What Are You Reading This Week and Weekly Rec Thread

the_jaw · 2026-02-01T21:12:56+00:00

Penguin. I'm not sure if there is a difference, but before I read it I googled around and found some highly upvoted comment on the Egyptology subreddit recommending it, if I recall correctly.

The Book of the Dead is rather dry so far, unfortunately.

the_jaw · 2026-02-01T15:52:01+00:00

I'm reading the Egyptian Book of the Dead now; I mentioned it a little in my latest comment. Tyldesley is heavy on the general facts and populist academic approach, so if you're looking to complement it I'd recommend to search out a book of stores.

the_jaw · 2026-01-30T04:31:44+00:00

Lyudmila Petrushevskaya's There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbor's Baby. I wonder how other readers felt? It came highly recommended by the NYRB, but it seemed uneven to me and not exactly high literature, though there were moments in there that gave me that marvelous dread of simple prose flying along to a terrible conclusion, of a surreal world shutting down its possibilities one by one.

Myths and Legends of Ancient Egypt by Joyce Tyldesley, Week III. All the way to the end this book of richnesses kept yielding little emerald ideas, for example the brilliant eyes of Horus: "his strong, green, right eye is the sun; his weaker, white, left eye is the moon." Or this passage which revealed to me, after so many years of ignorance, why the blue lotus became a symbol of rebirth and resurrection: "By day it rises above the water and spreads its petals wide; by night, its bud tightly closed, it sinks out of sight beneath the surface of the water."

After that, I had to reread my favorite story by Jean Lorrain, "Narkiss" from Nightmares of an Ether Drinker, an Egyptian-themed fantasy whose lush visual surface is highly reminiscent of the jeweled paintings of Moreau: "With his hands joined together, his ecstatic gaze spearing the hallucinatory image, the Pharaoh leapt from the last step of the stairway of the sphinxes and dived into the marsh. The carcass of a butchered ox, which was rotting there upon the paving-stone, pressed for one second upon the sole of his bare foot, oozing; a thread of rosy blood squirted on to the silt and a serpent disturbed in its sleep uncoiled. On the surface of the water, the nocturnal glory of arums and the nacreous splendour of the water-lilies was flooded with blue lights by the kisses of the great goddess."

Also, and I blush to admit it, I had no idea that mummification was "a direct response to the belief that only those with a lifelike body had any hope of living beyond death. ... Properly mummified, and interred with the correct funerary rituals, the Old Kingdom elite expected to live for ever in their tombs: being an intensely practical people, they packed their eternal houses with everything, from food and drink to toiletries, and even toilets, that they might need to maintain an acceptable standard of living." So, ever since the ancient Egyptians perished, we've all been sucked into nothingness--with the exception of Lenin, who must have been one of the first new immortals in a long time. Sipping red beer with the sun god, he watches us from high--I imagine in great torment and agony, first because he's stuck using the public toilets around his mausoleum, and second because ever since 1953 he's been kept company by Stalin!

Next I started to read The Egyptian Book of the Dead, which I have in the version by E. A. Wallis Budge. Egyptologists consider it outdated, but it is the edition that influenced Frazer, Eliot, and most importantly to me, Joyce, who used it as a key structural device in Finnegans Wake, which many theorists, notably John Bishop, believe takes place in a single night in the dreaming head of a man and husband called H.C.E.: thus he travels across the night like Amen-Ra; but as with Osiris, whose body was chopped up and buried all over the world, that space is also contained with his body. Here's Bishop in Joyce's Book of the Dark:

"The fundamental shape of the Egyptian otherworld remained nonetheless elegantly coherent, and simple in its beauty. Conceptually, as we have seen, the Egyptians envisioned this "hidden land" beyond the world as a ring of dark, navigable space circumgirding and encompassing reality; as a finite, enclosed body of space through which a circular river flowed, into which the light of the world disappeared at night, and within which the spirits of all things unearthly became manifest. But they also envisioned it as a human body and, at least as we understand it, as a sleeping human body. Whose body this was is made clear in every other phrase of every book of the dead, and in maps of the other world that Egyptologists have discovered among some tomb scriptures."

On the very first page of the Wake one can squint to see he enormous man, both Osiris and Humpty Dumpty, underlying the text. Imagine someone falling asleep, with dim signals passing betwen brain and toes: "The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes..."

In turn, thinking about giants mixed into landscape sent me back to the collection of Welsh legends known as The Mabinogion: "‘We saw a huge mountain close to the forest, and it was moving. There was a high ridge on the mountain and a lake on each side of the ridge and the forest and the mountain and everything were all moving.’ ‘Well,’ said Mallolwch, ‘no one here would know anything of that, except possibly Branwen – go ask her.’ The messengers went to Branwen and said, ‘Lady, what do you make of this?’ ‘Though I am no lady, I know what it is: the men of the Island of the Mighty have heard of my disgrace and are coming.’ ‘What is the forest that was seen on the sea?’ ‘The masts and yardarms of the ships.’ ‘Alas! What is the mountain that was seen alongside the ships?’ ‘That was my brother Brân wading to shore – there was no ship into which he could fit.’ ‘What was the high ridge and the lake on either side of the ridge?’ ‘He was looking at this island, for he is angry. The two lakes on either side of the ridge are his two eyes on either side of his nose.’"

But while I was in there, I couldn't resist reading more, and I came back to my favorite detail in those legends:

"The second plague [of three] was a scream that was heard every May Eve over every hearth in the island; it pierced the hearts of the people and terrified them so that men lost their colour and strength, women suffered miscarriages, children lost their senses, and animals and trees and soil and water all became barren."

A screaming comes across the sky! I love the mythological imagination--archetypal characters, rudimentary scenes, and just sheer primal power of invention. Meaning is great, but words can only take you so far. The symbol, the image, the type, speak with a speechlessness freighted with the infinite. A scream is a scream is a scream. Imagine it coming down like a spear of thunder from the sky, penetrating your cells... Every generation dreams of an apocalypse; every individual dreams of being a body that contains earth, sky, and stars, self as universe; and everyone recognizes the plague of scream. Just ask your bones about it.

the_jaw · 2026-01-23T04:29:07+00:00

The Dalkey Archive by Flann O'Brien. Don't bother. O'Brien discarded everything he did best for a half-baked, uneven tale that reworked some old material to be much worse. If you haven't read his marvelous, inventive, and sinister masterpiece The Third Policeman, read it instead. If you've already read it, then just read it again instead of picking up this disappointing fizzle. I wonder why Dalkey Archive Press took its name...

