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#1) we all grew up in a hegemony 2) we all turned out the same 3) the way we grew up had more privileges afforded to us

hello-that-happened · 4 years

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Noelle Stevenson’s She-Ra, Vanguard of a Postchristian Era

Plenty of She-Ra fans have written insightful posts about how the show criticizes the brainwashing, trauma, set-in-stone “destiny,” desire suppression, imperialism, and blind obedience of (toxic) Christianity. I wrote one a little while ago about how She-Ra challenges fundamentalist Christian values by accepting existential humanism instead. I want to situate these discussions in a larger cultural context, because Noelle and her fantastic show are the face of a massive sociocultural shift in the United States.

Before I start generalizing to tell the story of past and future American history, I need to say a few caveats: (1) there are plenty of kind, progressive, and/or LGBT+ people who are Christians; (2) it is okay to be Christian; (3) She-Ra does not necessarily criticize every form of Christianity, because some forms are not necessarily toxic; (4) Christians deserve the same respect as everyone else; and (5) as long as there is a United States, it will probably have millions of Christians among its citizens. I hope that covers all my bases.

With that said, let’s talk about the history of American Christianity.

Background: The Rise of the Christian Right

Main source and further reading: “Secularization Strikes Back: The End of American Religion?” in Providence Magazine

Americans are living through a sociocultural transition unprecedented in our history. For many years, the United States has bucked a global trend of secularization. As countries industrialize and become wealthy, their citizens care less about religion – except for Americans.

The U.S. has stayed so religious for so long for many reasons, but one of the most important has been American religion’s historical distance from politics. Decisions by the “founding fathers” deserve plenty of criticism, but one of their best decisions was to oppose a national church.

“The famous Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited the United States in the 1830s,” explained why European Christianity lost its influence then and American Christianity is losing its own: “Famously, he attributed the strength of American religion to its distance from politics.” The further religion stayed away from politics, the stronger it remained. European religion lost power, per Tocqueville, because “religion allied with power was inevitably tainted by factional political interests.”

Let’s fast-forward to modern times. In the late 20th century, the Republican Party realized that it could gain political power by whipping up Christian evangelicals’ hatred of (among other things, like racial integration) the rising social tolerance of sexual freedom. Opposition to these changes catapulted Ronald Reagan to power in 1981 on a wave of the new “Moral Majority,” a coalition of reactionary Christians who wanted the government to legally enforce conservative Christian values on the nation. Since then, the “Christian Right” has remained the most powerful force in the Republican Party.

Background pt. 2: The Future Strikes Back

Main source and further reading: “The Christian Right Is Helping Drive Liberals Away From Religion” from FiveThirtyEight

For the last 30 years, non-Republican Americans have grown increasingly disgusted with how Christianity merged with Republican politics. Moderates, liberals, and progressives have fled Christianity in record numbers, leading to the highest level of nonreligious Americans in history.

The straw which broke the camel’s back was marriage equality. In states where Christian conservatives caused more public controversy over gay marriage, nonreligion rose faster. Younger generations, the Millennials (born ‘81-‘96) and Gen Z (born ‘97-‘12), overwhelmingly approve of marriage equality – partly because an unprecedented percentage of us identify as LGBT+, and partly because most of us who don’t at least know a friend or family member who is LGBT+.

“The younger generation, Americans under the age of 30 — more than eight in 10 of them support same-sex marriage…[It's] a litmus test issue for many millennials in the country. It’s not just that conservative white Christians have lost this argument with a broader liberal culture. It’s that they’ve lost it with their own kids and grandchildren.” –Robert P. Jones

Generational warfare strongly shapes American political discourse, where young Americans are much more likely to be secular progressives who support LGBT+ rights, and older Americans are much more likely to be conservative Christians who do not.

That brings us, finally, to Noelle Stevenson and She-Ra.

Noelle Stevenson Tells the Ex-Christian Story

I couldn’t exclude this absolutely amazing image by @horde-princess:

Noelle Stevenson was raised in a fundamentalist Christian household. Her family taught her that homosexuality conflicts with “God’s plan” for people’s lives, and that some people are born destined to suffer in hell. At her fundamentalist Christian high school, Noelle took a class in apologetics learning how to argue in defense of evangelical Christianity. One of the “facts” she learned is that listening to "Stairway to Heaven” causes demonic possession. Yes, really.

As Noelle grew up, her family’s religion’s strict control over her mind began to crumble. To quote the goddess of she-ra religion posts @horde-princess, “Noelle describes herself going off to college and having her eyes opened, meeting gay people for the first time in her life, and realizing that they weren’t amoral devil worshippers like she was raised to believe.” Struggling with her own gay feelings, she eventually came to accept them and marry the woman she loved.

In a recent Q&A (and many other times), Noelle has described projecting herself into her characters so much that fan analysis reveals aspects of herself she never realized. She poured her experience into She-Ra, and thousands of (especially LGBT+) fans who grew up in strict Christian households saw their own struggles playing out on the screen. I suspect this relatable quality drove part of the show’s popularity and its staying power.

She-Ra is becoming a cultural phenomenon, building on the success of other LGBT+ friendly family cartoons like Steven Universe to spread its messages around the U.S. and the rest of the world. Netflix does not release viewership numbers, which makes it difficult to judge She-Ra’s popularity. But an unpopular show would not have enough fans to trend again and again on Twitter demanding a sixth season and/or a movie. She-Ra is not going away – but Christian hegemony is.

Save the Future

We can overcome the Christian Right Horde.

The more that people watch She-Ra, the more they are exposed to its message that LGBT+ love is a positive good against the evil forces of self-shaming religious imperialism. Kids who grow up with She-Ra will hear Christians using Horde Prime’s language to oppose LGBT+ rights, and will learn to fight the Horde in their own country: the Christian Right.

After selling their proverbial souls to the Christian Right decades ago, Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation are waking up in an America that they do not own anymore. This panic led them to hide behind Trump, hoping that he could fight back against the cultural tide. But Trump has only alienated moderates, liberals, and progressives further from Christianity. His divisive, hateful, reactionary rhetoric can only accelerate the already-exponential rise of nonreligion in the United States. When the Christian Right accepted Trump as their savior, they surrendered their future.

By turning the United States against itself and giving the fossil fuel industry free reign to wreck our environment, Trump and his worshippers are determined to destroy the future before the post-Christian generation can claim it for ourselves. Noelle Stevenson and her masterpiece show She-Ra are a near-perfect figurehead for our generation’s resistance against rising suicide-cult tendencies of the Christian Right. We can fight back, and She-Ra shows us how: with love and forgiveness to those who are willing to change, but with strength and bravery against those who want to force us back into the closet and back into the strictly-controlled dogmatic cult of American evangelical Christianity.

#spop spoilers #she-ra spoilers #religion #christianity #spop #she-ra #religious meta #...

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mcmansionhell · 6 years

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Looking Around: Reflections on Preservation

If you, like me, happen to follow architecture rather closely, you may have recently noticed several folks in the community talking about their Johnson. Always fond of puns, it’s the 20th-century American architect Philip Johnson they’re referring to, rather than, well, you know.

Two weeks ago, it was announced that the Norwegian firm Snøhetta revealed plans to overhaul the front facade of Johnson’s iconic 1984 AT&T building, a Postmodern skyscraper located at 550 Madison Ave in New York City.

Philip Johnson’s 550 Madison Ave (formerly known as the AT&T building). Left Image by David Shankbone, CC BY 2.5. Right Image by Matthew Bisanz, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Proposed changes by Snøhetta. Via Dezeen.

While this is not the first renovation to the tower (Charles Gwathmey did a less invasive but, in this writer’s opinion still problematic rehab in the 90s), architects and critics, famous and obscure alike, were quick to decry the changes. Olly Wainwright, architecture critic for The Guardian, in no small words, called the plans “vandalism.” Mega-architect Norman Foster, no friend to Postmodernism, said on Instagram that the building was nevertheless “an important part of our heritage and should be respected as such.”

Image by Anna Fixsen, Metropolis Magazine. Via Twitter.

A protest was organized, seen above. On the far right, you can see the famous Postmodern architect and former Dean of the Yale School of Architecture, Robert A.M. Stern, holding a model of the building.

A hashtag, #SaveATT, was created, alongside a Twitter account, @Save_AT_T, and a Change.org petition shortly followed.

You may be wondering why all of these architects and critics are losing their minds about a renovation of an 80s building that looks relatively sleek and contemporary. It’s not so much that the proposed renovation in and of itself is objectively bad, it’s about the building for which the renovation was proposed.

The Lowdown on Johnson’s Highrise

Before we get into the details, I’ll say it straight-up: the AT&T building, including its lobby, should absolutely be saved. Why? 1) Because it is probably the most famous example of Postmodern architecture, and 2) because it caused the biggest architectural hissy fit since the birth of Modernism.

Philip Johnson was, until the AT&T building, a high-modernist architect who built a large number of corporate headquarters and a famous glass house. Always a controversial and infuriating character, he decided, seemingly on a whim, to take a Postmodern turn in designing his tower for AT&T.

The Glass House by Philip Johnson. Photo by Staib (CC BY-SA 3.0)

In 1979, when the AT&T tower was announced, Postmodernism (a movement characterized by the revisiting, distorting, juxtaposing, and recontextualizing of historical architectural forms within a contemporary philosophical and aesthetic context) was a relatively theoretical movement, not yet thrust into the eye of the general populus.

Postmodernism had a certain critical eye that cast its gaze at (what was seen at the time as) the stifling hegemony of Modernist architecture, which the Postmodernists found cold, technocratic, and corporate. That the style was appropriated by Johnson for a major corporate building, made a few theorists rather angry, as corporatism was one of their key criticisms of Modernist architecture.

Johnson on the cover of Time Magazine holding a model of the AT&T Building.

To rub more salt in the critical wound, the AT&T building was Postmodernism’s first big media moment, obscuring the smaller, more nuanced works of the movement’s first five years, which added to the hissy fit. Charles Jencks, the eternal gatekeeper of the movement, was so in crisis at the ruining of his nuanced art by a particularly vain starchitect, that he had an existential crisis, asking “Is Postmodernism Dead?” Jencks would continue to see the building as a transition from “real” Postmodernism and “PoMo” aka Postmodernism that Jencks does not like.

Don’t worry, it’s probably all explained in one of his extremely great charts.

After AT&T, Postmodernism exploded in popularity and quickly replaced Modernism as the hegemonic architectural style, endlessly replicated, splayed across a landscape of gabled museums and courthouses; shopping malls and parking decks. RIP to theoretical purity, born: 1968, died: 1979. Cause of Death: Philip Johnson.

While it may be startling that a building completed in 1984 is already in existential danger, such danger is becoming more and more common, sooner and sooner after the building is completed.

Preservation itself is always a difficult topic, one that raises many questions: Why should we save buildings, and what makes a building worth saving in the first place? Why should we save just the exterior of the building? Why not the interior or landscape as well?

Why Should We Save Buildings?

Buildings are worth saving for several reasons. Sometimes, a building has an interesting cultural history - perhaps an important person was born there, or it was the site of a burgeoning subculture, or an important historical event. Sometimes a building is worth preserving because it is a particularly good example of its architectural style, or because it’s the only example of its particular style in the surrounding area.

Sometimes a building is worth preserving simply because it is beautiful, old, or built by a famous architect. Sometimes, like in the case of Johnson’s AT&T building, the building should be preserved because it had an important role to play in architectural history, theory, or criticism.

My own story of how I began writing about architecture is one that opens with loss - the kind of needless loss that should never happen again.

Paul Rudolph’s Orange County Government Center. Via Library of Congress.

When I was little, I was a house fanatic. (As we can clearly see, not much has changed.) Whether it was watching the then-nascent HGTV channel, or dirtying my mother’s station wagon windows with nose-prints watching yard after yard scroll by, I could not get enough of houses. For most of my young life, architecture was defined by houses.

My mother grew up in Goshen, New York, and we would occasionally go up there to visit family and friends. When I was around thirteen or fourteen, we took a wrong turn looking for a Dunkin Donuts, allowing me to stumble upon the building above, Paul Rudolph’s Orange County Government Center, built in 1967.

This building was unlike any building I had ever seen before, and in the few minutes we stopped by, it had transformed my ideas about what a building was, what it could be. It was the building that introduced me to architecture.

Around 2010, when I finally figured out what building it was, I learned that it had been threatened with demolition. My first ever snippet about architecture I had written was a letter pleading the National Trust for Historic Preservation to intervene. Throughout high school, I wrote at length about the need to save Modernist buildings so that they could have the same effect on future generations as they had on me.

In 2015, my junior year of college, it was announced that the fight for preservation had been lost, and Paul Rudolph’s masterpiece was mutilated beyond repair. I will never be able to revisit the building that inspired me to begin writing about architecture. If I’d never gotten to see that building, it’s unlikely that McMansion Hell would have ever materialized. I can say with some certainty, at the risk of being melodramatic, that had I not seen that building, I would be a completely different person than the one sitting here writing this.

Orange County Government Center during its Demolition. Photo by Daniel Case. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Now, others won’t be able to have that experience. What’s left of Rudolph’s work is beyond uninspiring, a shell of what used to be an innovative, form-defying building. What could have inspired many to make deeper inquiries into their built environment has been reduced to a non-place housing the DMV.

We don’t like to think of buildings as being non-permanent. When a building is constructed, there’s an expectation that it’ll last forever. Buildings seem monolithic, stable, permanent. It’s in a building’s very design to be anchored firmly to the ground, to be able to brave the elements, withstand the years. While natural disasters are responsible for the destruction of a great many buildings, the fickleness of the aesthetic tastes of human beings has felled a great many more.

After around the 70-year mark of a building’s life, it becomes significantly more at risk of demolition. Several books have been written about lost buildings in many cities, sparing few details about how needless some of these losses were. In Baltimore, as in other cities, many a masterpiece was felled in the mid-20th century to make room for a rather infamous building sniper: parking decks and parking lots.

Maryland Casualty Building. Demolished in 1984 in order to build a parking lot.

When it comes to pre-20th century buildings, whose preservation is argued for far more often than buildings like AT&T or Rudolph’s Government Center, the argument isn’t necessarily that these buildings are somehow superior architecturally to others because of their age, but because they are totally irreplaceable.

Even if you wanted to build a full-scale replica of a demolished building from, say, the 18th century, it’s likely that the materials needed to rebuild it are no longer around. Most of the marble and stone quarries that brought us styles like Richardsonian Romanesque or Gothic Revival, were completely depleted. In addition, the construction methodologies required for pre-industrial building practices are either not likely to get approval because they aren’t up to modern building codes or because some of those trade skills are simply lost. Regardless, the cost of replacement materials, as well as the labor needed to build these historic buildings, are both economically unviable.

On a more surface level, old buildings are snapshots of how people once lived, and saving them is an important part of charting the history of human development, historically and technologically.

Mechanics Theater, Baltimore, MD. Demolished in 2013 and replaced with a festering open pit.

A common fallacy of preservation is that it is reserved solely for the oldest, most ornate buildings, especially those relevant to the heavily sanitized version of American history taught in primary schools. I would argue that preservation is even more important for those buildings we find difficult to like, those that challenge us architecturally, like Rudolph’s Government Center.

There is always a point in time where a style of architecture is loathed by its successors. Many a Queen Anne Victorian house was razed because people at the beginning of the 20th century found them both dowdy, dusty, and plain unhygienic. Modernism was loathed by Postmodernism. Postmodernism is loathed by today’s architects who grew up in its shadow.

That which is loathed is not always that which is not worth preserving, but by the time we realize this, it’s often too late. Only after a building is threatened do people come rallying to save it, when these preservation efforts are more successful when they start long before the first threat. This is perhaps why so many houses by Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe skyscrapers remain for people to enjoy.

Interiors

TV AM building interior by Terry Farrell. Remodeled, mid-1990s. Via Dezeen.

People go to visit old buildings (especially places like Museum houses) because they want to experience life as it was in a different era. The exterior is one part of this experience, but it’s the interiors which give people the sense that they are not merely looking at history but are instead enveloped in it.

Though there has been some progress over the last few years, interiors and landscape architecture have not been as high of a priority for preservation as a building’s exterior architecture, and because of this, there have been great losses, like the TV AM building above, in which I’m sure many 80s and 90s children would love to bask nostalgically.

I’m always delighted when, in my searches for this blog’s house of the week, I come upon a time-capsule house, that is, a house that hasn’t been remodeled since it was built. As the years go by, these houses have become less and less common, and their interiors have been replaced with today’s white furniture, contractor gray walls, and sparkling white trim.

Interior of a house in Florida built in 1980s from the archives of the author.

It’s hard to describe the feeling of loss that comes with looking at a house built in 1980 and discovering an interior fresh out of last month’s HGTV Magazine. Do I really think the world needs more overstuffed chintz sofas or shag carpeting? No, but the idea that a world without a single room decorated like it’s fresh out of a Laura Ashley catalog seems like quite an erasure of the pop cultural history of how everyday people decorated their houses.

