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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| Well...where do you put it? |
At the beginning?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Absolutely not. This would clearly label it as a creation myth. It's a bit like the way Urban Myths are spread. Each person has been told by a source he himself implicitly trusts and therefore believes it. But when spreading the story he can't say, "A friend of a friend told me..." since this will immediately label it as hearsay (which, as it happens, this one really isn't) so he say's, "A friend of mine -- who I completely trust, told me...)
The point about Christians is that they know the story to be true so from their point of view any inclusion of local colour, detail etc which will increase uptake is perfectly proper. Only the Jesuit knows that Jesus was not born in Sunflowerland and he's not telling.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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DPCrisp wrote: | Well...where do you put it? |
At the beginning? |
Yes.
Mick's arguments notwithstanding, stories that you believe are true, but will not fit within the established timeline, can be positioned only in one place: the beginning.
This is precisely how History can actively grow far out into the distant past. As duplicate stories accumulate, they assume their only plausible position, which is prior to the established sequential history.
So let's imagine ourselves again as that 14th century archivist, attempting to make sense of the history of the human race.
Let's imagine that you have now, not just one duplicate story, but a whole series of doubled tales that do not fit the established timeline -- tales involving unknown people performing rational activities and participating in conflicts that you can immediately recognize as rational. For all the world, this looks like history but no history you recognize.
As we have established, it is rational to assume that these stories happened before the history of which you are already aware. So clearly, as an ethical archivist, you will position the stories at the beginning of your history.
But how will you decide the chronological order in which to arrange them?
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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Mick Harper wrote:
Absolutely not. This would clearly label it as a creation myth. |
And that's exactly what it becomes, once transplanted to that position. The duplicate tale of (relatively) recent history is there reworked to explain national origins.
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I started reading The Odyssey a few days ago. (My education never required me to read this. Actually, my education never required me to have even heard of it.)
It says this in the introduction:
| The exclusion of Iliadic episodes from the Odyssey can scarcely be accidental. We are left, as I see it, to choose between two conclusions. Either the poet of the Odyssey was ignorant of the Iliad, or he deliberately avoided trespassing on the earlier poem. |
Or, the third option is that the Odyssey was written before the Iliad. I googled this to see who had considered it. Apparently, Virgil thought the Odyssey was written before the Iliad. It was considered a minority, even eccentric view.
This made me wonder who Virgil was in the Fomenko chronology, since Virgil couldn't have existed in his view. I couldn't find that, but I found what Fomenko thinks of Homer's works:
| The Trojan War and the Gothic War are most likely to be phantom reflections of real wars that took place during the Crusade epoch. The Trojan War is a real event; however, it took place in the XIII century A.D. and not in deep antiquity. Homer's epic poem of the Trojan War is therefore an intricate compound myth telling us about the crusades of the Middle ages. The fall of Troy is the fall of New Rome = Constantinople = Jerusalem. | |
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Homer's poems weren't actually written down until a few centuries after Homer's death. Here's some of Fomenko's thoughts on how the oral tradition preserved the poems. (It's funny to read regardless what you think of Fomenko.)
The blind poet chanted his two poems before all kinds of audience many a time. The listeners eventually managed to memorize them. Then the poet died; however, his compatriots remained, and they had learnt the entire volume of these 700 pages by heart and verbatim. These people had carried on with the oral tradition, telling the poems to a new audience. They eventually perished as well, yet their "oral tradition", as historians are so very keen to call it, continued and became inherited by their children. This is supposed to have lasted for several hundred years. Towns fell and empires collapsed; still the descendants of Homer's first listeners would keep on chanting two gigantic poems by heart.