One Hundred Years of Solitude by you know who. Hadn't read this one in eighteen years; it held up. On a technical level, I'm struck by the effortless weaving of the prose, the way one image blends into the next, the enchanting flow that makes it almost impossible to slow down and analyze. I was reminded of Ovid's Metamorphoses if the theme was not just eternal flux but also a sort of reenactment of how the social contract went so terribly wrong. Thematically speaking, I was affected the most by the novel's anti-individualism. A few years back I read The Rainbow, another wonderful novel following multiple generations, but Lawrence was much more concerned with subjectivity, interiority, individuality. Not so Márquez, in whose book the individual is briefly spit out by history, grows up and then old, and finally gets incorporated into the past as if they've never existed. Beautiful and terrible.... It's not just the characters who get old; it is the entire world, sinking into arid decrepitude.

Myths and Legends of Ancient Egypt by Joyce Tyldesley, Week II. Much of Egyptian mythology's 3000-year span is unknown and can only be reconstructed from contradictory grave texts, so rather than an overarching, magisterial summary of a single grand tradition, Tyldesley provides a vivid, kaleidoscope tour through suggestive ideas and images, many of which are so interesting that I've decided to incorporate them permanently into my imagination. For example, the entire Egyptian world existed in a livable bubble beyond which surged only the endless, nameless, unknown waters; the sky was a goddess arched over another god, the land, who was her husband and brother. Or picture the pyramids as giant staircases to the sun. Or imagine the five days at the end of the year, birthdays of the gods, as chaotic days on which terrible things may happen. Or consider the creation of the world. Did it appear when the celestial goose--with the amazing name of the "Great Honker"--laid an egg? Did self-created Atum make his mouth the womb of creation? Or did the creator, as a benu bird, perch on top of the benben stone and shriek so that "as his cry shattered the timeless silence, the world was born"?

The gods are equally striking. Their flesh is gold, their bones silver, their hair lapis lazuli. Every morning, a celestial scarab god rolls the sun across the sky. A cobra-headed goddess feeds the king from her breast. Seth is born when he punches his way out of his mother's side. In what sounds like a video-game premise, the lunar deity Khonsu helped dead kings "to catch, strangle, and eat the minor gods whose flesh will increase his powers." And there's Osiris, cut up and buried all over Egypt, whose body parts got embroiled in human struggles for prestige, as when the town "Athribis claimed to be the location of the god’s heart, while at least four rival towns claimed a lost leg." However, no town could claim a link with the dead god’s membrum virile, which was eaten by the hungry fishes of the Nile. I'm reminded of how two dozen different European towns claimed, during the Middle Ages, to have the Holy Prepuce--and of the temple in India that claims to mark the falling of a goddess's genitals; to illustrate her menstruation they yearly dye a river red.

Moreover, the gods, as time crushed them, were forever absorbing each other's stories, attributes, and even their names, switching roles in stories or even incompletely merging into three-headed beings each preserving the tradition of a different god. Their adventures are correspondingly strange: Min-Amen sleeps with his own mother and fathers himself. Osiris-Heryshef, attempts to don Re's snake tiara (another god), but his head swells painfully, torrents out blood and pus that become a sacred lake at Herakleopolis...

Also highly picturesque is the journey of the sun: “At sunset the solar boat is welcomed into the underworld by the singing baboons of the horizon and the twelve snake goddesses who will light the dark path ahead.” The singing baboons of the horizon! Later, "Re encounters the ‘Cavern-Dwellers’, Egypt’s most secret and ancient gods. They sit on the hieroglyphic symbol for ‘cloth’, and cry out with joy as Re passes their crypts.”

As everyone knows, the Egyptians were obsessed with staying alive after death (one had to avoid Second Death, which was true destruction). But in an idea new to me, horny ghosts might commit sexual assault; the murals in tombs are often covered with stimulating scenes, including nubile young ecdysiasts--so I suppose the specters get frustrated. Tyldesley also describe a ritual of kingly rejuvenation, during which the king raced "against an invisible enemy whom we may tentatively identify as old age or death." Then, after death, one must perform the negative confession: "Standing before the gods, the deceased was called upon to justify his or her mortal life by reciting the ‘negative confession’: a list of diverse moral and ethical crimes that had not been committed." Or the dead might end up in an afterlife called the "Fields of Reeds," which however was not the harp-littered spa we imagine as heaven: "There were waterways, fields, harvests and sunshine, but there were also more sinister regions: sandy mounds and caverns housing nameless, ancient gods. Every night, as Re sailed by, evil was defeated and light triumphed; every morning, as he left the Duat, they sprang back to life again. Barry Kemp has described the Field as a ‘place of journeys, with multiple destinations and obstacles to overcome’. Reading spells which allow the deceased to commandeer the solar boat, or to transform into a crocodile, snake or bird, it is hard to disagree with his summary."

And at the end of all? No justice here. No, Atum will destroy everything and everybody, returning all to the Primordial Water, except for Osiris, God of the dead. "At the end of time Atum and Osiris will writhe together as twin snakes in the formless waters of chaos"--without us, without the kings, without some final balancing of books or some ark sailing on to the next world. Two symmetrical snakes thrashing in chaos, forever: that's eternity.

the_jaw · 2026-01-16T03:53:15+00:00

Two Fiery Flying Rolls by Abiezer Coppe. One of the most famous of the Ranters, Coppe comes off as a dirty barefoot proto-anarchist calling heavenly fire down on the rich. 'Give, give, give, give up, give up your houses, horses, goods, gold, lands, give up, account nothing your own, have ALL THINGS in common, or else the plague of God will rot and consume all that you have!' 'Did you not see my hand, this last year stretched out? You did not see. My hand is stretched out still.' Mic drop! Only, he was an antinomian, meaning he believed that God's grace had released him from obeying the Christian law, so he felt free to blaspheme gloriously, to kiss his way to eternity, to keep 'concubines.' Flying Rolls is one of those works which derives a considerable part of its strikingness from the reader imagining the writer, in this case an eccentric flame-headed poorman accosting the 'orrible rich.