I’ve devoted a large bookshelf to old catalogs, renovation books, interior design magazines, and other resources about how people decorated their homes partially out of personal obsession and partially because I’m afraid that someday that history will be lost in the material world and will only exist in the glossy imagery of those pages.

Conclusion

What deserves to be preserved and how that preservation is executed is in the eyes of the people. While that idea sometimes gets abused by ruinous people who use historic preservation designations to protect parking lots or empty spaces to prevent affordable housing from being built, or use preservation as a means of proving the superiority of one group of people over another, these bad eggs should not give us the idea that preserving or documenting our important spaces is somehow politically toxic.

Cottonwood Mall Demolition by Mike Renlund (CC BY 2.0)

The “our” is key. People experience architectural loss on an individual level. We can see this when the news reports a mall or shopping center is to be demolished - the comments on such stories are almost always people sharing their fond memories of school shopping, birthday parties, comings of age. When someone moves out of their house or apartment, there’s always a lingering sadness that whoever lives there after you will completely alter that place into their own small piece of the world.

While highly public campaigns like #SaveATT are one method of preservation, they aren’t the only way people like you or me can contribute to saving our collective architectural memory. Documenting and archiving one’s own life is, in itself, a way of preservation.

Inside Today’s Home, a 1979 decorating book from the collection of the author.

Got old catalogs or maybe photos of your parents’ house with all of its tacky decorating laying around? Consider scanning them and maintaining an archive or contributing them to one of the many online groups on places like Flickr or Archive.org devoted to maintaining collections of primary sources from certain time periods.

One of the most remarkable aspects of social media is that people are creating their own ethnographies, their own archives of collective memories through Facebook groups like one I’m in called “Old Baltimore Photos”, where participants get together and tell stories of how they experienced the city and its buildings as it used to be, on a scale past historians could only dream of.

As losses like the Orange County Government Center, barely in its fifth decade of existence, tell us, the time for preservation is not tomorrow or in a few years. The time for preservation is right now. If there’s a building that means something to you, take pictures, visit often, tell people about it! While it might take time and effort to make sure a building is protected for future generations, the first step of the process is always, as cheesy as it sounds, love.

HEY FOLKS! IT’S MY BIRTHDAY THIS FRIDAY!

Here are a few things you can do if you want to celebrate with me!

Sign the Petition to Save the AT&T Building!!: http://bit.ly/SaveATandT

Make a donation to DoCoMoMo US, the organization leading the fight to preserve important landmarks of Modernist and Postmodernist architecture: https://www.z2systems.com/np/clients/docomomous/donation.jsp

Consider supporting me on Patreon! I’ve started posting a GOOD HOUSE built since 1980 from the area where I picked this week’s McMansion as bonus content!

If you’re feeling particularly nice, you can view my book wishlist here: http://a.co/j5LNE0R

See you tomorrow with our Ohio McMansion of the week!

Copyright Disclaimer: All photographs are used in this post under fair use for the purposes of education, satire, and parody, consistent with 17 USC §107. Manipulated photos are considered derivative work and are Copyright © 2017 McMansion Hell. Please email [email protected] before using these images on another site. (am v chill about this)

#architecture #history #preservation #historical preservation #philip johnson #att building #postmodernism #modernism #paul rudolph #orange county government center #brutalism #late modern architecture #postmodern architecture

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easyfoodnetwork · 4 years

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Rajma Masala Might Be the Perfect Cupboard Comfort Dish for Our Times

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The north Indian kidney bean curry is a dish that forgives you if you do not have all the spices, and rewards you for patience and generosity

In the first few weeks of sheltering in place, I found a packet of old rajma in my pantry — that is to say, I stumbled upon a small treasure. Strictly speaking, it was an American brand, so the label on the bag read “kidney beans,” but their magic was the same.

I soaked them overnight and they bloomed into large, toothy beans already splitting at the seams. Boiling them turned their surrounding water brown and thick; I cooked them with onions, tomatoes, and whatever spices I had, and simmered it for hours, using the liquid from bean boiling to thicken the mix. In the end I had made the perfect dish of rajma masala — a rich North Indian kidney bean curry — even if it took me two extra hours of simmering, since I didn’t account for the added cook time for old beans.

Like so many of the world’s recipes that rely on hardy pantry staples, rajma masala is an ideal pandemic dish. You can turn to it when grocery runs are limited and time at home abundant. Its base recipe demands largely shelf-stable ingredients, and like the various bean chili riffs of the Americas, is a soothing comfort food for those who grew up with it. (To New York Times restaurant critic Tejal Rao, rajma masala is “her family’s store-cupboard comfort food” and the “indisputable king” of bean dishes.) Also like chili, there’s an acidic tomato base to cut through the bean’s inherent creaminess, and though it’s heavily spiced, it is a dish that forgives you if you do not have all the spices, and rewards you for patience and generosity.

“The beauty is that it is not instant gratification,” says Oxford, Mississippi-based chef Vishwesh Bhatt, who makes batches of Louisiana red beans to share with his neighbors. “Beans and rice are universal comfort foods, communal, big pot dishes— they lend themselves to sharing.”

After I posted photos of my own rajma masala efforts to Instagram, friends, both South Asian and otherwise, slid into my DMs to ask for the recipe and tips. Similarly, when food writer Priya Krishna posted a photo of her rajma chawal — rajma masala with rice — 10 people responded immediately, and more the next day, telling her that they too had been making rajma at home. Krishna, who grew up eating rajma, had cooked it with her mother while sheltering in place with her family in Dallas, but notes, “I hesitate to call what millions of people do everyday a trend.” Fair point.

It is true that what seems remarkable in the diaspora is not really so remarkable in the subcontinent. Would anyone in India really care that anecdotally, about 20 people also made rajma masala the same day that Krishna and I did? While I had finished the bulk of this essay before Alison Roman’s comments about two Asian women’s business endeavors kicked up a storm in food media, I am finishing it in the aftermath. It is true that writing about food is a fraught endeavor that skirts appropriation and neocolonialism — that often, food personalities exploit other cultures and their own. Exotification is, after all, an orientalist, capitalist ploy. And in learning more about the rajma bean, I have uncovered another complication in my notion of what is traditional desi, or Indian, cuisine, and — as an Indian immigrant to Turtle Island, another reason to honor the ancestors of this land.

Rajma masala may taste and feel like an ancient Indian dish, but its past is marked by cultural and colonial exchange, its recipe scarcely older than my grandfather. While rajma masala is a modern icon of North Indian food, the bean itself is not indigenous to the subcontinent, and neither is the dish’s base, tomato. “Ingredients that seem to many to be inextricably part of an Indian diet are not always autochthonously Indian,” writes historian Anita Mannur in her 2010 book Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture.

The kidney bean originates in the Americas, with sources pointing to Mexico and Peru. The bean journeyed from the New World to the Old, and then onward through the spice trade routes to Asia, in what is known as the Columbian exchange, where beans and other plants and animals and peoples and information and diseases were passed between continents in the 15th and 16th centuries. “We think we’re globalizing now, but look to the 1500s,” says Mannur, who co-edited Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader. “The irony is that in looking for India, Columbus bizarrely transformed the Indian diet.”

The bean’s beneficial properties as a nutrient-dense dried protein source, Mannur tells me, made it a good food for long nautical journeys. Portugal’s ships, filled largely with degredados — convict exiles who often died of dysentery and typhoid along the spice route, and were promised one chest worth of expensive spices to take home if they made the journey — arrived on the western coast of India. Goa, which became Portugal’s capital in India in 1530, was a hub for much internal trade — and was how the tomato and chile pepper took root in Indian cuisine.

It is possible that the bean made it up through the cattle caravan routes to the Mughal Empire in the north — but the recipe for rajma masala doesn’t really crop up until as recently as around 130 years ago, says culinary archaeologist Kurush Dalal. Dalal thinks it’s unlikely the kidney bean was traded by the Portuguese, even if they ate it themselves, because it is not mentioned in medieval Indian texts.

“There is evidence that the French brought the rajma bean from Mexico to Pondicherry,” he tells me, calling the French the “best conduit.” The French, who colonized Pondicherry on the Eastern coast of India, had mounted the Second French Intervention in Mexico in the 1860s, spearheaded by Emperor Napoleon III. (Cinco De Mayo celebrates the day the French were defeated by the Mexicans in 1862.) There is no paper trail of how it ends up in the hills of the North — though logically, it makes sense for the hearty bean to become more popular in cooler climates, where one would burn more calories. In the wetter, hotter south, such a bean would throw off the Ayurvedic energies of vata and pitta, Dalal speculates.

Rajma masala, which made a place for itself in North Indian cuisine, is not as popular in the South. Mannur remembers being told at a restaurant in Mangalore — another erstwhile Portuguese capture — that the North Indian thali was unique because it featured rajma masala.

“Methods of preparing rajma masala are not too different from how Latin Americans made chili,” says Mannur. Like Goan vindaloo, which retained both its Portuguese name and the foreign ingredient of vinegar, rajma masala folded in local ingredients like its spices and the Asian-origin onion, but kept its base of tomatoes and chile peppers, imports from long ago.

Of course, the bean’s entree into the international plate was accompanied by pandemics brought on by Columbus and his ilk, who pillaged the global south, devastating populations and colonizing them along the way.

And this is where a cruel mirror image emerges: A few hundred years ago, millions of Indigenous people died after European contact brought with it an onslaught of new diseases, then departed with native foods, including beans. Now here we are again in the midst of another pandemic, hastened and marked by irresponsible tourism, largely impacting vulnerable populations, especially Native Americans for whom “disease has never been just disease.”

Food exchange has historically been a story of carnage, and the hegemony established continues to benefit from these massacres that unwittingly introduced foods like beans to the world.

Beans that we’re now all staring at in our pantries, wondering how to best cook. Rajma masala came together on the other side of the world — to cook the beans in their “land of origin” feels like a nod to its history. Here, then, are some tips on how best to cook these lovely, storied beans.

How to Make Rajma Masala

Step 1: Procure

Red kidney beans are available at most grocery stories, whether canned or dry. Buy some onions and tomatoes (or tomato paste) while you’re at it. Cilantro leaves will brighten your finished dish. Check your pantry for the usual suspects: chiles, garlic, ginger, cumin, cardamom, cinnamon, bay leaves. If you’re missing any ingredients, or just want to punch up the flavor, the easiest cheat is to buy garam masala — well, the actual easiest would be to buy some rajma masala powder.

Step 2: Soak

“Not all beans are created equally,” says molecular biologist and food writer Nik Sharma. Rajma is a fatty bean, while the chickpea is both fatty and carby — these properties affect how you cook a bean. And while it’s a beautiful thing that the kidney bean can sit on a shelf for a year and still be delicious, the older the bean, the longer it takes to cook. “The skin contains magnesium and calcium,” which create water barriers. It holds in itself pectin, the same tough ingredient that makes jam gel together, and the calcium makes it insoluble.

If you’re using dry beans, you’ll have to soak them. Mannur cautions that faster processes may reduce some of the nutrients. She soaks beans overnight — “My mother was right, but I’ll never tell her.”

Step 3: Boil

Not all food legends are true. For example, we’re told that we must shave off the foam buildup from boiling beans because that foam contains whatever makes you gassy. Sharma, whose book The Flavor Equation will come out this October, says that this is a common misconception. The foam does not make you gassy; improperly cooked kidney beans do, though, if the complex carbohydrate does not break down. The precipitate is removed during the canning process, he says, so you don’t get it confused with bacteria — “it’s not poisonous itself, it’s just quality assurance.”

And Sharma has a secret that he’s willing to share as a tip, and it’s baking soda. “I did an experiment,” he says. Adding baking soda to boiling water and beans cut down the cook time from 4 hours to a mere 30 minutes.

Step 4: Make the Base

“You cook the masala with tomato and onion until the fat separates,” says Sharma, and know that canned tomato is chemically different from fresh tomato, that its acids and sugars have changed in the canning process — so start with fresh tomato, and judiciously add canned slowly, tasting every time. The rest (the spices, that is) is tweakable. I like to use garlic, ginger, cumin, red chile powder, a bit of garam masala, cardamom, and cinnamon.

Step 5: Combine

Hopefully your beans are cooked, somewhere between al dente and exploded. Throw them into the onion-tomato base and add the leftover bean water. I did this gradually. It renders a much thicker base than if you were to use water. Simmer for 20 minutes, checking for consistency. It should be thick and stew-like, not dry or watery.

Step 6: Eat and share

Serve it to yourself with rice. Squeeze a bit of lemon to cut the richness, and sprinkle on some chopped cilantro for sparkle. Or better yet, take a page out of Vishwesh Bhatt’s book, and make a ton. Separate the servings into jam jars. Leave them on your neighbor’s doorsteps as a contactless embrace and a reminder of the bean, its story, and how far it traveled.

Aditi Natasha Kini writes cultural criticism, essays, and other text objects from her apartment in Ridgewood, Queens.

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The north Indian kidney bean curry is a dish that forgives you if you do not have all the spices, and rewards you for patience and generosity

Food exchange has historically been a story of carnage, and the hegemony established continues to benefit from these massacres that unwittingly introduced foods like beans to the world.

How to Make Rajma Masala

Step 1: Procure

Step 2: Soak

Step 3: Boil

Step 4: Make the Base

Step 5: Combine

Step 6: Eat and share

Aditi Natasha Kini writes cultural criticism, essays, and other text objects from her apartment in Ridgewood, Queens.

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#Blogger #cooking #Eater #food #recipes

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dystopian-houndoom · 4 years

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Environmental and Cultural Hegemony in The Hunger Games

Okay, I know the title has a lot going on, but hear me out. Today’s post will revolve around the Capitol and how they use environmental and cultural control, or hegemony, to dehumanize and oppress the rest of Panem. Hegemony is more than just simple control in a certain aspect of life - it’s a monopoly of resources and restriction of access. For example, the Capitol’s cultural hegemony of Panem is found in many aspects of the trilogy. The Capitol censors a lot of oppression in each district, they control the type of identity each district displays to the rest of Panem, they limit interaction between districts, and they are the sole distributors of media and entertainment. And these are only a small handful of examples of how the Capitol maintains cultural hegemony. My favorite example of the Capitol’s cultural hegemony (I know it sounds weird to have a favorite example of oppression...it’s from a perspective of appreciation of clever parallels between Panem and media in the real world) is in the first book, The Hunger Games (Collins, 2008). We all know the iconic three-fingered send-off District 12 gives to Katniss in response to her sacrifice for her sister and we all know the solemn goodbye and solidarity tethered to this simple gesture. The Capitol knows all of this too, so while they do have this scene broadcasted to the rest of Panem, they make a concerted effort to belittle and crush the cultural significance of the act by responding with comments on how quaint and unique local traditions are. They simply chalk up the whole ordeal to being a cultural tradition rather than an act of solidarity for District 12 and dissent against the Capitol.

And you better believe that Collins had every intention to display the intense cultural control the Capitol has on the rest of Panem; after all, there is a parallel between the Capitol’s cultural hegemony and the cultural hegemony found in totalitarian governments. It’s also fair to point out that even in democratic societies (let’s be real, I’m mainly talking about the United States) that there is evidence that some governments and especially large (possibly monolopic) corporations are seeking out cultural hegemony. Sean Connors, who wrote specifically on the politics of Panem, looked to McDonald’s work in 2012 that states that dystopian authors focus on a “negative cultural trend and imagine a future or an alternative world in which that trend dominates every aspect of life” (Connors, 2014). I’ve seen a lot of political cartoons that reflect similar sentiments found in The Hunger Games trilogy. All you need to do is just edit the captions a bit - and viola! - you’ve got a forbidden Panem political cartoon. Here’s the original - and it’s pretty straight to the point. The original cartoon is basically saying ‘we’re just consuming whatever the media feeds us.’

Yeah, a simple statement. I couldn’t find the original source for the life of me, but I did cite where I found it (Dutkiewicz, 2019). If we want to see that “Capitol-ified,” just change the labels:

So I did also edit the figure in the chair a bit, but same general idea with the hegemonic power, the Capitol, feeding the rest of Panem with practically all of the information they get from the media.

