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ihaveatheoryonthat · 1 year

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If memory serves, this was going to fill ‘No Way Out’, but it was just too complicated and wasn’t working how I wanted. It was actually supposed to be a bigger thing, and when I decided to tackle Whumptober, I got distracted from outlining it. Oops. Maybe I’ll be able to scrape enough together to do that eventually.

This one’s a bit of a mess, and, again, incomplete.

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For all the existing folklore about the distortion world, they never divulged just how boring it was.

Oh sure, a person never got tired or hungry, any nick or cut stayed in stasis-- neither bleeding nor mending-- but the only thing to do here was… exist. There was some water and a few strange trees, but beyond that? Rocks and nothingness. Akari wasn’t entirely sure how she would’ve weathered it on her own.

She probably would have been alright for a little while, the memories slowly trickling back into place serving to entertain her for a time, but after that? The old-style pokeballs didn’t engage here; here, by herself, meandering aimlessly forever? It would have been unbearable.

As things had turned out, though, she hadn’t been alone when existence tore apart and swallowed her up. Mostly, she felt bad that she’d inadvertently dragged Ingo into this [?] with her, but a selfish part of her was glad for his presence. Not only did she not have to be stranded here alone, but another human was an avenue for discussion, someone with different thoughts, beliefs and information.

He was genuinely excited for her whenever she shared a new memory-- of cute little Twinleaf, of her awesome mom, of her best friends and original team-- and was happy to ask follow up questions, carrying the conversation or sparking new discoveries. When she rounded on him, in turn, he even had his own [news] to share: that the man who looked like him was his brother-- his twin-- that he’d battled for a living in a place called Unova, that the flame wielding Pokemon had been his very first partner.

She noticed when he started subtly steering the conversation back to her, clearly avoiding something, but she’d let him get around to that in his own time. It wasn’t like they had anything to do but think and talk.

There was little denying, now that they were here, that there wasn’t any getting out. They wandered regularly, chatting about whatever served the best [distraction] for the time being, and never saw anything like the [rift] that had spirited them away, just the usual features. Weird upside-down waterfall? Check. Trees with the roots at the top? Present and accounted for. Floating rocks? Oh yeah, they had floating rocks.

In a way, it was weirdly beautiful, cast in the greys of a perpetual twilight, but that was counteracted at every turn by how uncanny it was-- how there was no hot or cold, how the atmosphere was perfectly still without wind to carry it, how, even when you were next to the waterfall, it didn’t make a sound. No wonder Giratina had taken to stealing away into Arceus’s realm.

Akari had just wheedled out that Ingo and his brother had had an argument prior to his disappearance when, for the first time in a lack of time, something changed.

Without thinking, she started running toward it, only to stop in her tracks when a hand caught her by the scarf. And, okay, that had been a little hasty, but wasn’t he curious? She was just going to get a look at whatever it was. Ingo let go and she was off like a shot, glancing back only once to make sure he was following.

She propelled herself from one landmass to the next, using the lack of gravity to travel seamlessly upwards, until she reached the rock nearest whatever that was. Five-- maybe six-- feet past the jagged edge, there was a bright spot hovering in the nothingness. Leaning forward, trying to get a better look, her breath caught in her throat; was it… a beach? A tiny little strip of sand transitioning smoothly into grass, evergreens dotting the cliff face behind it-- she thought she could even see a couple of berry trees. The colors were sapped by virtue of where they were, but… but it was unlike anything in the distortion world. It looked real.

The same hand from before curled around her shoulder, drawing her safely back onto the stone.

[…]

The vision into reality became a subject of fascination for an indeterminable amount of time. Where was it? It didn’t look like any of the beaches in Sinnoh, and apparently Unovan beaches weren’t usually so close to a forest line. When was it? People passed through every now and then, their clothes of modern make, but how modern?

#ihaveatheoryonthat pkmn #submas #writing scraps

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eirikrjs · 2 years

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Isn't wildly differing interpretations of the significance of x or y subject within a larger framework that remains roughly consistent one of the hallmarks of the natural sectarian tendencies of living religions/myth systems? I don't think the modern UFO community having different interpretations of the purpose or hierarchy of the visitors disqualifies them from still being considered part of a larger "belief system" even if it's not as ordered as equivalent "classical" myth systems. A lot of the modern eye on interpreting ancient myth systems elides or collapses what was likely a significant amount of differing interpretation or etc. from person to person, let alone from temple to temple - we only get a broad picture of what was most widely accepted or documented.

Fair, and believing UFOs exist definitely qualifies as a transformative worldview. But as I said in the reply to Caligula, I personally just don't feel right calling their phenomenon more than "folklore" or thereabouts. And unlike the classical period where we certainly have multiple, conflicting accounts of myths, our modern media has more or less recorded every single instance of extraterrestrial phenomena--and more footage of lights in the sky or hazy recollections of abductions doesn't mean they are automatically compelling.

UFOs also exist alongside of (or in response to) our technological advances in science and its skeptical attitudes. Even if some buy into an event as genuinely extraterrestrial, just as many if not more will doubt and/or search for scientific explanations instead. These beliefs are considered fringe from the get-go. While lots of religious/spiritual worldviews (take the Goetia) are fringe themselves, they depend on an inexplicable supernatural force and are compatible with parent systems. On the other hand, aliens' existence depends on science and technology, not magic, albeit "technology that's indistinguishable from magic." (Though honestly, what's so techno-magical about dissecting cows in open fields?) That said, accepting the fabric of alien lore doesn't require the believer to scientifically consider the insane technology needed to travel vast distances in space or theories like the Fermi Paradox that raise doubts about Earth achieving actual extraterrestrial contact anytime soon.

While we've mentioned the consistencies, if you consider extraterrestrials holistically, there is a sliding scale of seriousness, tone, authenticity, you name it. For example, here are three wildly different extraterrestrial-based events: the Flatwoods monster, the Travis Walton account, and Heaven's Gate. Respectively, a barn owl that'll spook kids, a grifter whose movie adaptation spooked adults, and an actual religious cult that resulted in dozens of deaths. Even assuming the Flatwoods monster and Travis Walton abduction are authentic, is it even possible to reconcile these three into one system in a satisfyingly cohesive way? I would say no, and that the only "legitimate" one is Heaven's Gate, not necessarily because of the deaths but because of the members' fervor for Marshall Applewhite, their prophet and redeemer and on whose words they performed a final ritual for their own salvation. But Heaven's Gate by itself doesn't prove a consistent UFO mythology (in fact it seems rather incompatible), just that the group existed (exists?) as its own distinct interpretation.

I might be so opposed to the idea of UFO religion/mythology as equal to ancient mythology because I started learning about it via a book I read as a kid (that I've never been able to find in adulthood) that considered aliens or at least characters like the Flatwoods monster in the same category as the Mad Gasser of Mattoon, Spring-Heeled Jack, and other urban legends!

#aliens #ufos #heaven's gate #mythology

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2am-theswifthour · 4 years

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The 8 Theory-Folklore’s Commentary on Youth

Yesterday, I took note of @taylorswift and her careful attention to the number 8.

“Not a lot going on at the moment” had 8 words. The 8th track is “august,” which is also the 8th month in the year. She has 8 deluxe editions of her album. Many attributed this to Folklore being Taylor’s 8th album. I thought it meant either a.) we needed to pay very close attention to track #8 or b.) that 8 references infinity, a.k.a “forever and ever.”

To my surprise, I was actually selling Taylor Swift short.

When listening to the album, there’s a lot of back and forth in emotion and circumstance. I was confused about the order, especially when the strikingly sobering “hoax” followed the self-aware almost-tranquility of “peace.” Then it hit me. There are two schools of thought going on.

There are 16 tracks on Folklore (excluding the bonus track none of us have heard). 16/2=8. This means there are 2 equal emotional song threads on the album. In other words, you can get two drastically different lessons listening to each group of 8.

When you separate the even numbered tracks from the odd numbered tracks you get the following:

Odd

the 1

the last great american dynasty

my tears ricochet

seven

this is me trying

invisible string

epiphany

peace

Even

cardigan

exile

mirrorball

august

illicit affairs

mad woman

betty

hoax

Odd Interpretation:

Starting with “the 1” and “the last great american dynasty,” the lyrics are very upfront in showing that the protagonists are making fully intentioned mistakes. “the 1” says, “in my defense, I have none for never leaving well enough alone” (I see you “ME!” reference). In “the last great American dynasty” it says, “she had a marvelous time ruining everything.” These characters’ folly is their youth-induced selfishness. They’re casual in the harm they cause because they distance themselves from it. They’re fine with what they don’t look at closely. When you’re young, you make a mess of things in service of YOUR need. Your need for companionship. Your need for the thrill of danger. Your need to make your mark, to be somebody, to leave something behind. The marvel of the excitement and the chase and the very vitality of teens to 20-somethings’ shenanigans blinds us to the scale of our destruction…

…until you have no choice but to face the consequences of your recklessness.

The next track, “my tears ricochet” is not your average track 5. It functions as a pivoting point. Now our narrator is the hurt party, the one baring the brunt of callous treatment. Fickle mistreatment is no longer so casual. Now it’s a torment, and the tormentor learns the scale of their damage. So much so, that they get burned too. They learned their lesson at a terrible price, but what’s most important is that they learned.

“seven” is a long-overlooked memory revisited. In this picture of naïve innocence, the narrator tells of their childish belief in the impossible. Through magic and play pretend and fantasy they are invincible. They have all the control in the world to control the world they live in. Obviously, this is a flawed perspective that everyone eventually grows out of. Fairy tales don’t solve real problems. The point is that their sense of self-importance is in service of a stronger moral compass than the first two songs. If we accept our responsibility to others, to do what we can to ensure their welfare, are we not better and more satisfied people for it?

“this is me trying” hears that lesson and attempts to walk the walk. Part of being responsible to your fellow human is taking accountability when you fumble. The narrator doesn’t know what to say or how to make it right. What they do know is that they’re here, they’ve put the bottle down, and that they’re willing to try what’s necessary to heal what they’ve hurt.

“invisible string” gives us the reward we’ve been waiting for. The narrator says, “cold was the steel of my axe to grind for the boys who broke my heart, now I send their babies presents.” This is someone who has gone from lashing out in anger at a partner from a burned relationship to genuinely wishing them well in their next stage in life. It’s a powerful testament when you can recognize that youth drives us all to make hurtful decisions and that no one is immune to change if they truly want to change. When you let the anger and lies go, the strings that tied you to them fade away. All that’s left is the string you want to hold onto. The string tied to the one who matters, because you’ve made the conscious decision to deduce that their worth as a person should equal yours. It’s a painful path to traverse through, but when you do it’s all worthwhile. That’s why the narrator can say with confidence “hell was the journey but it brought me to heaven.”

In any other album, a song like “invisible string” would be the quintessential emotional payoff for this story arc. However, because this album is a masterpiece, we have a different payoff point in “epiphany.” “epiphany” takes us out of the world of a romantic relationship. We hear descriptions of war and nurses dealing with the despair of this international pandemic. This point in this emotional thread is that it powerfully declares it’s not enough to do no harm nor is it enough to just empathize with your romantic partner. You MUST show your responsibility to your fellow man. Stand beside them. Empathize with them. See them as whole human beings. Do good by them. In other words, it is our duty to do right by everyone, for everyone bleeds, loves, and dies.

The 8-song selection ends with “peace.” The song begins by saying that their, “coming-of-age” has come and gone.” I believe this (along with “invisible string”) to be the most overtly “Taylor Swift” track in perspective. This is her speaking as herself. She lets us know that she’s grown through taking her mistakes, and the mistakes she learned through folklore, into account. She is overly aware of her flaws and feels she pales in comparison to her partner. Rather than allow those insecurities to manifest in unchecked rage or resentment, she takes it as a challenge for herself to do better. She knows she can never give him complete peace (due to inside and outside factors), but she can make the choice to give him unselfish promises and embrace the entirety of her partner’s life. This is a person who has learned the value of selflessness in love and life, which makes this whole thread worth everything.

Even Interpretation:

“cardigan” foreshadows the eventual failure of the even path. The odd interpretation I just described culminated in the narrator finding their place with “the one” because they’ve left everything petty and casually cruel behind. In “cardigan” it says “chase two girls, lose the one.” On top of this directly referencing the first track, it also implies the partner’s self-destruction. By toying with two girls, James is losing “the one.” I don’t think losing “the one” means that you keep one of the two of them. I think it means that engaging in that kind of behavior makes you into a person that isn’t ready, or worthy, of “the one” that they are meant to be with forever. Meeting and keeping “the one” has to require each partner to love themselves and their partner wholly, truly, and selflessly. They can’t be a cardigan you pick up and only wear on the weekends. They must be a wholehearted commitment.

“exile” shows the blowout from “cardigan.” The two couldn’t stay together, and Bon Iver’s (character’s) toxicity comes out full force. He thinks her new man is lesser than him. He’s prepared to throw punches despite being at fault over a hundred times. He’s seen the film before, and he didn’t like the ending because it didn’t work out for him. He wants her under his thumb, not having learned from his prior relationships that that just can’t work. They leave out the side doors, neither fully ready to confront the problems head on.