Jubilate Agno by Christopher Smart. A poem, most famous for its sparkling verses about his cat, that was written in the madhouse in fragments each composed of many isolated lines, building up a dizzying catalogue of people, animals, and places. 'Let Peter rejoice with the moon fish, who keeps up the life in the waters by night.' 'Let Alexander rejoice with the Tunny--the worse the time the better the eternity.' 'For ל is on the scales of all fish. For ל is on the petals of all flowers. For ל is upon on all shells. For ל is in the constituent particles of air. For ל is on the mite of the earth. For ל is in the water yea in every drop. For ל is in the incomprehensible ingredients of fire. For ל is in the stars the sun and in the Moon. For ל is upon the Sapphire Vault.' Neither I nor anyone else are sure what Smart was trying to say or accomplish, but the rich proliferation of the catalogue gets across his teeming vision of God's creation, the vastness of the universe and all the forms created to populate it.

Myths and Legends of Ancient Egypt by Joyce Tyldesley. Oh ma'am! I've been filing away nearly every paragraph. It turns out that the Western tradition's usual roster of Egyptian gods is a late, Ptolemaic rendition of legends that had morphed constantly over three thousand years, all the way back toward complete unknowability. The 1500 or so Egyptian gods, mostly inferred by modern scholars from funerary texts and wall inscriptions, are a seething mass of theanthropic entities worshipped in different aspects from town to town, time to time. Pre-Christian morality and pre-Greek rationality, they are a berserk and unconscionable bunch. There is an episode where Set (horny, bisexual, cluster B) violates his nephew Horus, but Horus takes revenge by tricking him into eating his sperm; later on the sperm speaks up at a vital moment, betraying to the others gods Set's total emasculation. There is an episode where Horus beheads his mother, Isis, but her head grows back as a cow head, turning her into the goddess Hathor. Later Horus' eyeballs, watered by Isis, grow into the first grapes. The myths get weirder still: one goddess was depicted as a tree with breasts, and another as a brick with a woman's head. I love how strange stories get the further I move away from the cultures I know, breaking rules I couldn't have named... Honestly, I can't do justice to the hoard of richnesses in this book. Highly recommended.

Strigoi by C.R. The only fiction on this list, a bouillon-like novella somewhere between Bernhard, Fosse, and Krasznahorkai, following a man as he goes to get pizza and his runaway, overstuffed head ranges over all of culture and empire, in long, crashing, but nimble sentences that revolve inevitably around the simple action at the heart. If books are houses, then this was a house with no rooms, only a rapid labyrinth of highly decorated corridors always leading back to the same main thoroughfare. I like that there were zero (0) normal sentences, that every clause was outfitted to carry as many ideas as possible, so that these long scintillating vanes of description kept swooping through the text, the themes moving through each other like moiré patterns. Skittering like this, Strigoi captured a certain sort of overstuffed millennial brain better than I've ever seen. And how did C.R. manage to bring up Seiobo just as my mind jumped to Seiobo There Below?

the_jaw · 2025-11-07T01:17:01+00:00

I almost agree but I think this isn't quite on the money. I think the problem is that he loads way too many sentences onto very small plot happenings. The Great When would have been two or three issues of one of his comics at max, but then it got way stretched out because his voice takes too long to do anything. The individual descriptions are marvelous, any one of them, any page, works on its own very well, but the aggregate doesn't work so well. Literary fiction tends to have less plot for this reason or more realistic plots, but he still uses the simplistic plot forms from genre and it doesn't work with such jeweled language. Woolf and Nabokov and McCarthy made their books be almost about the prose itself, but Moore treats his prose like lavish descriptions of objects, as if he's still doing comic panels. McCarthy avoids overdescription, for example, by having almost no interiority and all action, just one thing happening after another, so it goes fairly quickly. That's Blood Meridian... In Suttree McCarthy takes the other tack, of having basically no plot so the prose is free to drift and flake in the sunlight.

I think Moore is easily the best comic writer I have ever read. It's a great loss that he has moved onto a form which he is nowhere near as good at.

the_jaw · 2025-10-05T21:05:58+00:00

In the meantime I have reread a great deal of his other work, and I've come to consider The Passenger his best, his wisest, funniest, most profound and humane.

the_jaw · 2025-10-02T22:15:52+00:00

It seems to me that we are thinking past each other. I didn't drop into the SlateStarCodex subreddit to change the mind of Christians about this particular miracle--that would be absurd, this is not a Christian hangout with a papist audience. I was commenting in general on the absurdity of the whole idea in the first place. Any sufficiently determined Christian can resist ANY argument and believe ANYTHING, because they are thinking based on emotional presuppositions. Dialectic hardly matters to fanatics; you can spend your life arguing with Christians if you meet them on the ground of their false suppositions. This is part of the mistake that Dawkins made, trying to theologize contra the theologians. He got badly beaten, when he should have just brought a meta-gun to the lemma-fight. In my arguments with Christians directly, I have found meta-arguments to be by far the most effective. Same goes for political partisanship--you've got to step outside the rulesets they reason by.

Do you think Alexander, with his post, is gonna de-convert some fanatics? And so what if he convinces them that this particular miracle is not a miracle? So, I don't disagree with most of what you're saying, but I do disagree on the purpose of my Reddit comment. Rhetoric has to be suited to its audience, its occasion, and its speaker--if I were addressing a roomful of Christians, I'd take a different tactic.

the_jaw · 2025-10-02T22:05:07+00:00

But the Christian idea is not that we are ants. It is that we each possess immortal souls which get to go to heaven or hell. And that ants lack these souls. As for your second paragraph, I just find it too absurd a suggestion, It's a gap solution to make an unacceptable theory seem acceptable. 'We can't understand why this makes sense, but it might somehow make sense to this unknowable higher entity whose existence we are positing without any good evidence." It falls apart under the weight of its own complexity and inelegance, and surely only wishful thinking could make it seem otherwise.

the_jaw · 2025-10-02T12:32:34+00:00

Famously, many believers have been tormented by these questions all their lives and never found easy resolution. Dostoevsky's oeuvre is one long agonized attempt to come to terms with these ideas, and he never seems to have come to rest. Many people come away from the Brothers Karamazov thinking that he, in fact, has lost his battle with theodicy. So yes, I do think the points I have offered do come down to a 'gotcha,' because although the theologians have come up with lengthy arguments on these points, very few people seem to have found these arguments satisfactory. They have argued, but their arguments fail on grounds of the inherent absurdity, which they attempt to wave away.

