Ulua is Istarelle

I've been pondering Clark Ashton Smith's "Istarelle" (1932ish), what it might have looked like if he'd ever finished it. Its outline involved temptation and gaslighting, against unprepared pious Frenchmen. I was envisioning the hellscape in CL Moore's "The Black God's Kiss" (October 1934). But, much as I've suggested that Smith was a "prophet" in... prior posts, no longer active; I doubt Smith had any premonition of what Moore would write in 1934. Nor am I aware of Smith-Moore correspondence to this effect.

Now that I've had cause to reread Smith's later works, I've run (back) across "The Witchcraft of Ulua" (1933). This also involves a sorceress, gaslighting some pious ascetic. Smith set this thing in Zothique, not Averoigne. As a result, it ends up necrotic and apocalyptic. But "Ulua"'s core remains Catholic and erotic.

Smith had a tendency, in his later fiction, to set stories in Zothique that he'd designed for his other settings. He'd done just that for "Euvoran". Zothique, in the middle 1930s, sold. And Smith needed the cash.

I'll posit here that, where Smith burgled his own "Istarelle" for several spinoff stories in Averoigne; the heart of that tale ended up in "Ulua".

BACKDATING 12/6. Just to keep this closer to the other Zothique posts.

Upload #182: authoritah

In October 2011, I was looking into a theory about the first Amirs Of The Believers, that they might have called themselves "God's Sultans" rather than caliphs. The theory was to stand as a tripod upon three prongs: the "shultané" term used by Ishoyahb III; ahâdith about "God's sultan on Earth" traceable to the Companions; and Ibn Sa'd (v.3)'s hadith about 'Umar referring to himself.

The thing fell apart because I couldn't back up Ibn Sa'd and I hadn't a handle on Ishoyahb III's full oeuvre. I dropped it 29 October 2011.

Thanks to Bcheiry, I can now sketch out Ishoyahb's developing thought (or rhetoric anyway) about the Arab shultané. It has the side effect of bolstering Bcheiry in outline. Also: although most of the sultanic ahâdith remain distant to me, I think at least one of them can be associated with sectarian debates in 180 / 800ish Basra.

[INTERPOLATION 12/1 - yes, this 150 year gap means I was barking up an extremely wrong tree 2011. I'm just glad I didn't upload that particular bit of wrong at the time. Anyway. Instead of one wrong essay in 2011, now in 2019 you may read two essays, neither of which are wrong!]

So here you go, "God’s Sultanate over the Upper Tigris" and "Abû Bilâl the Heckler".

Madrassa.

Resolutions

Last Saturday Bret Weinstein asked a question. He asked this question in good faith, because that is how Weinstein asks questions, but people who don't know Weinstein attacked him.

Some of history’s darkest chapters involved brutal coercion of people because they didn’t accept that “Jesus is the son of God”. Assuming Christians have outgrown that inclination, they’d be wise to quit broadcasting this exclusionary claim. Seems obvious. What am I missing?

One such attacker was NN Taleb: who is a jerk, whom I don't follow.

Another jerk, whom I do follow, is Theodore Beale. This one issued a series of responses in a short post. To whit: that what Weinstein is missing is, flatly, that Jesus is the Son of God. That "Judaeo-Christianity" is a lie (this is a strawman which knockdown, anyway, Weinstein himself might accept). That the whole "Intellectual Dark Web" of liberal free-thought intellectuals is, also, a lie.

Nobody brought this up in that "Vox Populi" blog's commentary yet, and they won't, because Beale is a jealous Deus who brooketh no Vox but his own. But for what it is worth, Weinstein has returned to his original post and explained things.

I would love to own the assurance that Jesus is, in fact, the hypostatic Word Of Our Lord. But I don't have this assurance, so I daren't argue for it here. Except to work around the edges: that Neolithic and post-Neolithic peoples share a dying-and-resurrected god as their central myth. That as a civilisation we might even need this myth, as Rene Girard has argued (and as his cultists in Michigan State keep publishing). I am further approaching the notion that Jesus, crucified under Pilate, is the most-viable such candidate. But I've never been impressed with bald statements that assume the proposition we're aiming to agree upon.

Weinstein also brings up, to his credit, not the Jewish experience with Christianity, but the Bolivian experience. This isn't even the "indigenous" experience. The Mesoamericans especially around Mexico City had a more nuanced experience with the Church; the Church has a case that they freed the people both from the tyranny of the Aztecs and from that of the Spaniards. And by now most non-Maya Mesoamericans are mixed-race anyway. But there are some First Nations whose interface with the Church was more brutal. And then there's the Japanese experience which was just to ban it (which is it, Teddy? is the Gospel just for Native Americans or is it for Asians too?).

This is, I think, why the Right needs to listen to honest liberals.

And the way to listen is not to blurt out debatable axioms of our own, nor to state comments irrelevant to the original post, nor to insult the liberals.

An early reaction to An Early Christian Reaction to Islam

In the publisher's expo, I saw that Iskandar Bcheiry has this very month released his PhD thesis as An Early Christian Reaction to Islam. You can read his overview of his predecessors likewise at the ATLA blog.

That he released it via Gorgias is annoying because they jack their prices... a lot. Gorgias has also taken it upon itself to re-release Hoyland's classic Seeing Islam which, unfortunately, is looking more and more dated in its 1998 form, thanks to fine studies like Bcheiry's.

Bcheiry - rather, his greedy and lazy editors at Gorgias - let through a few solecisms like "Heracles" for that Napoleonic self-appointed "consul", turned emperor, Heraclius the Younger (pp. 49, 117). Bcheiry himself knows better (p. 2 &c, and the index). The dḥlaw [d]alaha occurrences in p. 111 need their diacritical dots, especially given the dot under Ḥidyâb p. 73. I also noted some infelicitous redundancies in the prose here and there. Slips of the pen happen and that is why we have editors. If Bcheiry wishes I can introduce him to a fine editor over at Pickmans Press.

What a reader would have appreciated most would have been an epistle index. Bcheiry reproduces much of the original East Syriac in what looks like Serté (I claim no great knowledge of the many Aramaic scripts save perhaps the "Hebrew"). [UPDATE 2/1/22: Yeah, even in 2019 I'd smelled a rat. Mingana and Furman, using Oriental scripts, wore it better.] Bcheiry also lists Ishūʿyahb's mid-period letters, AD 637-50, explicitly at the start of ch. 3 over pp. 79-80; and some letters as Catholicos to his breakaway Farsi Metropolitan 650-2, pp. 75-6. If he so organises the man's output as Catholicos after 652, I don't see them here.

INTERJECT 2/6/22: Bcheiry's sequence of the late-630 CE letters is plausible but impressionistic and unargued.

Since Bcheiry scrunches the sequence of letters after AD 650 all to 650-2, the reader has no handle on what events might fall within 'Uthman's last (controversial) years nor on the Furqa following it AD 657 on. Bcheiry's last words pp. 151-66 concern the "impostor" of epistle 14C, implying that's Ishūʿyahb's last word as well (although another part of 14C appears p. 132, and he assigns 14C to 650 in p. 75). This correlates the "impostor" to Satan (no less). Bcheiry has not read my "Heretic of Rewardashir" which I first posted December 2010, currently in The Arabs and Their Qur'an, pp. 3-8. This argues that the heretic is al-Khirrît of the Banû Nâjiya, placing those events to AD 659ish.

