field of "late antiquity studies". Indeed, nothing is more characteristic of the period of history labeled as "late antiquity" than the state and church sponsored violence of Christians against Pagans, and nothing is more characteristic of the so-called "scholars" of this period than their Trump-esque (and ever-so-revealing) refusal to acknowledge this violence for what it is, and the perpetrators of the violence for what they are.

The Decline and Fall of Late Antiquity Studies

In September of 2015 the Los Angeles Review of Books published an online essay by noted Byzantinist Anthony Kaldellis entitled "Late Antiquity Dissolves." Here are three excerpts to whet your late antiquarian appetite:

1. "there is an imperative to turn the sources toward the study of social and cultural history, specifically to reconstruct the ideological value systems that underpinned groups and communities. Texts, their contents, and their authors are treated as instrumental or exemplary in such broader social processes .... So Prokopios has to be pressed into service as an exponent of imperial ideology; or, if he is allowed to speak against Justinian, he has to be made into the spokesman for a senatorial opposition (whose existence has yet to be proven) or imperial ideology 'in general.'"

2. "Difference, like identity, was but a discursive construct, an artifact produced by texts that ostensibly postulate essences, but we should not be fooled by them, for what they really offer are 'negotiations' among ideological options floating in the common soup of the late antique mentality .... The field also exhibits a Christian bias in the way it reconstructs the generic mentality of late antiquity, treating pagans often as a troublesome inconvenience."

3. "Religious hatred that reached the level of bloodshed is frequently analyzed under the irenic guises of identity construction and discursive negotiation, as if we were dealing with merely textual communities cultivating positive role models along parallel tracks that rarely intersected. But euphemism and discursive amelioration will never fully occlude the fact that the later Roman Empire was the site of tremendous and unparalleled religious conflict, which was accompanied by what seems to be an intensification of state violence too."

Check out the full article here: http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/late-antiquity-dissolves-by-anthony-kaldellis/

.