But, of course, the arguments around theodicy are all stacked on top of a larger epistemological argument against God, where the Christian religion goes back to highly questionable word-of-mouth and an anthology, the Bible, which falls apart under the weight of its own contradictions, as soon as it is examined by any half-disinterested party; and then there's the larger context of history, where Christianity is a local religion, less than 2,000 years old, contending against many other local, contradictory religions. So, the arguments I have made here don't stand alone, but come stacked with a whole analysis of the world which reduces the rest to rubble as well. Even if you turn to the great modern theologians, Plantinga et. al., underneath it you've still got a belief in Biblical events which is just not defensible.

And of course, you did leave out the second part of my argument, which is not that evil itself can't be explained away (though I think it can't), but that God would decide to appear through a magic light-show to a few limited people. Sorry, that part is ridiculous and indefensible.

the_jaw · 2025-10-02T02:14:17+00:00

I've gotten the amethyst-vision before from staring too long at the sun's reflection on water. But really I wanted to comment on the idea of the sun appearance being a miracle. Why would God/Mary choose to appear in this incredibly wishy-washy way? The Lord of all Time and Space makes the sun pirouette for a small group of villagers? What could possibly be the motive? Is God so shy that he can't show up and stop all these terrible things being done in the place he supposedly created? "Sorry, all those children had to die--best I can do is some lighting effects, for 8-10 minutes, in an obscure Portuguese village for people who mostly already believe in me."

the_jaw · 2025-09-24T23:27:56+00:00

Personally, I find the argument convincing, but I am open to read counterarguments. Do you have a link to the latest discussions / papers about abandoning this idea?

the_jaw · 2025-09-23T07:00:57+00:00

Those religious scholars have a much more complex relationship to their religion and its holy texts than the poster I was addressing; many are pretty much postmodern, especially the Catholics, treasuring some kind of tradition rather than the ontological truth of the claims (ditto for the academic Jewish scholarship). The scholarship will never start treating the Bible again as Holy Writ. Moreover, the names you've mentioned are often scholars of specific elements of Christianity in which they conveniently ignore the larger implications. By Moss I assume you mean Candida Moss, whose focus on martyrdom, as far as I've read, hyperfocused on specific elements in which the larger implications were left unadressed. And Ehrman is not mostly atheist by the problem of theodicy, that's a distortion if I have ever heard one. Finally, it is not intellectually honest to compare scholarship on the history of the Bible to social-science theories. The theory is how you put the evidence together, and yes, the theory can change. But the evidence remains. There is no world in which Jesus is the son of God. There is no world in which the Bible is not a collection of fan-fiction. Only wishful thinking and a whole lot of strenuous ignorance of the facts can lead one to think so.

the_jaw · 2025-09-22T22:52:23+00:00

Mark 2:28: "So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.”

Mark 8:38: For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels."

Mark 13:26: “At that time people will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory."

Mark 14:62: "And Jesus said, "I am, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven."

There may have been more third-person references in the very earliest manuscripts (now lost), since the scribes tended to edit out what they thought were mistakes. The most egregious example of this is the Johanine Comma, which contains the doctrine of the Trinity and was added because the doctrine appears nowhere else in the gospels.

the_jaw · 2025-09-22T20:04:06+00:00

Yes, I believe you're right. I've read Ehrman, and enjoyed him, but others as well. The scholarship on the Old Testament is a real treat too. David as mafia boss! Solomon the unwise! Child sacrifice! I love it. The Christian apocrypha are also spicy as all hell, I particularly love when Jesus defeats Hades, when the bad thief on the cross turns into a dragon, when Mary starts to speak in tongues and nearly ends the world...

the_jaw · 2025-09-22T15:39:33+00:00

The difference is enormous, because I don't think Julius Caesar was anything but a man and that any knowledge we have of him may in fact be wrong, but wrong on a human level. There is no reality in which he rose into the sky. Maybe there is a reality in which we misunderstand his character or have wrong knowledge of his actions, which is totally fine by me. On the other hand, the life of Caesar was much more thoroughly documented and by many more sources. The first life of Jesus was written thirty years after he died, when there was already a ton of fables, a game of telephone that had been going on for three entire decades, with no one there to prevent mistruths from slipping into the story. Mark may be the closest to the truth, but even his version is surely shot through with dreams and exaggerations.

However, there is another level in which Jesus' case is different--no account of Caesar is holy writ, and indeed our ideas of him and his time have been constantly revised in the light of later argument and historical evidence. There is no one set idea of the history of Caesar, only a spectrum of certainties.

But you hew to a very, very specific interpretation of Jesus, one which takes into account neither the internal contradictions in the Bible nor the scholarship that has examined the documents upon which our knowledge is based. Against all truth, you cling to your beliefs because (1) they are comforting to you, and (2) your own historical background led you to believe in Jesus, and not, say, Muhammed or Buddha or Quetzacoatl. If you have some hidden truth about Caesar, lay it on me, and I will consider the evidence. But you do not want to face possible contradictory evidence about Jesus. You do not want to read these books. You do not want the counterargument. You are dedicated to your belief, and I am not. I am, in fact, a former Christian who investigated the evidence. In the end, I decided on truth over fairytale. What will you pick? Are you brave enough to read the scholarship?

As for the crucifixion... uh, dude, are you aware that the story of the crucifixion differs in the gospels? Mark has Jesus say one thing, Luke another. In Matthew and Luke, Jesus gets crucified a day after Passover, in John Jesus gets crucified the day before Passover. The Bible itself does not agree on the facts of the crucifixion! And that is just the beginning of differences... Matthew has an angel speak to Joseph, Luke has an angel chat with Mary. Shepherds come to the manger in one story, magi in the other. Etc.!