But here let's not talk as a competitor; let's talk as an editor. The bulk of pp. 151-66 handles that letter 14C's affinities with contemporary Nestorian Syriac literature. The impression given - in this book's present structure - is that 14C is the capstone of the overall book's argument. But the overall text in this book, certainly the book's best text, present a temporal summary of these letters. In that context pp. 151-66 is many more pages than one should expect from an inline discussion of a not-very-long pericope of a single letter; it is also misplaced given Bcheiry's own 650 AD date. Inasmuch as 14C switches to outside parallels, it breaks the flow of the thesis as a whole.

I can imagine Ovidiu Ioan arguing the same for this book's take on "7C" pp. 106-16, that this is a digression.

I suggest to Gorgias, then, that this book get a thorough Second Edition. The edition would include that index of epistles. It would assign the bulk of at least pp. 151-66 to an appendix.

Rocks cause ripples

From Ineffable Island: Terri Cook and Kea Giles say, Extra-Terrestrial Impacts May Have Triggered "Bursts" of Plate Tectonics. They're talking the moderate impacts of Middle Archaean.

This goes to my theory that the Chicxulub hit might have "rattled the innards" and allowed swifter tectonics 65-55 mya. Specifically: that it may have softened the asthenosphere. I do notice that the Siberian and Deccan "traps" seem associated with mass-extinctions and with asteroid-sized impacts.

UPDATE 5/27/2020: Backsies on the Deccan.

The Feet of Sidaiva

On FanFiction.net, I felt like I owed "The Cult of the Singing Flame"'s readers and fans a new story, since "Cult" has got edited and published in a higher state.

"The Feet of Sidaiva". Here is a Cinderella story as they tell it in The Last Continent.

This is a Posthumous Collaboration with Clark Ashton Smith. It fleshes out his own synopsis, bringing in how he was developing its protagonists and settings over 1933. I lifted descriptions of Ummaos' palace from "The Dark Eidolon"; and for Miraab's palace, from "The Death of Ilalotha" mainly. Lunalia's shoes are onyx to match the flagstones which, later, Namirrha will use for his anti-palace. Colour is as important to "Sidaiva" as it was to "Cult" but here I drew upon a larger palate.

I watched some Uyghur dance to describe the music to which Sidaiva would dance.

This is Lunalia's story. Still: I kept narrative-distance from the black mass (seen from the rampart), and from the wedding night (related second-hand). The story is about the Envy Of Lunalia (with a subtext of Famorgh's folly). I didn't care about her character-arc as such an arc existed for Namirrha - or for Onfrei, in mine own "Cult". So I related "Sidaiva" from the third person, affecting the tone of a bazaar rumour-monger. This at least kept the story to 3200ish words.

For dramatic effect, I wanted Thasaidonism not to be followed even in Tasuun. I had written a paragraph about this archdevil's eidolon, buried and found and buried again; but I decided to drop it as unnecessary. Instead I presented an emissary from Maat as Eve's tempter, if you will. Given her presence - which I do explain! - I decided to dismiss Uccastrog by name from the premises. Sotar and Yoros are here but very much extras.

IQSA 2019

I am back from San Diego, IQSA 2019. The events weren't as enlightening as the events in Atlanta 2015 nor as groundbreaking as those here in Denver 2018. It went more like San Antonio in 2016 or, so I gather because I skipped it, Boston 2017.

A serious worry this year - and why I usually go by car - was the weather. I was warned in advance that the Denver aeroport was likely to be impassable on this day. Indeed, as a result, the flight previous got #canceled and my midday flight got delayed. Fortunately not by as much as I missed the bus... barely.

This year I passed the sillier sessions writing a silly story, set in Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique. Here's a hint: during the conference, those nice black shoes I'd bought for $150 or so in 2000ish, finally, gave out. Tisaina's curse. . .

I didn't trouble myself writing the summaries of events this time. Also, the AAR schedule neglected to include most IQSA events and, as a result, I plain missed the first two-and-half talks (again, I only caught half of Reynolds'). Further, I skipped the session on "the European Quran" - here, just because that's not my field. I was told that Hythem Sidky had a standout on stylometry which I really needed to attend; and I'm sure the talks on the "European Qur'an" were fine. So I'll just summarise the best of what I did hear.

Marijn van Putten sketched out a qiraat tradition prevalent in many early Quran MSS but not incorporated in Ibn Mujahid's canon. Emran el Badawi proposed that sura 97 might hark back to the pagan traditions of Inanna and Persephone entering the Sheol and creating seasons here on Earth. Shari Lowin spoke about the if-seas-were-ink motif across Judaism.

Only one talk, this time, I would rate as Academia Nuts. That would be Ghazala Anwar's talk on Quranic gender-fluidity. The crowd weren't buying that either.

Lunalia's palimpsests

Clark Ashton Smith proposed the following for a story, "The Feet of Sidaiva": Sidaiva, court-dancer of Ummaus, famed throughout Zothique for the grace of her dancing and the beauty of her feet, incurs the jealousy of Princess Lunalia, daughter of King Phantur of Zylac. I propose that Clark Ashton Smith dropped hints toward its overall plot elsewhere.

The synopsis itself is early: we can tell that, from the orthography. The region "Zylac" by that spelling is elsewhere mooted in the synopsis "The Crabs of Iribos". That story, without "Zylac", would be released 1948 as "The Master of the Crabs". The baseline begins at a sea-port, Mirouane; but although in the "Iribos" synopsis Mirouane resides in Zylac, the published "Master" story does not tell the name of the land.

I see three stages in "Crabs"' evolution: first, Smith mooted it as a synopsis; then, he sketched its outline; last, he submitted the draught to a publisher. "Sidaiva" was mooted but not, to my knowledge, outlined.

According to Nightshade 5.332-3 "The Crabs" was mooted before "Colossus" in early 1932 but then absent place-names. I would add, by November 1932 Ashton Smith had settled on spelling Xylac for the protagonist's home in "The Charnel God" (4.311; the following months, Ummaos too is floated in "The Dark Eidolon"). So "Sidaiva" was mooted at the same time "Crabs" was sketched in outline: most likely 1932, and probably that summer.

In the stories published in 1933, we meet Lunalia twice. She is the consort of another king: Famorgh, whose seat is in Miraab of Tasuun. She plays a somewhat-active if offstage rôle as a sorceress born in Xylac, with no particular love of her new lord, in "Weaver In The Vaults" (4.316-17, March 1933). Then she is noted as the princess's mother in "Witchcraft of Ulua" (5.304, August 1933).

As for Famorgh, we have the fragment Mandor's Enemy. Famorgh is here 59th king in Tasuun - rather, he was. He left his kingdom to his son Mandor. Lunalia goes un-noted in this one. This story looks like it was headed to explain how Tasuun, with a presumably well-stocked necropolis, finally fell; Smith assumed its fall for "Eidolon" which (I expect) he was writing around the same time.

I find in "Weaver" that Lunalia and Famorgh both were absent from the Black Book synopsis, and entered the story only in March. I also find that in the published version two arguably-redundant plot choices: the Vaults are not in the necropolis of the present capital; and it is the queen who ultimately has ordered the mission.

"Ulua" is a mirror-image in this: there Lunalia does nothing. Famorgh is present as king but Lunalia exists only to be described as Ulua's mother. She may as well be dead as far as the story goes. UPDATE 12/6 - I think "Ulua" itself is "Tower of Istarelle" repurposed from Averoigne to Zothique.

