Cosmotheism's compromises

In the spirit of reconciliation between Torah and AltRight, for which the Baghestan is so-noted... Greg Johnson offers a tribute to Dr Jan Assmann. Unlike Mix-A-Lot I don't think he was ever knighted.

The name aside (sorry), I ran across several of Assmann's books over the later 1990s. He promoted that form of Aegyptology which supported the priesthood against the pharaoh. Where late-Victorian Brits had lauded Akhenaten (Assmann's spelling), for his "beautiful monotheism" leading to Moses; Assmann damned his "counter-religion" for "normative inversion". Assmann planted his work in the "heretic pharaoh" subgenre alongside, in 1987, Donald Redford (and lately Foerster). Akhenaten was Egypt's Popol Vuh.

Mind you, given that temples and banks were the same thing back then: I place Akhenaten in the same reformist plane as Henry VIII and Basil I. The Alt-Left peopled by such as Michael Hudson should prefer the Victorian position, here.

Assmann studied more the Hellenistic-era Aegyptian theology, which he named "cosmotheism".

For Assmann (and Johnson), cosmotheism allowed for religious tolerance. If you wanted to build some other temple in Egypt - you could! you just shouldn't (say) be slaughtering lambs where Egyptians could hear it.

Assmann also studied the "axial age". Assmann didn't deny it existed; for him it was a "media event", wherein "truths" could be put to peer-review. A Greek could now read an Egyptian holy text, and critique it. In its wake a new world of exclusionary bigotry suppressed cosmotheism. (I gather it was Darius who spun-up Assmann's axis; if we're defining that age by textual- and calendrical-continuity through to the present.)

I won't review Assmann for what follows. I haven't ever read beyond his prefaces, and that was long ago. So I am trusting Johnson. What follows will go toward Johnson:

Down Egypt proper, I must ask how far the native Nile farmer (paganus, in Latin) was ever interested in this "cosmotheism", by Johnson's own lights more global-friendly than local cults would be. Ptolemy V was deep into the Hellenistic Age - and had inherited a brutal rebellion, against it. For Egypt, cosmotheism existed alongside the Axial Age, but ... how? The Rosetta Stone is all about the compromises which the Ptolemies had to make with the priests for their support, against their own commons.

Cosmotheism, then and now, smells to me like an élite phenomenon. It smells less like the old paganism and more like an artificial adaptation thereof, forcing pagans as much as Jews into a wider oecumene - and wider economy. Johnson's readers might ask (or be asked) how globalism compares with, say, New Guinean autarky (still neolithic at best). That subset willing to side with The Globe might ask how effectively cosmotheism can serve this Global community.

WD 0816–310

Among the polluted White Dwarf stars within 200 parsecs is WD 0816–310 alias SCR 0818−3110 or PM J08186−3110, at 19.4 parsecs. The new study doesn't cite Putirka / Siyi Xu on planetary mantles (tho' it cites an earlier Siyi Xu). I suspect this dwarf has no overlap with Putirka's set.

Its "cooling age" is 4.2 Gya; 2.5 masses before that, so between A0V and B9V for 600 My. And this one had more hydrogen than usual for a WD. This has been assumed pollution from hydrate ices like water, methane, and/or ammonia. I don't think Putirka had cited that paper.

Anyway the new study has this one as truly metal-polluted as well: Ca, Mg, Fe especially Mg. Usually when astronomers talk "metal" they mean anything higher than helium so would count oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen. This pollution is at least Vesta-mass.

More: the ratios look like chondrites. That's undifferentiated C-class rock like Pallas; Vesta proper is S (really P - for differentiated Marslike Planet). So this polluting mass is not counting what mass on its erstwhile Pallades wasn't metal. That may include silicon but assuredly includes carbon.

That, then, is why this paper does not overlap the others, on the planets' mantles. No differentiation means no mantles. Most worlds out in the soot zone perhaps even up to Mars' size stayed internally stiff. In the 600 My allotted them, they also did not mutually collide (as much). So they never differentiated; they stayed protoplanets to the end.

When the parent star went red, it expanded deep into what, here, would be the asteroid-belt. Gobbling... C-type asteroids, super-Pallades.

Anyon

In more excitin' quasiparticle news (well, from last week): Pixy Misa says hello to the new qubit. In a two-dimensional lattice, researchers can get a non-Abelian topological order. They are keen on the "anyons", as being neither bosonic nor fermionic.

Therefore certainly not mesonic which, as I've just been taught ("schooled", as I put it), can be both.

What we have here is an exciton, the moving gap in the lattice. Apparently it is more stable. Which is great, for those working with quantum computers (if not for encryption) because for all the hype and the cost, nothing here has really gone beyond "yayy we got a quantum computer (no it doesn't do anything your Acer can't do)".