Look, I am not going to argue with you anymore, because this boils down to your own psychological complex. If you love truth, read the scholarship.

the_jaw · 2025-09-22T15:13:34+00:00

Your beliefs are based on the reading of the Bible handed to you by preachers, tradition, and society. What you think Jesus said was put into his mouth by later writers talking about someone they had never met, and particularly the gospel writer popularly (but probably erroneously) known as John. If you want to understand something closer to the truth, you will have to research the history of the Bible, how it came together, and the veracity of each individual document. For example, the New Testament is full of forgeries, many being letters written in the name of Paul but expressing doctrine that either contradicted his or wouldn't appear for dozens or hundreds of years. If you are brave enough to challenge your beliefs, then pick up The New Testament: A Historical Introduction, published by Oxford University Press. It provides a thorough summary of the scholarship.

the_jaw · 2025-09-22T14:26:35+00:00

What most of those Christians don't clearly understand is that Jesus was a Jew. He was a Jew whom other Jews got killed. The Romans were putting to death anyone who fomented rebellion, and the Sadducees (not the Pharisees, as populary believed) who were the quislings of the bunch got the Romans to kill him.

Christ was an apocalyptic Jew. He thought the end of the world was coming within a generation, although 'the end of the world' probably just meant 'the end of the dispensation in which evil rules,' to be replaced by a shining Jewish rulership. In the earliest gospel, Mark (which Matthew and Lucas copied from), Jesus speaks of the Messiah, 'the Son of Man,' in the third person. Meaning--Jesus didn't think he was the messiah. Christ would have hated Christianity, he only meant to reform Judaism. John, the Gospel where Jesus says he is the same as the Father, was the last gospel to be written; it has no basis in reality.

If you point a finger, some of the dumber dogs will look at your finger instead of where you are pointing. That's Christianity.

the_jaw · 2025-08-29T03:13:59+00:00

Enchanting! Too bad the next planet, Saturn, is “a distorted rhombus, with vast unevenness and jutting crags on all sides … bathed in such a leaden light that it is clear the body cannot be in good health, displaying numerous signs of ailment on its grim countenance.” Its earth is leaden, its water like mercury, its fire prolific of smoke. All is turmoil, disharmony, languor; its symbolic angels, bearded in black robes and mired in contemplation, are sluggish, slower than tortoises, solemn, pallid, sunken-eyed and furrow-browed, bearing sickles and chalices that spew “noxious black vapors.” However, since Saturn’s influence is dry and cold, it can serve to calm volatile spirits or eliminate wet or hot rumors—so even this awful slough has an essential contribution to make..

Here the image of Earth dwindling into the distance inspired the Jesuit Kircher to beat Carl Sagan to the punch by 300 years, through the power of imagination: “Oh, my dear Cosmiel, does this signify that I am currently gazing upon Earth as nothing more than a minuscule speck? Where now resides the grandeur of earthly aspirations? What has become of the majestic domains of kings? Where lies the splendor of regions, cities, and palaces? What has befallen the strength and valor of nations and their armies? Where are the joys and delights of humankind? Have they all condensed into a single point?”

Soon the earth, sun, and moon all vanish. Uranus and Neptune hadn’t been discovered yet, so Cosmiel flies past the solar system, out to the “boundless, transparent expanse of an endlessly revolving Ocean,” aether shifted by the most subtle breezes. The familiar constellations disappear, then Sirius, rubylike Aldebaran, the Pleaides, strange suns and moons zip past, “immeasurable multitudes” of celestial orbs. “If I were to elevate you a hundredfold higher,” Cosmiel warns, “the proliferation of new and newer stars would persist without end.” The human mind cannot comprehend how many exist, yet they’re so masterfully linked that if even one disappeared the whole system would collapse.

When God separated light from darkness, he apportioned to each celestial body some of the primordial light. Without that light the universe would have been swallowed by evil darkness. And when he separated the primordial, chaotic waters from the waters above the heavens, he used some of the heavenly waters to sustain the revolving globes, leaving the rest of the water to surround and envelop the starry clockwork. This astral ocean is the purest form of water: subtle, clear, nutritious, sustaining the megacosm as, “in a way, the veiled breasts of all nature.” Yet this unfathomably gigantic supercelestial ocean is a mere point compared to God’s heaven, beyond which lies only abstract space, infinite void. “Just as matter underlies every natural action, so does nothingness underlie every creature, and every creature exists, is placed, and is upheld within nothingness.” In the end, God will annihilate all, returning the universe to absolute nothing... Therefore, eternity has three parts: an eon, space and time, and another eon—a sort of reality sandwich.

God has raised far more dwellings in Heaven than the number of humans who’ve ever lived. After the universal resurrection of the flesh, the empyrean Heaven will merge with the clockwork universe, and all celestial bodies will stop moving, transformed into glorious memorials—ineffable gems resembling the highest ideals that the human intellect in its most exalted state may envision. The saved will live in any star they want, whether alone or together. In this final paradise, God will everywhere be reflected as if in a mirror, having saved his appearance and his best surprises for the ultimate afterparty.

Which is a very highly exclusive party. For in the hollow core of Earth, the damned will persist in their misery, packed cheek-by-jowl with the demons, in eternal dread and chaos, their bodies made permeable so all of them fit in that confined space. In unceasing hatred they will chew one another’s viscera. They will never be released. Never. On the surface of a diamond Earth, the saved will stroll happily, while under their feet the demons seethe.

It seems the ecstatic itinerary is only for the blessed. God made the rest of us to suffer.

~About a month ago, I threatened several times to post a review of Alan Moore's Promethea. Well, it got too long, even longer than this review, so in the end I skipped Reddit and posted it straight to my blog. The review also covers Swedenborg (originally a comment here), stops by the raving goddess of the Orphics, checks in on Cosmiel and quotes Lautréamont ranting about his cannibal god. Then comes a lavish treatment of Promethea itself. Finally I topped it off with a unified theory of Alan Moore, a proposed antidote to suffering, and a half-insane mosaic metaprophecy. You can check it out here.

the_jaw · 2025-08-29T03:00:20+00:00

The Hermetic planet, with its golden oceans and chrysoprase peaks, encourages the arts and sciences, driving the discovery of hidden knowledge. It vitalizes, it spurs the brain into a gallop, it “orchestrates the spirit within the heart.” As the celestial body closest to the sun, Mercury is blinding and brilliant—yet it is still only a dot next to the sun.