Of course, cultural hegemony is not the only monopoly that the Capitol has on the rest of Panem. One of the more obvious hegemonies the Capitol has on the rest of Panem is environmental hegemony. It’s a simple enough concept, but it goes beyond just hoarding resources - it’s also a form of patriarchal dominance in a sense. Ecofeminists (yes, this is a real concept) see that many people see the parallels between the patriarchal dominance of men over women and the patriarchal dominance of humans over nature. Connors references McAndrew’s assertion that many people (and corporations) view the “natural world as something to be mastered or even conquered,” which aligns under “the dominance theme of patriarchy” (Connors, 2014). You can also see that, because the Capitol labels each district based on the resource they provide to the Capitol, there is a very (not-so-unfamiliar) colonizer-colonized relationship at play (Connors, 2014). And Collins is not subtle at all with this idea - just look at District 11 and how the predominantly black population there provides crops for the Capitol. You might as well call that whole district a big plantation. The Capitol uses their technology and power to control and monitor not only the districts but also the artificial environments constructed for the Hunger Games. Not just using Peacekeepers to make sure each district provides their fair share of resources, but also manipulating and ‘conquering’ nature to use it to their own benefit in the form of tracker jackers, jabberjays, other muttations. Just by looking at the environmental hegemony you can see this form of objectification of members of each district, further playing into this connection between feminism and environmentalism many emphasize today (Bland and Strotmann, 2014). And ecofeminists aren’t just seeing examples in fictitious dystopian novels - look at how major corporations are treating indigenous lands. Look at the destruction of the Amazon forest - the corporations’ entitlement to these resources even though their headquarters are thousands of miles away. Look at the heads turned away from the indigenous tribes that are dying and losing land from big tycoons like McDonald’s. There is environmental exploitation that certainly makes ecofeminism a logical response (as odd as the hybrid name may sound).

And those ecofeminists are not simply sitting idly and pointing out the errors of modern society. Dr. Vandana Shiva is a big name in ecofeminism and has her own TED Talk discussing the solutions to major issues using the ecofeminist perspective (and you know you’ve made it if you have a TED Talk). She also has an interesting perspective since she grew up in India and looks at solutions that revolve around taking care of the environment. But don’t just take it from me, hear what she has to say yourself:

youtube

I think that’s enough rambling from my part. Let me know what you think, and stay tuned for more…

Works Cited:

Bland, J., Strotmann, A. The Hunger Games: An Ecocritical Reading. Children's Literature in English Language Education, vol. 2, no. 1, 2014, pp. 22-43.

Collins, S. (2008). The Hunger Games. London: Scholastic.

Connors, S. P. (2014). The Politics of Panem: Challenging Genres. Rotterdam: SensePublishers.

Dutkiewicz, P. (2019, September 27). Where does world hegemony lie? Retrieved from https://risingnepaldaily.com/detour/where-does-world-hegemony-lie

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thelastdiadoch · 7 years

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GAULS OF THE EAST: PART 1 – BANDITS OF THE BALKANS

In this post I will be covering the rarely spoken of Gauls of southeastern Europe, their invasion of Greece, employment as mercenaries under Ptolemaic Egypt, their rebellious and warlike society as well as their little known kingdom of Tylis in Thrace. I will also cover their weaponry, armors and some archaeological finds.

Suggested by: @hardcore-crunchy-nut, @hugh-ardoin, @jhk-1, @reimaginings-of-the-middle-ages, @mcmarra, @iseesigils, @echogolfdelta, @yamswool, @ignited-euphoria, @mustangbratt, @wadeo-potato.

The rarely spoken of eastern Gauls lived on the edge of the Hellenistic world, raiders seeking riches and migrants in search of new lands. With the deaths of Alexander his Diadochi (“successors”) squabbled over the remnants of his empire and in their endless bickering, Macedon, Greece and Thrace were greatly weakened. As their fractured Hellenic neighbors struggled to hold their own, these eastern Celts seized the moment to invade and enter this Hellenistic game of thrones. In time these Celts can be seen inhabiting or working as mercenaries from eastern Europe to Egypt in the south and Persia in the east.

^ Celtic Expansion, 3rd century BCE.

According to Titus Livius (Livy, History of Rome, 5.34) the Celtic Bituriges of central Gaul (modern France) held supremacy there and made up one third of Gauls population. The king at the head of the Bituriges (“kings of the world”) was named Ambigatus, a man renowned for leading Gaul into a golden age of prosperity and growth. As Ambigatus grew older he became more concerned about the overpopulation burdening Gaul so he had two of his sister’s sons lead vast multitudes of Gauls elsewhere, settling wherever “the gods should grant them by augury; that they should take out with them as great a number of men as they pleased, so that no nation might be able to obstruct them in their progress”.

One of these sons was named Bellovesus and he would lead “Biturigians, the Arvernians, the Senonians, the Aeduans, the Ambarrians, the Carnutians, and the Aulercians” into Italy where they would become a great menace in the eyes of the Romans. The other brother, Sigovesus, was sent towards the Hercynian forest, a dense woodland on the German side of the Rhine River. This was but one step on this eastern Gallic migration, soon we find both Roman and Greek writers mentioning Celtic peoples in southeastern Europe, north of the Hellenistic world. These Gallic migrants now dwelled in regions south of the Danube River; namely the western borders of Thrace and Dacia with their core territory being just north and within the realm of the Illyrians.

One of the first victims mentioned to fall to these migrating Gauls were the Illyrian Ardiaei, a tribe that would be renowned in later history for their piratical activities in the Adriatic coast, their wars against Rome and their infamous queen Teuta. The Illyrian Ardiaei were known to love getting drunk, eating insatiably and celebrating daily so the Gauls used this to their advantage. The Gauls held a great feast at their camp and then abandoned it in order to lure the Ardiaei into pillaging their camp, the Gauls made sure to “put in the food certain herbs which had the power to cause severe pains and diarrhea.”

“When this had been done some of them were taken by the Celts and put to death, the others threw themselves into the river, being unable to endure the pains in their stomachs.” – The History of Philip by Theopompus.

Philip II’s brother Perdiccas III (both were sons of Amyntas III) lost his life during their conflict with Bardylis of Dardania (Thraco-Illyrians), when Philip II (Alexander the Great’s father) became king of Macedon (ruled, 359-336 BCE) he was successful in defeating and dismantling the Dardanians (Thraco-Illyrians) and some Illyrian tribes. Around this time the Gallic migrants were flooded with Greek armaments and coins which came from Macedonia during Philip II’s reign so it’s believed that these Gauls may have been hired as mercenaries to aid Philip II in defeating the Illyrians.

^ Kingdom of Macedon c.336 BCE.

Gallic mercenaries under Dionysius I of Syracuse

This was, however, not the first time the Greeks had encountered the Celts. While Dionysius I of Syracuse (ruled, 405-367 BCE), also known as Dionysius the Tyrant, was warring against the Greeks of Magna Graecia (“Great Greece”, southern Italy) an embassy of Gauls from northern Italy seeking friendship and allegiance spoke with him. These Gauls were probably from the Senones tribe since they are mentioned to have been the same Gauls that lived in northern Italy and sacked Rome not long ago. Some modern historians believe that said Gauls marched south against the Romans under the direction of Dionysius I of Syracuse.

The reason for this was so, with Rome preoccupied with the Gallic menace, Dionysius could freely attempt to subjugate the whole of Sicily without Roman intervention. Some of those Gauls who warred with Rome were now in southern Italy and dwelled within the “midst of his enemies”, they informed Dionysius that they could “be of great service to him, either by supporting him in the field, or by annoying his enemies in the rear when they were engaged with him” (Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus by Marcus Junianus Justinus, 20.5). In 367 BCE Dionysius I of Syracuse hired them then sent two thousand Celts and Iberians to Greece in order to aid the Spartans against the Boeotian League of Greek nations (ex. Athens, Thebes and Corinth).

“From Sicily, Celts and Iberians to the number of two thousand sailed to Corinth, for they had been sent by the tyrant Dionysius to fight in an alliance with the Lacedaemonians, and had received pay for five months. The Greeks, in order to make trial of them, led them forth; and they proved their worth in hand-to-hand fighting and in battles and many both of the Boeotians and of their allies were slain by them. Accordingly, having won repute for superior dexterity and courage and rendered many kinds of service, they were given awards by the Lacedaemonians and sent back home at the close of the summer to Sicily.” – The Library of History by Diodorus Siculus, 15.70.1.

According to Xenophon, when the Spartans were about to assault the Thebans, Corinthians and Athenians near the city of Corinth “the expedition sent by Dionysius to aid the Lacedaemonians sailed in, numbering more than twenty triremes” arrived to aid them. While the cavalrymen on the side of the Boeotian League were too afraid to attack the larger Spartan army, the 50 horsemen (Celts and/or Iberians) sent by Dionysius advanced on the enemy. These few brave cavalrymen scattered themselves and charged toward the enemy, hurling javelins at their front ranks, retreating from their advance and then returning to again assail them with javelins.

“[21] But the horsemen sent by Dionysius, few though they were, scattering themselves here and there, would ride along the enemy's line, charge upon them and throw javelins at them, and when the enemy began to move forth against them, would retreat, and then turn round and throw their javelins again. And while pursuing these tactics they would dismount from their horses and rest. But if anyone charged upon them while they were dismounted, they would leap easily upon their horses and retreat. On the other hand, if any pursued them far from the Theban army, they would press upon these men when they were retiring, and by throwing javelins work havoc with them, and thus they compelled the entire army, according to their own will, either to advance or to fall back.

[22] After this, however, the Thebans remained but a few days and then returned home, and the others likewise to their several homes. Then the troops sent by Dionysius invaded the territory of Sicyon, and they not only defeated the Sicyonians in battle on the plain and killed about seventy of them, but captured by storm the stronghold of Deras. After these exploits the first supporting force sent out by Dionysius sailed back to Syracuse.” – Hellenica by Xenophon, 7.1.21-22.

TESTING THEIR HELLENISED NEIGHBORS: “they feared no one, unless it were that Heaven might fall on them”

Embassies to Alexander the Great

After the assassination of Philip II, Alexander III (the Great) claimed the throne in 336 BCE and began securing the hegemony his father had created. In 335 BCE the Gauls sent Alexander an embassy while the latter was campaigning against the Thracians, Getae and Triballi. Many historians believe that their true intent was to probe and evaluate the strength of Alexander’s kingdom.

“Ptolemaeus, the son of Lagus, says that on this expedition the Celti who lived about the Adriatic joined Alexander for the sake of establishing friendship and hospitality, and that the king received them kindly and asked them when drinking what it was that they most feared, thinking they would say himself, but that they replied they feared no one, unless it were that Heaven might fall on them, although indeed they added that they put above everything else the friendship of such a man as he.” – Geography by Strabo. 7.3.8.

After Alexander the Great had successfully defeated the Persians and returned from his Indian campaign, just before his death, the whole of the known world sent embassies to him in Babylon congratulating him in his success and to kiss ass.

“[1] Now from practically all the inhabited world came envoys on various missions, some congratulating Alexander on his victories, some bringing him crowns, others concluding treaties of friendship and alliance, many bringing handsome presents, and some prepared to defend themselves against accusations.

[2] Apart from the tribes and cities as well as the local rulers of Asia, many of their counterparts in Europe and Libya put in an appearance; from Libya, Carthaginians and Liby-Phoenicians and all those who inhabit the coast as far as the Pillars of Heracles; from Europe, the Greek cities and the Macedonians also sent embassies, as well as the Illyrians and most of those who dwell about the Adriatic Sea, the Thracian peoples and even those of their neighbors the Gauls, whose people became known then first in the Greek world.” – The Library by Diodorus Siculus, 17.113.1-2.

Gauls against the Illyrians

The Illyrian Ardiaei were rivals of another, but far greater, Illyrian people known as the Autariatae. At this point the Autariatae were at their peak and held much of Illyria under their sway, from the Dalmatian coast to the borders of Bulgaria. The Autariatae had earlier expelled the mountaineer Triballi (Thracians) and forced the Macedonians to pay them tribute annually.

^ Teuta by Mariusz Kozik.

“The practice of mutilating prisoners may be the reason why the Autariatae killed their own weak and wounded, so that they did not fall into the hands of the enemy live and edible.” – The Illyrians by John Wilkes.

Molistomos (310-298 BCE) was able to overwhelm the Illyrian Autariatae who were already at war with the Paeonians (Thracians, Illyrians or both), these fractured Paeonians refugees were then settled by the Macedonians under Cassander (a Diadoch) who settled twenty thousand of them on their border as a buffer. While here Cassander marched a force to the slopes of Mount Haemus (Balkan mountains of central Bulgaria) where he defeated a force of Gauls constructing ramparts. In passages from Pliny the elder (‘Natural History’) and a fragmentary text (mentioned below) there is mention of a plague of frogs and mice who torment their neighbors, some historians believe that in actuality this is but a metaphor for the Gauls.

“During these transactions, Cassander, returning from Apollonia, fell in with the [Autariatae], who, having abandoned their country on account of the vast number of frogs and mice that infested it, were seeking a settlement. Fearing that they might possess themselves of Macedonia, he made a compact with them, received them as allies, and assigned them lands at the extremity of the country.” – Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus by Marcus Junianus Justinus, 15.2.

“Somewhere in Paeonia and Dardania frogs fell from the sky like rain and there were so many that the houses and streets were full of them. During the first days the people somehow bore it by destroying them and shutting up the houses. But as this achieved nothing, and their very cooking pots got filled with frogs which got boiled and baked with the food, and neither could the water be drunk, nor could men put foot to the ground for the multitude of them, and as the stink from the dead creatures was odious, the people abandoned their homeland.” – Heraclides, fragment 3, FHG vol. 3.

^ Kingdom of Macedon under Cassander.

This loss showed the Gauls that it was not yet time to invade as their Hellenised neighbors were still too powerful. The Gauls stationed themselves on the borders of the Hellenised world for some time; from here future campaigns against the Thracians, Macedonians and the Greeks would soon be launched. After the death of Cassander, Diadoch and king of Macedonia, a Gallic chief named Cambaules led a force against the Thracians but still the Gauls feared the military strength and multitude which the Macedonians and Greeks held so they ended their campaign and returned.

“But when they resolved a second time to carry their arms into an enemy's country—a step to which they were chiefly instigated by the men who had been out with Cambaules, and in whom the experience of marauding had bred a love of plunder and booty—a large force of infantry assembled, and there was no lack of recruits for the cavalry.” – The Description of Greece by Pausanias.

The cracks begin to show

It seemed as though, despite the loss of the great military minds of Alexander the Great, his Diadochi or “successors”, were still too powerful for the Gauls to overwhelm. Their next expedition would have to be timed at a moment when Macedonia and the Greeks were divided and weakened. This opportunity arose when, in the matter of three years, three great Diadochi passed away. Each of these three had established their own independent realms from the fragments of Alexander’s empire.

Ptolemy I Soter, founder of the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt (Hellenistic Egypt), died in 283/2 BCE.

Lysimachus founder of the Lysamichid dynasty of Hellenistic Thrace, Asia Minor and co-ruler of Macedonia, died in a battle against Seleucus I Nicator in 281 BCE.

Seleucus I Nicator, founder of the Seleucid dynasty of the Near East and Greater Persia, was assassinated in 281 BCE shortly after his victory over Lysimachus.

^ Wars of the Diadochi c.279 BCE [Source].

Ptolemy Ceraunus, ‘the thunderbolt’

With the deaths of these three major Diadochi, Gallic chief Bolgios chose a very opportune moment to assault the Macedonians and Thracians as they were both reorganizing under their new kings and were locked into a game of thrones. The Diadoch Lysimachus fell in the Battle of Corupedium against the Diadoch Seleucus I Nicator, shortly after the latter was assassinated by Ptolemy (son of Ptolemy I Soter) who then claimed the Macedonian throne for himself. This Ptolemy was also given the nickname ‘Ceraunus’, “thunderbolt”, for his daring initiative.

^ Marble bust of Lysimachus. Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli (Archaeological Museum), Italy.

“The assassin (Ptolemy Ceraunus) gave up the treasures to the guards to plunder, and reigned over Macedonia until, venturing to give battle to the Gauls (he was the first king we know of who did so)” – The Description of Greece by Pausanias.

“Bolgius marched against the Macedonians and Illyrians, and engaged in conflict with Ptolemy, then king of Macedonia. It was this Ptolemy who first sought the protection of Seleucus (I Nicator), son of Antiochus, and then assassinated his protector, and whose excessive daring earned him the nickname of Thunderbolt (Ceraunus).” – The Description of Greece by Pausanias.

Plutarch writes that Ptolemy Ceraunus was heavily plagued by nightmares stemming from his betrayal and assassination of Seleucus I Nicator, namely he dreamt that he was “cited to the judgment-seat by Seleucus, where wolves and vultures were his judges” (Plutarch). Ptolemy was well aware of the Gallic approach but dismissed them as being any true threat, his pride and overconfidence led him to even dismiss the aid of twenty thousand men offered by Dardanians (Thraco-Illyrians) for the purpose of defeating their Gallic neighbors

^ A Roman copy of a Greek statue of Seleucus I found in Herculaneum. Now located at the Naples National Archaeological Museum.

“An embassy from the Dardanians, offering him twenty thousand armed men, for his assistance he spurned, adding insulting language, and saying that “the Macedonians were in a sad condition if, after having subdued the whole east without assistance, they now required aid from the Dardanians to defend their country; and that he had for soldiers the sons of those who had served under Alexander the Great, and had been victorious throughout the world.” This answer being repeated to the Dardanian prince, he observed that “the famous kingdom of Macedonia would soon fall a sacrifice to the rashness of a raw youth.”” – Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus by Marcus Junianus Justinus, 24.4.

