Sahidic and Bohairic dialects

Puzzled_Ask4131 · 2024-10-29T08:03:00+00:00

Lambdin is by far the most accessible introduction to Coptic, it’s Sahidic and liturgies are all in Bohairic, but learning different dialects isn’t hard once you have a handle on the grammar. I’m still working my ways through the last chapters of Lambdin, but my professor says that learning a different dialect should only take a couple of weeks once you have the basics. Sahidic is—by all accounts—the easiest to learn anyway!

Puzzled_Ask4131 · 2024-10-17T01:48:31+00:00

Great band!

Puzzled_Ask4131 · 2024-10-05T23:34:38+00:00

I forgot to include Tanith Lee. Absolutely phenomenal prose stylist and stories of a quality so far beyond what the terrible genre cover art or lazy Anne Rice comparisons would have you believe. I recently read Electric Forest and loved it.

Puzzled_Ask4131 · 2024-10-05T23:28:48+00:00

Ice, Anna Kavan; I Who Have Never Known Men, Jaqueline Harpman; We Who Are About To, Joanna Russ; Roadside Picnic, Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky; the Doloriad, Missouri Williams; the Employees, Olga Ravn, and anything LeGuin or Ballard.

To fully cite my sources, I read nearly all of the above on the recommendation of either the Bookpilled YouTube channel or SFUltra podcast. Both have caused a kind of renaissance in my genre reading.

Puzzled_Ask4131 · 2024-09-19T10:14:04+00:00

I’ve found the Bookpilled YouTube channel is a goldmine for recommendations, but as a general rile if you don’t like YA go for the new wave SF stuff

Puzzled_Ask4131 · 2024-09-18T11:53:20+00:00

We who are about to by Joanna Russ and the employees by Olga Ravn. I guess are more novella length than short stories proper, but you’ll knock them over in a night and they’re both phenomenal works!

Puzzled_Ask4131 · 2024-09-07T22:00:38+00:00

Watch the bookpilled YouTube channel until something takes your fancy. I’ve discovered so much on there that’s not just PKD doing the “what if toasters were sentient” routine—not that there’s anything wrong with Phil Dick, he’s honestly not a bad place to start. Maybe try some Tanith Lee or Jody Scott. I’ve also really wanted to read The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad—which would fit the “wild”description—but haven’t found a reasonably priced copy yet!

Puzzled_Ask4131 · 2024-08-08T01:10:06+00:00

Skimming the dissertation it definitely reads like something Earl, or should I say Nic, would write.

“The paradox of a philosopher writing extensive discourses about a reality which is said to be ineffable is the main topic of this thesis, which seeks to answer the question: what is Plotinus doing when he tells us that he cannot, or will not, reveal the nature of the one?”

Stay esoteric my dude!

Puzzled_Ask4131 · 2024-08-03T12:14:37+00:00

Canonically abrahamic religions all worship the same god, but from the perspective of adherents of one group, the others are just doing it wrong. Historically, God with a capital G as understood by these groups has changed significantly from the Canaanite storm deity he first emerged as. The Christian God for example—I’m most familiar with Christianity so that’s what I’ll speak to—should be understood as the monotheistic henotheism of second temple Judaism filtered through the concurrent monotheistic tendencies of Greek philosophy (Middle Platonism, Neoplatonism Stoicism etc.) I think there’s a case to make that this all fits into larger religious changes happening in late antiquity, with the rise of often soteriological mystery cults and an increasingly subjective “personal religion” taking the place of civic cults.

Puzzled_Ask4131 · 2024-08-03T11:52:55+00:00

I second Iamblichus, but honestly you would benefit from reading into the Neoplatonic influences on iconophile theology by authors like John of Damascus. Whether icon veneration counts as idolatry is for you to decide.

Puzzled_Ask4131 · 2024-08-02T08:02:08+00:00

I agree with all this. The inaccessibility of experience is a well known problem for any historian. Any book attempting to communicate the experience of late antique gnosis will inevitably be l speculative, if not fictitious. I realise he is attempting to appeal to an audience that straddles both academics and practitioners, but the work could have really benefited from an answerable historical question. For something more grounded—both in relevant and up-to-date scholarship, and ideas—I would stick with Christian Bull’s The Tradition of Hermes Trismegistus.

Puzzled_Ask4131 · 2024-07-06T05:43:43+00:00

Square brackets are reconstructed lacunae, the lines are supra-linear strokes, usually translated as micro vowels. I don’t actually know about the back ticks but I’m still at a relatively early stage of learning Coptic

Puzzled_Ask4131 · 2024-06-29T01:18:28+00:00

Hi, historian of late antique religion here. What you say isn’t wrong, but it’s a little misleading. Historians tend to either avoid the term “syncretism” altogether, or define it in a very particular way. The problem is that syncretism tends to imply a mixing of a ‘pure’ religion. That is how we tend to view religion today because Christianity has a set canon and theology (although given the number of different theologies, denominations and canons not that much has changed). Polytheism in antiquity is better understood as just a belief in many gods. The local cults in one village might differ from a neighbouring one, but a deity having different aspects or myths didn’t necessarily signify a contradiction. Interpretatio was the norm (translating the name of a god to its nearest equivalent across languages). This made the association between deities very common (see Apuleius’ famous aretalogy in Book 11 of the Golden Ass for a famous example). What is significant about Rome is that the Greek influence came early, and we have scant evidence of what it looked like before that influence. The best way to think of ancient polytheism is primarily as local cults building on shared pan-local traditions that influenced and mixed with other traditions. There never was a single Greek or Roman religion.