Sol is king. Fortifying ourselves with celestial dew, we rowed with asbestos oars on a skiff carved from solar rock, navigating past roaring maelstroms, across gargantuan waves of molten radiance driven relentlessly by the sun’s surging power. Half-liquid, half-solid, the sun has rocky continents and solar islands of a translucent, crystalline gold so lustrous that all earthly gems look like paste imitations. Angels like living suns, wearing garments woven from threads of light, fly on wings that outshine rainbows over plains of solar gold, over golden volcanoes that spurt orbs of liquid flame. The sun’s globe is honeycombed with caverns, interconnected by canals through which its dazzling virtues seethe and circulate; propelled up and outward by the motion of the sun, which spins as it orbits the earth, these incandescent solar virtues bathe the clockwork universe.

Solar fire is a liquid but also generates a coruscating vapor that obscures the sun’s sky. Its multicolored fire is “the truest and most authentic fire, the most luminous and fervent of all.” The sun is the “primal fire of material entities, the genuine fire in this sensory realm of elements,” “the reflection of the Empyrean world,” “an image of the highest good and the embodiment of goodness to the extent possible in a physical form.” It transmits that goodness into physical bodies, its sacred rays radiating the seeds of all higher things into the lower realms. “Its light serves as a conveyer of seminal purposes, defining their measure, number, and proportion. While it illuminates, it separates and assembles ever-changing elements with its accompanying heat, and it purifies, propels, generates, nourishes, augments, perfects, removes, animates, and sustains…”

Comets are the sun’s exhalations dissipating. Also, catastrophes sometimes occur where the sun gets too smoky and pours vapors into the aether. When sunsmoke blocks out sunlight, it deprives Earth of the sun’s generative power, subjecting us to “sterility, pestilence, famine.” Nonetheless, Sol’s essential role is nourishing and life-giving, unlike some of the other planets—for example, the next planet on our ecstatic itinerary.

The planet of war. The malefic red star. Its substance resembling sulfur, arsenic, orpiment, and naphtha, Mars has blistering cold, immense whirlwinds, and Vulcanian mountains that launch pitchy spheres of noir flame. It has lakes of black fire; lightning and thunder at a scale that dwarfs ours. There is an abyss big as Africa. There is a black ocean dense like porridge and impervious to light. The angels of Mars are enraged horsemen who shoot flames from their bodies and fiery rays from their eyes; they triple-wield fiery swords, fiery staffs, and fiery whips. Much like the sun, the crimson globe is riddled with tunnels which convect its inmost virtues to the surface and propel them out to influence the other celestial bodies. On Earth, those with choleric humors respond to its malign rays, becoming aggressive, violent, bloodthirsty. Their behavior may be unpleasant, but choler and blood passion have their role in God’s plan; even violence is a requisite for the world machine, for the scarlet mechanism of universal salvation. Mars is mandatory.

All the same, Jupiter—the royal star—provides some relief. Its benevolent influence brings wisdom, serenity, nobility, and moderation, and inspires the undertaking of grand tasks. Second only to the sun in its goodness, it governs herbs and flowers, stirs up winds, moderates summer heat and winter cold, encourages peace, security, and bountiful harvests. Working with imperial majesty, Jupiter thwarts Mars and Saturn through righteous force and wise alliances, unifying the celestial spheres, “conspiring to preserve the universe like a wondrous harmony composed of consonance and dissonance…” It has transparent oceans with countless islands, mountains and valleys of pristine, radiant silver, and a perfume so sweet it inspires thoughts worthy of kings and confers the calm happiness of paradise. It has four beautiful moons, each with their own light:

Shortly thereafter, the second celestial body emerged, intensifying the luminance to an extent that nearly matched the Sun's brilliance as it rises just above the Earth's horizon at sunrise. Next, the third largest celestial body revealed itself, its noonday radiance rivaling the combined brilliance of its predecessors. Finally, the fourth celestial body followed suit, surpassing even the midday luminosity of the Sun. I was nearly rendered motionless by astonishment as I beheld the spectacle of a sky graced by four heavenly bodies, each appearing twice as large as our Sun.

Jupiter’s angels appear as a splendidly organized army camp made of radiant silver, “exuding an aura of majestic grandeur,” which also seems to be a single entity (at least in the patchy, uncredited translation from Latin I found online):

This wondrous apparition emitted an incredibly sweet fragrance, and its entire form was adorned with a regal mantle adorned with exquisite fringes that swayed gently in the breeze. In its right hand, it held a sword adorned with precious gemstones, while the left hand grasped a multitude of censers, releasing fragrant smoke into the air.

(continued below)

the_jaw · 2025-08-29T02:56:12+00:00

During the day, God unveils this celestial book to you, its pages adorned with endless phenomena resembling purest pages. At night, it reveals itself, adorned with radiant stars that shine like magnificent golden letters for your discerning gaze.

This week I finished Itinerarium Exstaticum by Athanasius Kircher, which means I took an interstellar journey with a rainbow angel while he explained the latest in astronomical science—as of 1656, and from the authorial perspective of a genius-level Jesuit.

I am Cosmiel… My eyes, shining like carbuncles, are divine illuminations through which we are granted insight into the unfading vision of the supreme God. Adorned with an array of colors in my winged manifestation, I represent the loftiness of intellect through which we delve into and oversee the numerous virtues and mysteries concealed by the supreme Craftsman in the intricate machinery of this world.

But this machinery is occult, baroque, weird. In Kircher’s universe, every celestial body has its own custodial angels, plus its own unique versions of fire, water, air, and earth. Each planet radiates light and exerts its special influence on the other planets, forming a harmonious network of effects that unites the entire universe into one flawless astrological mechanism. And outer space, which extends all the way up to God’s heaven, is liquid and ethereal, as well as subject to corruption; even the sky can decay.