The education of Jesus the Christ

Last weekend I was pondering a Talmudic teacher / student story where Jesu(s), str8 outta Egypt, schools his teacher by, um, worshipping a brick. Much as such tales might appeal to a Graves or even a Jenkins; the Gospels have shunned this one. If for no other reason, herein Iesous has, himself, a rabbi over him. Even where a Gospel touches upon Jesu's life pre-ministry, like... sigh, Luke or Infancy Thomas; such cannot have anyone in-position to teach the Rabbi (as opposed to testing him). And the timing between Gospel and Talmud diverges way divergent.

Most readers refuse that the accounts can be bridged. I am not most readers.

Yesterday I got to pondering (again) Papias' backhanded review of Mark's Gospel: "not in the correct order" (or timing!). Mark was writing a passion-play about the first-fruit of Qiyama. All agree that, before acting out Zechariah upon the stage of the Temple courts, Jesus learnt his troll-trade in Galilee and other northern regions. His prime fishery was the "Pharisaic" community. That means rabbis.

I speculate: these were Jesu's rabbis. Mark would, then, have collected stories about Jesu's apprenticeship to transplant them to his ministry.

Mark's source would be some vita of this annoying young twerp. This biography was itself unimpressed with the Peraḥya-to-Shammai school. At the same time I must concede: most rabbis were equally unimpressed with Zechariah LARP, in any faction. Accordingly Jesu's followers were at first a very minor minority. But... maybe that's the point. Major rabbis like Hillel and Gamaliel could take Jesu less seriously than they took Shammai. Such a reformist nonchristian Jew could appreciate some tweaking of the big Shammai schnoz, perhaps all the better if a joke of a failed messiah was doing it.

The brick story was perfect for Hillel. It was ineptus for Luke (and for Mark); but even Christians did not forget all the agrapha, most famously those which "Thomas" caught.

Christ the Troll

The only Patheos author worth the read is repondering (2) Zechariah 9-14. This pseudonymous prophet had floated an antimessiah: a redeeming figure who would behave opposite from how most Jews thought Christ should behave. Burton Mack would call this template a Cynical one.

Philip Jenkins was summarising Robert Graves; Jenkins has offered little to supplement that summary, almost four years on. Let's do it for him! Today I'd ponder "Jesus in the Talmud". Of course the rabbis returned Jesu's coin againt "pharisees", with interest. But there are rabbis and there are rabbis.

I propose that our Lord Incarnate's scandalous behaviour over there is of a piece with a Zechariahvic messiah. For instance: Sanhedrin 107b relates of two Jesu's, ben Peraḥya and his student. Ben Peraḥya, a Shammai before Shammai, used to teach (per Wiki) one who sins and causes the masses to sin is not given the opportunity to repent. The elder inevitably loses confidence with his pupil and gives him silent-treatment. Then in his own fit of pique, the student sets up a brick to pay it homage. Upon being confronted, this Jesu throws the words of his teacher back at him; nothing left to lose, you see.

The school of Hillel sides with the younger Jesu, "on points" if you will. The teacher was at fault for being so strict he caused, in reaction, an idolatrous schism (from the Jews' perspective).

Did the Talmudic event literally happen? The timing is off: this very narrative introduces Jesu ben Peraḥya has having fled Hyrcanus 93 BC, coming back maybe a decade later. All this, many years Before the Christ (of the canon Gospels).

But maybe, in some now-lost original, the aggressive rabbi was not Ben Peraḥya. Where's the story noted prior to Talmud? The timing allows our Jesu to have his sojourn in Egypt which Matthew discusses. And exonerates Herod, or at least chooses a different villain (although was Herod better or worse than Hyrcanus?).

Maybe the story had first been murmured about Jesu bar Maryam and some nameless Shammaist. The rabbis who took the story back up again used this as "proof" that Jesu - Christ - was an idolater. Which he wasn't.

I must however ask what Christian gospel or literature of any sort would include this story. That's another post for another evening.

Anti-Helliconia

From Yale: "The search for more temperate Tatooines". Actually a seasonal Tatooine; the anti-Helliconia. A planet orbits a primary star, and a secondary (smaller) star orbits the lot. This is from Malena Rice, Konstantin Gerbig, and Andrew Vanderburg: The Orbital Geometries and Stellar Obliquities of Exoplanet-hosting Multistar Systems. Which they didn’t paywall! yayaaaayy

The paper is all about dynamics, so forming the systems isn’t a problem – this is the paper which defines such systems! Habitability on the other hand . . .

