gradical

it doesn't have to get done, it just has to be perfect

while obv people getting the iliad's time focus wrong and saying that it ended with achilles' death is a very annoyingly common mistake i also think it's kind of fitting in relation to the ways achilles DOES die in the iliad. he ends the poem having basically killed himself in more ways than one after killing hector and he knows it. the last time we see him we know as well as he does that he's got an expiration date and it's very soon. he's alreasy chased around and killed a man in his own armour. not to mention all the ways in which he rejects life after patroclus' death. from his lying resembling that of patroclus' corpse (κειται Πάτροκλος/κειτο), to being sustained by ambrosia instead of human food just like patroclus is by thetis. like the entire murder/suicide thing going on between achilles and hector PLUS the idea that patroclus' death is modeled after and made to represent achilles' own from a narrative standpoit makes everything much more i tresting. i know it's definetly been said before but achilles' relationshio with death and his suicidality even should be taken into much more consideratkon in conversation about him.

god israel's destruction of tyre is like especially depressing tbh like thats one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world. people have lived there since the bronze age. there is so, so so much history and world heritage there that's being blown up and destroyed forever because its existence doesn't fit israel's nationalist vision of history.

(stumbling out of the document covered in blood) ok i wrote 100 words

gobbet perhaps one of the most charming academic terms to me.............. word that means a lump of some sort of substance. maybe meat but it could be anything. kind of gives the impression of an ambiguous blob of something that has been put wetly down in front of you. But☝️ here we use it to mean a small section or piece of text you are going to dissect and analyse as deeply as you can to the best of your ability

[one single bloodcurdling agonized scream] ok time to lock in

isn’t it so interesting that media about ancient rome consistently chooses to portray black characters as enslaved to white masters even when they have every possibility to do literally anything else. isn’t it so interesting how they not only almost always choose to cast black actors for north african characters when the characters are enslaved, but also consciously portray their clothing, hairstyles, accents and traditions as ~vaguely west african~ even when it is very far from the north african culture they’re claiming to portray? isn’t all of that so interesting

i was trying to explain to my mom why this pisses me off so badly and i think it comes down to this: time and time again, western media refuses to imagine a world where the enslaved are not black africans and the black africans are not enslaved

every year i have to submit a progress report to my funders which basically amounts to several thousand words of me saying "yes i am still working on my phd" and my supervisor confirming "yes they're still working on the phd" and quite frankly i fail to see how it's a good use of anybody's time to be writing or reading it

doubly so when they announced out of nowhere 2 months ago that the government is cancelling this whole funding programme and completely retooling it in september (to which i say: lol. lmao) so like. i KNOW they don't give a shit any more either

imagine you're Plato and you get resurrected and the first thing someone tells you is your name now means "not having sex" and you're like haha linguistic coincidences are wild and they're like no it's a direct reference to you as a person

re: tags several people have added this post is obviously not intended to imply an endorsement of Mormonism, with which your blogger has a history - it's simply the most immediate religious tradition that springs to mind whose origins are as a 19th century NRM. but it's also a somewhat instructive comparison in that Mormonism also makes claims to historicity and continuity with ancient practice that are, to put it mildly, extremely dubious

im sorry but this is misguided. by the 20thc Romanticism was far less relevant within paganistic worship reconstruction as well as neo-paganism practices. The majority of these sprung out of fascism. Wicca is a good example of this, as well as any modern polly-hellenic website which are often full of various dogwhistles for white supremacy, eugenics, and 20thc European Fascist imagery. To ignore the extremely extensive, well documented, and influential links between modern European and unamerican 'Paganism' and fascism is a huge blind spot.

definitely don’t mean to downplay this. my thinking in this post is largely about Margaret Murray’s witch-cult hypothesis, whose origins can be traced to Karl Ernst Jarcke and Franz Josef Mone in the context of early 19th century German Romanticism, and which very much gets picked up by 20th century Wicca and feminist attempts to reconstruct “matriarchal pagan religion” or similar. but the association of neopaganism with extreme nationalism and antisemitism is there from the beginning and as you point out, particularly reconstructionist Germanic paganism and Roman paganism à la Julius Evola and later the reconstruction of Hellenic paganism as practiced by the Golden Dawn cannot be extricated from the history of fascism and the far-right.