The Gauls under Bolgius sent envoys to Ptolemy Ceraunus, offering him peace in exchange for a fee but Ptolemy refused and boasted to his courtiers “that the Gauls sued for peace from fear of war.” Ptolemy told the ambassadors, right in front of the Gallic envoys, that he would only grant them peace if they turned their chiefs over to him as hostages and gave up their arms. When the Gallic envoys returned and relayed the message the Gauls laughed it off and said that they would show Ptolemy Ceraunus “would soon see whether they had offered peace from regard for themselves or for him.” Bolgius lead a force against Ptolemy Ceraunus, defeated them in battle, beheaded Ptolemy, placed his head on a spear, paraded it before his own people and executed or sacrificed the Macedonian captives.

^ Concord - Ancient Celts.

“-and the Macedonians were defeated and cut to pieces. Ptolemy, after receiving several wounds, was taken, and his head, cut off and stuck on a lance, was carried round the whole army to strike terror into the enemy. Flight saved a few of the Macedonians; the rest were either taken or slain” – Epitome of Philippic History by Justin, 24.5.

“Ptolemy himself fell in the battle, and the Macedonian loss was heavy; but again the Celts had not the courage to march against Greece, and so the second expedition returned home again” – The Description of Greece by Pausanias.

Bolgius didn’t follow up this victory, their momentum was eventually stunted by a nobleman and officer named Sosthenes who took on the title of strategos (general) rather than a kingly title. Defeated, the Gauls under Bolgius returned to their base of operations with their riches. Although thoughts of a successful invasion seemed bleak, the fateful tides were now turning in their favor. More Gauls back home were inspired by the promise of riches in a domain now showing signs of instability as the Macedonian throne was being pass from person to person.

Ptolemy Ceraunos, who ruled from 281–279 BCE was killed by Bolgius, as stated above.

Meleager, the brother of Ptolemy Ceraunos, ruled for two months before being forced to resign by his own troops in 279 BCE.

Antipater ruled for such a short time (45 days) that he was nicknamed Etesias (“annual wind”), brief summer winds. Antipater Etesias.

Sosthenes, the nobleman mentioned above, deposed Antipater Etesias and ruled as strategos (general) of Macedonia from 279-276 BCE.

Now, this force led by Bolgius was but one of three who were to lead a massive invasion of the Balkan Peninsula, according to Pausanias’ ‘Description of Greece’:

“Bolgius marched against the Macedonians and Illyrians, and engaged in conflict with Ptolemy, then king of Macedonia.”

“Cerethrius was to lead his force against the Thracians and the Triballian tribe”.

“Brennus and Acichorius commanded the army destined to attack Paeonia”.

THE GREAT GALLIC INVASION OF GREECE: “with the wine which they had drunk the day before, rushed to battle without any fear of danger”

The second branch of this three pronged invasion was under Brennus, the Gallic chieftain who urged the Gauls to invade at this particular moment since the whole of the Balkan Peninsula was in a chaotic and weakened state.

“Hereupon Brennus, at public assemblies and in private interviews with the leading men, energetically urged an expedition against Greece, pointing to the present weakness of Greece, to the wealth of her public treasuries, and to the still greater wealth stored up in her sanctuaries in the shape of offerings and of gold and silver coin.” – The Description of Greece by Pausanias.

The second invading Gallic army was numbered at “one hundred and fifty-two thousand foot, and twenty thousand four hundred horse”. Due to an interesting cavalry system the horsemen were actually numbered three times larger than stated above, this cavalry system is referred to as the ‘trimarkisia’ (tri = “three”, marcos = “war-horsemen”). Following the trimarkisia organizational system, each mounted warrior was assisted by two mounted slaves who would provide said warrior with a fresh mount if theirs were to die or tire. If said mounted warrior were to be wounded or perish in the midst of combat, one of his slaves would retrieve the body of the fallen and return it to camp while the other would take their lord’s place on the battlefield. The trimarkisia is believed by some to have been descendant from or inspired by the chariot system of having allied guards, servants, runners or skirmishers.

“These tactics, it seems to me, were copied by the Gauls from the Persian corps of the Ten Thousand, known as the Immortals. The difference was that in the Persian corps the places of the dead were filled up by enlistment after the action, while with the Gauls the squadron was brought up to its full strength on the field of battle.” – The Description of Greece by Pausanias.

Though the Greeks were weakened and demoralized by years of conflict between the Diadochi, a few brave souls assembled to meet this threat. Athenians led coalition consisting of Aetolians, Boeotians, and Phocians (among others) marched toward the famed choke point known as Thermopylae (“hot gates”), where they repelled the Persians about 200 years earlier.

“The spirit of the Greeks had fallen very low, but the very excess of their fear roused them to the necessity of defending Greece” – The Description of Greece by Pausanias.

“But the Athenians, although they were more exhausted than any of the Greeks by the long Macedonian war and many defeats in battle, nevertheless appointed the said Callipus to the command, and hastened to Thermopylae with such of the Greeks as volunteered. Having seized the narrowest part of the pass, they attempted to hinder the barbarians from entering into Greece.” – The Description of Greece by Pausanias.

The Spercheius River had bridges so the Greeks sent a small detachment to destroy them in order to hamper the Gallic advance and cut down any Gauls who crossed. Brennus, however, “was no fool, and had, for a barbarian, a pretty notion of strategy (Pausanias)”. Under the cover of darkness Brennus sent a thousand Gauls, who were either tall or great swimmers, further down the river to cross at points out of the view of the Greeks. When the Greeks learned of this they swiftly retreated back to their main force back at Thermopylae. The Gauls then forced locals into rebuilding or restoring bridges so the rest of his forces could cross. The Gauls then set out toward the district around Heraclea Trachinia where they raided, pillaged and took captives, the latter of which were massacred in an attempt to draw the Greeks from the narrow pass of Thermopylae.

^ Karwansaray – Ancient Warfare 6.6, ‘Attack of the Celts’.

The Forgotten Battle of Thermopylae, 278 BCE

Despite being outnumbered, the Greeks held the Gauls their heroically, echoing the similar clash the Greeks had against the Persians over 200 years earlier. The Celts sent wave after wave against the Greeks but against this wall of men and shields, under constant harassment from skirmishers hurling spears, slinging stones and shooting arrows, casualties escalated on the side of the Gauls. Brennus needed to find an alternate path toward victory.

“They advanced on the foe with the blind rage and passion of wild beasts. Hacked with axes or swords, their fury did not desert them so long as they drew breath: run through with darts and javelins, they abated not of their courage while life remained: some even tore from their wounds the spears with which they had been hit and hurled them at the Greeks, or used them at close quarters.” – The Description of Greece by Pausanias.

The Gauls ended up finding the same route used by the Persians two centuries ago. A portion of the Gallic force made their way through said path and, with their march being obscured by a dense mist, the Gauls routed the Phocians guarding the pass.

^ Karwansaray – Ancient Warfare 6.6, ‘Attack of the Celts’.

“But the Celts discovered the path by which Ephialtes the Trachinian once guided the Medes (Persians); and after overpowering the Phocians, who were posted on it, they crossed Mount Oeta before the Greeks were aware.” – The Description of Greece by Pausanias.

“It happened that on that day the mist came down thick on the mountain, darkening the sun, so that the Phocian pickets stationed on the path did not perceive the approach of the barbarians till they were close upon them.” – The Description of Greece by Pausanias.

The Greek Phocians retreated and warned their allies of the nearing disaster, a Gallic assault from both fronts. Luckily, since the Greek Phocians warned them quickly enough, the Greeks were able to be saved by Athenian naval vessels stationed in the Malian Gulf which nestled Thermopylae.

“Then it was that the Athenians rendered a great service to Greece; for on both sides, surrounded as they were, they kept the barbarians at bay. But their comrades on the ships labored the most; for at Thermopylae the Lamian Gulf is a swamp, the cause of which, it seems to me, is the warm water that here flows into the sea. So their toil was the greater; for when they had taken the Greeks on board, they made shift to sail through the mud in ships weighed down with arms and men. Thus they strove to save the Greeks in the way I have described.” – The Description of Greece by Pausanias.

With their path into Greece now clear, Brennus marched southward to Delphi in such swift determination that the Gauls left their dead unburied so their bodies could be “devoured by wild beasts or carrion birds”.

“After this battle at Thermopylae the Greeks buried their own dead and spoiled the barbarians, but the Gauls sent no herald to ask leave to take up the bodies, and were indifferent whether the earth received them or whether they were devoured by wild beasts or carrion birds. There were in my opinion two reasons that made them careless about the burial of their dead: they wished to strike terror into their enemies, and through habit they have no tender feeling for those who have gone.” – The Description of Greece by Pausanias.

^ Concord - Ancient Celts.

The sack of Callium

After the clash at Thermopylae, Brennus sent “forty thousand foot and about eight hundred horse” under the command of Orestorius and Combutis to raid Aetolia and lure them away. One settlement that felt the brunt force of this Gallic detachment was Callium which was utterly massacred. Though grim and brutal, the Gauls were effective in drawing the Aetolians back to their homeland.

“Every male they put to the sword, and there were butchered old men equally with children at their mothers' breasts. The more plump of these sucking babes, the Gauls killed, drinking their blood and eating their flesh. Women and adult maidens, if they had any spirit at all in them, anticipated their end when the city was captured.

Those who survived suffered under imperious violence every form of outrage at the hands of men equally void of pity or of love. Every woman who chanced to find a Gallic sword committed suicide. The others were soon to die of hunger and want of sleep, the incontinent barbarians outraging them by turns, and sating their lust even on the dying and the dead.” – The Description of Greece by Pausanias.

^ Osprey – ‘Warrior’ series, issue 030 – Celtic Warrior 300 BC-AD 100 by Stephen Allen and Wayne Reynolds (Illustrator). Plate B: The Battle of Telamon, 225 BC.

The city was ravaged and set ablaze, since most men of military age were sent off to fight the Gauls earlier, the Aetolians were pressured into, in their desperation, mobilizing women and the elderly for the purpose of repelling the Gauls. After successfully looting Callium, the Gauls retreated back toward Thermopylae but were assaulted by a force of Patraeans (Achaean) as well as “the Aetolians, men and women, drawn up all along the road, kept shooting at the barbarians, and few shots failed to find a mark among enemies protected by nothing but their national shields.”

“From all the cities at home were mobilized the men of military age; and even those too old for service, their fighting spirit roused by the crisis, were in the ranks, and their very women gladly served with them, being even more enraged against the Gauls than were the men.” – The Description of Greece by Pausanias.

Gallic sack of Delphi

Phocis was the homeland of the Greek Phocians who had earlier guarded the secret path around Thermopylae and warned the main Greek force of the flanking Gallic detachment. Almost 80 years earlier, during the Sacred Wars (595-338 BCE), the Greek city states fought over ownership or liberty of the sacred temple of Apollo at Delphi. The Amphictyonic League, the religious organization made up of representatives from much of Greece whom in all governed said temple, fined the Phocians harshly for their occupation and cultivation of land belonging to Delphi.

^ Delphi taken from the magazine ‘Ancient Celts: Barbarians!’.

In dire straits from being pressured into paying said fine and from hiring over ten-thousand mercenaries to combat rival Locrians and Thebans, the Phocians ended up stealing Delphi’s building funds, looting their treasures and melting down its rich metal offerings (“ten-thousand talents’ worth of silver”). The Gauls marched southbound toward Delphi and swarmed the mountainous area nearing the city, it is said that this rugged and broken terrain would’ve made the use of the famed phalanx formation difficult for the Greeks to utilize.

“The trembling inhabitants betook themselves to the oracle, and the god bade them have no fear, ' For,' said he, ' I will myself guard my own.'” – The Description of Greece by Pausanias.

As the Gauls blanketed the landscape, it seemed as though the Greeks had no chance of repelling such an insurmountable force. The Gallic advance was however hampered by the fact that the Gauls were pillaging the countryside, intoxicated by a land rich in wine.

“the common soldiers, when, after a long endurance of scarcity, they found a country abounding with wine and other provisions, had dispersed themselves over the fields, rejoicing as much at the plenty as if they had gained a victory, and leaving their standards deserted, wandered about to seize on everything like conquerors. This conduct gave some respite to the Delphians.” – Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus by Marcus Junianus Justinus, 24.7.

“The Gauls, animated by these assertions, and disordered, at the same time, with the wine which they had drunk the day before, rushed to battle without any fear of danger.” – Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus by Marcus Junianus Justinus, 24.8.

The Delphians were saved by the elements, sent by Apollo, as an earthquake struck which shattered portions of the mountains, creating landslides which crushed many Gauls. These earthen disasters were then followed by a violent and frigid tempest of hail.

^ Concord - Ancient Celts.

“In repelling the Gauls and the Celtic host, none of the Greeks were more strenuous than the Phocians; for they felt that they drew sword for the god of Delphi, and they wished, too, I suppose, to wipe out the old stains on their honor. Such were the memorable deeds of the Phocians.” – The Description of Greece by Pausanias.

“-the Phocians displayed more enthusiasm for the war than any other of the Greeks, and, as a result of this affair, they were reinstated in their position as members of the Amphictyonic League, and retrieved their ancient reputation.” – The Description of Greece by Pausanias.

The Gallic hordes were harassed by missile-fire the whole journey back home by the Delphians, Phocians and Aetolians – falling in droves since many Gauls were unarmored. Their baggage trains were also pillaged, forcing the Gauls to forage for food where they were also harassed. The Greek Phocians especially had something to prove, since they lost credibility and honor in the eyes of the Amphictyonic League when they desecrated and looted Delphi in the past.

According to Greek tradition the fleeing Gauls were tortured by “frost, famine, fatigue”, continual rains, snowfall and struck by thunderbolts and rockslides sent by Apollo. Phantoms were even said to appear before the Greeks to assail the Gallic plunders, Brennus himself was wounded and carried off from the field. Demoralized, when nightfall came the Gauls thought they heard the trampling hoofs of approaching enemy cavalrymen and in fear they mistook each other for Greeks and slew one another.

^ Karwansaray – Ancient Warfare 6.6, ‘Attack of the Celts’.

“the fate that was in store for them in the night was more dismal far. For a keen frost set in, and with the frost came snow, and great rocks slipping from Parnassus, and crags breaking off, made straight for the barbarians, crushing to death not one or two, but thirty or more at a blow, as they chanced to be grouped together on guard or in slumber.” – The Description of Greece by Pausanias.

“But when they came to close quarters, thunderbolts and rocks, breaking away from Parnassus, came hurtling down upon the Gauls; and dreadful shapes of men in arms appeared against the barbarians. They say that two of these phantom warriors, Hyperochus and Amadocus, came from the Hyperboreans, and that the third was Pyrrhus, son of Achilles.” – The Description of Greece by Pausanias.

“-soon to confound the barbarians the god sent signs and wonders, the plainest that ever were seen. For all the ground occupied by the army of the Gauls quaked violently most of the day, and thunder rolled and lightning flashed continually, the claps of thunder stunning the Celts and hindering them from hearing the words of command, while the bolts from heaven set fire not only to the men upon whom they fell, but to all who were near them, men and arms alike. Then, too, appeared to them the phantoms of the heroes Hyperochus, Laodocus, Pyrrhus; some add to these a fourth, to wit, Phylacus, a local hero of Delphi.” – The Description of Greece by Pausanias.

Brennus’ pride was wounded since the campaign he led had come to such a disastrous end, due to this, his wounds and in “fear of his countrymen” he “ended his life with his dagger” or by drinking poisoned wine.

“After that the barbarians made their way with difficulty to the Spercheus, hotly pressed by the Aetolians. But from the Spercheus onward the Thessalians and Malians lay in wait and swallowed them up so completely that not a man of them returned home.” – The Description of Greece by Pausanias.

The cursed treasures of Delphi and Greek monuments to victory

Sources are in conflict over whether Delphi and its temple of Apollo were looted and how successful the Greeks were in repelling the Gauls. According to Strabo the Gauls were successful in looting the Delphi and returned to the city of Tolosa in Gaul (modern Toulouse, France) with “about fifteen thousand talents” of gold and silver. They placed some of this loot in sacred lakes as an offering to the gods since they feared that these treasures were cursed.

A legend arose that any who looted these treasures would be cursed, which supposedly occurred when a famed Roman general named Quintus Servilius Caepio plundered the temple and shortly after met with terrible tribulations. Caepio soon lost the Battle of Arausio, was tried for losing the army, convicted of embezzling, fined heavily, and “ended his life in misfortunes — for he was cast out by his native land as a temple-robber, and he left behind as his heirs female children only, who, as it turned out, became prostitutes, as Timagenes has said, and therefore perished in disgrace (The Geography of Strabo, 4.1.13).”

“At all events, the Romans, after they mastered the regions, sold the lakes for the public treasury, and many of the buyers found in them hammered mill-stones of silver. And, in Tolosa, the temple too was hallowed, since it was very much revered by the inhabitants of the surrounding country, and on this account the treasures there were excessive, for numerous people had dedicated them and no one dared to lay hands on them.” – The Geography by Strabo, 4.1.13.