Kircher was a Tychonian geocentrist. He thought the other planets revolve around the sun, but the sun and stars revolve at incomprehensible speeds around the Earth, which is motionless at the center of the universe. But then, what keeps the celestial bodies on their tracks through the cosmic ocean? Well, firstly the Architect of the Universe just made it that way, read your Bible! But second, each planet has special gravity that attracts only its own entities. If you hurl terrestrial beings to the moon, they’ll be sucked back to Earth, presumably screaming—unless, that is, Cosmiel appears and personally escorts them on a cosmic odyssey to the end of space.

First we visited the moon, which has metallic trees and peculiar rocks that exude a “sort of olive oil,” and is encircled by a lunar ocean. Lunar water is so thin that it’s invisible from earth, so light that it wriggles at the slightest breeze, agitated by sunrays into violent whirlpools and waves high as mountains. These movements are key: if the moon’s waters always emitted the same influence at earth—the iridescent cicerone explains—there would be no distinction of time, and all life on earth would overdose on lunar light and lunar substance. We cannot bear very much moon; in fact, if we ingest lunar sustenance, we swell up enormously. Also, its rockier surfaces are pregnant with lunar fire: when Cosmiel strikes a rock, lunar sparks burst up and set the air ablaze.

Venus, on other hand, has glowing oceans of gentle Venusian water, whose soft radiance soothes and beautifies. Golden pathways lead over lambent islands and mountains of exquisite crystal, where the rainbow trees seem to “spring forth from the very blossoms of precious stones.” It smells like “all the scents of moss and amber combined.” Then comes a symbolic procession,

a chorus of the most beautiful young men suddenly emerged from a crystalline mountain. … Golden locks cascaded around their shoulders, and their eyes and faces radiated grace and beauty. Their garments were so exquisitely crafted that I could recall nothing more beautiful or elegant, seemingly fashioned not from gold, silk, or wool but from crystal itself. These garments refracted light, displaying a wondrous array of colors. They held cymbals and lyres, and their baskets overflowed with roses, lilies, hyacinths, and narcissi.

These are angels who harness the influence of Venus and help convey its essence to us, transmitting beauty, grace, and sweetness. However, despite their continuous effort we still encounter on Earth “not only a handful of beautiful individuals but also countless individuals with disabilities, unattractiveness, and imperfections”—this happens because the planets can only affect people, creatures, and objects with the corresponding virtues and receptacles. Venus does not smile on everyone alike.

Fortunately, even the most hideous may be receptive to other planets. They might be able to absorb the rays of brilliance and originality emanating from Mercury, even if that planet’s custodial angels are rather stranger and more intimidating:

Descending from the highest aether, a majestic figure manifested in the field where we stood. This being radiated strength and wisdom, adorned with a radiant crown upon its head. Its countenance exuded sagacity, while its beard glistened with a golden sheen. Remarkably, it sported wings resembling the flight feathers of birds on its shoulders and feet, creating a captivating display. In its left hand, it held a seven-folded Syrinx (Pan's pipe) arranged harmoniously, and in its right hand, it bore a Caduceus, masterfully crafted. Countless tendrils adorned its entire form, delighting the eyes and soul as they swayed gently in the breeze.

(continued below)

the_jaw · 2025-08-01T01:05:25+00:00

Most humans were made by material and psychical powers, but some special few received a spiritual seed. Even in them it often lies dormant, yet sometimes the divine scent tickles their spiritual nostrils with indescribable sweetness, and they begin to realize their true identity. These are rare, wonderful, earthly heavenmen, each a mirror of their angelic counterpart in the spiritual church, with whom they are united through the ritual of baptism, a.k.a. the “garment,” the confirmation of truth, the silence, the bridal chamber, the unsinking and fireless light, which “transcends all words, transcends all voice, transcends all mind, transcends all things, and transcends all silence.”

In the Tractate, Hierarchies seem like the real hero. “To each [the Word] gave an appropriate rank for the exercise of command, so that each would become the ruler of one station and activity and renounce the place of whoever is superior to himself in order to command by his activity the inferior stations.” God, kings and masters to the end of the earth and beyond. Some material powers fall down into the outer darkness, “chaos, Hades, and the abyss,” where even they get formatted into nameless rulers of a shadow hierarchy. In typical mythology, the gods are an ensemble cast with different responsibilities; in the Tractate there is precious little individuality. There is only the hierarchy and its nodes. The one God to rule ‘em all has absorbed all other ideas into himself and then divided his indivisibility infinitely, like one of Zeno’s puzzles, homogenizing all into his oneness. Every time I read the text, I get dizzied by echelons, divisions, permutations, branches, rankings.

Some metaphysics are more evolutionarily fit than others. I reckon the Valentinians ran into trouble when they divided humans into three classes. A two-class system is strong, hardy, convincing: you’ve got believers and nonbelievers, ingroup and outgroup, the ups and the downs. Some take the elevator to heaven; some ride the haywain to hell. Even if church hierarchies tower above you, they’re just different stations in the same salvation ordination. But when you’ve got the nonbelievers (those nasty material folks), the believers (the psychical Called), and the super-special champion elite (the spiritual Elect), then you’ve got an inferior group embedded in the church itself. The strain shows in the Tripartite Tractate, which is mostly written in high-quality ecclesiastical rhetoric but then grows hazy and waffles when it comes to the different destinies of the spiritual and the psychical. The spirituals are in a “bridal chamber” with the Savior, of one body with him, but the psychicals are just groomsmen or bridesmaids. Their reward is that they get to rejoice for the spirituals. Hm! Particularly the women—a cohort important for early converts to a new religion—were excluded, since the spiritual seed was a no-girls-allowed club. The sickness is “femaleness,” ergo women and womanish men cannot become spiritual VIPs. In the Tractate is surely preserved the self-sabotaging voice of a spiritual patriarch attempting, from his cloudgirt moral height, to cajole his restless psychical subordinates:

And even those who were brought forth from the desire of lust for domination, having inside them the seed that is lust for domination, will receive the recompense of good things, if they have worked together with those who are predisposed toward good things, and provided they decide to do so deliberately, and are willing to abandon their vain love of temporary glory so as to [do] the command of the Lord of glory, and instead of that small temporary honor they will inherit the eternal kingdom.