Lunalia's phantom appearances in these two tales represent, I venture, palimpsests. Smith's first notion for "Weaver" was perhaps that the king wanted the remains of his ancestors moved to his present capital as relics. Then Smith set the story in Famorgh's and Mandor's Tasuun where, as Smith developed his characters, Lunalia would end up. This distorted the events. There wasn't any real damage done to "Weaver" as a story. In "Ulua", though, we readers really should like to know what Lunalia is up to or, if nothing, why not.

There are some stories Smith didn't particularly want to tell. "The Tower of Istarelle" ended up a mine for tropes and nothing more. From that store of ideas, we don't ever meet Istarelle again; as we end up meeting Lunalia - twice, and unnecessarily. In Zothique herself "Mandor's Enemy" was more than abandoned, it was overthrown: "Ulua" makes it impossible. And the less said of "Oracle of Sadoqua" the better.

I think that Smith wanted to tell Lunalia's story. In it, he hoped to tell of how she travelled from Xylac to become queen elsewhere. Smith by 1933 had settled on Tasuun for her new seat and Famorgh for her new king.

Smith just hadn't got around to the outline itself - unless it is hiding in his 1933 papers. Remember it took him until 1947 to get around to "Crabs".

The Assumption of Moses

I've mentioned before a few times that I think the Torah has undergone a few layers of redaction, during the post-Exilic period. Here's another spot I find suspicious: the burial of Moses.

The burial of Moses is famously Problematic, in its present place, even for Jews; it breaks the dogma that the Torah was Moses' book. But the (early) Jews kept copying it anyway with this segment. Further: it reads like an apologetic. God buries Moses, and won't reveal where.

The usual secular critique is that the Torah was composed long after Moses' death; such go on that the Jews (and Samaritans) didn't want the people venerating a prophet's grave or, worse, doing necromancy over it à la Saul with Samuel. Problem with that is that the Jews and Samaritans own all manner of other grave-sites throughout their Holy Land. Why single Moses out?

To that, I'd bring in another text: the Assumption of Moses. We don't actually own this book anymore. But Saint Jude had heard a part of it, and Clement and Didymus both of Alexandria were able to identify this part as from the Assumption. They seem to be right on account that in Jude's summary, the question is exactly about Moses' body - implicitly dead.

Elsewhere - so the Evidence Unseen blog is telling us - Moses may appear to visionaries in the company of Elijah. The Elijah cycle is very old, likely older than Torah in origin; in it, Elijah is never buried at all. This one is taken bodily into Heaven - "assumed", is the word. The Assumption likely had it that Moses enjoyed the same destiny. Jude tells us that Moses' dead body was assumed where Elijah was assumed alive.

I sense a disagreement in early Judaism over whether Moses was buried, at all. Moses comes back to Earth to deliver apocalypses (or so claimed the authors of these apocalypses). To shut down these new visions, the Torah got amended with an account of Moses' death. This had the side-effect of crippling the Torah as a book by Moses, but this could (and did) get explained away.

The Assumption was a riposte to that. It saved Moses for the apocalyptic visionaries. Among these visionary accounts is, of course, the Christly Transfiguration and now this event features in the Gospels.

If we still had the full text of the Assumption of Moses, we could tell if it is an early Christian document like the Ascension of Isaiah. My thought so far is that it is Jewish. Intrinsically this dogma exists to exalt Moses to be (at least) equal to Elijah and, thereby, the Torah to the Prophets. It promoted that version of Torah which includes Moses' death, at that. It doesn't lead up to the Christians' Transfiguration so much as to ANY Jewish apocalyptic text involving a Moses apparition.

Indic before India

The Saker's got another comment about The Borderland. In it, he relates that Ukrainians sometimes claim that Sanskrit was born there - "Proto-Sanskrit" anyway, whatever that means. I'd float an alternate location for the trail of what would, in the trans-Indus Iron Age, be defined as Sanskrit (and the Prakrits).

I understand that what Russian Slavs call "Ukraine" was the Yamnaya heartland: where arose the common ancestor to Indic (incl. Sanskrit... and old Mitannian), Iranian, the three Baltic language-families (incl. Slavic), Greek, aaaaand Armenian. Even Balts like Marija Gimbutas - who further hated the Yamnaya / Kurgan invasions as 'androcratic' - have argued for an Aryan invasion from Ukraine. It's recently known through the R1a Y chromosome as well.

Maybe proto-Indo/Iranic was spoken in Ukraine. The Iranic Scythian languages certainly were spoken there. But we're on the trail of Sanskrit, of "Indic".

The first recorded "Indic" words are Mitanni. We first read these words as jargon, in the Bronze Age after they conquered Hurri lands which were literate, so could transcribe the cant of their non-Hurri conquerors.

We never read an "Indic" (or Iranic) word in the Bronze Age literatures west of Mitanni: nothing in Palaic, Luwic, or Mycenaean, or Hattic, or the big orangutan in the region: Knesian. To the north, once we get a record in Late Antiquity, we see many an Iranic loanword; never an "Indic" one. And if a Semite or an Egyptian ever uttered an "Indic" word, he was quoting a Mitannian.

Proto-Indic, I conclude, differentiated itself from Iranian somewhere around modern Tehran. (Calling it "Indic" is, thereby, a misnomer.) Thence it moved west and east; to be supplanted in its own heartland by (related) Iranian.

The great H

The H in the northern sky was sacred to Anatolians. Very early on.

This is Hercules in our star-charts, which come from the Greeks - here, I think Dorians, originally. In classical Greek the name "Hēraklês" happens to begin with an ἦτα; in Latin, "Hercules" with an H. They present the same shape to our eyes. The Latin H had come from Etruscan and the "blue" / "red" Greek alphabets, which had preserved the Canaani written Ḥēt - as 𐌇.

Note that if you're drawing shapes in the sky, the lines aren't what matter; only the vertices matter. Canaan had taken that letter from a Sinaitic abbreviation of the Egyptian courtyard pictogram; they did not see it as sacred. That took an Aegean approach.

Even such Greeks (like Homer) who didn't think Hēraklês worth the worship, and/or were catering (like Aratos) to illiterate poetry-auditors who couldn't read 𐌇, agreed that this shape in the sky represented some link between man and the gods. I am here directed to Gavin White, Babylonian Star-lore (Solaria, 2008), 199f. - on the Sumerogram MUL.DINGIR.GUB.BA.MESH, Babylonian "standing gods" who crush the Chaos-Serpent at their feet (later associated with Marduk and Tiamat).

I don't know how scholars regard Solaria as a press, but White's thesis has - as of last winter - some added support. Manu Seyfzadeh and Robert Schoch proposed "World’s First Known Written Word at Göbekli Tepe on T-Shaped Pillar 18 Means God" (pdf; h/t HBDChick). The Ḥēt sign in the sky, right after Younger Dryas, aligned closer to the North Pole. Back then the H was the Pole Constellation and nobody looked twice at modern "Polaris". The Anatolian (then) hunter-gatherers associated the Ḥēt sign with a gate to heaven. Then maybe with the bull's horns, presumably once they became farmers, with the harness of cattle for milling grain on hilltop.

This would, then, be the first abstract pictogram. As opposed to shapes in utilitarian pottery and drawings of some observed bison (or graffiti of penis). The pictogram means "god".

It doesn't tell us what language they spoke in Anatolia, because pictographic, like Cycladic and Susa III and Scorpion-King. It does imply that the culture had a shared language.

Scientody versus academia

Here - h/t hbdchick - is a powerpoint of the incentives involved in "science" and professional academia.

For my part I agree with the dissidents that "science" has been so polluted - mostly by academia - that a new word for "practice of the Popperian method" (or even Bayes') is required. "Scientody" it is.