The Greeks however celebrate their victory over the Gauls, though the extent of their success in repelling the Gallic invasion may have been exaggerated. Nonetheless the desecration of the city of Delphi was a hit for the Greeks much like the Gallic, Visigothic (410 CE), and Vandalic (455 CE) sacks of Rome were to the Romans. The Amphictyonic League commemorated their victory over Brennus and the Gauls by instituting the ancient Greek annual festival of Soteria (named after the goddess and personification of safety, refuge, salvation and protection) at Delphi. The festival was dedicated to Zeus Soter (“savior”) and Pythian Apollo and was filled with music, “athletics and equestrian contests” (IG II3 1 1005). Statues were dedicated to this victory as well as two hymns written by Callimachus (310/305-240 BCE) which were titled ‘Galatika’ and ‘Galatea’:

“Also there are statues of the Aetolian generals, an image of Artemis, one of Athena, and two of Apollo: these were offered by the Aetolians when they had brought their affair with the Gauls to an end. That the Celtic host would cross from Europe into Asia to destroy the cities had been foretold by Phaennis in her oracles a generation before the event took place:—

‘Then having crossed the narrow strait of the Hellespont, the destructive army of the Gauls shall pipe; they shall lawlessly ravage Asia and God shall make it yet worse for all who dwell by the shores of the sea for a little while. But soon the son of Cronus shall stir up a helper for them, a dear son of a Zeus-reared bull (Attalus, king of Pergamon) who shall bring a day of doom on all the Gauls.’” – The Description of Greece by Pausanias.

^ Osprey – ‘Warrior’ series, issue 103 – Macedonian Warrior, Alexander's Elite Infantryman by Ryan Jones, Waldemar Heckel and Christa Hook (Illustrator). Plate G: The aftermath of battle.

While the Gauls were ravaging Macedonia and central Greece, funny enough, the Peloponnesians, namely the Achaeans and Lacedaemonians (Spartans), had no involvement in the war as they were not only struck out of the Amphictyonic League at an earlier date but they also wished not to ally themselves with their rival Greek city states. Added to this:

“The march to Thermopylae to meet the army of the Gauls was taken as little notice of by the Achaeans as by the rest of the Peloponnesians; for as the barbarians had no ships, the Peloponnesians thought that if only they fortified the Isthmus of Corinth from the one sea at Lechaeum to the other sea at Cenchreae, they would have nothing to fear from the Gauls. Such was the policy adopted by all the Peloponnesians at the time of the Gallic war.” – The Description of Greece by Pausanias.

ANTIGONUS II GONATAS AND PYRRHUS OF EPIRUS: “the Gauls, a race insatiable of wealth, set themselves to digging up the tombs of the kings”

Battle of Lysimachia, 277 BCE

Early on in Brennus’ campaign against the Macedonians and Greeks he left a rearguard under the leadership of Cerethrius back at Heraclea, north of Thermopylae. A noble named Antigonus II Gonatas sailed toward Macedonian held Thrace seeking to claim the throne, he was the son (of Demetrius I Poliorcetes) and grandson of (Antigonus I Monophthalmus) two of the most famed Diadochi. After crossing the Hellespont he embarked near the city of Lysimachia, the area itself was known to have been occupied by Cerethrius’ Gallic hordes, and set up camp. The Gauls sent him envoys to spy out Antigonus’ camp and to threaten him into paying them to remain peaceful.

“Antigonus, with royal munificence, invited them to a banquet, and entertained them with a sumptuous display of luxuries. But the Gauls were so struck with the vast quantity of gold and silver set before them, and so tempted with the richness of such a spoil, that they returned more inclined to war than they had come. The king had also ordered his elephants to be shown them, as monsters unknown to those barbarians, and his ships laden with stores to be displayed; little thinking that he was thus exciting the cupidity of those to seize his treasures, whom he sought to strike with terror by the ostentation of his strength.

The ambassadors, returning to their countrymen, and exaggerating everything excessively, set forth at once the wealth and unsuspiciousness of the king; saying that "his camp was filled with gold and silver, but secured neither by rampart nor trench, and that the Macedonians, as if they had sufficient protection in their wealth, neglected all military duties, apparently thinking that, as they had plenty of gold, they had no use for steel.” – Epitome of Pompeius Trogus' Philippic Histories by Justinus 25.1-2.

Antigonus II Gonatas abandoned his camp in order to lure the Gauls into pillaging it and falling into an ambush. Antigonus II Gonatas succeeded in ambushing the Gauls and claimed the throne of Macedonia under the Antigonid dynasty; he also held hegemony over much of Central Greece. The Gauls that survived the ambush were hired by Antigonus II Gonatas as mercenaries, some of which may have been sent to Ptolemy II Philadelphus (Pharoah of Ptolemaic Egypt, 285–246 BCE) and Nicomedes of Bithynia. Antigonus II Gonatas’ victory over the Gauls at Lysimachia that it inspired the ‘Hymn to Pan’ by Aratus.

Pyrrhus of Epirus

During the Gallic invasion of 279 BCE, a famed king named Pyrrhus of Epirus was warring against the Rome Republic in Italy and the Carthaginian Empire in Sicily (Pyrrhic War, 280–275 BCE). After failing to defeat these two formidable adversaries Pyrrhus returned to Epirus (the western coast of Central Greece) and was in a bind since he was broke but needed to pay his men. During his Pyrrhic War he forcefully asked Antigonus II Gonatas for men, money and alliances but both of them refused him aid. Now that Pyrrhus was back in mainland Greece he was strapped for cash so he decided to lead a raiding expedition against Macedonia. In this operation Pyrrhus was joined by Gauls, possibly following the promise of plunder.

^ Routes taken against Rome in the Pyrrhic War (280–275 BC).

“After being defeated on his return from Sicily, he first of all sent letters to various parts of Asia, and especially to Antigonus, asking some of the kings for men and others for money; but from Antigonus he asked both. When the messengers were come and letters were delivered to him, he called together the captains both of his Epirots and of the Tarentines, and without reading them a word of the letters which he had received, he assured them that aid would come.

A report soon reached the Romans also that the Macedonians and other nations of Asia were crossing over to the help of Pyrrhus. Hearing this, the Romans remained inactive. But that very night Pyrrhus crossed over to the headlands of the Ceraunian Mountains. When he had rested his army after their discomfiture in Italy, he declared war against Antigonus, charging him, among other offences, with having failed to support him in Italy.” – The Description of Greece by Pausanias.

Battle of the Aous, 274 BCE

This raiding expedition quickly turned into a full blown campaign when Pyrrhus succeeded in capturing many cities and having a force of two thousand Macedonian soldiers switched over to his side. Eventually Pyrrhus assaulted Anigonus II Gonatos when the latter’s army was crossing a narrow pass. Antigonus’ rearguard, which was made up of Gallic mercenaries who he defeated and hired back in 277 BCE, took the brunt of the impact. Despite fighting bravely they crumbled before Pyrrhus’ twenty-four elephants and his overall sudden assault which forced the whole of the Antigonid army into a state of confusion. Pyrrhus then, “stretching out his right hand and calling upon the generals and captains, brought over to him all the infantry of Antigonus in a body.”

^ Pyrrhus of Epirus. Museo Archeologico Nazionale (Naples) (National Archaeological Museum of Naples).

“Pyrrhus, thinking that amid so many successes his achievement against the Gauls conduced most to his glory, dedicated the most beautiful and splendid of his spoils in the temple of Athena Itonis, with the following elegiac inscription:

‘These shields, now suspended here as a gift to Athena Itonis, Pyrrhus the Molossian took from valiant Gauls, after defeating the entire army of Antigonus; which is no great wonder; for now, as well as in olden time, the Aeacidae are brave spearmen.’” – Life of Pyrrhus by Plutarch, 26.5.

“The greatness of the battle and the decisive nature of Pyrrhus' victory are best shown by the Celtic arms dedicated in the sanctuary of Itonian Athena, between Pherae and Larissa, with the following inscription:—

‘These shields once laid waste the golden Asian land, These shields brought slavery upon the Greeks; But now they hang ownerless on the pillars Aqueous Zeus, Spoils of the boastful Macedon.’” – The Description of Greece by Pausanias.

Antigonus’ loss seems to have stemmed from the devastation of his Gallic forces which are mentioned as being “a numerous body”, this and the fact that Pyrrhus’ focus on his victory over the Gauls leads most historians to believe that by this time Antigonus relied heavily on Gallic mercenaries which may have made up the bulk of his forces.

“Antigonus, divesting himself at once of all the marks of royalty, repaired with a few horsemen, that attended him in his flight, to Thessalonica, there to watch what would follow on the loss of his throne, and to renew the war with a hired army of Gauls” – Epitome of Philippic History by Justin, 25.3.

After Pyrrhus’ victory he took over Macedonia and held power over Thessaly. While continuing his campaign Pyrrhus captured the old Macedonian capital city of Aegae (Vergina) which he held onto by leaving Gallic mercenaries their as a garrison force. His failure to punish or discipline the Gauls leads historians to believe that he was in dire need of their military aid.

“But the Gauls, a race insatiable of wealth, set themselves to digging up the tombs of the kings who had been buried there; the treasure they plundered, the bones they insolently cast to the four winds. This outrage Pyrrhus treated with lightness and indifference, as it was thought; he either postponed punishment because he had some business on hand, or remitted it altogether because he was afraid to chastise the Barbarians; and on this account he was censured by the Macedonians.” – Life of Pyrrhus by Plutarch, 26.6-7.

After Antigonus’ loss to Pyrrhus he sought refuge among the coastal cities where he had the protection of his navy. Pyrrhus meanwhile was invited to Lacedaemonia (realm of the Spartans) by an officer of his named Cleonymus of Sparta who was also the uncle of the king of Sparta. This Spartan nobleman wanted Pyrrhus to take Sparta for him and place him on the Spartan throne. Pyrrhus marched toward Sparta with a force of twenty-five thousand infantrymen, two thousand cavalrymen and twenty‑four elephants, while his son led two thousand Gauls and picked Chaonians (a Greek tribe from Epirus).

“Pyrrhus had twenty-five thousand foot and two thousand horse, besides twenty‑four elephants, so that the magnitude of his preparations made it clear at once that he was not aiming to acquire Sparta for Cleonymus, but the Peloponnesus for himself.” – Life of Pyrrhus by Plutarch, 26.9.

Pyrrhus’ Siege of Sparta

The usurper Cleonymus of Sparta advised Pyrrhus to lead an assault against Sparta under the cover of darkness but Pyrrhus refused since he was concerned that his soldiers, more likely than not the Gauls, “would plunder the city if they fell upon it at night”. The Pyrrhus did assault Sparta they found themselves hindered by a wall of Spartan shields, trenches and a barricade of wagons.

^ By mariusz-kozik.

When the Gauls tried to move the wagons they were flanked in the rear by the Spartans, packed into a chaotic mass and forced into retreating. The Spartans, like expected, despite being vastly outnumbered succeeded in holding off Pyrrhus until reinforcements arrived from the Macedonians and the Spartan king Areus, who was in Crete. Failing to take Sparta, Pyrrhus then moved toward Argos to aid the democratic faction against the pro-Macedonian aristocracy, all the way there Pyrrhus’ rearguard (Gauls) was harassed by the Spartans. When Pyrrhus made it to Argos:

“At the dead of night Pyrrhus came up to the walls of the city, and finding that the gate called Diamperes had been thrown open for them by Aristeas, was undiscovered long enough for his Gauls to enter the city and take possession of the market-place.” – Life of Pyrrhus by Plutarch.

The Gauls here, however, faced a united Greek force which overwhelmed them and forced them into a retreat. In the end Pyrrhus would lose the battle as well as his life.

First Gallic mutiny under Antigonus II Gonatas

Sometime later Antigonus hired Gallic mercenaries under the command of a man named Ciderius, paying them one piece of gold each and giving them aristocrats (men and boys) as hostages. When the time came for them to aid Antigonus II Gonatas in battle they demanded more pay, stating that the agreement was to pay every Gaul not just those who were of age and armed.

“the Gauls demanded pay for all that attended the army, whether they bore arms, or not, even women and children: alleging, that the agreement was to pay every Gaul a gold Macedonian coin.” – Stratagems by Polyaenus, 4.6.17.

Antigonus II Gonatas refused to pay them such a large sum so the Gauls responded by returning to camp and “vowing vengeance against the hostages”. In fear that the Gauls may harm the aristocratic hostages given to them, Antigonus promised to give them the sum they asked for. All the Gauls had to do was send Antigonus their chiefs to pick up their pay, when said chiefs entered into the Macedonian camp they were taken captive and were to only be returned when Antigonus had the aristocratic hostages back in his care. The Gauls complied to Antigonus’ demands, had their chiefs returned and were to only be paid for their armed warriors – what Antigonus intended initially.

Second Gallic Mutiny under Antigonus II Gonatas, 266 BCE

According to historian Marcus Junianus Justinus, the Gauls committed an atrocity when faced by an army under Antigonus II Gonatas, the man who had earlier halted Gallic involvement in Macedonia at the ‘Battle of Lysimachia’. While Antigonus was distracted by his war (Chremonidean War, 267–261 BCE) with Ptolemaic Egypt (Ptolemy II Philadelphus), Athens and the Spartans but heard that his Gallic mercenaries he placed to hold the trade port city of Megara for him had mutinied and taken the city. When the Gauls heard that Antigonus was marching towards them the Gauls performed human sacrifice and read their entrails to foretell the outcome of the conflict.

“as they were preparing for battle, sacrificed victims to take presages for the event; and as, from the entrails, great slaughter and destruction of them all was portended, they were moved, not to fear, but to fury, and thinking that the anger of the gods might be appeased by the slaughter of their kindred, butchered their wives and children, commencing hostilities with the murder of their own people; for such rage had possessed their savage breasts, that they did not spare even that tender age which an enemy would have spared, but made deadly war on their own children and their children's mothers, in defence of whom wars are wont to be undertaken.” – Epitome of Pompeius Trogus by Marcus Junianus Justinus, 26.2.

The Gauls then rushed into battle with the blood still wet and fresh on them. It is noted then that in response to the barbarity that the Gauls had committed against their wives and children:

“as they were fighting, the furies, the avengers of murder, overwhelmed them sooner than the enemy, and the ghosts of the slain rising up before their eyes, they were all cut off with utter destruction. Such was the havoc among them, that the gods seemed to have conspired with men to annihilate an army of murderers.” – Epitome of Pompeius Trogus by Marcus Junianus Justinus, 26.2.

This account is either highly fictitious propaganda or a misunderstanding of another common action we see Celtic peoples undertaking, when it seems as though the Celts would meet their end they would kill their wives and children to spare them from becoming raped or enslaved.

EMPLOYMENT UNDER THE PTOLEMAIC DYNASTY OF EGYPT: “he engaged, amongst other mercenaries, four thousand Gauls; but found that they were plotting to seize Egypt”

Ptolemy I Soter a commander under Alexander the Great’s as well as being his childhood friend and one of his bodyguards. After Alexander’s death Ptolemy I Soter became one of the greatest of Alexander’s Diadochi (“successors”), succeeding in founded the long lasting and famed Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt. Two of Ptolemy I Soter’s sons ruled Macedonia and died during the chaotic Gallic invasions (Ptolemy Ceraunos and Meleager). Ptolemy I Soter’s most beloved son and successor was Ptolemy II Philadelphus, who spent much of his reign feuding against his half-brother Magas of Cyrene who rebelled against his rule, sided with the Seleucids (rivals of the Ptolemies) and declared himself the king of an independent Cyrenaica (coastal eastern Libya, west of Egypt).

^ Seleucid and Ptolemaic Reformed Armies 168-145 BC (2) Ptolemaic Army by Nick Sekunda and Angus McBride (illustrator).

While Ptolemy II Philadelphus was trying to subdue said brother he employed the aid of four thousand Gallic mercenaries offered to him by Antigonus II Gonatas to aid in quelling this rebellion. Ptolemy II Philadelphus later discovered that these mercenaries were conspiring to take Egypt for so they could rule as kings over it or were plotting to pillage Ptolemy’s treasures for themselves so Ptolemy forced them onto an island where “they perished by hunger and each other's swords.” This event was commemorated by Ptolemy II Philadelphus sometime after 265 BCE by minting coins featuring a Gallic shield.

^ Bes, the Egyptian god of protection, is depicted here wearing a ‘diadem of victory’ and stepping on a Celtic shield. This is believed to have been made to symbolize Ptolemy II Philadelphus’ triumph over the Gallic conspirators. Bes was also the god of the common man and soldiery, lord of entertainment (music, dancing, drinking, sex, and overall amusement) and protector from harm, evil, illness and infertility. This terracotta figure is from the Egyptian city of Athribis (modern Benha, Qalyubia, Egypt).