Just try to memorize as little as the first hundred pages of the Iliad merely by listening to them chanted so as to keep them in memory for about two decades. Failing that, try to learn by heart reading the actual text of the book - something Homer's descendants didn't have. We shall be told that "the ancients had a better memory", which is highly unlikely - the contrary is more probable, since there weren't any libraries at the time, nor anything resembling a unified education system. | |
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Rocky wrote: | | Homer's poems weren't actually written down until a few centuries after Homer's death. Here's some of Fomenko's thoughts on how the oral tradition preserved the poems. (It's funny to read regardless what you think of Fomenko.) |
Fomenko, to my complete satisfaction, utterly demolishes the official line on Homer. I am personally convinced that the Iliad is a work composed just sometime before and around the time of Milton and his Paradise Lost.
The reason so much classical literature gets quoted by so many of our first poets and playwrights: The classical literature had only been written just a few decades before; it was popular pulp reading material at the time; "classical literature" was the latest rage sweeping Europe.
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| Ishmael wrote: | | I am personally convinced that the Iliad is a work composed just sometime before and around the time of Milton and his Paradise Lost. |
That would be Shakespeare's day, wouldn't it? Are there any unmistakable allusions to the Iliad in any of Shakespeare's works? I tried googling this - it seems to not be the case.
Troilus and Cressida can be traced to a work called Il Filostrato by Giovanni Boccaccio, a friend of Petrarch. Fomenko claims that Petrarch is one of the main concoctors of ancient history.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I noticed that Santa turned up in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe -- the recent movie shown on telly -- but the point was that Santa was very much not dressed in red.
This was confusing to me, never mind the target audience, so we need to know the reason. The only one I could come up with is that the book is not yet out of copyright and the author's estate insisted on, as it were, not advertising coca-cola (the origin of Santa's red). But this doesn't sound right. Is Hollywood coming over all authentic maybe? This would be an arbinger since the moguls are an unfailing guide to future social history.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| The only one I could come up with is that the book is not yet out of copyright and the author's estate insisted on, as it were, not advertising coca-cola (the origin of Santa's red). |
I can't remember the book that well but seem to recall that C.S. Lewis's Santa couldn't wear red as long as Narnia was in the grip of winter, under the rule of the White Witch, but at the end I think he does appear in his usual jolly attire along with hitherto silenced bells. The red, in this case, was a symbol of freedom, or rather the freedom to be Christian. I think.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| The red, in this case, was a symbol of freedom, or rather the freedom to be Christian. I think. |
Typical Lewisian bollocks. He just didn't know the true origin, that's all. This reminds me of the day I disagreed with Tolkien on some Anglo-Saxon website or other. I was convicted unanimously of blasphemy since Tolkien was not regarded as a middle-ranking Anglo-Saxon scholar (his actual academic status) but The Master From Whom All Flows.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | This was confusing to me, never mind the target audience, so we need to know the reason. |
I assume it is because he is not so much "Santa" as he is the older -- and more "mythical" -- Father Christmas. I believe Lewis -- in the book -- was suggesting Santa survives from a pre-Christian, Pagan yule-tide tradition, better represented in the Father Christmas figure.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Yes, yes, I know all that. The point is whether Lewis knew the origin of the red Santa. The general point is quite important because 'tradition' can have remarkably shallow roots. Not just that Red Santa dates from around 1925 (so unlikely to have affected Lewis?) but that the whole British Christmas dates mainly from Prince Albert introducing all the German stuff (trees, prezzies) and then Dickens popularising it.
Many of our most ancient customs are doubtless the fruit of scholarly folklorists but of course it's one of our tasks to find out which ones are old as well.
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TelMiles
In: London
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Alas Mick, coca cola is not the origin of Santa's red. It actually comes from Germany-ish, and represents the wearing of a deer's fur inside out. It was something Saint Nick was supposed to have done if my memory serves me right. The coca cola thing is a myth that Coca Cola have been only all too eager to perpetuate.
There are renditions of Santa wearing many different colours of clothing, with green being another popular one. It's all just confused fact and mythology and red came out on top.
_________________
Against all Gods.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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See what I mean? The centuries-old tradition that Santa's red is from Coca-Cola is actually very modern!
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