I like to think I am a "good scientist" but I do have some academic tendencies. That's why I self-publish for the most part.

Be skeptical of your results v. "Sell" your results - I do sell my results. And then I sometimes have to go back on them, which is why Throne of Glass was such a moving target 2015-16: the closest it's got to a review was Dr Fred Donner 2017, in a footnote, complaining about it changing so much up to then. On the other hand: nobody else, not even Donner, gave me that feedback that its last chapter was crap and had to be shorn of, what, nine pages. tl;dr: I do practice self-skepticism, even if it's belated.

Interpret conclusions carefully v. Highlight/exaggerate importance - My problem is the Interesting If True meme. I think I give my own work all the respect its findings ask for. The issue is, what if I got it wrong? I've been insufficiently careful in the past. No surprise to my readers.

Publish negative results v. Publish "strategically" - This comes with a comic on a large stack of The Daily Journal of Negative Results next to small stacks of Nature and Science. I still don't know what it means unless we're saying, "academics don't like to debunk a bunk article". I'm clearly on the pro-scientody side here.

Ignore social prestige v. Use impact factors to make writing decisions - Yeah, I suppose my focus on the early Umayyad-era literature has been more controversial than if I had kept myself to the later years and the 'Abbasids.

Challenge authority v. Cite authority. Make friends - I stink at making friends anyway. I'm interested only in authorities who get it right. Or in those (I'll even name one: Ruqayya Khan) who get it most amusingly wrong.

Replicate. Replicate. v. Replicate... if you must - In the Islamic work, I'm always going back on the document cross-connections. The way "replicate" works here is: if I think 28 < 7, I'm off to see if, say, 27 < 26, 27 < 25; and then 25-26 < 7. They all have to line up. If they do: replication has happened.

As scientody, I'd say my work on Islam is classed as "headstrong". Which is why I rarely dare to publish on an outside platform.

Another review of a poor paint-job

Laurent Guyénot has a long post over at Unz - home of overly long posts - to discuss Holocaust revisionism. I'm restricting myself here to extracting what, there, is said about the German government's part in events relating to 1930s German Jewry. Consider it another review.

Spoiler: the Austrian painter doesn't come off well.

First - for background - Germany perceived three sorts of Jew: the Diaspora Jew abroad, mainly eastern (like me); the German shopkeeper at home; and the Zionist, with his heart in Jerusalem. Hitler was anti-Zionist from the start, from Mein Kampf. That book didn't approve any other sort of Jew, either. When the German elites saw fit to elevate this man to Chancellor, on 24 March 1933 Judea Declared War On Germany.

Hitler's response was to proclaim to the world that he was holding Germany's Jewish population hostage : Jewry must recognize that a Jewish war against Germany will lead to sharp measures against Jewry in Germany. Bad things happen in the passive voice, as Loewen would say. And so by the end of the month Hitler proclaimed a boycott against Jewish businesses.

This was of a piece with that infamous "annihilation" speech in 1939. Again, Hitler made a "prophecy" in the passive and third-person style; if there was a world war, the Jews of Europe would face Vernichtung. But who'd have the authority to do it? There was only one power on the planet whose Führer had made a platform out of Judenhass.

Guyénot and others here raise other facts, admittedly inconvenient to the "Holocaust" topos. For instance: that Hitler and the Zionists had at first made an alliance of convenience, for the "racial hygiene" of both German and Semite alike. Guyénot is probably even right. But Hitler's heart - as noted - was never in Zionism. When the German imperial interest pointed to an alliance with the Arabs, Hitler gladly took the Mufti's side over the nascent Israelis'. I submit that Hitler did not need much prompting. A radical thought in these circles, I know . . .

Said circles can dress it all up as they will. Guyénot can complain about the term "Holocaust" for the Jews' share in the Bloodlands. Their allied "Groypers" can snark about the body-count, and about the means by which the Vernichtung took place. But they keep letting slip the base facts.

The facts are: that Hitler kept promising to punish the Jews, his men punished the Jews, and Europe in 1945 exited the war with MANY fewer admitted Jews than when she entered it in 1939.

Malaria jumps ship

Last October (h/t CBD @ace), was published a history of malaria's jump to African humankind. This happened 50kBC. It jumped from the gorilla and not from the Asian apes, which trend more orange.

By that time, human huntergatherers were already roaming Eurasia and even, I think, Australia.

The main genetic resistance to malaria was the Sickle Cell. This gene, Rosie McCall reported last year, first appeared 259 generations ago - estimated, 5300 BC - in the Moist Sahara. It had got to the Scorpion Kingdoms by the time they could first do pictograph, 3200 BC.

McCall thinks the gene traveled to India with the major trade-routes. She dates that as late as the "Bantu migrations". At a guess, so did malarial mosquitoes, perhaps in the rain-buckets carried on board. Sasanian era?

BACKDATING 11/17

Hercules

Hēraklewês was the great hero of the Dorians as they entered the Peloponnese.

We can roughly trace the path Heraclewes made into Latin. In Linear B, we have -ke-le-we (and not -wa) ending several names: e-te-wo-ke-le-we (most famously), ni-ko-ke-le-we, ke-ro-ke-le-we, a-ri-si-to-ke-le-we. Hēra was already a goddess but we have yet no Hēra-klewês in Linear B.

Hera was, of course, no Italian diety. The cult of Heraklewes entered southern Italy by way of Tarentum, which associated itself with Sparta; in their Doric dialect the "digamma" w fell out, leaving a long "e" at the end. HGG Payne, "A Bronze Herakles in the Benaki Museum at Athens", The Journal of Hellenic Studies 54 (1934), 163f; 170 verifies that even in (authentic) Doric we never see "Heraklas"; although, certain Dorian patriots occasionally hypercorrected that name.

Further up the peninsula the Etruscan language accented the first syllable and contracted the vowels on the rest. Hera-cles, there, became HER-cle (more rarely "Hercla"). It happens "l" is a voiced liquid consonant, almost a vowel. So when the Latins came along to stick that masculine -s back onto those nouns: "Hercules", it was.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, by then likewise at least a pro-Doric city, associated him with Eudoxos' Kneeling constellation adjacent to Alpha Lyrae, Arabic Vega (Eudoxos as versified Aratos ll. 63-70). The Odyssey, composed by Ionians, meanwhile was pleased to lock Hēraklewês in Hell.

But the celestial letter H was already in the man's name, in all the alphabets. And the cult of "Hercules" proved too popular outside the Greek cities; the Romans and very probably the Etruscans considered the hero a demigod. Eventually Ptolemy the astronomer canonised this name for the constellation, where it remains to our days; and our Odyssey was altered to mute Heracles' presence. Here we are directed to Friedrich Solmsen, "The Sacrifice of Agamemnon's Daughter in Hesiod's' Ehoeae", The American Journal of Philology 102.4 (1981), 353-8; 355.

BACKDATING 11/17 Noon MST. Raised from a long aside in September's "Proserpina" post, inserted here in a gap in this week's output to lead up to the celestial "H" post I'm planning. VECTOR 11/3/23: Just found out that the solar apex is in here.

'Tis the season

What would it be like to live on – rather, over – Venus? One notion to start, is how the diurnal and annual cycles would work.

Mars is easy because it’s got a 24:40 hour “sol”; it also has clearly-defined seasons. Venus cloud citizens will likely force its day to be as much like ours as possible – because of the human body’s rhythms. The cities will be subject to the wind, which make one circuit of this planet over four of our days. If drifting with that wind, so to limit the gusts on people working outside, each city will want to force one artificial “day” and one artificial “night” over the four days.