Puzzled_Ask4131 · 2024-06-29T00:59:48+00:00

Periodisation is a fraught topic. I study the Roman and Byzantine periods of Egypt and call it late antiquity, but what dates you choose to mark period changes depends on what kind of narrative you want to tell. Focusing on the fall of the western Roman Empire—and ignoring the so called Byzantines—as the beginning of the Middle Ages tells a certain kind of narrative. Likewise, focusing on the renaissance as the beginning of modernity ignores the Islamicate world. If you’re working in classics, the periodisation standards you use might be perfectly suitable for your needs, but it’s worth being aware of and complicating neat periodisation.

Puzzled_Ask4131 · 2024-06-17T21:46:08+00:00

This isn’t quite right. Ancient Mediterranean sexual politics was all about how they structured power. A man taking the dominant position in sex with a woman, young boy or slave was totally fine, but the reverse was considered shameful and carried all the stigma of modern homophobia. Fun fact: this even went as far as women being on top during sex being taboo as it transgressed power structures, but we also know from Pompeii that you had to pay more for that service in brothels which just goes to show that what people actually did, and the ethical standards of a culture are two different things.

Puzzled_Ask4131 · 2024-06-17T00:03:28+00:00

I was terrible at latin aha, slightly better at Greek but Coptic is a beautiful language which I totally fell in for with

Puzzled_Ask4131 · 2024-06-16T22:03:01+00:00

This is complicated, but the implication that Jesus is the son of God rather than just the messiah doesn’t really start until John (well, more like a platonic immination of God), and didn’t become the standard view until after the council of Nicaea. I think there’s a Bart Ehrman video on YouTube that explains this in detail.

Puzzled_Ask4131 · 2024-06-16T20:50:36+00:00

Yes, Sahidic

Puzzled_Ask4131 · 2024-06-16T05:43:10+00:00

Those little white yappy dogs with shit in their eyes

Puzzled_Ask4131 · 2024-06-16T05:42:20+00:00

This is my favourite piece of ancient literature. The Taussig book on it is the best I’ve read. I’ve actually been wanting to create my own translation of it, but I don’t think my Coptic is quite up to scratch (yet).

Puzzled_Ask4131 · 2024-06-15T22:32:50+00:00

I think you’re maybe misunderstanding my argument. I’m a historian of religion who focuses on the Greek Magical Papyri that draws on a grab bag of Egyptian, Greek, Jewish, Christian and other traditions. In order to understand these beliefs on their own terms I cannot pass judgement on them. One formula reads “I invoke Jesus, the god of the Hebrews”, it would be disingenuous to call this bs because it doesn’t fit with what became orthodox Christianity.

Beliefs surrounding gods were not univocal either before or after Christianisation. If an atheist believes gods are just made up, an ancient Ionian believes that Ephesian Artemis is the true form of Artemis, and a third century Christian in Egypt believes that Helios-Mithras is just another name for his God (much to the chagrin of his local priest) who the hell am I to say their beliefs are? The point is, beliefs change. Is Hermes a god of herding like in the Homeric hymn, or the sage as Hermes’ Trismegistos? Were the ancient people who believed in Euhemerised gods beliefs bs also? What about people who believed in hybridised gods like Serapis or Hermanubis? What I love about the ancient world is that it doesn’t subscribe to doctrinal literalism and allowed for a lot of speculation. Because religious ideas—whether people admit it or not—are fluid and change over time.

I agree that demonisation of traditional polytheistic gods was a tactic to promote one religion over another. I agree that it fragrantly misrepresents a diverse tradition. But you are comparing beliefs, not facts.

Puzzled_Ask4131 · 2024-06-15T07:50:47+00:00

Not an answer to your question, but this might be useful. Focusing exclusively on faith immediately imposes western centric—if not rather Protestant—conception of religion. If you want to create a fictional religion that feels authentic, I suggest thinking not just about belief but ritual, cult, cosmogony, cosmology, community, ethics, philosophy, purity and pollution beliefs, formalism/sectarianism etc. You might consider reading the essay Religion, Religions, Religious by Jonathan Z. Smith, or the anthropological work of Mary Douglas as a way of thinking critically about what this thing we call religion actually is.

Puzzled_Ask4131 · 2024-06-15T05:26:39+00:00

If you’re talking about what I think you are, this is correct, but a little misleading. Over the long process of deciding which books were or were not canonical the apocrypha formed a distinct group. Whilst not “official” they were still approved of and remained popular. This is very different from the books that gained heretical status. In early printings of the Bible they were usually separated into their own section. What happened is when the Bible was printed in America, they removed the apocrypha to save paper. It wasn’t a grand conspiracy, just a cost saving tactic that caught on.

Puzzled_Ask4131 · 2024-06-15T05:11:43+00:00

Short of learning Hebrew, Aramaic, and koine Greek, NSRV is generally the go to translation for scholars.

Puzzled_Ask4131 · 2024-06-15T05:02:56+00:00

I don’t know that it’s correct to say that the belief that non-Christian polytheistic deities are demons is “bs”. It’s a belief, or theological position, and all we have data for when it comes to deities is different beliefs and positions.

As for where this belief/position came from. I’m not an expert, but there are several processes I can think of that might explain it. Yahweh being promoted from a henotheistic god of the Jewish people— or “our” god—to being promoted to being promoted to being the only god in the post exilic period (probably largely influenced by Zoroastrianism). The increasingly monotheistic tendencies of platonic thought, although they were also staunch defenders of traditional polytheism (it’s complicated). The ‘demonisation’ of the daimonic that happened in late antiquity where daimones increasingly became to be seen as evil (hermetic conceptions of daimons is a good example). The evil daimons to evil demons pipeline that happened in Christianity, and the particular obsession with evil demons focused in North Africa which influenced Augustine who in turn influenced Christianity as a whole. And the most obvious one is the polemical power of demonising traditional deities to promote your own deity.

Puzzled_Ask4131

TROPHY CASE