“When he was making ready to resist the attack of Magas, he engaged, amongst other mercenaries, four thousand Gauls; but finding that they were plotting to seize Egypt, he took them to a desert island on the river, where they perished by hunger and each other's swords.” – The Description of Greece by Pausanias.

Despite the apparent unreliability of Gallic mercenaries the Ptolemies continued to employ them, Ptolemy II Philadelphus hired more for the purpose of quelling rebellions and for manual labor such as construction. Ptolemy II Philadelphus’ son, Ptolemy III Euergetes, is said to have employed Gallic mercenaries for help against the Seleucids in Judea, Syria, Mesopotamia and Persia. During the reign of the latter’s son, Ptolemy IV Philopator, Gauls and Thracians settled in Egypt aided them at the famed Battle of Raphia where they were numbered at six thousand.

Many of the Gauls now lived in Egypt as cleruchs (klerouchoi, “(p)lot-holder”; i.e. colonists or settlers) or katoikoi (“settlers, inhabitants, residents, dwellers”), intermarried with Macedonian Greeks and native Egyptians, the latter of which resulted in mixed offspring which were referred to as epigonoi (“progeny, descendants, successors, heirs”; i.e. the descendants of earlier Gallic settlers in Egypt). At the Ptolemaic cemetery of Hadra (by Alexandria, Egypt) there are three painted tombstones bearing the names of Gallic mercenaries. Their names were written in Greek script and the art style was also Greek, signifying the Hellenisation of the Gauls. One slab, the ‘Funerary Stela of Isidoros’, is the tombstone of a deceased Galatian named Isidoros, a Greco-Egyptian name inspired by the names ‘Isis’ (Egyptian goddess) and ‘doros’ (Greek, “gift”).

^ ‘Funerary Stela of Isidoros’, 2nd half of 3rd century B.C.E. The painted inscription says “Isidoros, a Galatian”. The Met Museum’s site states: “The soldier, in a long blue cloak, stands at the right and clasps the hand of a small girl. Behind her another girl raises her hand in a gesture of farewell. These may well represent the soldier's children, indicating that the mercenaries settled in Alexandria and raised families.”

In addition to this, under the reign of Ptolemy V Epiphanes (204–181 BCE) Egypt erupted into a civil war which divided north and south. Gauls aided in suppressing this rebellion and were involved in the siege of the ancient cult center of Abydos (186-185 BCE). Soon after we find two separate examples of graffiti left behind by Gauls at a temple, both were written in the Greek script and whose names were mostly or all Greek. These inscriptions show how rapidly the Gauls became Hellenised, one was left by a “Dimitrius the Galatian” and another mentions four Gauls:

“Of the Galaton (Gauls), Thoas, Kallistratos, Akannon, and Apollonios, we came and foxes we caught herein.”

According to Jewish historian Josephus in his ‘The Wars of the Jews’ Julius Caesar gifted the famed Cleopatra (Cleopatra VII Philopator, the last pharaoh of Egypt) four hundred Galatians (noted for being clad in mail-shirts) in 48 BCE to act as her personal guard and after her death these Gallic royal guardsmen were given by Augustus (born Gaius Octavian, founder of the Roman Empire) to Herod (I) the Great, king of Judea. According to the Jewish historian Josephus, after Herod the Great’s death his “regiment of Thracians, the Germans also and Gauls, all readied as if they were going to war” (Flavius Josephus, The Wars of the Jews) attended his Herod’s funeral procession.

^ Seleucid and Ptolemaic Reformed Armies 168-145 BC (2) Ptolemaic Army by Nick Sekunda and Angus McBride (illustrator).

FRAGILE BALKAN KINGDOMS

Tylian Kingdom of Thrace, trade and tribute

Some groups of Gauls that survived Brennus’ invasion made their new home in Thrace where they overwhelmed the Triballi and the Getae. Here in Thrace the Gaul leading them, Comontorius, founded the city of Tyle and the short-lived Kingdom of Tylis. At its peak the Tylian kingdom’s territory encompassed much of modern Bulgaria, bordering Macedonia in the south and the Danube River in the north. Archaeology tells us that there was little evidence of substantial destruction or conflict so this points towards the Gallic movement being more of a migration than an invasion. Even Thracian and Greek settlements under the Tylian periphery of control or influence show few signs of destruction or social disruption and all benefited from an economic boom.

There are also signs of these Gauls marrying foreigners (Illyrians and Thracians) and being buried with said spouses. The area witnessed a significant influx of Celtic La Tene influence and an increase of imported goods like wine and olive oil. Amphorae, a type of Greek or Roman jar used to hold said liquids and other commodities (olives, grapes, dates, figs, nuts, peppers, flour, grain, and fish sauces), have been found both in Thrace’s Black Sea coastal cities and the rivers of connecting said sea with inland Thrace. Even though they made the local populace pay them tribute it was still significantly less than their previous Thracians, Dacians and Hellenistic overlords had charged. This is evidenced by the fact that the tombs and palaces left by the Hellenistic kings before them were extravagant and lavish while Gallic settlements and burials were simple and modest.

Many Hellenistic coastal trading cities were left as virtually independent free trade zones which flourished despite being within the area of Gallic control, example being Kabyle, Apros and Mesambria. Both of these minted silver and bronze Tylian coins, the latter two (Apros and Mesambria) made ones with a Gallic shield on its reverse side. The Tylians traded as far south as Rhodes in the southeast region of the Aegean Sea and as far east as the capital city of Sinope in the northern coast of Asia Minor held by the Pontic kingdom (Greco-Persian). The next great Tylian king was Cavarus, under his leadership the capital city of Tylis grew economically. Near to them was the city of Byzantion (Greek) or Byzantium (Latin), better known by their later names, Constantinople and Istanbul.

“the Byzantines always bought them off by presents amounting to three, or five, or sometimes even ten thousand gold pieces, on condition of their not devastating their territory: and at last were compelled to agree to pay them a yearly tribute of eighty talents” – The Histories by Polybius, 4.46.

Now strained due to their having to pay the Tylian Gauls tribute, the Byzantines used their position by the Bosphorus strait to their advantage. Since this strait was part of a rich naval trade route which connected the Greek held Aegean Sea and the Pontic Sea (modern, Black Sea) the Byzantines started placing tolls on those who crossed and extorting heavier ones on those they had disagreements with. When their neighbors became angered by these tolls they declared war on the Byzantines, eventually the Tylian king Cavarus stepped up and convinced them to come to peaceful terms.

“Cauarus, king of the Gauls in Thrace, was of a truly royal and high-minded disposition, and gave the merchants sailing into the Pontus great protection, and rendered the Byzantines important services in their wars with the Thracians and Bithynians. This king, so excellent in other respects, was corrupted by a flatterer named Sostratus, who was a Chalchedonian by birth.” – The Histories by Polybius, 8.24.

Within Tylis there was a tribe called the Aegosages (“combat-seekers”), who were known for minting coins stamped with a Celtic shield. The king of Pergamon (Attalus I Soter)offered them land in Asia Minor (Anatolia, modern Turkey) in exchange for their aid against his enemies. The Aegosages, who were accompanied by their women and children, grew tired of their march and grew ever fearful over the terrible omen that arose in the sign of an eclipse. The Aegosages refused to continue, declined orders, would camp separately from Attalus’ and were acting rebelliously.

In fear of seeing his mercenaries defect to his enemy’s Attalus returned them to the area where the first landed in Asia Minor with the promise that he “would assign them suitable lands for a settlement; and would afterwards do them any service they asked for, if it was within his power and consistent with justice.” This proved to be a lie as they were left to fend for themselves and when Attalus’ rival, King Prusias I Cholus of Bithynia, attacked them he brought them no aid.

^ Concord – Ancient Celts.

“Prusias, therefore, led an army against them, and after destroying all the men in a pitched battle, put to death all the women and children in their camp, and allowed his soldiers who had taken part in the battle to plunder the baggage. By this exploit he freed the cities on the Hellespont from a serious menace and danger, and gave a good lesson to the barbarians from Europe in future not to be over ready to cross to Asia.” – The Histories by Polybius 5.111.6‑7.

Back in Thrace, the Tylians were faring badly after the large migration of the Tylian Aegosages tribe into Asia Minor, this large loss of manpower, widespread corruption, Cavarus’ attempts to Hellenise them, and subsequent Thracian incursions led to its rapid downfall and collapse around 212 BCE.

“the time of Cavarus, in whose reign their kingdom came to an end; and their whole tribe, being in their turn conquered by the Thracians, were entirely annihilated.” – The Histories by Polybius 4.46.

Scordisci, last gasp of Gallic resistance in the Balkans

Another major Gallic group that remained in southeastern Europe were those that dwelled around the Scordus mountains (Šar mountain, northwest of Macedon) which gave them their name, the Scordisci (Greek, Skordiskoi). The Scordisci lived among and were influenced by the Illyrians and Thracians, so much so that ancient historians were also confused to their affiliation. The Scordisci continued to clash with their neighbors and were able to subjugate the Paeonians (Thracian and/or Thraco-Illyrian), Dardanians (Thraco-Illyrian), Triballi (Thracian), Autariatae (Illyrians), Moesians (Thracians), and several other tribes, forcing all to pay them tribute.

They, like their ancestor Gauls under Brennus, led countless forays and raiding expeditions against Epirus, Macedon and Greece. Once the Romans gained control of Greece and Macedon they began warring with the Gauls, Thracians and Dacians beyond their new borders. The Scordisci then led retaliatory assaults and the cycle of punitive invasions continued between the two, this continued from 141 BCE until their subjugation under the famed king Burebista of Dacia in the 50’s BCE, large-scale deportations, their defeat against Tiberius (soon to be second emperor of Rome) in 15 BCE and their inevitable assimilation and Romanization under the rule of Trajan (thirteenth roman emperor, 98–117 CE).

Artifacts in the Balkans

In terms of literary sources, not much is said about these eastern Gauls other than sparse and vague mentions of their military clashes. This is where archaeology steps in a sheds a bit of light on these otherwise obscure realms. Celtic burial sites in the Balkans usually hold swords, scabbards, lance heads, and curved daggers (sica). The latter were sacrificial daggers as each of them had a ‘blood channel’ and were usually found among the bones of sacrificed animals. These daggers also had triangles, rayed suns, punched circles, chariot wheel images (symbolic of the sun and Taranis, god of thunder), and ravens (symbols of death and the afterlife).

^ Triskele and chariot wheel symbols.

One fame important find was the so-called ‘Montana Hoard’ discovered in northwest Bulgaria (late 2nd-early 1st century BCE) which features a Scordisci cavalry officer. This cavalry officer had a sword, scabbard, lance, curved daggers bearing raven symbols (sacrificial function), an iron shield boss, belt buckle, horse bit and spurs. Similarly, like the artifacts found at the Montana site, here near the modern village of Koynare in northwestern Bulgaria we’ve discovered Celtic swords, scabbards, spearheads, curved daggers (sica), shield bosses, horse bits and spurs – yet another cavalry officer. North/northwest Bulgaria, most precisely between the Iskar and Ogosta rivers, we find the highest concentration of late Iron Age Celtic warrior burials than anywhere else in the Balkans.

^ Archaeological Celtic finds in Bulgaria.

The ‘Bogolin Hoard’ was yet another important find as here 285 coins were found and, unlike the Tylians who actually minted their coins, the Scordisci overstruck them. By overstriking I mean that they struck their own impressions over preexisting already minted Macedonian and Roman held Macedonian coins. This also points to the fact that the Scordisci attained much of their wealth either from mercenary work or banditry – the latter of which is more often attributed.

These Gauls of southeastern Europe truly remind me of the Varangians, Norse warriors who traveled far from home where they lent their skills to rich nations or men willing to spare coin and arms. Like the Norsemen, the Gauls witnessed a much larger world than most Celts had ever known of and those that returned home with tales of enormous and wealthy cities, massive armies of heavily armored warriors, gigantic mail-clad beasts (elephants), and previously unseen exotic lands, flora, fauna, cultures, and religions.

^ Ciumesti, Satu Mare County, Romania.

One example of the riches they attained from the Hellenistic world can be seen at a cemetery complex Ciumesti, Satu Mare County, Romania. Therein we find the grave of a great chieftain who was cremated and buried along a set of iron chainmail (Marcus Terentius Varro states that the Celts invented chainmail) decorated with bronze discs with the traditional Celtic triskele sign (possible symbol of Lugus, a triple faced god and triple deity who Julius Caesar compares to the Roman Mercury (Greek Hermes)), an iron javelin-head, an iron chain belt, two bronze greaves and a unique helmet. The two bronze greaves are especially interesting since they were manufactured in Greece and were made specifically to fit this 5’9-6’2 ft. tall chieftain. The greaves, vessels of Greek wine and Greek coins point towards this chieftain being a mercenary leader working in the Hellenistic world.

“Some of them have iron cuirasses, chain-wrought, but others are satisfied with the armor which Nature has given them and go into battle naked.” – The Library of History by Diodorus, 5.30.3.

^ Left: Greek Bronze Greaves. Right: Chainmail and bronze disc with a triskele sign.

The most fascinating find was an iron Celtic helmet which had riveted cheek-guards and a bronze calotte (skullcap) a hole at its peak. The hole then had a rod which would be topped off with a cylinder which would act as a perch for a bronze bird of prey (falcon, hawk or eagle), the wings of which would flutter when the wearer moved or the wind uplifted them.

"On their heads they wear bronze helmets which possess projecting figures lending the appearance of enormous stature to the wearer. In some cases, horns form one piece with the helmet while in other cases it is the relief figures or the foreparts of birds or quadrupeds.” - The Library of History by Diodorus Siculus, 5.30.2.

^ Osprey – ‘Men-at-Arms’ series, issue 158 – Rome’s Enemies – Gallic and British Celts by Peter Wilcox and Angus McBride (Illustrator). Plate B: Gallic Warriors of the Middle La Tene Period, 3rd - 2nd cent. BC.

^ Picture posted here, created by Stefan Jaroschinsky.

^ I created this gif from ‘this video’.

If there are any errors please privately inbox me so I can update it. As always, if you’d like to read or learn about any specific historical subjects just let me know what they are and I will take note of them.

SOURCES:

Osprey – ‘Warrior’ series, issue 030 – Celtic Warrior 300 BC-AD 100 by Stephen Allen and Wayne Reynolds (Illustrator).

Osprey – ‘Men-at-Arms’ series, issue 158 – Rome’s Enemies – Gallic and British Celts by Peter Wilcox and Agnus McBride (Illustrator).

Seleucid and Ptolemaic Reformed Armies 168-145 BC (1) Seleucid Army by Nick Sekunda and Angus McBride (illustrator).

Seleucid and Ptolemaic Reformed Armies 168-145 BC (2) Ptolemaic Army by Nick Sekunda and Angus McBride (illustrator).

balkancelts – Journal of Celtic Studies in Eastern Europe and Asia-Minor.

Karwansaray – Ancient Warfare 6.6, ‘Attack of the Celts’.

Lords of Battle, The World of the Celtic Warrior by Stephen Allen.

A brief history of the Celts by Peter Berresford Ellis.

Celtic Mythology by John Arnott MacCulloch.

Celts and the Classical World by David Rankin

The Celts: A Chronological History by Daithi O Hogain.

A History of the Celts by H. E. Winter.

Kingdoms of the Celts: A History and Guide by John King.

The Ancient Celts by Barry Cunliffe.

The Celtic World by Miranda J. Green.

The Greatness and Decline of the Celts by Henri Hubert.

As well as the countless historical sources mentioned throughout the post.

POSSIBLE FUTURE POSTS:

These are posts I’d like to cover, if any of the below peak your interest then let me know.

The Thracians were “barbarians” who were feared for their skilled cavalrymen, javelineers and sica (scythe-like swords) wielding infantrymen so they were often employed as mercenaries by many of their Greek and Hellenistic neighbors. I may expand this to cover the Dacians, their wars with the Roman Empire and their shield slicing sickle-like weapon known as the falx and Scythian inspired cavalrymen.

“The Thracians are the biggest nation in the world, next to the Indians. If they were under one ruler, or united, they would, in my judgment, be invincible and the strongest nation on earth.” – The Histories by Herodotus, 5.3.

Yet another rarely spoken of people are the Illyrians, mysterious “barbarian” tribes inhabiting a swath of land from northern Epirus (Chaonia) to the far north by the borders of the Italian Alps and the Danube River. The Illyrians even colonized the south-eastern coasts of Italy, the heel of the Italian boot. The Illyrians were renowned for their guerrilla tactics, cavalrymen, javelineers, their famed queen Teuta who clashed with the Roman Republic as well as their navy and pirate dominion over the Adriatic Sea.

“He sailed round the promontory of Brundisium, and was carried up the Adriatic, where he had on his left the harborless shores of Italy and on his right the countries occupied by the Illyrians, the Liburnians, and the Histrians, savage tribes chiefly notorious for their acts of piracy.” – The History of Rome by Titus Livius (Livy), 10.4.

To be honest, I don’t know how much this one would work as there is little to no artwork and illustrations representing them.

