The Fimbulwinter in Peru

For the context of the coming of Light to Peru: Adolph Bandelier 1904.

Pedro Cieza de León stands alone (well, except for Joseph Smith Jr., s.a.w.) in annunciating a Post Resurrection Appearance to the lake Titicaca. What we do find at Titicaca is a consistent account by the Aymara and the non-Inca Quechua that, here, fiat lux.

Some this weekend are telling us that this happened in AD 32. Of all the world's historians, only the Christians insist on this. On pain of being OFFENDED. As usual the Christians launder their sources through several layers of... er, ahadith.

For Peru, literacy was done through quipú - an arcane art of knotted ropes, wholly lost to the fires of the Conquest. South America was handled... less gently, than was the Mesoamerica, whose Nahua-speakers swiftly learnt the Latin alphabet and took to it at least as well as did their semiliterate Extramaduran masters.

If we are looking to an event recorded in the AD 1500s, we need to count backwards from that later century. Nobody thinks today that the Fimbulwinter in the Danes' Mark referred to Calvary Hill. They think it referred to the horrors of AD 536, well-documented elsewhere. Including among the Maya, many say.

As of the sixth century, coastal north Peru was dominated by the Moche culture. The Huari would arise around AD 600 and eclipse the Moche over the next century. As for Tiahuanaco, they're later; trading-partners to the Huari, not worth the Huaris' time to conquer.

To sum up, anyone claiming a time of darkness over Tiahuanaco based on sixteenth-century hearsay needs to prove it's earlier than AD 536.

Y luego questo pasó

Let us look at Pedro Cieza de León's "El Señorío De Los Incas", The Chronicle of Perú 2.3.5. You may read this here. In what must be a legend of the Tiahuanaco culture, the local Aymara(?) recall a time of darkness and then the return of light. We'll get to that . . .

De León then writes Y luego questo pasó, which he'll do again soon enough. This has nothing to do with the "mid-day". This is archaic Castilian for llegó a pasar - "and it came to pass", familiar to Anglophones in both the Douay-Rheims and the King James traditions. Here will follow a protoMormon account of a white man's coming to preach to the heathen. I assume a Bible calque, available to Extramadurans. You may read the context from Adolph Bandelier 1904.

The Vulgate had read factum est autem for, say, Luke 5:1; nothing that looks like "pasar" / "to pass". The Old Latin source was LXX and Acts egeneto de / kai egeneto; from preëxilic Hebrew it was wa yehi (וַיְהִי) as Genesis 1:15, 29:10 and so on.

It comes to pass that the second (and later) parts of de León's Crónicas didn't come out until the nineteenth century, but I do think we may rule out the Mormons. Also it is difficult to pin this on the "Alba" translation by Moses Arragel which was occulted by that time. The fabled Biblia alfonsina was lost also.

The Spanish conquistadors were about as heathen as were southern Peruvians as of the early sixteenth century, if not more so; later generations of priests had to sort out the former. Still, the Second Council of Lima, which brought Trent's Bible-ban to Perú, was - AD 1567 - yet to pass.

I smell the language of an early-sixteenth-century Extremaduran lectionary. I also detect a local's attempt to appropriate the post-Resurrection tradition for the Titicaca basin.

Bah

Christian apologetic had spread far enough by the AD 200s that Julius Africanus was able to launder stories to force a solar eclipse (and Byzantine earthquake) to a full moon. The Christian apologists launder Africanus accordingly. But we're here for the New World; we are here to evaluate the Book of Mormon.

Reported there are Francisco de Avila's Huarochiri Manuscript and Pedro Cieza de León's "El Señorío De Los Incas", The Chronicle of Peru part II. In the former: the sun was gone for five days. Stones knocked against one another. Shepherds were attacked by their own sheep whether they were running away in the fields or hiding in their homes. Even the mortars and pestles (grinders and their bowls) are said to have rebelled against their owners. In the latter: there was a people before the Incans. These ancient people experienced a period without light. So they prayed until the sun finally rose from Lake Titicaca, and in the midday, a white man who carried great authority came into the land. He is said to have turned hills into plains, and vice versa. Fountains sprang from the very stones. He was a man to be venerated, and those ancient people regarded him as the Maker of everything.

The former made me laugh because, as apparently I keep having to remind my readers, Peru had no sheep. We in North America have the Ovis canadensis but nobody has domesticated this, and it never came to the Andes. Some kid with a headful of freaking Encyclopedia Brown could tell you.

As to the latter, I'll deal with that next.

CHINESE FOOD 4/16: Let's call that blogger what he is - The Forger. From China, he launders Chan Kei Thong. And I'll go further - if it happens now it happened then. If Arian "Nicene" Christians lie today then Eusebius lied, then.

John Boehner's one-for-the-road

Matt Drudge has a couple memoirs up on his page. One by Hunter Biden, one by John Boehner. Hunter's is probably better. Reckon I'll look at the second one.

The ex-Speaker Boehner did have some successes in the House. One of them was finding Michelle Bachmann, who started 2007, something to do in 2011: the Intelligence Committee. Bachmann - if Boehner says so himself - did well at that.

Boehner rips, absolutely rips, the Nirth Certifikit nonsense rife through Right circles in 2009. I took a hiatus from such circles that year. I only rejoined - I only could rejoin - when Ace commenter "Progress Over Peace" offered a credible alternative to the Ineligibility meme, namely that Barack Obama had presented himself to university as a foreign exchange student. Did I give that meme any credence, myself? Ehh. As I recall, I considered this guy eligible by technicality. Much like Biden's victory last November.

