reading frances yates, “giordano bruno and the hermetic tradition”, about 16th century occultist stuff and what followed from it - it’s good and takes the tack you want from this kind of thing, which is that of someone who isn’t themselves a believer but is still interested in the question of why these other guys believed without necessarily just writing them off as delusional or fanatics.
there’s a funny point raised early on which is that part of the impact of this stuff at the time just came from errors in dating - finding these post-christian syncretic beliefs which mixed bits and pieces of that with egyptian mythology and believing that they’d stumbled on pre-christian “ancient” beliefs which weirdly seemed to predict and anticipate jesus, and which therefore acted as license to explore all the other zodiac stuff stirred in. it’s funny but after a while you do find yourself sympathising a little with the church guys who had to deal with this mangle of astrology and kabbala and talisman magic being presented on their doorstep. don’t worry, guys, it’s all street-legal.
looking forward to getting to the memory palace stuff AKA the founding point of 90s puzzle cd-rom aesthetics
Just read Nathan Ballingrud’s 2013 collection North American Lake Monsters, and if you can stomach depressing stories about people confronting supernatural things in very realistic, modern settings, then I can issue a high recommendation. I can promise you will find plenty of vivid descriptions about really intense emotional or psychological states, and monstrous or gory anatomy as well. There is a TV show produced after this collection, which I know nothing about.
My favorite stories from the collection might be “The Monsters of Heaven” and the title piece. In the former you get a marriage being strained by a kidnapped child amidst a weird situation where angel-like things are appearing and being “hoarded” or held hostage by people. The latter is about a man who just got out of prison fumbling a vacation with his wife and teenage daughter out at a lake, where some inexplicable monster thing has beached itself and is decomposing. The other stories are mostly good too, like “S.S.” and there is even a good At the Mountains of Madness Antarctic expedition pastiche called “The Crevasse” by Ballingrud and Daile Baley.
Can’t underestimate the psychological effect of the trappings of authority. It’s a photo of a printed book, on decent book paper; there’s a typeface, layout, a title. It’s a Work of Art. Type these exact same words as a tweet and watch the hate brigades deploy
i am not sure if this is worth posting about here. but because it’s far enough outside of my own extremely narrow research field stuff for it to be considered leisure reading, thought i’d mention that i have been skimming paulette steeves’ "the indigenous paleolithic of the western hemisphere’ and finding it really interesting.
it’s about evidence for human inhabitation of the western hemisphere prior to 12,000 bce, which is i guess relatively controversial? or at least runs counter to sort of popular knowledge re: the ‘clovis cultures’ that people use to argue for more recent migration. the author goes through the archaeological evidence from pre-clovis sites, but is more focused on arguing for the importance of demonstrating alternate possibilities for arrival of people in the western hemisphere to contemporary indigenous people, and talking about the racist assumptions that have made it harder to make the case for pre-clovis evidence. it’s really interesting but i am finding i don’t know enough about the archaeological side of it to really get much out of it. the remaining chapters are on oral traditions and other sources of information about the distant past which i think i will be more keen on.
does anyone else follow this stuff? is the pre-clovis theory really still that controversial? it seems like steeves has reams of evidence to support much longer histories of inhabitation so i’m kind of having a hard time figuring out if the 12,000 bce date is really still the gold standard among archaeologists, or if it is just a kind of popular misconception at this point.
Most archaeologists seems to agree that the crossing over from Siberia happened sometime between 20,000 and 15,000 years ago, with the land bridge that was used to cross existing as far back as 45K years ago. I think the controversy is that Steeves is suggesting that people were inhabiting the Americas 130K years ago.
has the book itself been controversial? afaik she is not introducing any new archaeological evidence (or analysis of evidence that doesn’t come from other archaeologists), and from what ive read so far is not actually claiming the 130k date as fact, just one of several that have been posited