The Iberians and Celtiberians of… Iberia (Spain and Portugal) are yet another group of, you guessed it, rarely spoken of “barbarians”. I think I sense a theme here. The inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula were caught between two great powers, the Carthaginians and the Romans, both of which used them as pawns to sway support to their own favor. These “barbarians” were notorious for their skill as cavalrymen, skirmishing, hit-and-run tactics and guerrilla warfare.

“[1] Now that we have spoken at sufficient length about the Celts we shall turn our history to the Celtiberians who are their neighbours. In ancient times these two peoples, namely, the Iberians and the Celts, kept warring among themselves over the land, but when later they arranged their differences and settled upon the land altogether, and when they went further and agreed to intermarriage with each other, because of such intermixture the two peoples received the appellation given above.

And since it was two powerful nations that united and the land of theirs was fertile, it came to pass that the Celtiberians advanced far in fame and were subdued by the Romans with difficulty and only after they had faced them in battle over a long period. [2] And this people, it would appear, provide for warfare not only excellent cavalry but also foot-soldiers who excel in prowess and endurance.” – The Library of History by Diodorus Siculus, 33.1-2.

#celtic #history #archaeology #greece #egypt #culture #gaul #gauls #celts #celt

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instantdeerlover · 4 years

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Rajma Masala Might Be the Perfect Cupboard Comfort Dish for Our Times added to Google Docs

Rajma Masala Might Be the Perfect Cupboard Comfort Dish for Our Times

Getty Images/iStockphoto

The north Indian kidney bean curry is a dish that forgives you if you do not have all the spices, and rewards you for patience and generosity

Food exchange has historically been a story of carnage, and the hegemony established continues to benefit from these massacres that unwittingly introduced foods like beans to the world.

How to Make Rajma Masala

Step 1: Procure

Step 2: Soak

Step 3: Boil

Step 4: Make the Base

Step 5: Combine

Step 6: Eat and share

Aditi Natasha Kini writes cultural criticism, essays, and other text objects from her apartment in Ridgewood, Queens.

via Eater - All https://www.eater.com/21320317/how-to-make-rajma-masala-recipe-history-cooking-covid-19-dinner

Created July 17, 2020 at 02:26AM /huong sen View Google Doc Nhà hàng Hương Sen chuyên buffet hải sản cao cấp✅ Tổ chức tiệc cưới✅ Hội nghị, hội thảo✅ Tiệc lưu động✅ Sự kiện mang tầm cỡ quốc gia 52 Phố Miếu Đầm, Mễ Trì, Nam Từ Liêm, Hà Nội http://huongsen.vn/ 0904988999 http://huongsen.vn/to-chuc-tiec-hoi-nghi/ https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xa6sRugRZk4MDSyctcqusGYBv1lXYkrF

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fashiontrendin-blog · 6 years

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Go Ahead, Take This Opportunity To Say You Always Hated A Creep's Art

http://fashion-trendin.com/go-ahead-take-this-opportunity-to-say-you-always-hated-a-creeps-art/

Go Ahead, Take This Opportunity To Say You Always Hated A Creep's Art

Have you always believed that Quentin Tarantino makes dreadful movies? Have you always wondered how a director could be so celebrated for work that luridly depicts the abuse and degradation of women and black people, and that offers little more than exploitative ’70s pastiche?

Maybe your belief that Tarantino sucked spoke in a small, niggling voice, something you pushed down because you felt embarrassed that you couldn’t appreciate the auteur’s work. Or maybe it was louder. Maybe you even got into arguments with your film school classmates or your boyfriend about it.

Either way, this past week has likely brought a sense of grim vindication.

First, in an interview with The New York Times’s Maureen Dowd, Uma Thurman revealed details about Tarantino’s direction of “Kill Bill,” including his role in pressuring her to perform a car stunt that went awry and left her severely injured, as well as scenes in which he personally choked and spat on her in place of her acting partners.

With the spotlight now on Tarantino, news outlets are digging up other disturbing moments from his career. Thurman wasn’t the only actor he’d choked during filming ― he’d also choked Diane Kruger for a scene in “Inglourious Basterds.” Perhaps most damning, audio surfaced from a Howard Stern interview in 2003 in which Tarantino not only defended director Roman Polanski against his notorious rape charge, but insisted that his 13-year-old victim “wanted to have it.”

Though Tarantino defended his on-set behavior in a lengthy interview with Deadline’s Mike Fleming Jr., and both Thurman and Kruger went on to praise his direction on Instagram, the public reckoning with his oeuvre had already begun; plenty of naysayers jumped on the opportunity to admit that they’d always hated his movies.

Like Louis C.K. and Woody Allen before him, Tarantino had become, almost instantly, the new cool entertainment dude to have always hated.

I’ve never understood the allure of Tarantino or his films. I’ve never seen Kill Bill (1 or 2), DJango, or the rest of them, except Pulp Fiction. Once. After reading that NYT article about Uma Thurman, I know I made the right call. He is unmitigated trash.

— April (@ReignOfApril) February 3, 2018

I’m glad that my once unpopular opinion that Tarantino films are rubbish because it’s like watching the worst thoughts of the annoying lad you don’t fancy but he bothers you anyway playing out in hypercolour, is finally getting it’s moment.

— Jess Phillips (@jessphillips) February 4, 2018

You know, I thought by this point there would be at least one of these Hollywood dudes where I’d be like, “that’s a shame, I want to like his work.”

But….all of them are of mediocre talent

— Kelly Ellis (@justkelly_ok) February 6, 2018

But is this … bad? Should we resist the urge to distance ourselves from the fandom surrounding a detestable creator, to declare to the masses, “I always hated that creep”?

This week, that declaration was met with the usual pushback, as critics accused Tarantino cynics of turning a serious conversation about misogyny and assault into a conversation about superior film taste:

Revelations that Tarantino is a piece of shit (not new) doesn’t suddenly require you to tell the world how much you have always hated his films (which suck incidentally).

— Richard Whittall (@RWhittall) February 3, 2018

Ah, we’re in the “I always knew he was shifty…” phase of Tarantino discourse, then.

It tends to overlap with the “I was always an outlier in the court of public opinion and now I’ve been vindicated!” phase.https://t.co/V7Xxt62pyo

— Darren Mooney (@Darren_Mooney) February 6, 2018

All the people that never liked Tarantino films are feeling somehow vindicated and that’s fucking awful. You’re profiting off the sadness and hurt of another human being to feel morally superior to the rest because you feel that your critical opinion feels somehow accurate??

— Jaime Grijalba (@jaimegrijalba) February 6, 2018

The initial urge does seem self-serving, a way to retroactively claim credit for knowing better than everyone else. The #MeToo moment should not be viewed primarily as a plum opportunity to hipsterize disliking Louis C.K., to smugly claim, “I hated him before it was cool.”

Nor should we reflexively vilify people who loved the work of people like Louis C.K. and Tarantino. We all have problematic faves; the hardest and most vital part of changing a toxic culture is holding those faves to the same standards as artists we dislike.

But you know what? Go ahead and take this moment to tell the world you always hated a creepy dude’s art. Feel extremely free to unload on all the troubling hints in his work that he thinks of women as objects. Why shouldn’t you? We should have that conversation, too.

The #MeToo movement emerged as an urgent reckoning around sexual abuse and harassment in the workplace, but it’s churned up discussions of issues beyond that ― not only sexual abuse outside the workplace, but also a broader culture of misogyny. Those discussions have revolved around the art of abusive and chauvinistic men, and how their visions have defined our culture, often in ways that harmed women. They’ve also included talk of how white critics have long taken up the air in the room; how they’ve been empowered to curate an artistic canon by and about them, while people of color, women and other marginalized groups have not.

We’re now grappling with how admiration of these problematic men became de rigueur, and how frustrating this enforced consensus was for the many people who felt exploited or forgotten by the canon.

For years, when I’d balk at watching Tarantino films because the content made me uneasy, I was told I was being too sensitive. Between this and Uma Thurman’s devastating stories, it’s all coming together. https://t.co/X0G0kv9F4K

— marisa kabas (@MarisaKabas) February 6, 2018

Since I was around 12, the dudes in my life constantly told me I was being too sensitive when I questioned the misogyny and racism in Tarantino’s work. I was often told I “didn’t get it.” Well… I think maybe… YOU guys didn’t get it, actually? #quentintarantino https://t.co/K4dXjvEJxM

— Brigit Young (@BrigitYoung) February 6, 2018

This is not to say that only white dudes (or all white dudes) are fans of unsavory artists like Tarantino or Louis C.K. Plenty of men have been happy to note that they never liked Tarantino anyway, and plenty of women loved “Louie” and “Manhattan” and “Pulp Fiction” and have been struggling, in the aftermath of unsavory allegations, to resolve their admiration of the art with the personal crimes of the artists. (Personally, I never had the stomach for Tarantino films ― blood makes me queasy ― but I grew up on Allen’s daffy early films and liked a decent amount of Louis C.K.’s comedy.)

Still, it’s impossible to disregard the fact that an almost entirely white and male set of tastemakers (not to mention creators and investors) elevated certain male artists to the level of demigods, so above criticism that one’s dislike signaled one’s own inferior taste rather than the artists’ failings. Most critics with major platforms have long been white men; the lack of diversity in the ranks has not only stunted the breadth of conversation, but fostered the false sense that white men’s concerns are the most pressing, their opinions the most objective, and their viewpoints the most conducive to great art. Even when women or people of color dissented, their voices did little or nothing to alter the perceived consensus.

Take Allen: Pauline Kael and Joan Didion, both prominent female critics, savaged his opus “Manhattan,” which revolves around a 42-year-old man who is romancing a 17-year-old student, for, respectively, “pass[ing] off a predilection for teen-agers as a quest for true values” and telegraphing that “adolescence can now extend to middle age.”

Then-Columbia professor John Romano quickly rebutted Didion in a letter to the editor, describing her review as a result of “pique”; the letter twice describes Didion as “complaining.” Meanwhile, critic Roger Ebert had a startling take on the artistry surrounding Allen’s character’s sexual predation, writing, “It wouldn’t do, you see, for the love scenes between Woody and Mariel [Hemingway] to feel awkward or to hint at cradle-snatching or an unhealthy interest on Woody’s part in innocent young girls. But they don’t feel that way.”

As the years passed, “Manhattan,” beloved by male critics who were unbothered by or eager to explain away the movie’s troubling sexual undertones, became cemented in film canon. If Kael and Didion couldn’t get us to openly acknowledge the flaws in Allen’s work, who could? At least now it seems right to go back and examine the catastrophic failures of some critics to tease out these threads. Many critics, including the New York Times’ A.O. Scott, are now openly reckoning with the insufficiency of their past criticism of Allen’s work, and they’re right to do so.

It’s also fair to point out that some people wanted to have this conversation before the #MeToo moment, but that a patriarchal hegemony of taste served as a bulwark against it. The cultural change didn’t just begin in October. For example, when Tarantino released “The Hateful Eight” in 2016, critics explicitly called out his dicey use of extreme violence toward women in the film, questioning whether it was artistically essential or even justifiable.

#MeToo was possible in part because women in Hollywood, and elsewhere, have spent years advocating for more respect and representation.

This is exactly my problem with Tarantino. He glorifies violence against women and people of color, makes an industry out of movies centered on violence towards minority groups, and gets called a “genius” for it. That’s the kind of regressive junk we need to cut out. https://t.co/RDKt9rhBu9

— Heidi N Moore (@moorehn) February 4, 2018

The central connecting thread between all of the aforementioned morally ambiguous or nihilistic art and so much more in that vein: it was all primarily by and for white men and wistfully imagined worlds where white men were never held to account for anything.

— David Klion (@DavidKlion) February 6, 2018

But despite these rising questions, the classic films ― “Pulp Fiction,” “Kill Bill” ― seemed untouchable, and disliking them remained taboo. If you’ve ever told a date, a classmate, a mentor or a friend that you can’t watch Tarantino because you find his work to be exploitative of women, only to be informed that you simply don’t understand his art, the indisputable revelation this month that he’s a bona fide creep is, in a small but real way, liberating. It’s something solid to cling to, at last, evidence that you’re not overreacting or too obtuse to appreciate the aesthetic perfection of his tobacco-spit trajectories. Distaste for his work, often cast as a mental flaw or tragic unhipness, has become, in an instant, a mark of discernment.

In a tit-for-tat sense, it does seem just that artists like Louis C.K. and Tarantino ― whose reputations were long bolstered by the plaudits of critics and the reflexive hipster posturing of fans ― have now slid to the wrong end of the “my taste is better than yours” hierarchy. That’s not the point of this moment, nor should the goal of this reassessment be to simply unseat one set of white male icons, to turn the same smugly superior judgment on their fans that their detractors have experienced. It’s only human, though, to feel vindicated.

And yet, vindication isn’t the only feeling at play. There’s something about this sudden shift that’s wildly infuriating as well. Oh, NOW you’re listening? I thought recently when a writer I’d criticized as sexist ― only to have my critique neatly brushed aside by male colleagues and friends ― faced career consequences after being accused of personal misbehavior toward women. Why couldn’t you take me seriously when I broke down all the none-too-subtle misogyny in his writing?

Saying “I always hated his work” might be a cheap hipster pose, but it also might be bitterness born of long-suppressed, impotent anger. If you’ve grown used to being shamed or condescended to for caring about an ugly thread that everyone else seemed to be overlooking, the sudden shift is gratifying, but also exhausting. All the years of churn and self-doubt suddenly feel like a cruel, unnecessary burden forced on you by the people who insisted you were wrong.

So go ahead; vent your spleen. Give yourself the tiny shred of comfort that comes from claiming your long-simmering, now-validated disdain. Take the opportunity to try, once again, to have a real debate about the artistic merit of works like “Kill Bill” and “Manhattan.” It’s a first step to envisioning a world that isn’t just rid of monsters, but that actually offers everyone an equal place in constructing our culture.

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raceandspeculation · 7 years

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What is Scarier Monsters or Men?

By: Hannah Dal Porto

Season one of Supernatural is considered to be one the scariest due to its monster-of-the-week format and the variety of monsters, but episode 15, "The Benders" takes the show in an entirely different direction. The episode starts with Sam and Dean looking into some disappearances in rural Minnesota but Sam finds himself being taken as well. It is then we learn that what has been taking people for so long is not a supernatural entity, but a family of normal people. In true Supernatural fashion, Dean goes in with a plan and the plan fails but he still manages to save the day and get his dear little brother back alive. Toward the end of the episode Dean says, “Demons I get. People are crazy (Shiban).”

During the episode, we see Sam and Dean fighting evil in humans. We see the boys fight for their lives against something that wasn’t influenced by religions mythology, legends, or the paranormal. The name ‘Bender’ even has a connection to other, very human, killers. The Benders were a family that had numerous victims over an 18-month span in the early 1870’s they may not have killed in the same way, or had the same family dynamic and the one portrayed on the show, but the name still connects them, as does their human background.

The portrayal of the Benders in Supernatural characterizes them as rednecks or hicks. The stories about the family include incest and separation from non-family members. As seen in the show, even the young daughter is included, when necessary, in the trapping of victims. An aspect that is especial grotesque, and adds to the horror of the show, was finding out that the family not only hunts people for sport, but it is implied that they eat their kills. Even with these facts taken in to account, Dean is hesitant to attack the daughter when he sees her, which is a mistake on his part and leads to his capture.

The entire show is based around the premise that there are non-human beings in the world and these two guys hunt them, but adding this episode that shows people can be just as brutal to each other shows a different side of our culture that we would rather not think about. As said by the article “Demon Hunters and Hegemony: Portrayal of Religion on the CW’s Supernatural.” many, nearly all, episodes of Supernatural include “..creatures originating in a range of religions, myths, and folklore (Engstrom 68).” Though the article looks at how religion is portrayed in Supernatural, the research they preformed also looked at the types of foes they face in the first three seasons, including a few purely human enemies. Part of the reason this episode is so shocking is because it does not have a paranormal element, but a rather horrifying human one.

The deranged Bender family, led by Pa Bender, hunts other humans and their reasoning could easily be applied to real life. Pa Bender tells Dean, “But the best hunt is human. Oh, there’s nothin’ like it. Holdin’ their life in your hands. Seein’ the fear in their eyes just before they go dark. Makes you feel powerful, alive (Shiban).” For a large percentage of the population, myself included, television is a way of escaping our own reality, and so adding this episode showing how cruel and sadistic humans can be to each other is a jolt back to reality. For psychologists like Clay Routledge, people’s belief in evil supernatural entities, in addition to good, was a source of inquiry, in his research he discovered that, “…people don’t only turn to the more positive beliefs about benevolent forces when they are seeking meaning in life. Meaning can also be found in the less emotionally pleasant beliefs concerning the existence of forces for evil (Routledge).” Through his study he found people who looked for meaning in the supernatural, such as religious individuals, were more likely to attribute horrible crimes to the supernatural. These people, most of the time, would not attribute the actions to non-supernatural reasons, such as growing up in an abusive home. They would rather attribute it to the perpetrator’s “dark soul (Routledge)”.