Over the poles and in whatever 30-mile mountains, the inhabitants will be seeing eternal twilight and eternal darkness, respectively. Those can work with artificial day and night, like in space.

The yearly cycle on Venus doesn’t matter for the seasons. There’s another cycle that matters more, especially at first: the Synodic Year, that road shared with Earth. Other routes exist; but all the mainline planetary routes will sync up on the same schedule, and Venus-Earth matters most to Venus. Of the synodic transfers the Hollister Cycler might be how Venus gets passengers. But most important, Hohmann Transfer is how the planets get regular interplanetary trade.

Earth>Mars is on a 25 calendar month synodic cycle. By Hohmann it takes 9 months to get places; overall here's their schedule.

For Earth-to/from-Venus these launch windows occur about every nineteen calendar months (plus maybe five days). Absent any other seasonal markers, Hohmann takeoff from Earth orbit is celebrated on Venus: as I see it, as a "Carnivale" over the next four weeks, before the corresponding Venus caravan takes off back to Earth. OFFSET 11/5/2020: Mostly heavy and fragile objects, with a skeleton crew. Supplies and passengers blast off by shuttle later, say two weeks, meeting the caravan maybe a couple days in microG. AND 11/29: Much depends on which synod of the five in the [eight Earth year] meton; reset [1/9/2021] every circa 245 years. MARS 1/1/2021: In some centuries - like the next one! - there's a Martian angle.

There is, lower-key, also a takeoff from twelve degrees behind the STL5 focus. This station runs a slow orbit in its halo, to match the calendar mooted here. Its main day is 146 days before Venus departure - because some of these travelers are to join Venus', finally to come to Earth. They might even include Terrans from six years ago.

Then follows Conjunction, eight weeks after Hohmann exits Venus. This kicks off an Advent season, of another eight weeks. The next Earth-origin arrival at Venus-orbit after that, is Christmas. Venus' gravity well is wide enough that some will be trickling in a few days before and after the central day itself.

Earth on occasion may send a "Pioneer 12" earlier, to arrive around the same time as the corresponding "P13" meaning, vanilla Hohmann. Those aren't for main freight; they're for orbits.

There are also ranges of dates to get into Venus' long kidneybean Libration orbits. These foci are a sixth of a circle fore and aft so, as part of a synod, 97.3 days. Key here is the Last Chance day, to get out of Venus' gravity-well into its leading L4 (and Earth). Because after that, Earthlings are truly stuck: it's another 389 days before Venus' trailing L5 gets within a Hohmann of Earth. For the spacers, L4->L5 and then L5->L4 do open up in between; so their long wait is "only" a third of the synodic, 195 days.

[METON 11/28/2020] Each synod is not created equal. Earth's orbit is elliptical. Also (Mercury aside) Earth is the planet tilted most against the Sun's equator; Venus the least, at 3.39° between them. Planet-pair synods get grouped by their metonic cycle. For Venus-Earth, it's five. That is the famed Octaeteris on Earth, which - if Venereans cared - would be treiscaedecaeteris over there. This matches the cycle of Hohmann: where materiel not parked first-run, repeats.

DIVISION 1/3/2021: Because each synod per meton is so different, I expect Venereans will be back to thinking like Imperials. Remember £sd? Or stones-and-pounds-and-ounces? Gallons-pints-cups? The natural Venerean long-count, taking the place of decade / year / season (1/10/4), will be meton/synod/quarter: 1/5/4. Shorter "decade"; longer "year" and "season". Above, Venus will observe the Transit Cycle every 243 Earth sidereal years, more Julian than Gregory. That's 30 metons plus a synod, usually two - I expect intercalation will be needed, above that. Below I don't know if they cut the season into three pseudomonths or into four.

BACKDATING 11/15/2019

UPDATE 12/8 - the Maya will love this place.

UPDATE 12/9 - I'm ruling out the Aldrin Cycler for this planet. Back to 1969-70, we go; back to Hollister.

Venus, capital of the Solar System

Let’s talk about life on Venus.

There are some pretty-good models in speculative fiction about how life on other planets might work. Mars is best-modeled; Robert Zubrin’s How To Live On Mars is pretty much the foundation for anyone who’d write a story on the Red Planet. The Expanse, meanwhile, has looked at mining-colonies especially in Ceres. Venus has - historically - had the science-fictional disadvantage that nobody knew what was under the clouds until my father's generation. Once Venus was discovered to be a high-pressure hellscape, serious authors (i.e., not Pohl) abandoned that planet until, I think, the late 1990s when was mooted that its cities could float.

Books on travel among our planets have also lagged concerning Venus. The 2007 Traveler’s Guide to the Solar System guide dealt, again, with the planets’ surface, which for Venus nobody sane will be walking on (at least not for long). In 2017 we got a more-reasoned Vacation Guide to the Solar System which did discuss the cloud cities.

As for, why come here: Venus is the most-centrally located Earthlike planet. It is easy, relative to other planets, to send materiel here, or past here. It will host orbital platforms suitable as a hub for visits to the rest of the System. Landis in 2003 argued Venus' case for shifting asteroid ore. (I don't know if Landis' PDF has been lost, but "PAT" made a copy and posted that at The Space Monitor in 2007 - before PAT, too, quit blogging.) In 2015 NASA pointed out that Venus serves as a step toward Mars as well. In terms of central location a stone Rama station at SV-Hilda spinning for high-G is more ideal; even here, we'd supply it from Venus.

If you worry about a place to store water, I will personally host you at the L2 Station to assuage those worries.

One advantage of Venus herself here, is that her own cloudbank is a planetwide refinery for all the ores basic to technological man. And once Venus' mines are running, and have done supplying their own cities and orbitals: Venus can send some Hohmann traffic back to Earth. Also, Venus' nightside coma, blowing away from the Sun, is a free resource for moving craft away from Venus, or decelerating incoming traffic (excepting the fry-by returnees, from sunward).

Venus should be the capital of the System, with Earth as its (initial) breadbasket and holiday destination. [SPECIFICATION 12/4: the Venus orbit holds that capitol.] I have made a directory of Venus' top spots for colonisation.

BACKDATING 11/15

RETHINKING 12/14 9:35 AM MST - relocated the farm floaters to 50s° ecliptic north and south.

Two Jeromes

Istarelle (as of AD 1315) knows two men named after Saint Jerome: a Jérôme and a Hiérome. Clark Ashton Smith liked to do this in his Vyônes stories; elsewhere I've seen a Guillaume and a Villom juxtaposed. There we could credit dialect: Guillaume is post-Occitan and Villom, more Norman.

The two Jeromes imply another dialect, here between Vyônes and "the Lierres" - whatever the latter is. I am told that the "J" appears with the printing-press. But the "I" before the "J", without the "H", is older. I expect the "J'ai" contraction assumes the "J" as the modern French /ʒ/. Before that, as you can see in Old Occitan, and for that matter in Latin, people would just leave off the pronoun. But I am also told that the "J" consonant is Early Old French. Maybe it is not dialect.

Maybe it is class distinction... but it is strange that the hedge-knight Hiérome has the more classical name, over our man from the cathedral-city.

The proliferation of sorcery in Averoigne, AD 1175-1395

The main tales in Clark Ashton Smith's Averoigne cycle which deal with major sorcery are three: Holiness of Azédarac (supplemented with Doom), The Colossus of Ylourgne, and The Beast of Averoigne. I charted them out last week and found something of interest to future authors.