“mirrorball” is daring in its shift of focus. While all of the tracks I’ve mentioned thus far have dealt, in some way, with the problems that result from a young person’s selfishness, this song doesn’t do that. This song illustrates an extreme that young people participate in at the opposite end of the spectrum; radical selflessness. To be selfless means that you should never allow something that harms someone else to happen just because it benefits you. Young people, girls in particular, are often groomed to interpret selflessness differently. Their definition is synonymous with accommodation. Change your looks, change your personality, don’t object, and embody what your partner wants so that they’re happy. That’s why the symbol is the mirrorball in the song. It reflects everything in the room but itself. By explicitly not factoring in their own sense of self-respect in a relationship, they are unknowingly and tragically enabling their partner’s mistreatment. To be clear, that doesn’t mean abuse is their fault if they have low self-esteem. It’s not, even remotely. But not having the capacity to defend your self-worth is what keeps so many drawn into toxic relationships there for so long. This radical selflessness manifests itself in the other woman too. In “august” it explicitly says that she was living on the, “hope of it all” and that she would cancel plans in the name of a potential hookup with someone who was never hers. The idea of radical selflessness culminates in “illicit affairs” when one of the women deals with their addictive compulsion toward someone who treats them like a cheap lay. Their relationship is a secret that leaves her feeling used in parking lots and as though any trace of her is gone. These three songs have taken the desperate hopelessness of “Abigail gave everything she had to a boy who changed his mind” to the extreme.

Many have speculated that “mad woman” is a commentary on the Taylor/Scooter conflict and I’m inclined to agree. However, if I were to assign an interpretation that goes with my theory, I would say that “mad woman” details the unforeseen consequences of a tormentor’s abuse. When a toxic partner performs bad behavior, their expectation is that they will always be found in the right. After all, Taylor noted on her previous album that for men, “everyone believes [them].” So in the face of lies about her character that everyone believes, she gets rightfully angry. Her anger is their affirmation. For many, a woman being angry on her own behalf is “crazy” and “irrational.” What kind of a society have we set up? A society that promotes women to lack self-worth and, should they find it, they’ll meet a whole other exile.

“betty” is our complete look into James’ perspective. On its own, it sounds like a big romantic gesture to get behind. However, this path is very clear to put “cardigan” first. “cardigan” says, “I knew you’d miss me once the thrill expired and you’d be standin’ in my front porch light.” Lo and behold, in “betty” he shows up to her party when she doesn’t want to see him and asks if she would, “kiss [him] on the porch in front of all [her] stupid friends.” It’s an absolute punch in the gut. Betty knows in “cardigan” that he would come back after he had his fun with another girl, but that she would take him back when he saw momentary value in her again. James in “betty” claims he didn’t know anything, but that’s just an excuse. He knew what he was doing, he knew that he would be able to pick up her broken pieces with ease, he knew he could isolate her from her friends, and he knew that he could capture the imperfect “comfort” of that cardigan again.

This path ends in the final even-numbered song, “hoax.” In the odd numbers, “peace” shows a lesson learned. This even path shows what happens when we don’t learn. The seeds of youth-driven mistakes have led us here. The narrator wants nothing outside the pain of this faithless love. Without learning what it means to be selfless, the traumas of these young relationships create a never-ending cycle. The narrator knows that the “love” is a “hoax” but doesn’t care because that’s all they have. There’s no point to wanting anything else. Without the perspective of age, of truly going beyond that, they’re stuck in a truly dark place.

Final Thoughts:

Taylor Swift is an exceptional artist for a lot of reasons. No one makes albums this good this far into their career. Most artists teeter off after two or three because they retread. Their audience inevitably gets bored of them e same thing time and again. Repeating themselves is something that a lot of artists do because they want to go with the formula of what works. With Folklore, Taylor has done what few artists have dared to do. She’s allowed her discography as a place to uncompromisingly expand her worldview and challenge her listeners. She’s not reiterating previous lessons to make another quick sale. Instead, every album prior has been a steppingstone. As she said at the Time 100 Gala, she has truly turned her lessons into her legacy. From a variety of narrators, she has brought what I decree to be her best album to date. This wouldn’t happen for anyone else 8 albums into their career, but she’s done it by devoutly embracing age’s wisdom.

Learn from the highs and lows presented in these paths. As all good folklore does, it teaches us how to live better. It is our duty to live selflessly and with self-assured dignity. These writings, I have no doubt, will become integral to the legend that is Taylor Alison Swift.

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yamayuandadu · 4 years

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Hecate: falsehoods and myths

While my blog generally focuses on China and Japan, occasionally other topics related to religion and mythology warrant a post too. Due to Halloween being right around the corner, I decided to finally cover something I've been meaning to for a long while – the large number of misinterpreted, misreported or outright made up information about my favorite minor figure from Greek mythology, Hecate. While only rarely present in myths, she's a mainstay of not only popculture, but also of what I think warrants being called “pop-spirituality”. Under the cut I will examine a number of claims commonly seen online, and provide both the necessary debunks as well as some interesting genuine information.

Falsehood #1: Hecate's three bodies represent the neopagan virgin, mother, crone trinity This claim, as baffling as it is, made its way even to a number of academic publications – what prompted me to write this post was in fact stumbling upon it in a paper about a completely unrelated topic. In truth, there wasn't even such a thing as an universal “virgin-mother-crone” trinity in Greek mythology – the whole idea is a product of dubious 20th century scholarship, mostly that of Robert Graves, a man whose notable deeds include writing a number of seemingly entertaining historical novels, cheating on his wife with his “muses” (some of them teenaged), and introducing the world to a wide array of myths and interpretations he came up with himself, but presented as genuine (he want as far as lament that more credible authors refuse to spread his ideas further). The most prominent of them, outlined in his book White Goddess, was his belief in the existence of some form of universal goddess figure with three aspects, which he himself named rather inconsistently, and which he claimed corresponded to the phases on the moon. What is true is that Hecate was associated with the moon from the Hellenic period onward, with neoplatonic writers in particular highlighting this affinity. This appears to be derived from Hecate's role as a “light-bringing” deity, frequently depicted with torches in art. Her arguably most prominent appearance in a myth presents her as Persephone's guide on the way back to her mother, lighting the way through the underworld. A shift from a general light-bringing role to just an association with the moon likely occurred due to conflation occuring between Hecate and Artemis – however in earlier times she was also frequently associated with Apollo, who even held the title of “Hecaton” in some sanctuaries. It has also been suggested that originally the connection was based on Apollo being depicted as a “builder” deity, while Hecate's principal role was that of a guardian of homes, gates and roads, which made their purposes overlap. Due to the aforementioned moon connection, combined with the fact she was commonly depicted with three bodies in art, Hecate became a postergirl for Graves' theory. Of course, this association has no foundation in reality – Hecate is not described as triplicate in Hesiod's Theogony, the oldest source mentioning this goddess.

The oldest known depictions, both sculptures and pottery decorations, likewise depict her with only one body. Some later sources seemingly discussed the three bodied version as merely an art motif. Pausanias's travelogue presents the three bodied Hecate statues as an invention of the sculptor Alcamenes, and contrasts them with a single-bodied depiction: Within the enclosure [in Aegina] is a temple; its wooden image is the work of Myron, and it has one face and one body. It was Alkamenes, in my opinion, who first made three images of Hekate attached to one another, a figure called by the Athenians Epipurgidia [on the tower] It should be noted that yet other sources consider them to have religious importance as guardians of crossroads, though these claims are obviously not contradictory. Additionally, a few pieces of art, such as the Pergamon altar, depict Hecate with three bodies despite presenting myths in which she only possessed one.

Hecate was consistently portrayed as a young woman (some pieces of art, like the one above, depicted her in an Artemis-like manner, in a knee length garment) and with some small exceptions, usually relying on conflation with various nymphs, ancient Greeks seemingly considered her a virgin goddess. There are no widely agreed upon ideas regarding any other figures being regarded as Hecate's children, and even after becoming only a distantly remembered boogeyman she was not depicted as an elderly woman. Falsehood #2: a “pan-european” set of “witchcraft traditions” was derived from Hecate Most claims online related to witchcraft try to add a degree of complexity to what was senseless violence caused by moral panics, not dissimilar from the 1980s satanic panic. There was no “pan-european” component to them (beyond all instances of large scale witch hunts being motivated by religious fervor, of course), and in particular the worship of Hecate was neither extant at the time associated with witch hunts and the development of the modern western image of a witch, nor was it ever “pan-european”. If anything, an argument can be made that outside Greece and Anatolia, Hecate was more of a popular import in the east than in the west. Some Roman sources present the existence of Hecate household altars in Greece as a puzzling curiosity, which further strengthens this impression. The late version of her cult, presenting her as a witchcraft goddess spread to Egypt and Mesopotamia, while an older, more positive image of Hecate seemingly survived in far off Bactria. as evidenced for example by Agathocles’ coins with Zeus holding Hecate, seen below.

Neither version ever spread to western or northern Europe, though, and pretty clearly it did not survive in any form into the middle ages and beyond. Wikipedia mentions a truly outlandish modern association between Hecate and germanic wild hunt folklore, which strikes me as completely random. An actual well documented example of Hecate syncretism with a figure from outside Greek mythology involved the Mesopotamian underworld goddess Ereshkigal, however.

What's rather curious is that the very concept of Hecate as a witchcraft and underworld goddess might have been a relatively late development, and as such not an accurate representation her original character – and even in antiquity it wasn't an universally embraced association. Earliest Greek accounts of Hecate cast her in a positive, benevolent role. In the Theogony she's a titan siding with the Olympians and then aiding them during gigantomachia as well; in certain versions of the Persephone myth, for example in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, she's an ally of Demeter offering her counsel and finally escorting Persephone back to her mother. Many of her epithets also point at a benign character.

The deity whose role was most likely the closest to Hecate's own before the negative associations made her little more than a boogeyman was Cybele. Iconography and surviving accounts of rituals to both of these figures bear many similarities, which is considered one of the strongest arguments in favor of Hecate being an Anatolian goddess adapted into the Greek pantheon due to contact between Greek colonist in Asia Minor with local inhabitants such as Carians. It's also worth noting that in Greece both Hecate and Cybele were generally worshiped at household shrines rather than official, large temples. Sometimes Hecate and Cybele were also depicted together, though it's generally agreed they were never conflated. It is still uncertain to what degree Hecate was associated with the underworld before becoming a goddess of witchcraft – some authors assume that she was already in part cthtonic as a Carian deity, while others assume she only started to fulfill this role due to the later witchcraft associations, or due to conflation with the goddess Enodia popular in Thessaly, who was depicted as a crossroad deity like Hecate and was associated with ghosts. Falsehood #3:Hecate was always depicted with animal heads While not entirely made up, this claim is rooted in the Argonautica Orphica, a text only written in the 5th or 6th century, and likely inspired by neoplatonic, gnostic and magical sources. A probable origin of animal-headed Hecate are Egyptian magical papyri, likely influenced by Greek perception of Egyptian religion, and to a large degree disconnected from worship of Hecate in, say, Caria or Phrygia. Earlier sources and art depict Hecate with a single, human, head on each body, as discussed above. The animal-headed image only developed when Hecate started to be perceived exclusively as a goddess of witchcraft and similar arts. However, even though that was always the perception of this deity in Roman sources and in most Greek ones from 5th century BC onward, a number of cult sites in Anatolia, for example the temple in Lagina, continued to venerate her under the regular guise, and one of the most prominent indications of a lasting devotion to her comes from Greco-Bactrian coinage depicting entirely human, single-headed and single-bodied Hecate with Zeus.

While Hecate was not depicted with animal heads before the dawn of Hellenic Egyptian magical papyri, from the very beginning she was associated with a number of animals, most importantly dogs, but also martens and polecats. Occasionally her animal companions were assumed to be humans cursed with such forms. While some versions of associated myths claimed Hecate cursed specific individuals (such as Gale or Hekuba) to live as animals, in others she instead took pity on victims of another deity's curse – for example, Antoninus Liberalis notes that it was believed that the polecat was a woman named Galinthias who was transformed into the animal by the Moirae and “Hekate felt sorry for this transformation of her appearance and appointed her a sacred servant of herself.” Occasionally Hecate was also depicted with lions, like Cybele and a variety of other Anatolian, Levantine and Mesopotamian goddesses. Falsehood #4: Statue of Liberty represents Hecate While the three falsehoods discussed earlier intersect and overlap, this one, as far as I can tell, developed separately, though it also was influenced by the idea of Hecate as a malevolent witchcraft goddess to a degree. Debunking it is much easier and doesn’t require any complex research – the Statue of Liberty was simply based on the personification of liberty depicted on the Great Seal of France:

While Statue of Liberty's crown does resemble that worn by one of the three bodies of a famous statue of Hecate, currently displayed in the Vatican Museum, this style of crown was associated more with solar deities, especially the late Roman god Sol Invictus, and I have been unable to find any other depictions of Hecate wearing it.

