A while back, I wrote that, while I have immense respect for Mother Nyx, I didn’t really give Her much explicit worship. I didn’t feel it was my place to do so, and so I kept a fair distance and only offered what I knew to be Her due. There is nothing wrong with that, because that’s as it should be —anyway, ask the Orphics what could happen if you deny one of your deities Their fair measures.
Since that moth landed on me last week, Eros has been bugging me to give more to Mother Nyx.
This is what I get for ignoring pop culture.
Of course, I just had to do a search on the Internet and, hoping to find, you know, real information,
found a lot of this, instead. I’ve read the synopsis of the series on Wikipedia, and oh dear, I have a feeling that, if i read these books, I’d get the same kind of impression off of these books that
Stoney321 got off of Twilight (considering she, apparently, grew up Mormon). Just reading the plot description on the Internet encyclopedia that everybody hates to love, I get the impression that the women who wrote this meant well, but I don’t get a genuine Nyx vibe off of some of the pertinent excerpts I managed to find at all; of course, those were on the tablet, and I’m not going to fight to try and C&P anything on that thing, and I don’t care enough to look it up on the desktop. I might still eventually read them, if only “for the lulz”; seriously, it’s like a weird hybrid of
Harry Potter,
Twilight (complete with Magical Natives!), and
Percy Jackson (without even half the homework completed), and twice as long as either series. There’s going to be something deliciously stupid about this crap.
In other news, I’ve grown really frustrated with Tumblr. I’m going to keep doing Hellenic Problems and How I See Eros, but I’m going to stay away from any pagan / polytheist blog that focuses too hard on “issues”, cos frankly, I’ve come to the conclusion that all the “Social Justice” talk on Tumblr is just as much based on UPG as a good third of what I post here. Sure, there’s a lot that seems pretty basic and is stuff anybody with any sense can learn pretty easily, but after a certain point for each “issue”, the only polite thing to do is just let the people affected by those issues most to discuss it amongst themselves, because if you have comparative “privilege” in that area (like being apparently white and / or a gender-normative male, for example), nothing you say is going to go over well with everybody in that group, no matter which “side” you take, you’re basically saying some-one’s UPG is more valid than another’s —and the only time a person can really make that call is when they’re actually affected by the topic in question.
You know, it’s like “Don’t ask an Apollonian about the mysteries of Persephone; ask some-one versed in the mysteries of Persephone, but take heed, cos if you ask five different Persephone people, you run the risk of getting up to twenty different answers”. I’m a bit of a people-pleaser, and there are times when it genuinely distresses me when I realise that, no matter what I say, I’m going to make someone unhappy; the only times it doesn’t matter is “when I know I’m right”, and we all know that when I know I’m right, I’m infallibly right —if you don’t think so, that’s your problem. 😉 I’m rarely too staunch about my own rightness unless it’s about factual correctness.
Of course, then there’s my taste in music, which is just inherently superior to yours. But I don’t preach to the unbelievers, I just pity them.
Related to all that Tumblr drama, I realised I was going to make some people very unhappy, indeed, if I decided to say any more than I did on the colours of ancient Egyptians. Thankfully, nobody’s tried to hand my ass to me, but all things considered, I have science on my side. See, I grew up in a predominantly Black and very low-prole neighbourhood; now, I know this doesn’t make me an expert on all things Black, but I like to think that I have a slightly better understanding understanding of poor urban Blacks than your average white boy about my age and of similar education, but it’s still probably not going to measure up to what some activists would like. On the other hand, I had an Egypt phase as a kid —fair enough— and the “Egyptian race controvery” has fascinated me since high school, so I get very interested in any studies of Egyptian mummy DNA and other mummy genetic studies. There are a LOT of Egyptian mummies with Caucasoid hair types, just about as many as there are mummies with Black African hair types, and yes, I’ll trust that a geneticist will be able to tell the difference with his microscopes and shit better than a blogger who, at best, might have photos to accompany one’s speculation.
This is not white-washing; no more than that famous photo of an Afghani girl with dark red hair and bright green eyes.
* The leading consensus on the “race” of ancient Egyptians is that the “indigenous” population of Egypt has remained relatively consistent in this last three thousand years —people get a bit paler the further north you go, and darker the further south you go.
* The aristocratic classes in Egypt have variously been Nubian, Persian, Greek, and others. Egypt is pretty much a rainbow of skin-colours no matter where in the country you go, no matter what point in time you visit.
* Sure, there’s no reasons for modern depictions of various Egyptian deities to be pale, but there’s really no reason they need to be dark, either. That’s kind of what happens where an ancient culture, such as Egypt, defines “race” as “the culture one is a part of”, and that culture has all sorts of people, with all sorts of skin colours, eye colours, hair colours, and hair textures. Egypt is in North Africa, which is one of those regions like the Middle East and Central Asia, where people has historically just all
fucked until they were the same colour; well, actually that’s not how those alleles work, what happens in those regions, and pretty much always has (especially in pre-modern eras), is that it’s been so diverse for so long, that there’s a far greater variation of skin-colours and other features typically “racialised” (like the shape of nose, brow, etc…), that even within the same family, there can be a wide array of “racial” features.
By the way, have I mentioned this week yet that I’m needing a circle punch so that I can keep working? I have? Ah well, I’m mentioning it again.
Of Thespiae 