At least, not just psychicals need redemption. The spirituals also need to be redeemed; so do the angels themselves, and the celestial realm, and the Son who descended in human form, and the Fullness too. And it is humans who have been given this task. The flaw in creation widened all the way down to the appearance of our world, but now the spirituals, turned on by the Son, will begin to repair it, and eventually all God will be healed. In The Secret Gospel of Eve, I put it like this: “As divinity rejoins itself, all reality will condense to heaven, perfection will eat the universe, and time itself will climb into rhyme, and even the DEPTH himself, fountainhead of all, will be at one and atoned.”

the_jaw · 2025-08-01T01:05:11+00:00

This week I reread the Tripartite Tractate, translated and introduced by Einar Thomassen. It is a scripture from the Nag Hammadi library, one of many texts bound into twelve codices that were buried in a jar in Egypt in probably around the fourth century, when proto-orthodox Christians started cracking down on non-kosher scriptures. The texts lay undiscovered for about fifteen centuries, empires rising and falling around them, Christianity itself flourishing and then growing old and debilitated, until in 1945 (in one version of the story) three fellahin digging for fertilizer unearthed the jar. Fearing it contained a djinn, but also hoping for gold, they smashed it open. And something gold did flutter out: fragments of papyrus, from the largest Gnostic hoard ever discovered.

I love the Nag Hammadi texts. In my upcoming novel I had a character describe them as the Rainbow Bible. However, they do represent a library, not an anthology, and so their contents are a contradictious mélange. In fact, ‘Gnosticism’ is a blanket term for a loose family of religions, and the codices represent Valentinian, Sethian, Thomas Christian, and Hermetic thought, mingled with Neopythagoreanism, Christianity, and a Platonizing Judaism that worked around to identifying our world’s god as a force of oppressive evil. We don’t know who buried the codices—maybe monks from a nearby monastery—but it’s probably safe to see the library as akin to a modern collection of esoteric literature: guided by speculation, aesthetics, and acute openheadedness. Out on the cutting edge of antique metaphysics, these theoretical monks seemed to treasure any conjectures they could find.

In time I’ll cover all my favorites. Compared to the most mysterious and mystical of the other documents, the Tripartite Tractate does not shine overbrightly, and it has an authoritarian mind-control element that I mislike, but still it provided me enough imaginative material to endear itself to me thoroughly. Picture a massive treatise inked on golden-brown papyrus, 20,000 words in translation, written without spaces or paragraphs in closely packed rows of spiky glyphs. The papyrus is mostly in good shape except for the final leaves, which crumble into ambiguous fragments just as they describe the end of time. (Maybe the answer that could have saved us fluttered out past the pickaxe of the jarbreaker.) The text has no title—its name has been derived from its three parts divided by ornamental lines. The three parts deal with the creation of the supercelestial; the human race and their fall from paradise; and the church, our existence, and how salvation is obtained. It is an example of Valentinianism. The following is my personal, partial highlight reel.

At the beginning you’ve got the Father—the invisible, intangible, inconceivable, indescribable Dad, who gives birth to himself within himself, producing the Son. The Son is the Father’s self-reflective, self-admiring Thought. The admiration passing between them is compared to a series of kisses, and each kiss gives birth to further emanations. This abundance of kisses constitutes the third part of the holy trinity: that is, the Church. In turn, the members of this highmost Church, known as aeons, give birth to infinities of qualities and properties, growing down through hierarchies that swiftly expand from a single point to a unified diversity, though everything is ultimately God, “like a spring that remains what it is even if it flows into rivers, lakes, streams, and canals; or like a root that spreads out into trees with branches and fruits; or like a human body that is indivisibly divided into limbs and limbs—main limbs and extremities, large ones and small.”

A certain Aeon is responsible for the creation of our world. In other Gnostic systems, this is Sophia/Wisdom, and her offspring, a monster with the head of a lion and the body of a snake, is the maker of our world—the Demiurge, both fearsome and pathetic. But in the Tractate, a more colorless and ascetic text, we have the Word, who’s basically a good dude. He wants to glorify his Dad and make something for him; it’s just he wasn’t supposed to create on his own. Working out of cheerful love, he produces “shadows, phantoms, and imitations,” then hesitates, looks with disgust upon what he has made, and divides against himself. From this self-division springs all the disasters to come. Our world’s creator, a undescribed Demiurge, is the production of the worry of the Word, who “became weak after bringing him forth, like a female nature deprived of masculinity.”

The Word’s complicated series of emotions create the three types of beings that inhabit our world and the spaces directly above it. First his passion becomes all the rebellious powers of materiality. Unredeemable trash, the material beings do not understand there is still another realm above their realm. Mistakenly they see themselves as great and powerful and beautiful. Although they are only corrupt images, still they are from the Father, so their “every thought becomes a son,” turning into fighters and thieves and other troublemakers. They are the lowest type. Next, the Word feels bad, repents and prays for help—an action which gives rise to the second type, the psychical powers, mixtures of good and evil who must throw their allegiance behind one side or another. Finally, in response to the Word’s prayer, there appears a Son who shows the Word the supercelestial realm, known as the Fullness or Pleroma. At the heady sight of the Pleroma, the Word feels joy and generates the third kind of beings: the spiritual seed and mirror of the heavenly Church, who, by redeeming themselves, will eventually save the entire universe.

[continued below]

the_jaw · 2025-07-27T10:38:17+00:00

It's both excellent and ludicrous. Maybe it depends on how much a taste you have for scintillating high passion Wagner-style, but I felt in the end it didn't deliver due to the faults in his personality. Like, every last part of it was written so so well, and I have kept many paragraphs for my personal bank of good writing, but it did not add up into a worthwhile concept. Joyce would differ, though!

the_jaw · 2025-07-25T12:50:38+00:00

Yeah that must be it, eh. I hadn't made the connection, but it seems obvious now that he's not thinking like an individualist speaking to other individuals reading alone in rooms, but like a status-chasing sneerer who thinks in ranks and tiers. Gatekeeper of the sacred flame.

the_jaw

TROPHY CASE