Bibliography:

Fragments from a Catabasis Ritual in a Greek Magical Papyrus by Hans D. Betz

Hecate Cult ın Anatolia by Coşkun Daşbacak

Hecate: Her Role and Character in Greek Literature From Before Fifth Century B.C. by Carol M. Mooney; some arguments on the contrary can be found in Hecate: Greek or “Anatolian”? by William Berg

Theoi Hecate and Hecate cult pages - great source of quotations

COININDIA gallery of Agathocles’ coins

#hecate #hekate #cybele #greek mythology #homegrown esoterica

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calder · 3 years

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I’m a strong personal believer that all cryptids (read: CRYPTIDS not appropriated cultural things you FUCKS) are real in some variation, like Nessie is a big ol lizard or perhaps the ghost of one, the Jersey Devil is a real bitch who pulls nonsense, and Bigfoot is just A Guy

respectfully disagree. i understand some high-strangeness regional entities are common optical illusions or codified local myth, but some simply make more sense as genuine psychedelic abiotic phenomena.

i don't claim to understand any given case but i generally take folkloric entities at face value as an extant force to be acknowledged and taken seriously. i respect belief in imperceptible benign presences to be respected and potential dangers to be avoided. i personally believe this stuff runs the spectrum from metaphor to accounts of metaphysical concerns i cannot begin to comprehend.

cryptobiological evidence is almost always forged because trying to scientifically prove "cryptids" as animals we can cage is simply coming at the whole thing incorrectly

i don’t know how serious you were being but categorically presuming all "cryptid" encounters to be misunderstood situations or unusual individual animals is bluntly reductive skepticism, and, respectfully, "folklore i feel comfortable wildly speculating about" is not a meaningful scientific classification

i mean. bigfoot has become pop culture, sure, but you know settlers are not the first to describe sasquatch, right?

#this came off firmer than i meant it to its just something i wanted to put a finer point on

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serpentstole · 3 years

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Luciferian Challenge: Bonus 1

Since I combined the 13th prompt with the 12th yesterday, here’s one of the bonus question.

What do you think is best about Luciferianism?

I don’t think I can make a blanket statement about what’s best about Luciferianism in general. The religion is incredibly personalized, and while I believe its core values and ideals are admirable, I don’t actually think they’re exclusive to Luciferianism. I think it’s one of those things where if you check enough off of the list, and you’re drawn to the label, you’re a Luciferian. If you don’t or aren’t, you can end up as damn near anything else. However, I’m perfectly happy to explain what’s so great about it for me, as I’ve been giving it a lot of thought during this challenge.

Something I will state outright is that what I’m about to describe is specific to my own special brand of Luciferianism. While I would not be at all shocked if it overlaps with others, I don’t make any claims or statements that should be forced onto literally anyone else who shares my religious label.

I’m prefacing this because my Luciferianism has a bit of an odd relationship with Christianity in a way I’m not ashamed of, but that some people might find peculiar at best and uncomfortable at worst if they’re someone who endlessly strives to separate or distance the two.

If that’s not a dealbreaker for you, and you’re curious to hear more of how that works and why it’s so valuable to me, the full explanation can be found below the cut.

I appreciate you sticking around! I struggled with how exactly to begin this part, so I’ll start with a big dramatic statement and then over-explain it from there.

My Luciferianism is impossible to completely untangle and separate from Christianity, and this is despite my tendency to remind people that the name Lucifer appears precisely once in the Bible, and is not meant to refer to a fallen angel.

The biggest thing that drove me away from my Lutheran upbringing was the worship. I did believe in God, and His potentially all knowing and powerful nature, but I genuinely cannot remember a time as a Lutheran when worship felt genuine to me. I thought angels were fascinating. I loved a good deal of the music, the sound of the organ, the stained glass… I even had some fondness for the community, as the one I was in wasn’t terrible and I spent a great deal of time in it as one of the children’s choir’s few members, and later as an acolyte. But I didn’t really want to be a Lutheran. It didn’t feel how I knew it was probably meant to, even going into confirmation classes. I’ve always believed a person should be passionate about their religion, if they have one, and that your deities should be a figure you look to in times of celebration instead of just in times of strife.

As time went on, I also began appreciating the trappings of Catholicism. Don’t get me wrong, I have some issues with the church as a whole, but there’s a reason everyone keeps stealing the aesthetic, right? They certainly put a church together far prettier than the ones I grew up in, they kept much more of the Latin, I like the meditative nature of a rosary… and I ended up forming a relationship with a few saints, despite my religious affiliations.

I had a pagan’s love for Dionysus, for incorporating magic into my everyday life, and for seeing the world through the mindset of an animist. I also had no interest in worshiping God, though the belief in Him remained, and I was kind of just apathetic when it came to the divinity of Christ. However, I do have a deep appreciation for saints in the sense that they’re powerful dead and ancestors of sorts, and angels will continue to be fascinating to me even if it turns out I can work with them less and less. In regards to both, I strongly believe in approaching a spirit on their own terms, and have no issue with incorporating prayer or verse into how I petition the aforementioned saints.

Luciferianism kind of just… has room for all that, given just how loose its requirements are. The figures that are at the center of my practice are undeniably Abrahamic in origin (which I will finally use in the sense that figures like Eve and Azazel are found in a number of religions that share those historic roots) and my typical understanding of Lucifer is a blending of Christian folklore and the long dead religions that came before it.

The result was that I’m kind of steeped in Christianity and its aesthetics the way a vampire from a gothic horror is. All the pieces are there, but there’s something wrong with it.

And I love that for me?

So I don’t call myself dual faith, because I tend to think that requires some level of worship of or loyalty to both sides, but I like existing alongside Christianity. On the fringes, in a way. My Luciferianism merged my polytheism, my animism, my love of the occult, and also my appreciation of figures like Lucifer and Azazel and Eve in a way that I don’t think any other religious label would have allowed for. Not to mention that all the while it also spoke to the ideals and values I hold dearest.

Though I’m still sorting out the finer points of how I view the deities and spirits I work with (partially on account of how our relationship is still growing) I’m very content as a whole.

I could only go into so much detail without making this monster long, so if you’re a little confused by or curious about any part of it, please do shoot me an ask instead of wondering or making assumptions. Even if you worry it’ll come off as a touch rude or confrontational to ask questions about it, I don’t mind.

#luciferianism #theistic luciferianism #30 Day Luciferian Challenge #30dayluciferianchallenge #illumine #personal

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grimoireoffolkloreandfairytales · 3 years

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Balkan Bestiary: Ala

A creature, it is weather demon that can be found in Serbian, Croatian, Montenegrian, Bulgarian, Macedonian and Albanian beliefs, it is very popular and wide spread spirit which was immensely feared and important, because to population that relied greatly on their agrarian lifestyle to survive.

Ala, sometimes called hala, has several etymological explanations behind it. Some think that name may have come from Turkish word for snake. Others think that it may have it’s origin in Greek word for hail. It may also be derived from proto-slavic word for terrible weather. There is obvious connection with alav, archaic word for very gluttonous person, but it is hard to determine whether creature was named after it, or word is derived from folkloric monster. In Albanian folklore there is creature known as kulshedra, kuçedra or bulla, which is very similar to ala.

Ala is powerful and dangerous serpentine sky monster, responsible for creating tumultuous and chaotic storms that destroy harvest, bringing down thunder and hail upon crops. As such, it is very much problem for humans, and often has to be fought off by zmajevi (dragons, and it’s counterparts), or sometimes, eagles and saints. It can be seen as descendant of animist beliefs in storm spirits, as it sometiems seems as if ala is storm itself.

Another of it’s defining characteristics is it’s appetite. Ala in incredibly gluttonous, and ever hungry, which is why it attacks human dwellings, to steal away their crops. Some believe that destruction of crops and soreading of famine is how ala feeds, that it steals away vitality and life of earth’s bounty.

(Ala is often, in nearly 90% of tales, portrayed as feminine spirit, while dragons are primarily masculine. However, as there are famous tales of male alas, I will use it for sake of convenience. Worth noting is that in most Balkan languages the nouns are gendered, so ala as species being feminine might not apply to specific spirit, just as fish is feminine noun, and chair, and rain... Nonetheless, fact that dragon-ala conflict can be seen as conflict between male and female spirit of same type is intriguing line of thought.)

The eclipses were often attributed to ala, sometimes claimed to be result of ala trying to eat Moon and/or Sun. People would obviously react negatively to this ( both because of scary folklore, but also, eclipse is very surprising and scary when you are farmer dealing with stubborn bull that refuses to be yoked). People would go out, bang on pots and pans to scare ala away, and recite ritual chants to banish it.

How does ala look? Well, that too can be ambigious sometimes, but thankfully there are more accounts of it, some quite descriptive. While sometimes invisible, or hidden spirit, it is also often described as black cloud or wind spreading across land, highlighting it’s origins as animistic explanation for storm. Often, it is a giant, monstrous serpentine monster, sometimes said to be so tall that it’s head remains hidden in clouds, while it’s tail drags across earth. It can have wings and several heads, and often can also resemble usual depiction of western dragon.

Ala’s origins are most intriguing to me. Like dragons, ala too begins life as ordinary snake, and then over long period of years, changes into monster. Explanation is rarely given ( especially since period neccesary for becoming dragon is shorter than one for ala), but some tales claim that ala is born from snake that has remained in underground darkness, unseen by human eyes, for over a century. After those years pass, it shall ‘’reveal it’s legs’’ and unveil wings.

Ala’s main and most dangerous powers were it’s power over weather, the ability to cause storms and control wind, summon or take away rain, bring hail and disaster. It however had many other abilities, beyond that and flying, of course. It was believed that, aside from it’s immense size and strength, ala’s head was so horrifying that whoever looked at it would be driven to madness. It’s breath and presence were poisonous, and could cause men to fall sick and crops to wither. It was also capable of shapeshifting, mostly wild animals, but sometimes women too.

It’s most dangerous ability, however, was power to possess humans. It would sneak inside person’s body, sometimes in form of dark smoke or ill stench, and unknowingly hide inside, finding both refuge from enemies, and being close enough to terrorize commmunity. Often people affected wouldn’t notice anything, but their appetites would become enormous. One story claims that St. Simeon ( born Stefan Nemanja) was possesed by an ala, until St. Sava ( his son, born Prince Rastko, and maybe most important Serbian saint) cast it out.

This ability is connected to belief in aloviti, the ‘’ala-like’’ people, in some places also called zduhaci or zmajeviti ( the dragonlike). They are people whose souls leave body to become dragonlike spirits that defend village’s crops and weather. In traditions connecting them to alas, they are either children alas have with humans, survivors of ala attack or possession, or alas themselves. A claim amy even be made that all weather related demons and dragons are these men, protecting their own and attacking neighbouring villages.

Ala is usually malicious, and always unclean force, but it can be beneficial to humans. Whether due to debt, the bargain, pragmatics of living there, or even genuine connection, ala may particular region as it’s domain, and defend it’s humans from other spirits. Sometimes it may even develop attachment to particular human and aid them, such as helping a prince she grew fond of in quest, or deciding to become human girl’s godmother. In such cases ala is to be treated with respect and gratitude, but you should never forget that it is still violent and capricious demon, whose ‘’goodness’’ extends only to interests of it’s human friend.

In some fairy tales ala takes on roles of more classical dragon in caves, or monster demanding tithe of maidens at bottom of lake ( a connection to azdaha is possible), or wicked witch in woods. In those cases ala will be antagonist, but can even be helpful if you fulfill it’s tasks. Some connection had been made with Baba Yaga, but whether it’s just coincidence of chtonic beings fulfilling ambigious functions in folktales, or both figures are derived from Proto-Slavic storm goddess, is up for anybody to guess and never find out.

#balkan folklore #slavic folklore #balkan bestiary

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moonice20408 · 4 years

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The Curious Disappearance of C. Cullen

Word Count: 3818

Read on Ao3 Read on FF.net

“This week on Buzzfeed Unsolved we’re investigating the disappearance of C. Cullen, as part of our new investigation!”

“New investigation?”

“Are vampires real?”

Shane groaned. “Oh no. No no no. Absolutely not. Nope.”

Ryan let out a laugh. “What, you don’t believe in vampires?”

“No Ryan, I do not.” Shane shook his head. “And you know what, I think I might believe in them even less than ghosts!”

“Oh wow.” Ryan laughed again. “Why are vampires so much more unbelievable than ghosts?”

“Because Ryan. They’re stupid! That’s why!” He slammed his hand onto the desk with some force. “If vampires were real, we’d know about it.”

“Well what if it’s like in the movies and they’re all just living in secret?”

“Oh, c’mon. There are cameras everywhere nowadays. You don’t think we’d have caught some guy just munching on another guys neck till he drops dead at some point? Then turn into a bat and fly away.”

“Well you’d just say it was fake if we did.”

Shane paused for a second then shrugged. “Yeah, that’s probably true.”

Ryan shook his head, then faced the camera. “So, this episode of Supernatural is a going to be a little different.”

“How so Ryan?”

“Well… we’re not going anywhere. There’s no location footage this week guys.”