My first proviso is that the paper concentrates on transits, a sample of 184 systems subsequently restricted to forty (reserving the right to boost the sample-set again). So: they’re close-in to the star. Leave aside habitable-zones for now…

The eight systems of interest to the paper have spin-orbit and orbit-orbit alignment. The binaries are: Qatar-6, CoRoT-2, DS Tuc, HAT-P-1, HAT-P-22, HD 189733, and TrES-4; and V1298 Tau, for ternary (spin-orbit). This led the authorial ternary to add binary TrES-2, as although too faint for the 40-system sample, it looks to share qualities with the other seven. Binary separations are like 200+ AU; that third member of V1298 Tau was a “proxima” at 10,515 AU. All this means the secondary star is not providing much light let alone heat. Might as well be Proxima v. AB – hardly proximal, from the perspective of that one’s planet(s).

So Yale’s take is clickbait as it stands.

But that is transit; just what we see. The paper's good news is that alignments cluster at stars under 6100 K. Our own Sun is 5780 K at its 4.567 Gy. So these stars are “cool”: we can talk reasonably-wide habitable-zones and long ages, types G and K. We won't see nontransits at 1 AU but we can't rule them out (anymore).

Consider a (hypothetic) M star orbiting in the Uranus range 20 AU from a G or high-K. For the first billion years the M is baking the planets inward of that; but then it cools off. How far does the M have to sail before it has no effect on warming those inner planets? How to deliver water and other “ices” to the HZ? Maybe through the eccentricity it will force upon its Kirkwoods. I worry lest the leftover ices be soots, such that the inner planets end up too carbonic.

And some major stars huddle closer. The obvious instance is the Alpha Centauri mainline, a high G with a K, the K orbiting outside the G’s inner planets. The K would have to run a bit further out than in the system αC got. Although … I hope it wouldn’t interfere with the inner planets even being created. And I expect little moisture on those planets as isn’t imported.

I further wonder if we could do this if the system had started out Helliconian: the K star and its cold planet are, together, orbiting an A. But then the A goes redgiant and dwarf. Now the barycentre has shifted (abruptly) to the K. The K has billions more years to live. Mind: in this case the dwarf isn’t delivering much radiation to the system anymore. That sounds dynamically difficult.

How Luke broke the Gospel

That title may seem a Strong Statement, but I've been pondering Marcion's favourite work, the protoBezae, for some time now - so, let's assemble what I got, in one place.

First up: we'll consider what Luke had to work with. For timing, everyone agrees Luke wrote after the Temple had fallen. Everyone agrees he built from Mark and from Tradition (oral or not). We Catholics and Mark Goodacre would add: Matthew. Another direct source was Paul's first volume, especially "Romans"; which was also important to Mark's implied genealogy which Matthew reified. In secondary volumes I deem safe to assume Luke knew 1 Thessalonians; Jesus' ascension being the firstfruits of Rapture. I can be convinced to include Philippians, also; and further-afield, "To the Hebrews" although perhaps under Barnabas' byline. Luke has the postdisciple John citing 1 John. And Luke was at least contemporary with such as Jude, the Patmian Revelation to John, the tract we know as "Barnabas", 1 Peter, and 1 Clement. Somewhere around here, I've argued, comes the Hegesippus > Africanus lore around James. I allow that Luke no longer even had the Lachrymose, 1 Clement feeding that need.

But Luke did not have equal respect for the library provided to him.

Luke's Acts, by ending the Spirit's journey at Rome, ended Paul's career. There was nothing left for the Apostle to do, but die. This led to a truncated copy of "Romans" which - conveniently - did not have Paul promising Spain. Also Luke offers an artificially rosey view of the early intraChristian disputes because hey, Holy Spirit. I suspect all these conflicts between Luke and the emergent canon, later, led to the Ecclesia's decision not to promote the Western text's inclusion of 1 Clement among the Catholic Epistles (which survived to the Alexandrinus).

Luke's gentilism, which surpassed Mark's and maybe even Paul's, led to Bezae's evangelion outside Luke, and to parallel adulterations in 1 Thessalonians.

Last fall I've started pondering Oxyrhynchus 4009 and 5575, and their - more likely its - parallels with "2 Clement". Since then I've pondered also if Justin Martyr and Ignatius might have assumed a more Petrine presentation of the Gospel. I'll just Go There: it's the Gospel of Peter, known to Serapion. Those accepting Luke - like Irenaeus - meant one of Luke's sources had to draw the short straw, which straw was "Peter" - perhaps because it was that obvious a pseudepigraph based, itself, on Mark. The Apocalypse of Peter followed it; although, for dumb reasons, 2 Peter stayed.