Beast reveals that time-traveling Azédarac, Bishop of Ximes in AD 1175 and sainted (in one timeline) as of 1230, had left a society of sorcery behind him. These sorcerers, of whom Luc called "Cauldron-Maker" is he whom we meet in Beast, weren't in league with Yog-Sothoth. They were, instead, able to resist the worst of the Lovecraftian aliens.

Meanwhile Colossus had let us in that Vyônes, too, hosted a circle of sorcerers in the thirteenth century. In AD 1275 a dwarf Nathaire infiltrated this circle; it was claimed that he came from outside Averoigne. Nathaire, obsessive, cared only for necro and I assume he didn't bother with other arcana.

We are not told that the one city had any relation with the other. But I can guess, and in this chart my thoughts are represented by the dotted-line.

The Archbishop in Vyônes already suspected (Holiness) that his man in Ximes was not a holy man. When word got out concerning Azédarac's miraculous ascension, his library got raided. I do not speculate on who burgled the place first: the Church, or Azédarac's apprentices. Either way, most of his tomes were saved... and kept from the rabble. The Averoignard Church hit upon a compromise: beatify Azédarac in public; tolerate sorcery in private, if it be used for the good of the province. Ximes further got a Benedictine convent featuring a grand wooden icon of Our Lady. (My "Cult", like CAS's Holiness, is unaware of this convent.)

That meant that Vyônes could not well resist when white-magi established a cabal over there too. Gaspard "of the North" translated parts of the Book Of Eibon (The Coming of the White Worm); either the ninth chapter therefrom, or the ninth pericope he had deemed of interest. I assume these pericopae had been dictated by the Oracle Of Sadoqua. Other Hyperborean tales in CAS's oeuvre may well derive from Gaspard's translation.

After the Colossus had been and gone, if the Bishop of Vyônes hadn't yet secured some of these fell texts for his collection, his minions assuredly had got some after they had conducted their own raid on the Ylourgne ruin. There was a need to cleanse the Champ de Nathaire (hat-tip here to James Chambers, "Unhallowed Ground, Unholy Flesh") outside the cathedral city, or at least to keep its necrosis from spreading.

UPDATE 11/11: Istarelle - if you think "Sorceress" belongs in the canon - had nothing to do with Nathaire's circle. If, further, you agree she was at the height of her power in 1315 AD then she was an infant in 1275.

Near-complete review of The Averoigne Legacy: B+

I have read or almost-read most of the stories in The Averoigne Legacy. I reviewed them over at Ace's. Here's the first bunch and here's the rest.

I didn't review the poems - only Stillman's rises above the high-school level. For the stories, I reviewed twenty out of the twenty-two; skipping "Cult" which was mine and "Clotaire" which I didn't finish.

I graded them by the American system of FDCBA. By a grade-point system, that's 0-4. I'm counting my one "A-" as a "B" for the purpose of a grade-point average (GPA). My total was 66 64; so the collection's GPA is 3.2. Again: not counting "Cult" or "Clotaire".

I punished otherwise-competent authors for ignoring Klarkash-Ton's canon. The main offender here was Simon Whitechapel, who did it twice: first by relating of phantom city Touraine, second by summoning up a bridge to nowhere (tho' I may have rescued the latter). Third time lucky though, with "Quarry". I further had an editorial problem with the end of "Cats", which I hope can be fixed in future editions.

Of the three duds I counted, I observe that two of them were among the first-written: Hilger's "Oracle" and McNaughton's "Return". It is difficult to see what an editor can do with either, the one being abandoned by CAS himself (although Hilger did resurrect "Doom" successfully) and the other coming from an author now deceased. Contrast the poetry! Grace Stillman's 1934 "The Woods of Averoigne" is the only one free of false rhyme and forced metre.

As markers in the history of Averoigne derivative fiction, the editor has that case for including the two misfires. Here I point over to Nightshade Press, which included several tales from Smith himself that not everyone likes: among them, "Ubbo-Sathla", and the famously-misplaced "Voyage of King Euvoran". For Averoigne, anyway, the Nightshade editors found their way to salvage "Disinterment of Venus" and "Beast of Averoigne". Our editor agrees with Nightshade's decision: The Averoigne Archives (Pickmans) reconstructs "Beast" similarly and independently.

On a happier note I count that over half the stories - twelve eleven out of twenty-two, since for this denominator we may bring the exclusions - are excellent. The five I ranked "B" only barely missed my standard, which I like to think is a high one. I would like to read more from all of the associated authors.

As an almost comprehensive selection of the genre, I propose that The Averoigne Legacy succeeds.

UPDATE 3:30 PM MST: I've rung the alarm-bell on "The Fell Fête". I still don't count it a "dud" since some editing can fix this.

Melkor's lies

Recent news is that HBO just sank 30 million quid... into the Bermuda Triangle, with its ASOIAF prequel.

I'd make that #joke about going #woke and getting #broke, but you've heard it already and from funnier bloggers. I am here to talk about how to respect a canon. It might surprise those who know my name Better For Other Work; but in art, I do not rule out diversity for its own sake.

If, in the Westeros timeline, you want a story with non-Europeans (non-Westerosis) for the focus: your best bet is the Valyrian / Targaryen conquest. (Or you could just run a story wholly in Essos. But #wokesters don't consider that.) The Conquest - It Is Known - maps to the Norman conquest; an invasion by a foreign elite with no care for the Westerosi way of warfare. As The Bastard was pleased to take over Britain with whatever he could dredge from Europe's third sons; so the Targaryens - who had an air-force you know - would have merrily taken whatever they could find from wherever they could find them.

I could also consider recent plans to do a Middle Earth Second Age story. Yeah, Lord of the Rings was white against the rest. I am less assured of the age before that, when Ar-Pharazôn faced Sauron. What would the Haradrim - the Arabs - make of two Fir'awnûn locked in battle against one another? Seems to me like it would look, to Harad, like Justinian I against Khusru I. (Tho' probably not Heraclius against Khusru II.) A Haradi shaykh assuredly got himself a Ring. But under which banner was he fighting?

... nah, we're getting lesbian PoC against some wicked homophobe under a swastika banner.

#woke doesn't care about canon. It doesn't, in truth, care about diversity. It doesn't care about the good, in general. #woke is Melkor, the enemy to light.

The cutting room

Kronk’s record for the 776 AD comet runs as follows:

776. The Chinese text Ku chin t’u shu chi ch’eng (1726) is the sole source of information for this comet. It says a comet appeared at Hu-Kua [α, β, γ, and δ Delphini] on 776 January 11. The date and location indicate it was in the morning sky, implying a UT of January 10.9. The Chinese added that the comet “trespassed” Huan-Chê [60, SAO 102553, and SAO 102564 in Herculis, and 37 Ophiuchi], but remained visible for only 20 days.
FULL MOON: January 10
SOURCES: Ku chin t’u shu chi ch’eng (1726), p. 92; I. Hasegawa, “Catalogue of Ancient and Naked-Eye Objects”, Vistas in Astronomy 24 (1980), 59-102; 73, 92 #437*.

Hasegawa had translated the source:

On a i-hai day in the 12th month of the tenth year of the Ta-Li reign-period a comet appeared at Hu Kua (α, β, ν Del). It was several feet in length, after 20 days it disappeared. It trespassed Huan-che (near α Her).

"i-hai" is in the Shang-era sexagesimal numeric system; the yi-hai number from the new moon is indeed 12. This date is off only by one or two days to the “white vapor” noted in more-contemporary Chinese sources for 12 January that year.