“Yeah, this week we just thought, ‘you know what, not feeling it.’” Shane relaxed back in his chair. “We’re gonna sit back and take it easy.”

Ryan ignored him. “The reason being, well two reasons actually. One being that, at least I figure, if they were real, vampires aren’t, err… trapped, shall we say, to one place. Therefore, if they were real, they’d still be free to leave a place. So, we’d get there-”

“And we’d be talking to no one.” Shane interrupted.

“Exactly.”

“Imagine that.” Shane continued. “Going to a supernatural hotspot, just talking to the air…”

“Would you-”

“Wouldn’t want that! Would we?” He threw his hands up in the air. Ryan just stared forward, looking into the camera with an unimpressed look. “Wouldn’t we just look dumb! Just yelling into an empty room, expecting a response.”

“Erm, excuse me, we’ve gotten plenty of responses!” Ryan defended.

“Pffft.” Shane waved his hand.

“You know what, I’m just going to continue.” Ryan said matter-of-factly.

“Please.”

“The other reason we’re staying here, is that this case is from England. And we just couldn’t find time that worked for us, as well as crew members to do a quick trip to another country.” Shane nodded with Ryan. “I did look around the location, y’know on Google, and err, it’s just a bunch of offices now, so…”

“Not as exciting as our last trip there.” Both of them shook their heads.

“Now,” Ryan straightened out the file in front of him, before looking to the camera. “I am going to admit, right off the bat…” He quickly peered to Shane. “See what I did there?”

Shane nodded.

“Vampire… Bat…”

“No, I got it Ryan. That was a good one.”

“Thank you.” Ryan smiled while Shane rolled his eyes. “Anyway, I have to admit, I, err… I’m already prepared for some… criticism, shall we say.”

“What, because vampires aren’t real?” Shane said sarcastically.

“No. Well, I guess that’s part of the debate isn’t it?”

Shane sighed and shook his head, looking straight to the camera.

Ryan continued. “What I mean is, that this is case we’re investigating, is one of the oldest cases we will have covered so far on the show.”

“Oh really? Interesting.” Shane said, genuinely intrigued. “What’s the oldest so far? Witch trials right, gotta be.”

“Err, well that’s the oldest full episode, I think. But there’s some of the ancient alien stuff we looked at-”

“Oh right, yeah.”

“But the Salem witch trials were 1690s. But the case today dates back, roughly, to the 1640s.”

“Wow. That’s pretty old Ryan.”

“Yeah, which is part of the problem. Because it’s as old as it is, the erm, documentation of it is… It’s not great.”

Shane let out a small laugh. “So, what you’re saying is, you’ve got shit.”

“No! No… It’s just we, meaning our tremendous research team, we’re usually able to get multiple accounts on stuff, and can cross reference information, you know, so we can put together a more valid case.”

“So, you’re telling me, that before the videos even started, this case has no credibility and is crumbling through your fingers as we speak?”

Ryan sighed. “Look, I feel that what we have is defiantly something. I just want to make it clear; it’s just not as backed up as our usual content. You know we try to keep it as honest as we can here. So, I figured, I’d be upfront about this, before people start yelling at me through the comments. Obviously, I’m not going to put together an episode if there’s absolutely nothing, cause that’s… that’s just telling a made-up story off the internet isn’t it?”

“Hmm,” Shane nodded. “Okay. Alright. I will reserve my judgement for the end.”

Ryan laughed. “I doubt that, but anyway, let’s get into it.

- - -

“Legends of vampires can be dated back millennia, and stories told of them are found globally. Many ancient cultures had tales centred around the nocturnal undead, reanimated corpses spreading disease to the living, or blood drinking spirits all that hold similar characteristics to the modern idea of what a vampire is.

The idea of blood drinking became very ingrained into the lore of vampires. It was once believed that the blood of a living person, contained that person’s life force, and to drink it would allow another creature to absorb that life force. Some even thought that by drinking a person’s blood, that the drinker would also gain the characteristics of that person, allowing the vampire to better disguise themselves amongst the rest of society.

The word ‘vampire’ itself only came into use in the mid-18th century, from fast spreading tales told in Transylvania, and was later further popularised due to Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, which was published in 1897. It’s Stoker who is credited for defining the modern vampire, after combining multiple myths together for his book.

In most folklores, vampires were believed to be the revenants of evil beings, or an unrested deceased person who had committed unforgivable sins in their life, but it became a common belief that a living person themselves could become a vampire by being bitten. The belief in some parts of the world became to extensive that it led to mass hysteria, which resulted in many people being sentenced to death, usually by burning.”

- - -

“What’s interesting to me,” Shane started.

“Yeah?”

“Is just how wholeheartedly people, back in the day, believed in this stuff!”

“Yeah. I did come across something, and can I just say, the historical research in this case was very interesting… Like, go look up vampire history guys.” Ryan pointed at the camera. “But anyway, in, err, Greece I think it was, was that after three years, they would dig up dead bodies and they’d be examined.”

“To see if they’d become vampires?”

“Basically.” Ryan nodded. “And if they hadn’t decayed to standard, or whatever, then they’d be ‘dealt with accordingly’” He said, adding air quotations.

“Who decides,” Shane snickered. “Who decides what a suitable decomposition is?” They both laughed. “Were they just like, ‘hmm, no, too much meat left on ‘im’”

“‘toss him in the fire!’” Ryan added.

“‘Into the pit’,” Shane mimicked throwing something over his shoulder. “‘Bring in the next decayed body!’”

“It’s like a line at the doctor’s office.” They both chuckled.

- - -

“Now, back to the case at hand. In early the 1950s, construction workers in London were working to fix up a number of buildings that were destroyed by bombs during World War Two. In one particular location, the damage caused actually led to the discovery of a basement-like room, that had been previously built over, remaining hidden for centuries. Upon further investigation, it was determined that this room was originally part of an Anglican church that was destroyed during the Great Fire in 1666, and was never rebuild.

Inside this room, many historical artefacts were found, but some of the most interesting, at least to me, were a journal and a stack of documents, that belonged to a previous pastor of the church. It is worth noting that the year 1640 is written on the first page of this journal, but it is up for debate for how long this journal was kept. The documents that were recovered, have been since entitled the ‘Crusades of Evil’.

Unfortunately, over time a lot of the writing on these pages has become too faded to accurately read. But enough can be made out to get a good sense of what they’re about. In short, the pastor of the church would lead hunts for all manner of unholy creatures. Almost all of them resulting in the execution of people who were thought to be these creatures. These documents contain the information about the accused, which was essentially just a name and location, if that, as well as what they were accused of doing/being, and the method of execution. Most of the documents found were signed a S.C. Cullen. But, thanks to the journal that was found with these papers, we know that the man in question was named Samuel Cullen.”

- - -

“No middle name?” Shane asked.

“Err, no this guy didn’t write his whole name. Unfortunately.”

“And am I correct in assuming that the unknown ‘C’ initial is perhaps the same as our missing person’s?”

“It is certainly believed that the initials do come from the same name, yes.”

“Interesting…” Shane paused for a moment. “You know… just to switch subjects here,” He huffed a laugh, “And I want this on record, this guy already seems like an asshole… I’m very against the whole idea of burning innocent people to death…”

“Oh good, I’m glad.” Ryan said sarcastically.

“But, I gotta say… Crusades Against Evil! Sounds like a badass movie!”

Ryan chuckled. ��To be honest, when I first read that… I did think it sounded like some kind of shooter video game.”

“Oh! Like Doom! You ever play that?” He mimed holding up a gun, and pointing it around the room. “Vampires just popping up, like bangbangbangbangbang!” He ‘aimed’ at Ryan. “Kaboom.”

Ryan just raised his eye brow. “You done?”

“Yeah.” Shane sighed, smiling to himself.

- - -

“Not much is known about Samuel Cullen, other than the fact he was the church pastor during the 1630s and early 1640s at the very least, according to the papers found. And the journal that was found, was unfortunately in an even worse condition than the documents. That being said, one legible section did make reference to a son, and if you were paying attention, you’d have noticed I said most of the documents were signed by Samuel. Some however, were signed C. Cullen. Which has led many conclude that this C. Cullen was the pastor’s son. But when efforts were made to find out more about this man, researchers came up empty handed, and found almost nothing. Not even a first name.”

- - -

“Not even a name?” Shane said loudly.

“I know.”

“So I take it that it was Samuel naming his son after himself?”

“Err, yeah. At least that’s what most people think. Which, honestly, I think is a fair conclusion to make.”

Shane nodded in agreement. “That’s kind of sad, that we’ll never know this guy’s name.” Ryan hummed in agreement, and there was a brief moment of silence. “I bet it was Clive.”

Ryan laughed. “Clive?”

“I dunno man, first name I thought of.” Shane shrugged.

“You thought of Clive before, like, Christopher? A much more common name.”

“Aaa, this is an uncommon guy though, Ryan.”

Ryan shook his head, not commenting.

- - -

“As I said, Samuel seemed to be very enthusiastic about the hunts he led, given the number of documents signed by him. His son however, only seemed to have taken charge in two of these crusades. And if it is to be assumed that the documents were kept in any sort of order, then that would mean, these two accounts from the son were much further apart in time, than that of Samuel’s. It’s also worth mentioning, that C. Cullen’s papers were noticeably longer in length, even if too faded to fully read. But this does suggest the man was, perhaps, more detailed in his telling of what happened, or even maybe had more compelling evidence of what he believed to be a supernatural creature. Researches involved believe the most likely scenario is that Samuel put his son in charge of the church and of the hunts, when he was old enough, as the son’s involvement doesn’t seem to be much later. But that his son was much more hesitant at doing the job at hand. Therefore, leading Samuel to decide to take over once again, possibly to save his own or his family’s reputation.

One document in particular sparked interest, when upon further inspection, it appeared to be written by both Samuel and his son. When comparing the handwriting, it was concluded that it was mostly written by the son. Starting with what seemed to be a description on a group of people living underground. This most likely meaning the sewage system at the time. Bible verses can also be found, such as Leviticus 17:10-14, which quotes ‘And whatsoever man there be of the house of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among you, that eateth any manner of blood; I will even set my face against that soul that eateth blood, and will cut him off from among his people.’. But the account of the raid itself, as well as what is assumed to be the execution details, was written, and signed by Samuel. And no evidence of C. Cullen can be found after this point in time.

Which begs the question, what happened during this crusade that meant C. Cullen was unable to complete his own documentation? Was it a conscious decision to leave for good? And, what became of him?

- - -

“See,” Shane started, “I know where you’re going with that that question…”

“Yeah?”

“And I don’t like it…” He sighed.

- - -

“One theory as to why he vanished, is that it during this aforementioned raid, someone fought back against him, and he was killed in self-defence. As mentioned, this attack was written to be on a group of people. Consequently, it seems pretty likely that this group would fight back, given the chance. So perhaps C. Cullen met his match, and ultimate end in this way. Similarly, could it be that he was killed accidentally? Many historians agree that these types of hunts for supernatural beings, would have involved a large number of people. Could it be, that in amidst the chaos and disorder of the crowds, undoubtedly fuelled by fear, that C. Cullen was killed. Perhaps being trampled, or being mistaken for someone else.”

- - -

“Personally,” Ryan started, “I’m not sure I think that’s likely.”

“Of course you don’t, it’s a logical assumption.”

“Oh what, you don’t think, if we were in some crazed mob, I wouldn’t recognise you?” Ryan raised an eyebrow. “And I’d just accidentally kill you cause I was so caught up in the madness?”

“Okay one, you couldn’t kill me no matter how hard you tried.” Ryan made a sound to interrupt, but Shane continued before he could. “And two, hysteria does things to people man. You’re not thinking straight.”

“I just think that the leader of this raid, would be the most recognisable person out of everyone there. I imagine they’d have had him up on a little stage while they all crowded round for instructions before they set off. They’d all of had a pretty good look at the guy, and I’m sure he’d have just been a well-known guy at the time. The trampling, or self-defence I could kinda understand, but I can’t see how someone could’ve just like, grabbed him, and I don’t know, beat him to death or whatever.”

Shane just shrugged.

“Plus, again, he’s probably the most relevant person there.” Ryan added. “So, you’d like to think someone would have noticed his death and there’d be evidence of that.”

“It’s the 1600s, Ryan! What kind of evidence do you want? It’s not like they were running round taking photos or anything.”

“Well, there could be some sort of documentation of it. Newspaper article perhaps?” Ryan suggested.

“I don’t think many newspapers would’ve survived that long… Were newspapers even a thing at this point?”

“You know, honestly I don’t know.”

“And this is the 1600s, how many people were reading?”

“Hmm…” Ryan sighed. “Okay, you got me with that one.”

- - -

“The most commonly accepted theory is that C. Cullen simply ran away. As I said, it is widely believed that he was more hesitant about conducting these crusades in the first place, so is it possible that he used the attack as a cover to escape? Many believe so. Perhaps being in charge of the crusade in question granted him more protection in the event, and perhaps he wasn’t involved in the attack at all. He was simply waiting for news on whether it was successful or not. Is it possible that he hung back, and made his escape while the crowds fought without him? And that no one realised he was gone until afterwards. That being said, some have their doubts about this. Afterall, if C. Cullen was indeed so much more humane than his father, would he really cause an attack on other people, just for his own benefit? And would he be one to watch from the side-lines, while others risked their own life?”