On the minus side of this new book, if people were murmuring that Boehner might have a slight drinking problem, the title and cover of his memoir isn't helping his case: On The House. Really? Does this also mean I get to read your book for free? I suppose I'm commenting on a free chapter therefrom, so: slainte. I mean, once these days of dark memory have passed and Our Lord rises again . . .

As for Obama's relationship to America - pace Boehner, it was always strained at best. I recall when this President got most upset was when the Congress failed to pass a Federal "gun sense" bill in the wake of Aurora. He certainly never got this upset about Benghazi. Pam Geller, for all her faults, wrote a pretty decent summary of first-term Obamism in The Post American Presidency. Dinesh D'Souza wrote a better book, and then a documentary so based that Obama had his lackey "justice" Preet Bharara send him to a halfway-house. Obama was a "New Party" new-Left minion, a middleman between Ayers and Soros with not a little of Jeremiah Wright. From 2013 he encouraged the #woke cultural-revolution (It's On Us, Ferguson etc) which we suffer today.

Boehner finds fault with the above summary. He pretends Soros is naught but a Right bogeyman. He ignores Soros funding... what we see in our cities today; he ignores Wright-like reverends egging it on. it just shows how far America and the West have drifted, that these people could be considered mainstream now. Where was Boehner?

As to Benghazi, excuse me: but did 13 Hours... not happen? Was it not a total failure of Obama's Cabinet? Also, that Cabinet pinned it all on some nowhere Coptic showman on a bad Youtube channel. Is Boehner agreeing? Boehner just praised himself for putting Bachmann on the relevant committee; as of September 2012, Bachmann was no longer running for (that) office but had aligned behind the nominee Mitt Romney. Bachmann knew there was something wrong with the Obama / Clinton / Kerry triumvirate (Biden, we've learnt, wasn't consulted). Again: where was Boehner?

There is a serious question of focus, in Boehner's book. Boehner can justifiably speak to Right insanity in 2009. (In 2021, one like him could speak to Right media giving air to the Berenson bears.) But I think Boehner should speak more strongly to Obama's divisive leadership, to Washington's general failure to secure the border, to the collapse of Libya and Syria (ISIS, I'd pin more on the Iraqis), above all to Cancel Culture. Boehner has missed this opportunity to argue for the Right, despite the foibles of Rightists.

Boehner's sin was always acedia. The man should cut down on his drinking.

The Creed for Theodosius

We have witnesses to the "Nicene" Creed, in the AD 390s under Theodosius I. Viz., the North African creeds.

"Only-begotten" is still the over-wordy natum de Patre unigenitum. Pilate, the Crucifixion, and the Burial are not introduced. Neither is the "right hand of the Father". I see here that the Virgin is introduced; this looks like the only change from Constantine's original, beyond language. Our Lady anchors the event in history but at the cost of leading to the Miaphysitism to come.

Theodosius himself was a man of the West. We should assume this as the Creed he knew. Marcian's Creed cannot be proven as from Theodosius pace Vox Day (against interest, to be fair!). It's later.

It will be fascinating to learn who altered this Creed, when, why, how - all of it.

The first Palm Sunday

We all know from Papias not to trust Mark's chronology... which, by supreme irony, makes the base-chronology for our New Testament today. This blog has mooted theories that Palm Sunday was Sukkot AD 32, and that the paradosis - when the Sadducees turned Jesus over for likely crucifixion - was the Wednesday before Passover. Why, then, should Christians collapse it all into one Holy Week?

First, the Christians already had a ritual calendar - the Jewish calendar - by the time Mark and John 1-20 were being composed. Every time Jesus' followers observed the Passover, they were haunted by Jesus' ghost. Sometimes literally in asomatic visions - but that's another issue. Also since the palms are absent from the Synoptics, those Christians who did not know John - like Justin - would likely have thought of it as Processional Sunday.

The Processional Sunday works only in a large hall or on a street fit for a procession. Christians couldn't even observe such a solemnity until they had either.

If Processional Sunday lagged the rest of Holy Week in Christian Easter observance, that would explain the gospel confusion. Might also - in part - explain its disconnexion from the Maundy Thursday-through-Easter block. (Christians are stuck with the Saturday dead time, from Jonah's three-day prophecy.)

I conclude the Gospel of Mark was composed among a Christian congregation large and powerful enough that a Processional Sunday was possible. Further, this had been made integral to its Easter week - this, clearly, elsewhere than at Jerusalem. The Gospel of John shows (much) more evidence of being composed in stages, I'd say from Egerton; its source perhaps did not own a Processional Sunday as such. But John 1-20 as we have it today at least addressed fellow "Antiochene" Christians who did. It arranged its final chapters accordingly.

Aelia Pulcheria, Augusta

Aelia Pulcheria was born AD 398ish to Theodosius. The younger Theodosius was born later - and then their father died. In AD 414 Pulcheria assumed a regent's role.

Of note is that the shah Yazdegird I had sent tutors west for the younger Theodosius - and likely for his teenaged sister as well. That tutor, arriving after AD 410, will have been a Nicene; but perhaps not a Nicene au courant.

Pulcheria renounced men and proclaimed reverence for the Virgin Mary. She was a Miaphysite. There's talk she was a rival for her brother's affections against his wife Eudoxia.

During Chalcedon, I think, Pulcheria's affinity to her fellow virgin Mary ensured that Council could never rehabilitate Nestorius himself. Her advanced age, I also think, kept her from preventing the Council from being what it was, which was a Nestorian rehabilitation.