Also to be noted, is a record for 767 AD. I'll follow its quote to John Williams. I'll correct it slightly.

A.D. 767. January 12. In the reign of Tae Tsung, the 1st year of the epoch Ta Leih, the 12th moon, day Ke Hae, there was a comet in Kwa Chaou. It was about a cubit in length. After 20 days it disappeared. It passed over Hwan Chay.
Emperor Tae Tsung [18 May 762 – 23 May 779]; epoch Ta Li, 766-79; ... 12th moon, day Ke Hae, January 12, 767.
Kwa Chaou, α, β, γ, &c. Delphini.
Hwan Chay, ε, ι, &c. Ophiuchi.

Shiji continuatus; Mă Duānlín's encyclopaedia Wénxiàn Tōngkǎo

"Ke Hae" would in modern Mandarin be ji-hai which is 36. A bit much for a month, but...

I had, last week, already decided that the 776 CE record in Ku chin t’u shu chi ch’eng is an eighteenth-century interpretation of its own sources, allied to those which record the “white vapor”. Recently I found J. Chapman, D.L. Neuhauser, R. Neuhauser, M. Csikszentmihalyi, “A review of East Asian reports of aurorae and comets circa AD 775” / “Chinese aurorae in the AD 770s”, Astron. Nachr. 336.6 (2015), 530-44; 540-2 #5.2.

It may be that the Ku chin - ah hell, the Gujin tushu jicheng - recorded a comet immediately preceding the vapor which the earlier sources describe. More likely, the phenomena are the same, in which case the modern scholar should prefer those sources closer to the event. Such a reader would interpret the Gujin record of that 776 event as misinterpretation.

But I figured that Chapman has already did the work for us. I am personally incompetent in Tang-era Chinese, and in Qin-era for that matter. If someone else wants to figure out how Williams calculated his date for 767, and what the Gujin was on about for 776; be my guest.

The latest navel-gaze

Scott Alexander has made an argument that the "secular web" started out from liberals. He then explains the #awokening of the second Obama Administration, 2013-15.

I attended the secular humanist events in the late 1990s. It was liberal-driven even then - but not yet #woke. The rank and file, where I was at, were young metalheads and autists. We thought there was, in humanism, a positive drive (because not negative like pure atheism) toward better wisdom. I personally hoped that, in this community, the Burkean Right had a chance to win.

The Burkean Right didn't win. Atheism+Plus excommunicated the whole Secular Right. In 2008 PZ Myers followed Atheism+; and in 2009 Charles Foster Johnson followed Myers. I have to confess that the Ex Muslims of Britain are Atheist+Plus as well; I fled them before I could get banned.

Meanwhile the fundamentalists were losing their power over the Right. They had a lot of clout... up to the Dover decision Pennsylvania 2005. Evangelicals still exist but they're now fighting on the cultural side, not anymore on the scientific and educational side. I would even go so far as that the Evangelicals and their Right allies don't argue from the Bible anymore (at least not as an authoritative text) - they have figured out that this tactic doesn't work.

I note that the Atheists+ have observed the Right remnant about accurately. The Right don't dispute the Left on religious grounds anymore. They - I should now and in this context say, we - dispute them on their own ground, these days. (Sometimes with unintended humour. As with the bleats about "Darwin!", and "Wilson!!", and "Sanger!!1"; all summed up, "hoo r reel raysiss then, huh!?". I personally avoid this.)

And yes, that the Right is challenging the Left from secular principle is the problem, and this is why the Current Year #wokening hates the Right so much more than the old secular liberals did. The Left thought they could convince us if they only talked us out of the Bible. So the Right set the Book aside (this much was easy for me)... and we still aren't buying what the Left were selling.

As for what Atheism-Minus can do next, I can recommend also the Prussian's comment. At least, to get his take on it. He observes that if "Atheism+Plus" truly cared about social justice, they'd oppose Islam more than they oppose (rump) Christianity. He predicts that social-justice and Islam will both lose the coming holy-war, formally allied or separate. The Prussian argues that Atheism-Minus should jump Right and convince us reactionaries toward classical liberalism, before we all go Freikorps. He wants more people like 1999-me in the Right.

The LeBaron story is yet untold

On the Right I have noted some dudgeon about steaming, smelly hot-takes dumped by various media concerning the LeBaron massacre. Drive-by media indeed. But although most our media's takes have been misdirected and stupid, the Right outlets' Pouncing and Seizing on these takes are no improvement. They're just feeding the troll.

Fortunately not all our media have been this irresponsible. One standout here (h/t Taqiyyologist) is my own dear Houston Chronicle. (Who knew?)

The LeBarons are infamous. They feature in at least one chapter in Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven. They're a splinter group from post-LDS "fundamentalism" that, themselves, went on to compose new Scriptures. And they got into fratricide. I myself had first suspected the latest massacre to be, likewise, fratricidal; but I didn't post that theory here.

I was right to hold my fire: the Mexican authorities don't suspect fratricide, so the LeBaron Way is ruled out as a motive. And although some (better) LeBarons have gotten into Mexican politics, and died for their activism, it doesn't seem to be a crooked cop or army-division that did this, either. Some criminal gang did this hit.

So: cartel? maybe, but maybe not drugs. There are child- and sex-trafficking problems unfolding between Utah and Arizona; officials are implicated, and LDS bishops. Among the LeBarons, the (nonLDS) cult NXIVM has been implicated. As the Catholics have taught us, when you let in one pack of perverts, the other perverts see their opening and eventually it's full paedo. It doesn't matter what the authorities want; the lower decks are infested, and need purge.

Back to the media: another angle I could see being taken is a story on Sonora - and its descent to anarchy, being one of the farthest-flung states in Mexico. Bantjes' As If Jesus Walked On Earth might be a place to start. Here's a review.

So this is why I delayed on this story: we haven't sufficient facts. But hopefully we can sketch out paths toward the facts.

Are the LeBarons Americans?

I typically don't entertain the "but they're Ameeericans" argument, arguing how we must Do Something whenever some compatriot meets up with Darwin. I argued as much as long ago as 2001: when you disown the Constitution, the Constitution should disown you. Since we have just passed the decade anniversary of Fort Hood, the Awlakis - here - were a Righteous Kill. Obama sometimes did do the right thing.

The whole LDS clade was deemed non-American the moment they fled the United States into Indian Territory. American government over this region started out as an occupying force. The Union classed it all as Territorial, and they retained a Territorial government until the near end of the nineteenth century - when the LDS mainline finally bent the knee. The LDS splinter-groups became, thereby, the white equivalent to rebel Native tribes off the reservation. So the LeBarons are not American, unless and until they formally apply to be.

A white nationalist might make a case for the LeBarons' Americanism; but if that's your definition of American, it's not (say) Ace's definition.

As for the birthright citizenship game, which the LeBarons play across the border, I hope no Americans of whatever definition are still falling for that, just coz the LeBarons be honkies.

BACKDATING 11/8

The selkie who dareth not speak

I was musing about the Selkie topos; that it might be a memory of the hunter-gatherers gone fishin'. The most-famed North Sea were-creature legend, from the Danes to us, is Hans Christian Andersen's Den lille havfrue. For Andersen, when the maiden mermaid joins normative (farming) man, it turns out she cannot speak.

I had been assuming that Andersen was pulling from Old Norse legend. On that basis I further interpreted the havfrue's muteness as that she didn't speak the farmers' language.

But... Andersen doesn't say that the havfrue couldn't speak the local language. He says she couldn't speak AT ALL.