- - -

“Okay…” Shane said.

“What?”

“I mean, obviously, I don’t believe for a second that there were actually vampires involved in any of this… But back in the day, people did quite truly believe that they were real. So, I can’t imagine it would have been difficult to get a crowd all riled up, and then send them off. Especially if the leader of it all also truly believed in the… in the cause, I guess. And I think, that if this guy did use the attack as a cover, and if he was as good of a person as everyone thinks, then he at least thought they were really vampires.”

“That’s fair.” Ryan agreed. “And if you think about it, bible verses were only found in his accounts. So that leads me to think that he at least had like, I dunno, God in mind or whatever.”

“It’s kinda strange to, like, imagine yourself living like that. If you’re taking the bible that seriously, and know it well enough to quote like that, it’s gonna be hard, cause it has a lot of contrasting points. I mean, I can’t say I’ve read the bible, but just from what I’ve seen online. It seems like it’s a bit all over the place!”

“Oh yeah, I agree. I mean, this quote again,” Ryan shuffled through his papers, “I will even set my face against that soul that eateth blood, and will cut him off from among his people’. I can understand that perhaps that could be interpreted to mean killing vampires is okay… But then in the same book you have ‘thou shall not kill’.”

“You know Ryan, I like it when we argee on this stuff.”

Ryan laughed. “Well, we’ll see what you’re saying after this last theory.”

Shane let out a loud sign.

- - -

“I’m sure you all can guess what this final theory is. But some people actually entertain the idea that C. Cullen was correct in his quest. And that he truly found a coven of vampires living underground in London. He was attacked, and transformed into a vampire himself, and he is still out there today.”

- - -

Shane let out a long and loud groan. Leaning back on his chair, and covering his eyes with his hands.

Ryan giggled. “What, you don’t like this one?”

“No.” Shane replied in pained voice.

“Well you’ll be glad to know, neither do I.”

“Oh really. I’d of thought this one was right up your street.”

“What? You seriously think I’d believe in vampires?”

Shane shook his head. “You are so genuinely terrified of ghosts, it’s really not so outlandish to think you’d believe in anything like this.”

“No, no. I’m gonna put vampires in the same category as I put witches. I think a lot of innocent people were unnecessarily killed. And in all honestly, I think Samuel Cullen here, knew what he was doing. I think it was a case of him wanting to maintain a reputation, and as with the second theory, his son just took off and left to live an honest life somewhere.” Ryan nodded.

“I dunno…”

Ryan exaggerated a gasp. “Do you think it was vampires?” He laughed.

Shane chuckled. “Absolutely not. But I mean, I’ll put the whole vampire thing down to mass hysteria, you know, like those people in France!”

Ryan rolled his eyes. “I was so desperately trying to avoid you bringing that up.” He muttered.

“They danced till they died Ryan!” He looked to the camera. “Look it up! Anyway… Mass hysteria, plus, like I think I said this about the witches, but, general boredom can cause a lot of crazy behaviour. But with this C. Cullen guy… he probably just died. It’s not like they were medically advanced. People would get some sort of disease and the local doctor would give them cocaine or some shit. And it’s just a case of crappy documentation.”

Ryan laughed. “You don’t think he managed to get away and just move somewhere else? Probably chance his name?”

“I mean, that’s a possibility.”

“I just… I think there’s something just not sitting well with me, that this guys own father, never seems to mention a death. And that he just seemed to vanish and no one noticed.”

“Well maybe he did mention it, it’s just part of the journal that was unreadable.”

“Maybe…” Ryan said, unsatisfied.

“I guess we’ll never know…”

Ryan sighed. “I hate it when you say that.”

“I know…” Shane nodded, chuckling slightly. “I’m not gonna lose any sleep over it. It was four hundred years ago, he’s defiantly dead now anyway.”

Ryan nodded and hummed. “Well on that note!” The two laughed. “Hey, do you think if a vampire died, that it could still become a ghost?”

“Okay…” Shane stood up and walked off camera.

“Where are you going?”

“Away from you!”

“It was just a question.”

Thanks for reading, and hope you enjoyed it. Please let me know what you think!

#Twilight #carlisle cullen #fanfic #op #twilight fanfiction #Carlisle Cullen fanfiction #Carlisle fanfiction #buzzfeed unsolved #the cullens #we really be out here in 2020 writing twilight fanfic huh?#own fic

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thenightling · 3 years

Text

Opinion on the rioters who dressed as The Punisher

Opinion on the Rioters dressed as The Punisher:

I recently found out some of the Capitol rioters were dressed as The Punisher from Marvel comics. Do I blame the character? No. However, i have become very cautious in regard to hardcore fans of the character and not merely over this.

First, I admit, I never really liked The Punisher as a character. I thought of him as an edgy byproduct of comics gradually shifting to being darker and grittier. He was one of the first heroes to not preach about justice and redemption but instead wanted to kill. He was not a protagonist. He started as a villain in the Amazing Spider-Man comics. Stan Lee had not liked the character. (This is a fact that is easily checked and Googled).

In the late 80s and early 90s he became very popular as comics became darker and so he was given his own comic and appeared more often and often as a protagonist anti-hero.

I never liked the concept of him. Sure, he had a sympathetic backstory but the “Killing is the only answer” never sat right for me. The lack of mercy he showed even to the repentant, it always bothered me. I got that he was supposed to be mentally-ill but in his own comics his behavior was, far too often, justified.

Other media tried to mimic the character. The Ben Affleck Daredevil behaved more like The Punisher than Daredevil. Instead of a defense attorney he was now a prosecutor. And if he lost a case he would hunt down the criminal and kill him, brutally. There’s one scene where he severs a man’s spine and then gloats as a train comes to hit him, as he lays paralyzed on the track. That’s not Matt.

Ben Affleck again played totally-not-Punisher in his portrayal of Batman. A gun-using batman that was loosely inspired by Frank Miller. And all the Zack Snyder Fanboys came crawling out of the woodwork, insisting that this was “realistic” and “more accurate to the comics” and “but look, he killed in these old comics!” They either were lying by omission or didn’t know about Crisis on Infinite Earths and how main continuity Batman had been anti-gun and anti-killing since at least 1985. The entire plot of Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke was based on this established lore.

There’s no doubt Punisher has had a serious influence on popculture and something I called Darkity, dark, dark writing or as others have named it: “Edgelord.”

It’s a sort of “dark and gritty” “realism” popular among boys between the ages of eleven and fifteen who genuinely think crime would end if we shot every criminal and don’t realize that most real world police officers have never drawn their gun, despite what you might see in the news. If murder truly was the norm, people wouldn’t still be horrified by it.

Now on to the fans. There are far too many Punisher fans who think he was and is in the right. They think he is an aspirational figure to admire and look up to. A “realistic” hero by Zack Snyder standards, because hope and mercy are what is apparently unrealistic in a world consisting of aliens, Greek Gods, witchcraft, and even the folkloric Sandman (That’s in DC, not Marvel though Nightmare is arguably the Marvel equivalent).

I used to be Facebook friends with a Punisher fan. He was equally obsessed with The Joker. At first i just let it be. You’re allowed to like edgy or dark characters. There’s no harm in that. But... he got creepy. He would quote the Joker in conversation about “SJWs” and “progressives.” He would say things like “My eyes were opened as yours soon will be.”

He was convinced liberals tried to ruin The Joker movie and posted pictures of the Joker dancing down the stairs with “HAHAHAHAHA! Suck my dick, Progressives!” in at least two of the facebook groups I run. It got embarrassing that when people would search for my Horror Comics group, the sample post Facebook gave was that one.

He kept talking about how both The Punisher and The Joker are right. His facebook picture would alternate between the two characters depending on his mood. He would post memes “explaining” why The Punisher is right.

He would post articles about this or that criminal being arrested and refer to them as “it” and “thing” and how “it should be tortured four hours before someone kills it.” things like that, about various people who did things that were (admittedly) horrific and reprehensible but he would go into graphic detail about what he wanted to do with them Very sadistic, Saw-like tortures before “Mercifully” killing them.

He once casually told me how he wanted to kill all progressives. I gently reminded him that I have liberal leanings and I got a “You’re different” sort of response.

As his behavior got more fanatical and disturbing, the more uncomfortable I became. After the progressives threat I made the mistake of telling someone who was mutually friends with us both that I felt threatened. Needless to say the one I have just described to you called me a liar, insisted he never said anything threatening. And accused me of being “one of them.”

I told him he had been acting increasingly strangely and needed to stop posting the pro-Joker stuff. And it wasn’t just the film The Joker. It was the version from Gotham (TV series) he tried to emulate and praised. A woman celebrity he didn’t like was soon being called “It.” Then some feminist (I didn’t agree with this person) was saying how The Mandalorian didn’t have enough female characters or diversity and should be canceled. It was some stupid opinion piece published by a site like Buzzfeed or Io9 during the first season of Mandalorian.

This guy was very conservative but had a bad habit of seeking out fanatical articles like this to make himself angry. The only time I ever agreed with him on the matter was when he came to my defense for not liking the 2016 Ghostbusters. Someone in my own Gothic Horror Facebook group had decided to call me a self-loathing misogynist and insisted the only reason I didn’t like it is because the characters were women. No, I don’t like slapstick comedy. I didn’t like that they didn’t bother to use real parapsychology or theoretical physics (as the original had done). I didn’t like that the “genius” of the group licked her proton blaster and that was the common promo image for the film. I didn’t like that people who praised the film entirely forgot that there was a diverse team lead by a woman in the 90s. (Extreme Ghostbusters). I didn’t like that they destroyed ghosts instead of trapped them. That violates the law of conservation and most spiritual beliefs as even being possible. It was just a bad movie.

I agreed with him on that one but when this anti-Mandalorian article came out he went too far. He insisted the woman who wrote it should be dragged out into the street and shot. He called her “it” and “thing” and said she didn’t deserve to live . I told him he was going too far, and she couldn’t take the show away, that he was over reacting.

He then blocked me. I thought it was done and over with, then the Pandemic hit.

When the Pandemic happened he unblocked me and in a revisionist history of events insisted he had blocked me because I had “lied” and said he threatened me. No, he had told me he wanted to kill all progressives, knowing that I am one. And that was not why he blocked me. It was because I disagreed about his death threats about the writer of a Mandalorian article. He wanted to fight. He alternated between insulting me and trying to show how good he was to come to me during a world crisis, like he was doing me a favor. I blocked him this time.

That night my Facebook account was disabled. Someone had reported my account as not being a real person, and Facebook wanted photographic proof that I’m real. It was re-enabled as soon as I sent in a photo but as I don’t have a smartphone (I live in a deadzone) and I’m visually impaired it was a little bit of a pain. This was not something that had ever happened to me before. And I had witnessed this Punisher fan report accounts of those he wanted to “punish” before.

And now I find out some of these rioters were wearing Punisher shirts. So yes, I keep my guard up around Punisher fans.

Do I blame the character? No. Not really. If not him they would have found someone else to try to emulate and idolize. Getting rid of the character won’t get rid of this mentality. I never liked the character but I don’t want him banned. I would be happy if less people were obsessed with him. I would be happy if those obsessed with the character didn’t all remind me of the man I described here. I would be happy if fans of the character were more likely to say that they don’t agree with the character’s actions, they just like his story.

There’s nothing wrong in liking a character with problematic behavior. But if you can’t acknowledge that it’s wrong and instead glorify and romanticize the actions of the character, that’s the problem. I love lots of characters who do bad things. I love Count Dracula. I don’t intend to drink blood and sic wolves on people. And I have absolutely no interest in impalement.

I think far too many Punisher fans don’t realize he’s in the wrong, instead want to be like him, and have trouble separating fiction from reality. I do not blame the character. They would have found someone else if not him. But unfortunately, I AM starting to view hardcore / obsessively being a fan of The Punisher as a bit of a red flag considering how many of them behave this way...

#The Punisher #Marvel Comics #MCU #Marvel Cinematic Universe

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mokyn · 5 years

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Sarazanmai Primer

Since I might as well fully admit to myself that I like this show, I thought it might be useful to share some resources for any follower of mine who might be curious about what I'm reblogging now.

While Sarazanmai is purposefully abstract and weird at times, and delights in sexual, crude humour, I worry part of the reason some viewers are confused by it is because it's very Japanese, and thus certain references fly right over our heads. I've gotten the help of other people in the fandom to make the viewing experience a little smoother, so for anyone else here are some links that might prove handy.

Integral Mythology:

Kappa folklore [tl;dr the shirikodama stuff is based on a genuine belief, it's not just weird for weirdness' sake]

Otter folklore [tl;dr they're considered deceitful and tricksters, and have various ties to kappa depending on the region]

Puns and Wordplay:

So much of the writing is based in untranslateable puns both for humour and thematic effect. Subtitles and Funimation's simuldub try their best to convey that, but unfortunately a lot is very obtuse to another audience because English doesn't have exact equivalents.