Taking this a step farther, most people don’t want to believe that people are bad, so when someone does commit a heinous act, we look for an answer to why. There has to be a rational, perhaps it was how they grew up or it could be a supernatural force, but the end rational that the perpetrator is simply a bad person leaves an unanswerable question in the back of our minds, “Why?”

When reading Engstrom’s article, her focus is on the portrayal of religion in the show, her data shows that in the first three seasons 48% of the episodes don’t mention religion, and 13% of the episodes have human antagonists for Sam and Dean to fight (Engstrom 75). In addition, 22% of the episodes in the episodes they looked at have demons as antagonists, which in the ‘lore’ of Supernatural are mostly humans that have been to hell. Meaning they too were once human, adding more fuel to the argument that humans can be vicious and evil. However, these once-human creatures are now tinged with a supernatural flair that makes them not human.

Sam and Dean face monsters on a regular basis on Supernatural, but “The Benders” was different because it showed that people could be monsters as well. The episode prompts a question of what is truly scary, monsters made of the paranormal or the ones created in mankind.

Word count: 940

Works Cited

Shiban, John. “The Benders.” Supernatural. CW. 14 Feb. 2006. Web. 1 Apr. 2017.

Engstrom, Erika and Joseph M. Valenzano. “Demon Hunters and Hegemony: Portrayal of Religion on the CW’s Supernatural.” Journal of Media & Religion, vol. 9, no. 2, Apr-Jun2010, pp. 67-83. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/15348421003738785.

Routladge, Clay. “Why do People Believe in Supernatural Evil Forces?” Psychology Today. N.p., 31 Oct. 2015. Web. 1 Apr. 2017.

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sensitivefern · 7 years

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Nonetheless, Charles made pro-Catholic gestures to keep Louis’s money coming in. In 1672 he again tried to enforce religious tolerance on his people with a Declaration of Indulgence, suspending penal laws against the Catholics. Just as it had ten years before, this proved only that his subjects were neither tolerant nor indulgent. A fearful society could not allow the objects of its fear more rights; the Commons snapped its wallet closed and so blocked the Declaration with the most effective weapon in its arsenal – the refusal to fund the Crown.

King Charles, caught between the need to rule a simmering Protestant nation and the need to please a foreign Catholic king, walked the finest line. His father had paid with his head for his disdain for the representatives of the people in the Commons; Charles was determined not to make the same mistake. But his situation was a strain, and the thin veneer of acceptable Protestantism which covered his unacceptable fondness for Catholic France began to crack. Suspicions grew in England’s streets that Charles was in league with the hated Catholic king.

[The Plot Against Pepys]

===

...But it remained for the shock of World War I to carry me all the way. Even in its preliminary rumblings I saw the beginnings of an inevitable struggle to the death between the German Weltanschauung and the Anglo-Saxon Weltanschauung, and it was quickly apparent which side I was to take myself. I, too, like the leaders of Germany, had grave doubts about democracy. I, too, felt an instinctive antipathy to the whole Puritan scheme of things, with its gross and nauseating hypocrisies, its idiotic theologies, its moral obsessions, its pervasive Philistinism. It suddenly dawned on me, somewhat to my surprise, that the whole body of doctrine that I had been preaching was fundamentally anti-Anglo-Saxon, and that if I had any spiritual home at all it must be in the land of my ancestors.

[H.L. Mencken]

===

Not just Southerners and Midwesterners and Russians were entering the hate market. In March 1920, Charles Scribner’s Sons published Boston attorney Dr. Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White Supremacy. Stoddard argued that Russia’s humiliation in the Russo-Japanese War and then the ceaseless bloodletting of the Great War had shattered global white racial hegemony. [...] Stoddard’s racist tract achieved not only bestseller status but actual respectability... F. Scott Fitzgerald provided a thinly veiled reference... in The Great Gatsby. The New York Times editorialized that the book was ‘as sane and measured as it is dramatically effective’...

[1920]

===

Clitocybe phyllophila (= Clitocybe cerussata) Poisonous... flesh thin and white... associated with beech... gills white, turning yellowish or pinkish-cream; spores whitish... sometimes confused with Clitopilus prunulus, sweetbread mushroom, which has pink spores... oft found growing under juniper, in grassland and woodland... is edible; do not eat...

===

pink muhly | Muhlenbergia capillaris ‘It is a good thing that nurserypeople discovered’ this plant when they did, because it is an endangered species in Connecticut, Maryland, and New Jersey, and it is extirpated in Ohio and Pennsylvania... they should be grown in drifts, not onesies or twosies... zones 7-10... full sun... propagate from seed; divide when established...

feather grass, silky thread grass | Nassella tenuissima (= Stipa tenuissima) A clumper, not a spreader... ‘The flowers are soft and are fun to run your fingers through. This is a terrific plant for containers as well as an exceptional softener for the garden’... zones 6-10... propagate by seed...

lavender cotton, gray santolina | Santolina chamaecyparissus ‘Grows in mounds, forming tall ground cover. Height: 2 ft.’... zone 6... propagate by seed, cuttings, or layering... grow it in your Elizabethan knot garden... excellent groundcover... Parkinson: ‘The rarity and novelty of this herb, being for the most part but in the gardens of great persons, doth cause it to be of great regard’... repels moths...

===

❚Sarah Silverman U R racist arrogant garbage& history will remember u that way & I know u asked Jeff Ross if my tits were real (they are) now pack4 hell Mary

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Stoned Extraterrestrial Stumbles Across Hidden Message After Listening To Golden Record Backwards GAMMA CEPHEI STAR SYSTEM—Taking long hits of euphoria plasma from his electro-collider bong, stoned extraterrestrial Zogart 21X Flaxum stumbled across a hidden message Friday after listening to the Voyager 1 probe’s Golden Record backwards. “What the fuck,” said Flaxum, telling his fellow Zorlarts to come “check this shit out” and put their ear gills up to the speaker while he used a tendril to turn the record counter-clockwise so that Chuck Berry’s ‘Johnny B. Goode’ played in reverse. “There! You hear it? It’s saying, ‘Kill the Vorblox, children. Kill the Vorblox, children.’ Damn, this is some spooky shit. I’m not gonna be able to zard tonight, no fucking way.” At press time, the aliens had grown paranoid and were now fully convinced that some dark malevolent entity was trying to track them down them from afar.

The Republicans Fold on Health Care To a man and woman, nearly every one of the 237 Republicans elected to the House last November made the same promise to voters: Give us control of Congress and the White House, and we will repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. On Friday, those lawmakers abandoned that effort, conceding that the Republican Party’s core campaign pledge of the last seven years will go unfulfilled.

Ex-Penn State Prez Graham Spanier Found Gu...

Rich-world agricultural subsidies ensure coca leaves are Colombia's only viable cash crop

Wer packt hier die Bojen aus?

...In "Homer's Enemy", an 8th-season episode of The Simpsons, Moe Szyslak shows off his own enemies list, which Barney Gumble quickly appraises as Nixon's list, with the latter's name crossed out and replaced with Moe's. Moe promptly adds Barney to the list for his insolence.

When shoplifting, leave the amount of cash the stolen goods are worth on the counter so as to distract the shopowner while you escape.

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easyfoodnetwork · 4 years

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Getty Images/iStockphoto The north Indian kidney bean curry is a dish that forgives you if you do not have all the spices, and rewards you for patience and generosity In the first few weeks of sheltering in place, I found a packet of old rajma in my pantry — that is to say, I stumbled upon a small treasure. Strictly speaking, it was an American brand, so the label on the bag read “kidney beans,” but their magic was the same. I soaked them overnight and they bloomed into large, toothy beans already splitting at the seams. Boiling them turned their surrounding water brown and thick; I cooked them with onions, tomatoes, and whatever spices I had, and simmered it for hours, using the liquid from bean boiling to thicken the mix. In the end I had made the perfect dish of rajma masala — a rich North Indian kidney bean curry — even if it took me two extra hours of simmering, since I didn’t account for the added cook time for old beans. Like so many of the world’s recipes that rely on hardy pantry staples, rajma masala is an ideal pandemic dish. You can turn to it when grocery runs are limited and time at home abundant. Its base recipe demands largely shelf-stable ingredients, and like the various bean chili riffs of the Americas, is a soothing comfort food for those who grew up with it. (To New York Times restaurant critic Tejal Rao, rajma masala is “her family’s store-cupboard comfort food” and the “indisputable king” of bean dishes.) Also like chili, there’s an acidic tomato base to cut through the bean’s inherent creaminess, and though it’s heavily spiced, it is a dish that forgives you if you do not have all the spices, and rewards you for patience and generosity. “The beauty is that it is not instant gratification,” says Oxford, Mississippi-based chef Vishwesh Bhatt, who makes batches of Louisiana red beans to share with his neighbors. “Beans and rice are universal comfort foods, communal, big pot dishes— they lend themselves to sharing.” After I posted photos of my own rajma masala efforts to Instagram, friends, both South Asian and otherwise, slid into my DMs to ask for the recipe and tips. Similarly, when food writer Priya Krishna posted a photo of her rajma chawal — rajma masala with rice — 10 people responded immediately, and more the next day, telling her that they too had been making rajma at home. Krishna, who grew up eating rajma, had cooked it with her mother while sheltering in place with her family in Dallas, but notes, “I hesitate to call what millions of people do everyday a trend.” Fair point. It is true that what seems remarkable in the diaspora is not really so remarkable in the subcontinent. Would anyone in India really care that anecdotally, about 20 people also made rajma masala the same day that Krishna and I did? While I had finished the bulk of this essay before Alison Roman’s comments about two Asian women’s business endeavors kicked up a storm in food media, I am finishing it in the aftermath. It is true that writing about food is a fraught endeavor that skirts appropriation and neocolonialism — that often, food personalities exploit other cultures and their own. Exotification is, after all, an orientalist, capitalist ploy. And in learning more about the rajma bean, I have uncovered another complication in my notion of what is traditional desi, or Indian, cuisine, and — as an Indian immigrant to Turtle Island, another reason to honor the ancestors of this land. Rajma masala may taste and feel like an ancient Indian dish, but its past is marked by cultural and colonial exchange, its recipe scarcely older than my grandfather. While rajma masala is a modern icon of North Indian food, the bean itself is not indigenous to the subcontinent, and neither is the dish’s base, tomato. “Ingredients that seem to many to be inextricably part of an Indian diet are not always autochthonously Indian,” writes historian Anita Mannur in her 2010 book Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture. The kidney bean originates in the Americas, with sources pointing to Mexico and Peru. The bean journeyed from the New World to the Old, and then onward through the spice trade routes to Asia, in what is known as the Columbian exchange, where beans and other plants and animals and peoples and information and diseases were passed between continents in the 15th and 16th centuries. “We think we’re globalizing now, but look to the 1500s,” says Mannur, who co-edited Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader. “The irony is that in looking for India, Columbus bizarrely transformed the Indian diet.” The bean’s beneficial properties as a nutrient-dense dried protein source, Mannur tells me, made it a good food for long nautical journeys. Portugal’s ships, filled largely with degredados — convict exiles who often died of dysentery and typhoid along the spice route, and were promised one chest worth of expensive spices to take home if they made the journey — arrived on the western coast of India. Goa, which became Portugal’s capital in India in 1530, was a hub for much internal trade — and was how the tomato and chile pepper took root in Indian cuisine. It is possible that the bean made it up through the cattle caravan routes to the Mughal Empire in the north — but the recipe for rajma masala doesn’t really crop up until as recently as around 130 years ago, says culinary archaeologist Kurush Dalal. Dalal thinks it’s unlikely the kidney bean was traded by the Portuguese, even if they ate it themselves, because it is not mentioned in medieval Indian texts. “There is evidence that the French brought the rajma bean from Mexico to Pondicherry,” he tells me, calling the French the “best conduit.” The French, who colonized Pondicherry on the Eastern coast of India, had mounted the Second French Intervention in Mexico in the 1860s, spearheaded by Emperor Napoleon III. (Cinco De Mayo celebrates the day the French were defeated by the Mexicans in 1862.) There is no paper trail of how it ends up in the hills of the North — though logically, it makes sense for the hearty bean to become more popular in cooler climates, where one would burn more calories. In the wetter, hotter south, such a bean would throw off the Ayurvedic energies of vata and pitta, Dalal speculates. Rajma masala, which made a place for itself in North Indian cuisine, is not as popular in the South. Mannur remembers being told at a restaurant in Mangalore — another erstwhile Portuguese capture — that the North Indian thali was unique because it featured rajma masala. “Methods of preparing rajma masala are not too different from how Latin Americans made chili,” says Mannur. Like Goan vindaloo, which retained both its Portuguese name and the foreign ingredient of vinegar, rajma masala folded in local ingredients like its spices and the Asian-origin onion, but kept its base of tomatoes and chile peppers, imports from long ago. Of course, the bean’s entree into the international plate was accompanied by pandemics brought on by Columbus and his ilk, who pillaged the global south, devastating populations and colonizing them along the way. And this is where a cruel mirror image emerges: A few hundred years ago, millions of Indigenous people died after European contact brought with it an onslaught of new diseases, then departed with native foods, including beans. Now here we are again in the midst of another pandemic, hastened and marked by irresponsible tourism, largely impacting vulnerable populations, especially Native Americans for whom “disease has never been just disease.” Food exchange has historically been a story of carnage, and the hegemony established continues to benefit from these massacres that unwittingly introduced foods like beans to the world. Beans that we’re now all staring at in our pantries, wondering how to best cook. Rajma masala came together on the other side of the world — to cook the beans in their “land of origin” feels like a nod to its history. Here, then, are some tips on how best to cook these lovely, storied beans. How to Make Rajma Masala Step 1: Procure Red kidney beans are available at most grocery stories, whether canned or dry. Buy some onions and tomatoes (or tomato paste) while you’re at it. Cilantro leaves will brighten your finished dish. Check your pantry for the usual suspects: chiles, garlic, ginger, cumin, cardamom, cinnamon, bay leaves. If you’re missing any ingredients, or just want to punch up the flavor, the easiest cheat is to buy garam masala — well, the actual easiest would be to buy some rajma masala powder. Step 2: Soak “Not all beans are created equally,” says molecular biologist and food writer Nik Sharma. Rajma is a fatty bean, while the chickpea is both fatty and carby — these properties affect how you cook a bean. And while it’s a beautiful thing that the kidney bean can sit on a shelf for a year and still be delicious, the older the bean, the longer it takes to cook. “The skin contains magnesium and calcium,” which create water barriers. It holds in itself pectin, the same tough ingredient that makes jam gel together, and the calcium makes it insoluble. If you’re using dry beans, you’ll have to soak them. Mannur cautions that faster processes may reduce some of the nutrients. She soaks beans overnight — “My mother was right, but I’ll never tell her.” Step 3: Boil Not all food legends are true. For example, we’re told that we must shave off the foam buildup from boiling beans because that foam contains whatever makes you gassy. Sharma, whose book The Flavor Equation will come out this October, says that this is a common misconception. The foam does not make you gassy; improperly cooked kidney beans do, though, if the complex carbohydrate does not break down. The precipitate is removed during the canning process, he says, so you don’t get it confused with bacteria — “it’s not poisonous itself, it’s just quality assurance.” And Sharma has a secret that he’s willing to share as a tip, and it’s baking soda. “I did an experiment,” he says. Adding baking soda to boiling water and beans cut down the cook time from 4 hours to a mere 30 minutes. Step 4: Make the Base “You cook the masala with tomato and onion until the fat separates,” says Sharma, and know that canned tomato is chemically different from fresh tomato, that its acids and sugars have changed in the canning process — so start with fresh tomato, and judiciously add canned slowly, tasting every time. The rest (the spices, that is) is tweakable. I like to use garlic, ginger, cumin, red chile powder, a bit of garam masala, cardamom, and cinnamon. Step 5: Combine Hopefully your beans are cooked, somewhere between al dente and exploded. Throw them into the onion-tomato base and add the leftover bean water. I did this gradually. It renders a much thicker base than if you were to use water. Simmer for 20 minutes, checking for consistency. It should be thick and stew-like, not dry or watery. Step 6: Eat and share Serve it to yourself with rice. Squeeze a bit of lemon to cut the richness, and sprinkle on some chopped cilantro for sparkle. Or better yet, take a page out of Vishwesh Bhatt’s book, and make a ton. Separate the servings into jam jars. Leave them on your neighbor’s doorsteps as a contactless embrace and a reminder of the bean, its story, and how far it traveled. Aditi Natasha Kini writes cultural criticism, essays, and other text objects from her apartment in Ridgewood, Queens. from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2B4rzET

http://easyfoodnetwork.blogspot.com/2020/07/rajma-masala-might-be-perfect-cupboard.html

#EasyFoodNetwork #ComfortFoodRecipes #EasyRecipes #GoodFood #BestComfortFoodRecipes #TastyFoodv

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