As Andersen constructed the story, the havfrue had sacrificed her voice for the ability to interact with normies. There's talk on the internet that Andersen meant this as an analogy of Teh Closet. The havfrue can love... so long as "she", the one who pines to be the other, doesn't speak of it. And I admit: the element of sacrifice points that way.

However I persist that the background elements in the tale share much in common with the selkie motifs, rife through the North Sea. Amphibious para-humans (shamans?) live at sea, adjacent to a land village; and by nature, the twain shall not mix.

So let's consider Andersen's chosen barrier: mermens' inability to speak on land. Might he have got this too from his sources?

The Neanders even before the Western Hunter Gatherers were fishers. More likely they gathered molluscs, from off the Atlantic coast; the Pauper's Protein as Londoners used to call it. We know that because the Neanders got Swimmer's Ear. (UPDATE 3/31: mussels confirmed.) It's cold on the Atlantic fringe. Andersen himself must have met many deaf swimmers on the Danish coast.

I've since noted that in the aftermath of the 6200 BC famine, hunter-gatherers on rivers moved to a fish diet around the world. (Aquaculture, in proto-China.) Gatherers on the Atlantic would have spent more time in a colder Atlantic, by necessity.

If Andersen was working from an old South Scandinavian template, he's heard a story - ultimately - about a maiden brought up by deaf-mutes. I don't know if she is deaf yet herself (the legend doesn't require it) but her genetics, perhaps, had drifted away from hearing and maybe even more so from speaking. Why speak (beyond a loud wail) if none can hear (excepting maybe her mother, back when SHE was young)?

Oh, and some gratuitous genomic nerdery - The main genetic deafener of Eurasians is mutation at connexin 26. Among Europeans the gene (not) there is 35delG. Over the previous decade (2001-2011) ancestral 35delG was pinpointed to the eastern Mediterranean, 12k-8k BC; it then traveled through Europe. That much must have come with the Farmers. But 35delG is just one SNP. Ashkenazim get that too, and 167delT. Chinese get instead 235delC. Who knows what else was rotten in Stone Age Denmark.

None of this means to besmirch Andersen's creativity. That his selkie, the havfrue, sacrificed her voice is a powerful tweak to his sources. It made of an already tragic star-crossed story, a heartbreak for all the ages. The modern marriage-equality movement can (and does) point to this story as a founding text, perhaps on par with Uncle Tom's Cabin.

BACKDATING 11/8

That aurora again

I found that Chapman in 2015 had done my work for me on the 776 pseudocomet, so that whole section is out. Further, since Arabic typesetting is hard, and since I ain't got O. 9449 at hand around here, I've put screencaps of the Zakkar edition of Nuaym's text.

Again: I am not finished. Left to do: convert the references into some standard, whatever that standard might be; delete the end acknowledgement of that astronomer's aid, since I'm going to offer him co-writing credit; continue digesting the feedback he's offered thus far; and await whatever Dr David Cook (and others) might tell me.

I've posted the PDF in its current state so that Dr Cook, and anyone else looking in on this effort, have a more-professional document to look at.

Lactase

Lactase is the enzyme which breaks down lactose. That's a special kind of sugar, in milk, which mammals (ideally) should grow out of drinking. Failure to do that - lactase persistence - results in Kate Upton obsessives and nobody wants those around.

Over the Neolithic, men who'd already learnt to domesticate dogs and, maybe, rabbits learnt to domesticate the big dumb mammals, starting I think with sheep. It occurred to some of these men to milk the beasts. That allowed a sort of interim-weaning for human infants and, further, led to lactose-light cheeses and several other dairy products. The one exception, in adults, was milk itself - but who needed that anyway, in an age before Louis Pasteur.

David Reich is here to constrain lactase persistence. Milk-guzzling did not come with the Neolithic farmers and herders. It came with the Bronze Age - with western Europeans, like the Sabines.

Why they chose to keep drinking milk as adults, I know not - but I'll take a guess at it. It is often the case that a sugary liquid crop is fermented for drink, before it is consumed "raw". Milk, in a pre-Pasteur age, historically was fermented as kumiss. Indo-European gatherers were famed connoisseurs of mead honey-wine; berry boozes are all over the Balkans to this day. A pastoral society, with direct descent from gatherers, would experiment with milk.

AIDS resistance in the Chalcolithic steppe

David Reich has a summary of his lab's work up to October. Most of it is familiar; and you'll have to sit through his nice-Jewish-boy voice and mannerisms to get there (Heeb-to-Heeb, the man needs a voice-coach). For those who've read Reich, the new stuff picks up around 25 minutes or so.

One such: an HIV resistance gene. I recall mention of this gene in 2001. The gene was associated with survivors of the 14th-century AD Yersinia pestilence. Now, Reich's lab has tracked it to 5000 BC, north of the Caspian and traveling both sides of the Urals. This route became, later, the main byway of the historic Plague.

This region as of 5000 BC is Yamnaya Ground Zero. Given the cluster in the British Isles 1000 BC, I strongly suspect the gene was bourne by the Bell Beaker invaders in between.

I don't dismiss an HIVlike out of Africa before our nineteenth century. Also, genetic drift was a definite Thing in the sparsely-peopled early steppe. I do, however, wonder how this gene got selected for. One problem of course is that nobody's found HIV anywhere in Eurasia at this time. Although we may not have been looking yet.

It might also be that plague and HIV behave similarly. Plague kills when it sneaks past the immune system. HIV kills when it takes over the immune system. I'm so Generation X, I remember when they were still calling the latter a strain of the T-Cell Leukaemia.

Is this gene a hyperallergic reaction? A generally "hypochondriac" immune-system might identify both the bacterium and the virus, where a normal system might not.

Salfuyche's bridgework

Simon Whitechapel's "Symposium of the Gargoyle" starts with an assumption of a bridge between Vyônes and Ximes, for trade. I've investigated this through Clark Ashton Smith canon. I submit an indictment against Salfuyche for sabotage.

The Nuaym bin Hammad aurora, revisited

I've been consulting with an astrophysicist on that aurora. I have made some important digressions as a result (here).

First, I now think the comet which Kronk 1999 notes for 776 must be the same phenomenon as the "vapor" noted elsewhere. That vapor is currently agreed auroral. That would render Kronk's 776 a pseudocomet.

Second, it was brought to my attention that I'd confused the issue when I brought Nu'aym #596 to the table. So I am hereby kicking it off the table. I looked up the poltroon who transmitted the hadith to Nu'aym, one 'Abd Allah bin Marwan, and found his accounts... consistent. Consistent with a 200/815ish forger. We don't need him for the 770s.

I am still not nearly done with the project but I wanted to put up a placeholder.

Why Sadoqua didn't make the cut

If you're reading The Averoigne Legacy, which you should (preview available Google; may be purchased here), you may have noted Hilger's collaboration.

The "Oracle of Sadoqua" derives from the Black Book. It involves a man seeking out the mystery of Sadoqua and being consumed by it. It is similar in structure to "Satampra Zeiros" from the Hyperborean cycle.

To be brutally honest, I think it is "Satampra Zeiros". It may be a halfbaked crossover. Alternately it is an earlier version, first cut for Averoigne with Hyperborean callbacks, and finally brought to its correct state as fully Hyperborean. Either way, its redundant nature explains why Smith never expanded on the tale himself.

By contrast "The Doom of Azédarac", also a Black Book unfinished-tale, seems more original. Its expansion is well worth the read.

BACKDATING 11/2 2:55 PM MST

CONSIDER 12/6 Ulua and Istarelle.