Puns for episodes 1 to 3

Puns for episodes 1 to 8 [this site seems to update more frequently than the previous link]

Reo and Mabu:

Despite not being the main characters (I think it takes four episodes for them to even say what their names are) the two cop characters were a major part of promo material before the anime starting airing. By the sounds of it, this was due to limited screen time and material having to be cut. I personally don't think these are integral, I inferred on my own from eight episodes that they were once close but something happened to cause a rift between them, but if you're not used to food being a visual marker for social and shared bonds, I think these help solidify that thread running through scenes. Seriously, they mostly talk about food.

keeponly1luv [in-character Twitter account that starts off with every day happenings and snapshots of Asakusa's locales, then slowly introduces something mysterious going on in town]

Reo and Mabu: Together They're Sarazanmai [short manga of mostly fun domestic scenes of the two solving small crimes and mysteries while raising a baby they found. Cute but at this point it raises more questions than it answers to potential links in the anime]

Miscellaneous:

Archive of Sara's TV text crawls [obviously you can read these on subtitles yourself, but not only is this archive useful if you have trouble focusing on multiple things, it also annotates what gets lost in translation]

The Tokyo Skytree is not only a prominent structure on the landscape, but also has parts of its architecture referenced in the show's visuals [ep7 spoilers]. Whether it serves a direct story purpose or is only used for aesthetics has yet to be seen, this theory post still details symbolic elements of its design and may prove useful to keep in mind.

Kappazon.info [this site was a huge boon to me, and has links to more translations and interviews that might interest a fan]

Last but not least:

This show definitely isn't for everyone and that's okay.

Every episode has a post-credits scene that is vital to the story, don't skip them! The ending credits are great anyway, why would you not watch them every time?

#sarazanmai

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maddiviner · 6 years

Photo

Morgan Daimler, a practicing witch for almost three decades, focuses primarily on the Celtic Fairy Faith. They are considered by many to be the foremost expert on the Fair Folk in neopaganism today.

I just finished reading their recent book, Fairies: A Guide to the Celtic Fair Folk about a month ago. If you know much about me, you know that, while very little in the Craft scares me, I’ve always been wary when contemplating the Fair Folk and related concepts.

I suppose you could say that everyone, witch or otherwise, has some odd fear here or there, and for me, it’s the Gentry.

Still, with anxiety comes fascination. I was lucky enough to snag a short interview with Morgan, who answered some of my pressing questions about the Fair Folk, their own beliefs, and their work with the Gentry

Eliza: “Do you think that the Fae remain as they were in ancient times, despite legends about them changing? Or, do you believe they, too, have evolved and changed?”

Morgan: “I think it’s a bit of both to be honest. I think that much like humans and animals are a lot like they were 3000 or 2000 years ago in the sense of physical appearances and abilities and such the Fey are as well. I don't think they've evolved to become something entirely different from what they were in stories and anecdotal accounts from a few hundred years ago either.

If we look at the folklore and the anecdotes we see that they are pretty consistent across time; while its true that the Good People do seem to follow and mimic human society they also stay true to who and what they themselves are.

We only start to see stories of radically different fairies very recently, comparatively speaking, and those are coming from fiction and authors who generally didn't believe in the actual reality of fairies.

On the same hand, yes I do think we see that the fairies do adapt and evolve like any other beings do with time and change. Their clothing changes, their speech and language changes, they modernize with the humans around them albeit at a slightly delayed rate.”

Eliza: “What’s the best bit of advice would you give witches who would like to begin working with the Fae within the context of modern life?”

Morgan: “The single best bit of advice I can give is to really dig into the living cultures that still believe in these beings as real or have a deep cultural folklore related to them.

There's such a pervasive idea around fairies from modern pop culture but if you look past that to what we can still find in places like Ireland, Scotland, and Iceland you can get a much more accurate idea of what exactly you're dealing with.

And knowing what you're dealing with, I think, is the single most important thing.”

Eliza: “You’ve spoken often about some of the downright dangerous misinformation out there about the Fae. What would be the worst piece of recent advice you’ve heard? Why?”

Morgan: “I don't want to give an actual example because it wouldn't be fair to have anyone read this and think I was calling them out, but I think to paraphrase the worst advice I've heard recently was the suggestion for people with little or no experience with these beings to invoke fairies known in folklore to be homicidally dangerous.

I think that entire concept comes down to people who don't believe these types of fairies actually exist as independent beings with power and agency, like the humans are just reading a book or playing a game. The thing is as much as I'm sure people think I overdo the warnings I have seen people get really hurt by some of these things - and I mean like nearly dying, going mad, being physically injured.

So when I talk about the dangerous misinformation it’s usually connected to things like that example, invoking the ones that are known to kill people, or treating them all to lightly, or doing anything that folklore makes clear can have severe consequences.

Obviously Fairy being what it is sometimes any action can bring a blessing that would normally be dangerous or bring a blow that would normally be safe. It has a lot of uncertainty to it. But for people with no practical knowledge or experience to go straight into dealing with the most dangerous beings, that always makes me cringe.”

Eliza: “In recent years, we’ve seen new and modernized legends about the Fae develop, such as the idea of Fae becoming human. What’re your thoughts on otherkins and related concepts?”

Morgan: “I think modern legends built from genuine experiences and lore are vital. There's some really great work being done in some corners by people working on this like Aine Llewellyn's Otherfaith on the more spiritual end or Sam Dow's Elsewhere University on the more fictional.

Otherkin is a very complicated subject and I have mixed views on it. Certainly there is a ton of folklore supporting the idea that the Fey and humans have sometimes interbred; we see that with the Irish aos sidhe, Scottish Selkies, and the Norse Hiddenfolk just to give a few cultural examples.

The idea of people having some kind of non-human or Otherworldly ancestry or connection is something I fully believe is possible. I'm more skeptical though of the idea of a non-human soul in a human body in this world, because I usually don't see what the purpose of that would be or how it would happen and also because so far the lists I've seen for identifying if you have such-and-such a type of soul tend to be based more on common stereotypes of a particular kind of fairy than actual folklore.

Which isn't to say I disbelieve, just that of all the people I've encountered claiming to be non-human souled I've very rarely - like only 2 or 3 times ever - believed it was true.

In a much wider sense there is folklore of both humans being taken into Fairy and becoming fairies as well as fairies taken out of Fairy who were turned into humans (but entirely into humans) so that's definitely a thing.”

Eliza: “What’s your thoughts on commonalities between older legends about the Fae, and modern, science-inspired stories about alien abductions?”

Morgan: “My personal opinion is that modern alien abduction stories are actually how we now interpret fairy abductions. speaking of fairies adapting and evolving I think that as humans have moved into the sci-fi era the fairies have adapted to using that paradigm to give us what we expect with their glamour. So instead of seeing fairies people see aliens.

It’s certainly worth noting that the first alien abduction happened well after literary and cinematic aliens became a cultural trope. So now we have fewer fairy encounters but we have alien abductions in their place.

Given how powerful fairy illusion is it would be simple enough for them to make a human think they are seeing a spaceship and aliens instead of whatever is actually going on, and it’s very clever on their part given how much folklore has taught humans about fighting back against fairies - where aliens seem like a force a captured person can't resist or fight back against.”

Much thanks to Morgan for providing this interview! You can visit their author page on Amazon here, and I highly recommend picking up Fairies: A Guide to the Celtic Fair Folk as introductory material on the matter.

Overall, I found the idea of the Gentry adapting to our own cultural landscape (see: the comments regarding aliens) most fascinating. This has sparked my further curiosity about the Gentry, and I’ll likely do some more research.

I hope you enjoyed this short discussion of the Fair Folk. Yes, I still feel a bit intimidated by the Gentry, but c’mon!

Everyone, even witches, ultimately get spooked sometimes... it’s not that weird to be afraid of fairies, is it?

Is it?

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vampireadamooc · 5 years

Link

As Always: text is provided only in the event of access expiration or post deletions from the hosting site. Whenever possible, always read the article at the link.

Note: I've been debating setting up a web store where I sell Folklore Correct Vampire Hunting Kits, but I'm already busy enough. My plate is full. I don’t need goths and former twilight fans emailing me that I’m an “idiot” for not including this, that or the other thing.

I did put one together over a weekend just to illustrate the differences between Hollywood inspired kits and the folk tales. Like... I can tell the maker of the kit was a fan of Bram Stoker-ish vampires or if they preferred Hammer Horror. And neither fandom would do much to actually “kill” a vampire. PS: no. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Vampire Repellent wont do shit except suck all the money from your bank account.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/silver-bullets-killing-kits-very-13940409

Silver bullets, killing kits and the very weird history of vampires Creepy cases packed full of vampire-killing instruments are selling for tens of thousands of pounds

ByMatt Roper 13:16, 6 FEB 2019

A vampire killing kit might not seem like the most obvious item for your gift wish list but it's the latest must-have possession.

It has been claimed the cases of creepy instruments were once used by real life Dracula hunters.

And they don’t come cheap - ‘authentic’ kits dating back to the 17th century can sell for tens of thousands of pounds.

Most of the antique cases include wooden stakes and a mallet - to strike vampires through the heart - as well as a crucifix, rosary and prayer book, and a pistol with silver bullets.

Other items include garlic powder, holy water and vials containing anti-vampire serums.

But while, with a recent new vampire fever taking hold, the kits are experiencing a modern-day renaissance, doubts have been raised about whether they ever existed at all.

Even the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds recently admitted the vampire killing kit it's had on display since 2012 might not be authentic.

The museum's Keeper of Firearms, Jonathan Ferguson, wrote that after researching vampire slaying “it became clear that kits like our one could not have existed until the era of ‘Hammer’ horror films in the 1950s-70s”.

But he said it still had value as “an invented artefact that reflects our cultural obsession with the vampire.”

Another museum, however, insists their vampire killing kits are 100 per cent genuine.

Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum claims it owns the world’s largest collection of the kits, of which no two are alike.

The kits contain everything the vampire hunter needs

It claims that, while vampires were described in tales and folklore for thousands of years during the 17th century people were so scared of them that they often took extreme precautions.

A graveyard in Poland, for example, was discovered to have people shackled at the neck.

Then, as Bram Stoker’s Dracula swept Victorian England, vampire fears finally made it out of Europe and travellers toured the hills of Transylvania with grave caution.

The museum’s 30 vampire killing kits include stakes, guns and equipment for making silver bullets.

No two kits at Ripley's are the same

There are also vials of liquid including “Professor Blomberg’s New Serum’, a Victorian sulphuric acid stomach tonic called Elixir of Vitriol, and one simply labelled ‘vampirism’.

Ripley’s, which has museums around the world, claims it has managed to authenticate the age of some of the components, including the firearms.

It says: “Were they sold to witlessly terrified travellers in the forests of Transylvania?

"Were they assembled later by mysterious individuals for purposes unknown? Either way, these kits are real.”

Historians agree, however, that for centuries there was a genuine fear of vampires throughout Europe.

'Vampire' skeleton that was speared after death uncovered in Yorkshire burial site

Often, these legends arose from a misunderstanding of how corpses decompose.

People mistook longer-looking teeth and fingernails for bodies turning into monsters, while the dark “purge fluid” that can leak out of a corpse was seen as evidence it had been drinking blood from the living.

Many blamed vampires for outbreaks of diseases like the plague, and the business of killing them, or preventing the dead from feeding on the living, was deadly serious.

Historical accounts emphasised the need for particular methods and tools, such as stakes to destroy the heart - one of the only ways to permanently kill a vampire - and the use of holy water or garlic to ward off the dead.

In a 1979 tract entitled ‘On The Chewing Dead’ a Protestant theologian wrote that people could stop the dead from leaving the grave and eating people by stuffing soil or a stone into the dead person’s mouth.

Without the ability to chew, the tract claimed, the corpse would die of starvation.

In 2006 archaeologists found evidence of this tactic when they unearthed a 16th-century skull in Venice, Italy, that had been buried among plague victims with a brick in its mouth.

Tales of vampires continued to flourish right up to the end of the 19th century, despite a declaration by Pope Benedict XIV that vampires were “fallacious fictions of human fantasy”.

Many of the cases contained cricifixes and firearms

They were also filled with strange vials filled with potions designed to kill a vampire

In 1892, when neighbours of Mercy Brown, a 19-year-old from Rhode Island who had died of tuberculosis, opened up her grave and found blood in her mouth, they took it to be a sign of vampirism.

Believing she was harming her brother, Edwin, who was sick, they burned Mercy’s heart and mixed the ashes into a potion for him to drink - a common anti-vampire tactic.

The potion was meant to heal him but he died a few months later.

By the 20th century belief in vampires subsided, but the monsters were revived in books, films, and more recently, hugely popular TV series.

And it was during the latest period of fascination with the vampire legend that the first anti-vampire kit emerged, in 1986, when one was put up for sale in the US.

The kit contained a percussion pocket pistol with accessories, a combined cross and stake in wood and ivory, and two silver bullets, and was sold as a genuine 19th century artefact.

In the years that followed other kits began to come to light, and values began to climb as the big auction houses got involved, with some fetching tens of thousands of pounds.

While some claimed they were genuine, made to sell to vampire-fearing western travellers to Transylvania, others insisted that vampire killing kits never existed at all.

In 2004, Sotheby's sold a kit attributed to German Ernst Blomberg and Belgium gunmaker Nicholas Plomdeur for nearly £25,000.

Although the auction house cautioned that "neither the existence of the gunmaker Plomdeur nor that of the gunmaker Plomdeur can be confirmed.

"Also open to question is whether these kits were ever employed successfully in the killing of vampires."

Genuine articles once used to stake the hearts of suspected vampires, or expensive novelties still fooling buyers today? One thing is sure, vampires are still dividing opinions and fomenting beliefs even today.

#By Matt Roper #vampire hunting kits #novelty

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elegantshapeshifter · 6 years

Note

Is hag ridding actually a thing or is it something that the inquisitors just made up? Thank you

I’m sorry I’m not English-native, therefore I don’t know if I understood well the term “hag riding”. Do you mean sleep paralysis due to witches?

If yes, do you remember when I wrote about how Witchcraft spread and changed from those who believed in Witchcraft to those who practiced it? I quote from an old article of mine:“So… witches existed only in folk legends and not really?Even supposing that initially that was the case, there is the phenomenon of emulation. That is, somebody could have taken inspiration from the folklore in order to emulate these beliefs in real life.Probably the emulation required several steps, for example it is possible that:1) there was a vast majority of the population who believed in legends about witches;2) there were certain people who let food offerings to these legends’ characters;3) there was a minority of people who dreamt these legends;4) there was an even more restricted minority of people who believed that their dreams about witchcraft meant something and that they were actual witches;5) there was a minority of minority of minority of people who emulated in physical reality the Sabbath they dreamed.”

Now, let’s focus on the points 3 & 4: “there was a minority of people who dreamt these legends” and “there was an even more restricted minority of people who believed that their dreams about witchcraft meant something and that they were actual witches".According to Julian Goodare, the internalization of these dreams happened because they were accompanied by sleep paralysis. According to him, the sleep paralysis and the visions of the Sabbath could be seen in two different ways:- as an attack by witches;- or as the joining of a witches’ procession/as an experience previous to go to the Sabbath.

So in the first case, the person would have thought to be a victim of witches, while in the second case, the person would have thought to be a witch.

I quote from his book “The European Witch-Hunt“:

“Psychological conditions and the ‘nightmare experience’ A few contemporaries tried to explain witchcraft as a delusion caused by witches’ ‘melancholy’ – their term for what they perceived as a medical condition. This is no longer regarded as adequate, but, if we sifted through the evidence from witchcraft records looking for medical or psychological conditions recognised today, what would we find? It is difficult to diagnose such conditions at a distance of hundreds of years, since symptoms were recorded according to contemporary, not modern, categories; but this difficulty presents itself, in some way or other, in most historical work, and is not insuperable in principle. Historians and epidemiologists have thought it worthwhile to diagnose the cause of the fourteenth-century Black Death, for instance; recent DNA-based studies have confirmed the theory that the disease was bubonic plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. Can we diagnose medical or psychological conditions, either in witches themselves, or in their accusers? Medical conditions are those in which there is an observable, physical cause for the symptoms. Psychological conditions are those in which the cause of the symptoms is taken to be located in the brain (where there may or may not be an observable condition). An example would be the distinction between fits caused by epilepsy (a medical condition) and fits caused by conversion disorder(a psychological condition). Here we are mainly looking at what seem to be psychological conditions. To begin with there are hallucinations, which are quite common. Mostly they are aural; about 5 per cent of the population today hear imaginary voices or other sounds. Visual hallucinations, in which people see imaginary objects, also occur. The imagined objects are usually modifications of existing ones; thus it is possible to glimpse some movement and to decide that it was a cat. A few people, however, genuinely ‘see’ things that are not there at all – usually a single object (or, often, a person) superimposed on a real background. The word ‘imaginary’ should not be misunderstood; to people who hear voices, the voices are real, even though they know that nobody else can hear them. Witches reported having sex with the Devil; neighbours reported being assaulted by the witch, often at night. Could there be a medical or psychological condition that might lie behind these strange reports? Unlikely though it may seem, there is indeed such a condition. Sleep paralysis is a disorder experienced by perhaps a quarter of people at some time in their lives. Typically they are just falling asleep or are just waking up. They believe that they are awake, are aware of their surroundings and can look about – but they cannot move or speak, because their bodies are still ‘asleep’. They feel themselves becoming heavier, their hearts race and they have difficulty breathing. They feel anxiety or terror. A large minority of those experiencing sleep paralysis hear strange sounds (such as buzzing or heavy footsteps), see strange visions (such as lights, animals or demons) or feel strange presences assaulting them. The whole experience lasts from a few seconds to several minutes, but can seem much longer. Although the sleep paralysis experience is physically harmless, it can be utterly terrifying to the helpless and bewildered sufferer. Sleep paralysis is not well known, even today, and sufferers make sense of their experiences in culture-specific terms, ‘seeing’ the kinds of intruders that they believe in. Today, some turn to the belief in ‘abduction by aliens’, which is essentially a modern folk belief – and it provides clues to the beliefs of earlier ages. People’s accounts of alien abduction are usually produced with the help of therapists who believe in alien abduction themselves, using techniques like hypnosis or guided imagery to ‘recover’ what the therapist calls ‘repressed memories’. Under the therapist’s guidance, the subject’s vivid but fragmentary experience of sleep paralysis is transformed into a detailed and convincing-looking narrative, complete with recognisable aliens and spaceships. In psychological terms, these are ‘false memories’ which the therapist has unwittingly implanted in the subject. This is fairly easy to do for many people, particularly those who have elaborate fantasies [...]. The nearest equivalent to the therapist for the early modern witchcraft suspect was the interrogator. We tend to think of interrogators as hostile to the suspects, but some interrogators, at least some of the time, behaved in a sympathetic manner towards them, encouraging them to ‘repent’. Witchcraft suspects were often questioned intensely, and leading questions were used; this is likely to have produced similar effects to the therapists who implant false memories. Moreover, sleep paralysis can be brought on by deprivation of sleep, to which witchcraft suspects were sometimes subjected. Early modern folk knew nothing of aliens; what they believed in was the ‘night-mare’, a terrifying experience, sometimes thought of as a female nonhuman entity, that laid on people’s chests at night and tried to crush them. (This should be distinguished from what we usually call a ‘nightmare’ today; physiologically, this is an ordinary anxiety dream.) The early modern ‘nightmare’ did not have to be a distinct being; people often attributed ‘night-mare’ experiences to witches or demons. Neighbours’ testimonies against witches sometimes described the witch as visiting them in their beds, sometimes also as pressing on their chests (a rationalisation of the breathlessness common in sleep paralysis). A nocturnal visitation by three witches is depicted in Illustration 5.2. Some neighbours reported being pressed by a cat; witches were reputed to transform themselves into cats, and cats were known to lie on people in their beds. The belief that witches ‘pressed’ their victims in bed was well known, found not only in the testimony of victims (sleep paralysis sufferers), but also in confessions of witches who allegedly carried out the pressing. Some women sleep paralysis sufferers report experiences resembling sexual assault. This probably contributed to the medieval and early modern belief in the ‘incubus’ and ‘succubus’. The incubus was a male demon that had intercourse with women in their sleep; it was thought to be a particular problem in nunneries. The succubus, a female demon that had intercourse with men [...]. Both incubi and succubi were sometimes regarded as equivalent to the ‘night-mare’. To the extent that incubi were regarded as demons, they may have been alternatives to the idea of assault by a witch, but there was some confusion and flexibility about these experiences. If the sleep paralysis experience was interpreted as demonic possession, this in turn could be attributed to a witch. Sleep paralysis may also have something to tell us about witches’ flight. Although the experience of being pressed is a common symptom of sleep paralysis, a few sufferers instead experience floating, flying or spinning. A yet smaller number have out-of-body experiences, floating above their beds and looking down on their own bodies. Unlike the terrifying intruders, some of these flights are experienced as positive and even blissful. Some of the people who believed that they had travelled with the fairies were probably sufferers from sleep paralysis, though it is unlikely that they all were. The idea that some people joined nocturnal processions with nonhuman beings was widespread. Sleep paralysis seems to have been behind a second popular idea about nocturnal witches (that is, legendary or folkloric witches), related yet distinct. The main idea arose from the visionary experience of people who believed themselves to have flown or travelled out. But some people believed that they had been visited by nocturnal witches, or feared that they might be visited by them. In Hungary, there was a name for such witches: ‘mora witches’. Many victims witnessed an apparition of a mora witch – a person known to them, but (it was believed) appearing to them in a second, physical body. A mora witch could enter a house through a keyhole, or could appear and disappear. One was said to have ‘formed herself at the fire’, while another flew through the window ‘in a night-going manner’. Sometimes the victim was the only person able to see the mora witch. To the extent that the mora witch was a known neighbour, she (and it was always she) was related to the community witch whom we examined in the last chapter. She was also an individual, rather than a member of a group such as a fairy cult. Unlike the community witch, however, the mora witch was not primarily a worker of malefice – at least not of ordinary malefice; if she committed harm it was in abducting the victim to an imagined witches’ sabbat. The mora witch was a regional elaboration of the widespread idea of the nocturnal visit by a witch. Finally, therefore, sleep paralysis could lead people to believe that they had been abducted to a witches’ sabbat. In Kiskunhalas, Hungary, in 1747, Anna Hös reported that her husband woke up terrified, ‘lying there stiff, barely drawing breath’, and then cried out, ‘My Lord Jesus help me! Oh! fiery witches took me to Máramos and they put six hundredweight of salt on me.’ The inability to move, the breathlessness and the visions all mark this as a case of sleep paralysis – but the content of Hös’s husband’s visions was culture-specific. Sleep paralysis, which is not culture-specific, can hardly ‘explain’ the cultural content of witchcraft beliefs, but it provided early modern folk with material with which to articulate and validate those beliefs. The structure of beliefs about witches and envisioned experience is illustrated in Diagram 5.2. This diagram is in two largely separate parts: the trance experience (positive) and the nightmare experience (frightening).Shamanistic visionaries had trance experiences, and should be distinguished from witchcraft victims who had nightmare experiences stemming from sleep paralysis. There are connections between the two, notably in the shared motif of night flight. Some witches’ confessions were based on the nightmare experience (it was not just something for victims of witchcraft), which provides another link between these two modes of experience.”

Source: Julian Goodare’s “The European Witch-Hunt”

Moreover, even without resorting to the interrogators, the sharing of dreams inside the family or with friends could have made dreams or “the subject’s vivid but fragmentary experience of sleep paralysis”, "transformed into a detailed and convincing-looking narrative” as well.

This can be seen as the “internalization of the belief” to be either a witch or the victim of a witch of which I talked about in previous posts.

However, if you wanted to know if really witches did spiritual journeys in order to press upon the stomach of somebody they hated and causing them a sleep paralysis, I don’t think it was a real thing. For 2 reasons: - if you hated somebody you wouldn’t have limited to causing them sleep paralysis;- wasn’t it simpler to do something else?

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yamayuandadu · 4 years

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300 followers special: debunking Arahabaki

Arahabaki is a mythical figure with a relatively large popculture footprint, mostly thanks to Shin Megami Tensei, but little to no source material to go with it. For this reason, especially in english-speaking spheres, many claims rooted in pseudohistory and hoaxes, such as the image above, circulate uninterrupted. Under the cut, I will attempt to debunk their source. If stories about dogu, piss bottles and improbable journeys to Ecuador interest you, you found the right place.

The claims of Arahabaki's antiquity and in particular associating this obscure deity with dogu – specifically the shakoki dogu - all go back to Tsugaru Soto Sangunshi (I will refer to it as TSS in the rest of this article) and other associated writings, so called ”Wada family documents,” all of them written by a certain Kihachiro Wada. It's a series of forgeries created in the 1970s (with additional works produced through the rest of Wada's life – he passed away in 1999), which in addition to presenting a fictional history of the Tohoku region, centered around a fictional local kingdom, also mention Mayan prophecies, Nostradamus, Mu, and various scientific concepts, usually misunderstood by the author. To my knowledge, TSS is only covered in one english language source, which is horrid and basically unusable - The Sacred Science of Ancient Japan: Lost Chronicles of the Age of the Gods by Avery Morrow, which does present the truth - eg. that it's a forgery - but then the author gets caught up in some sort of Evola-influenced spiritual doctrine which makes him claim that perhaps it's an echo of some "spiritual truth" or something along these lines, which is obviously not a sound argument from the perspective of anyone with even just a passing interest in history. Social sciences are still sciences, not religions. TSS claims shakoki dogu represent an “outlawed” god formerly worshiped by people inhabiting Tohoku, whose name was also their endonym. It doesn't delve deeper into the history of Jomon art, and doesn't acknowledge dogu other than shakoki – considering not all dogu found in the Tohoku region (or even further north) belong to this category, it potentially makes it possible Wada was simply familiar with von Daniken’s confabulations and had no other exposure to jomon art; I have not seen this possibility in any japanese debunking articles, though. It's additionally worth noting here that while the exact purpose of dogu remains unknown up to this day, they're neither a taboo (indeed, many towns use peculiar locally excavated dogu as mascots nowadays, like Ravi from Minami Alps), nor particularly rare – estimatesof the number known today vary between 15000 (National Museum of Japanese History estimate) - 18000 (estimate from this article). The majority are of course not shakoki dogu; the difference between various estimates likely comes from different approach to counting figures only known from fragments.

Wada claimed that he merely discovered TSS, rather than wrote it – according to his account, a case of old documents fell from the ceiling while his house was being renovated in 1948. Supposedly, the discovery – so called “Kansei original” - was compiled between 1789 to 1822, and then copied between 1870 and 1910. Wada later claimed he lost the original, but based on gathered evidence it seems obvious it never existed. Various pages known to researchers, purported to come from the original, the Taisho copy, and writing Wada confirmed to be his own, are written in the same style, and with the same mistakes. Additionally, as a visit made in the house by a debunker at the request of Wada's cousin, who appears to be its owner currently, confirmed it's virtually impossible that a large number of documents could have been stored above the ceiling; it has also been called into question if the house existed before 1950. What the visit did reveal was a large number of plastic bottles containing human urine, left undistrubed since the 1990s. A relatively unsophisticated way to make paper appear older than it is requires soaking it in urine, and this rather offputting find has proven that this was Wada's preferred method of making his writing appear older than it is to onlookers, especially these lacking formal experience with antiquities.

Truth to be told, even without the grand urine discovery, TSS was not difficult to discard as a forgery. As I mentioned above, its particular weakness are bizarre references to scientific concepts and discoveries, revealing a low level of historical awareness of the author – for example, references are made to quasars, continental drift theory and Pluto – discoveries not yet made in the suggested eras; to make it more embarrassing, TSS claims it was based on foreign sources which weren't yet published at the listed dates. It also references natural disasters which never happened, and urban legends and folklore which only developed recently, like the claims about Jesus' grave being located in Aomori prefecture, which only date back to the 1930s (Wada's documents claimed it was a story already known in the Kansei period, in the 1790s...). On top of all of this, a number of purported authentic illustrations were simply traced from contemporary sources:

It's worth noting that TSS wasn't the only fraud Wada was involved in, as we can learn from his wikipedia biography he fraudulently claimed to be a former Imperial Palace escort officer before embarking on his adventure with crafting false chronicles soaked in urine. Tragically, TSS found supporters not only among the expected crowd of various wannabe occultists, frauds and naive teenagers, but also among a number of genuine historians, most notably Takehiko Furuta. It would appear that he became interested in it in hopes of finding support for his theories about Japan originally having more than one ruling family, but with time he fully embraced it, and actively advocated the bizarre visions it contained. A particularly outlandish claim of his was insisting that Meiji era educator and political activist Fukuzawa Yukichi quoted TSS in his work (the quote in mention appears to be a paraphrase from american declaration of independence). It's worth noting that while Furuta seemingly was a genuinely accomplished scholar of Shinran doctrine, supporting TSS was far from his only adventure with pseudohistory. He was also a staunch believer in the long discredited claims about links between japanese Jomon culture and the Valvidia culture of Ecuador, claiming that various references to fantastical lands lying between China and Japan or beyond Japan prove that the Japanese reached America in ancient times (you can torment yourself with one of such articles here). This theory was briefly advocated by a number of American scholars before him, but obviously has no support today. It's nothing but a new take on XVIIIth century French claims about present day British Columbia being the Fusang described in some Chinese texts. Sometimes strange lands and creatures at the edge of the map are nothing more but fantasy. Furuta's particularly shameful contribution to TSS discourse was declaring that undermining its authenticity is rooted in historical prejudice against the inhabitants of Tohoku and Hokkaido. Personally I'm under the impression that discarding an entire region's real, very complex history in favor of fanciful hoaxes is much more likely to be rooted in such prejudice. The claim Arahabaki was an Ainu kamuy, common online, appears to come from a similar place – I will not examine it here, but I find attempts to shield forgeries from criticism by attaching them to poorly documented and historically suppressed beliefs of historically persecuted groups to be even more disgusting than regular fraud of this sort. What Arahabaki actually is? This is difficult for me to tell for sure, but certainly nothing out of ordinary - not a dogu, and not the main figure of some lost fabulous country. There is a number of mundane temples enshrining Arahabaki, for example here. This article also mentions a number of mundane locations enshrining Arahabaki today; curiously, many of them are located outside Tohoku. A number of theories exist, linking Arahabaki to the usual suspects: religious beliefs of the Emishi people, who originally inhabited Tohoku, and may or may not be one and the same as ancestors of present day Ainu; snake worship; ironworking traditions; marebito beliefs; gods enshrined in freshly established fortresses... Whatever the truth is, it will inevitably turn out to be more interesting than hoaxes, as study of history generally proves.

#arahabaki #dogu #smt #japanese history #pseudohistory

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tigy-the-gaymer · 4 years

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Some Anti-Theist Religious Bits & Pieces: Round Thirteen

Of those Big Questions vital to philosophical ideas that encompass life, the universe and everything, the domains of religious philosophy and religions and the idea of divinities keep on captivating. Assessments multiply in books, articles, recordings, discussions in bars and bars, and in actuality anyplace and wherever at least two people are in nearness. There's the genius side; there's the counter side. There aren't an excess of fence-sitters. I'm still in the counter camp as the accompanying odds and ends outline.

Concerning

*You needn't bother with a divine being to have significance and reason in your life.

*There is one quality that the multi-a huge number of varying strict conviction frameworks/religious philosophies have displayed and that is the intensity of the human creative mind to strikingly proceed to envision fanciful ideas never envisioned. The world would be a less beautiful and fascinating spot without our different folklores.

*I think there ought to be required strict and Biblical instruction in schools since that ought to guarantee a constant flow of nonbelievers growing up and entering the network!

*Religions frequently do great to veil the shrewd they do, yet would now be able to do without risk of punishment.

*The Catholic Church: AIDS is terrible yet the utilization of condoms is more terrible since God doesn't favor of 'conception prevention' in any way, shape or form Engagement Rings Perth. It is obviously educated in Africa by Catholics that utilizing condoms makes "Infant Jesus cry". Abnormal.

*Then too we had the Catholic Church's Index of Prohibited Books. It wasn't only the Nazis that consumed books. Presently you must be extremely shaky and uncertain of your philosophy and how to protect it in the event that you need to take cover behind a brought down drape that outcomes by the controlling of disparate conclusions. It's simply one more sign of Christianity's eventual demise.

*There's no more proof for casual and complicated strict conviction (like being profound without being an individual from any proper strict faction/association/church) than officially sorted out religion. It's all only a type of "charm".

*When it comes to religion, "fall back on toleration when in doubt" True Believers are particularly in the minority. (By means of Greta Christina).

*Any religion is only a working speculation about how life, the Universe and everything, except particularly the world, works. All things considered, that religion is dependent upon investigation and counter and being tested and rectified as would some other working theory from some other effective region or of topic of worry to people, from the sciences through to political frameworks.

*We don't will in general go out to shop for the brand of religion we need among the entirety of the extraordinary and broadly contrasting brands of religion on offer and afterward picking the most reasonable the manner in which we accomplish for the multi brands of parcels of rolls on offer at the grocery store or for a particular brand or design name of dress at the women style shop and apparel division. Rather we continue eating/wearing a similar brand over and over and again in light of the fact that that was only the manner in which we were raised. In like manner, we will in general keep the religion that was forced on us when we were kids. This is to a limited extent because of custom (in the event that it was adequate for Mum and Dad its sufficient for me) just as family/social weight. Obviously in certain social orders the weight verges on real physical dangers and disciplines on the off chance that you stray from the acknowledged overlap.

*Thanks to Christianity and its all-adoring, all-simply, all-benevolent God, more than 50,000 blameless individuals were tormented and executed - they were classified "witches" however were not any more genuine witches than the individuals who turned the thumb-screws, fixed the rack, and light the blazes encompassing the stake. Incidentally, this training is as yet going on in numerous remote regions in immature nations. God (and His hirelings here on earth) should balance their heads in disgrace for Exodus 22: 18 "Thou will not endure a witch to live".

As to versus Science

*According to Leviticus 11: 6 and Deuteronomy 14: 7, rabbits (for example - hares) cheweth the cud. This obviously is zoological hogwash. Chalk up one more Biblical uh oh.

*The general pattern over all of written history is that normal clarifications have displaced, typically surpassed in informative force, powerful (for example - strict) clarifications. I'd wager that is a pattern that will fight the good fight.

As to and Belief

*Saying that you simply know something (without proof to back up your insight) is simply not a pathway to truth.

*If you state your confidence bests proof then you are absolutely impervious to both self-amendment and impervious to contradict.

*Religious conviction is confidence in the mysterious. There's not a single verification in sight in the strict pudding. Any evidence to be discovered comes after you've kicked-the-basin and by then it's short of what was needed to tell anybody.

*The thought of choosing what's actual dependent on what you need to be genuine is ludicrous in the extraordinary. The truth is the thing that the truth is and your convictions to the opposite are immaterial. So any conviction framework that urges individuals to disregard the truth is a terrible conviction framework and that covers Christianity directly down through and including New Age "Charm".

*The prime instructing of monotheistic strict confidence in an imperceptible enchantment man in the sky is a conspicuous model known to software engineers of GIGO - Garbage In; Garbage Out.

*Christian: You need to regard my convictions.

Nonbeliever: No! I may regard you similar to a legitimate and amiable individual yet that doesn't mean I need to regard what you put stock in.

*You reserve a privilege to your private strict convictions until such time as you go too far and your strict convictions enter the open field and begin to hurt others.

*It's misleading in the outrageous for you to basin the strict convictions of others when those convictions don't adjust to your convictions and afterward anticipate that your strict convictions should get a free pass.

As to and Miracles

*For the Catholic Church to announce some occasion as a real wonder (for example Fatima, October 1917), well that is much the same as a genuine devotee to Bigfoot or the Yeti pronouncing that a photo of a disintegrated 'primate' impression in the snow is outright verification of same. Genuine adherents will clearly embrace occasions that reflect proof for their actual conviction.

With respect to

*The thought that strict confidence consequently makes you a decent and good individual is ridiculous in the extraordinary. Jails in America, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, and so on are brimming with Christians. Penitentiaries in Muslin nations are brimming with detainees of the Islamic confidence. And afterward as well, shouldn't something be said about those individuals of the material and the neckline - like Catholic (and other) ministers and other church who utilize their places of power to 1) intellectually misuse little kids with frightening dangers of interminable discipline in Hell and 2) who genuinely misuse kids in their consideration, particularly captivating in sexual maltreatment. What's more, that is simply starting to expose the disasters submitted by those proclaiming strict confidence.

With respect to End Times

*Faith is a container! Proof? There have been a large number of exact prophetic estimates made by the devoted for the End Times; End of Days; the Second Coming; the Rapture; Armageddon; the Apocalypse, and so forth. There have been multi-a great many loyal devotees who have accepted those prophets. Every single such prescience have fizzled. None have ever happened. Score: reality of extremely genuine reality 1; confidence 0.

*We're despite everything pausing!

*Sorry Michele Bachmann and all related "End Times" fan, yet one more day has traveled every which way but then once more, God's a flake-out. Also, Jesus, of Second Coming distinction, gives off an impression of being somewhat late too. Did they neglect to set the morning timers? Did they miss the transport? Possibly their Holy Chariot had a level! Michele Bachmann and organization may accept that the end is near (and has been for very some extensive time) and the Rapture is impending (and has been for very some significant time also), yet I believe it's really ok for you to plan and pay for your next occasion and develop that savings for your long a long time in retirement.

With respect to Soul/Afterlife

*This may come as an amazement to numerous yet there was no confidence in an existence in the wake of death in antiquated Israeli Jewish people group. The main genuine reference to an existence in the wake of death in the Old Testament is at Daniel 12: 2. That is it. There are no different hits "forever endless" or "interminable life"; "life never-ending" or "never-ending life"; or "existence in the wake of death" or "eternal life" or even "restoration". So there's no area given for a life following death in the Old Testament on the grounds that with the one special case there is no understanding of an existence in the wake of death in the Old Testament and Daniel 12: 2 discussed no the hereafter area. Well that is truly amazing given the noticeable quality eternity gets in the New Testament. Maybe life following death was only an after-thought on God's part as in "hmm, it is extraordinary to have some consistent gracefully of new faces and friends to converse with me here upstairs on my eminent seat".

*As long as religions can dangle the hereafter carrot before the incredible unwashed (and furthermore taking into account the not very good washed), you'll never dispose of the organization (particularly when it utilizes countless individuals and produces billions in salary).

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