This is a bad explanation of the dodecahedrons for several reasons:
Where the dodecahedrons are typically found - not broken or heavily worn in waste piles as you would expect if this was an everyday object used for practical purposes, but with money and other expensive objects. They also rarely have any signs of wear.
The size of the dodecahedrons isn’t suited for making anything large enough for an adult, which seems kind of useless if it’s meant to be a knitting tool.
Some of the dodecahedrons have no holes and can’t be used for knitting.
Knitting did not exist for almost 1000 years after these dodecahedrons were made. Knitting is a technology that hasn’t existed throughout all of human history.
I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, it’s just important to note that we still don’t know what these objects were for.
Edit: I have also never known any historian that wouldn’t immediately launch into way more detail than anyone outside the field cares about at the drop of a hat, haha.
Metalworker status symbol seems compelling, as it explains several facts about them, and the knitting angle could be a chicken vs egg situation. Either knitters found an existing and relatively common object to be useful for their needs, or knitting is older than we think and the need for these tools drove metalworkers to decide that a hard-to-make tool was a good status symbol. Or maybe it’s both/and, with both needs influencing each other. I can easily imagine some metalworking culture deciding that this hard-to-make tool is a good status symbol, and they eventually turn it into something that’s not actually useful for the original purpose, but works great to show off.
I’ve always thought of it was you get more conservative as you get wealthier, rather then older. The system as it is now makes it far harder to get wealthy, hence people are staying liberal as they get older.
I think it’s also true for those people who lose the ability to learn and understand new things as they age (which happens a lot but not to everyone). In the everchanging world those people find themselves longing for stability and the good old times that they understand. Change becomes confusing and scary.
Also: Some people keep their positions that used to be progressive and find themselves on the conservative side much later. Example: If you are ok mixed race marriage, that used to be a progressive talking point and now is common sense. Gay marriages weren’t discussed in the slightest back than. If you don’t move, you find yourself on the edge of the Overton window one day.
I have a paid off house, plenty in the bank, and investments. I’m less convinced by communism than I was as a kid, but I support the progressive agenda, vote green and annoy city planners asking about pedestrian and bike infrastructure in new developments
I don’t think I could be accused of conservatism, though I seem to have done capitalism reasonably
Actually maybe I am a conservative - I do want to conserve this biosphere, rather than destroying it through the radical increase in carbon burn in the last few hundred years
Actually maybe I am a conservative - I do want to conserve this biosphere, rather than destroying it through the radical increase in carbon burn in the last few hundred years
That’s conservationism, not conservatism. Conservatism is about establishing and enforcing hierarchies of social power.
It was a joke :). I was playing on the dictionary definition of (little C) conservatives, in contrast to (big C) Conservatives
Modern Conservatives area actually radicals, and they unfairly leave actual conservatives (who want stability or careful change) with no representation
I’ve just seen it as people get set in their ways. You were progressive in your youth, got what you wanted, and have grown comfortable with it. Now, you’re old and the new generation wants to change things you are comfortable with, and you don’t want it to change.
It’s really that the world becomes more liberal as it goes on. If you don’t change with it, you’re comparatively more conservative. It’s never been the case that people, in general, become more conservative as they age, just that they want things how they expected them before, which at some point is reached and surpassed.
It’s really that the world becomes more liberal as it goes on.
I don’t even think it has. It feels like we’re in the same conflicts that have existed since at least the 60s era of the Civil Rights Movement.
Government spying, endless warmongering, exclusionary public policy that fixates on bigoted stereotypes, hostility towards immigrants fleeing the warmongering, looming ecological disaster…
Maybe we’re more fixated on trans kids than gay kids, or Latino immigrants rather than Asian immigrants, or AIs that filter out resumes by black surnames rather then racist senior managers, or climate change rather than leaded gasoline and sulfur rain, but the fundamental problems are all still there.
How do you get more conservative in the face of that? Idk. Feels more like we’re just trapped in a news cycle that fluctuates between “left is winning!” and “right is winning!” headlines.
Recently learned this. Back in the day, women brewers would make beer in big cauldrons at the market place, wear big pointy hats so the customers could spot them easily, and had cats to chase away the mice that ate the raw materials. When monasteries started brewing beer they suddenly discovered that the women who were their competition were also WITCHES!!!
A bit searching confirms this. Turns out brewing beer was considered women’s work originally, something done between taking care of the kids and making dinner.
Women were in general accused of being a witch because they did most of the child care, sick care and other jobs concerning people. If somebody died, and lots of people died of disease, bad hygiene and so on, they sometime blamed the nanny or nurse and called her a witch that cursed them. Men usually worked with inanimate things or animals where chances of being called a witch were much lower.
If I had to guess, I’d say that the name in Boston comes from the fish, given the area’s maritime heritage. But the name of the fish probably came from their resemblance to the brewing ale-wives.
If only I knew! 😀 I’m from Wisconsin, and know about alewives (the fish) because they’re invasive in the Great Lakes, where they die off seasonally and wash ashore in large, stinky masses.
Curious as to what your source for this is. A quick search turned up this article, which is prefaced by a lengthy editor’s note regarding its veracity. The article as it now exists links to this article as the source of the claim
men accused female brewers of being witches.
This “source” doesn’t even make that argument at all.
I doubt you’d be boiling the wort at a marketplace, even for small beer you’re looking at a week or more of ferment.
Selling it from a tun at the market, having a characteristic dress (and probably call), is very consistent with European retail traditions. “Fishwives” were famous for their shrill, sharp calls for example.
The modern equivalent I guess is the ice cream truck; they pretty much all have the same livery and play the same recorded organ tunes. Just imagine that approach for every product category.
calling in artillery on your own position is certainly a tactic, though, if they had this kind of spell waiting in their back pocket, how the hell did they get captured?
I noticed only boys play the game now. Either way, I’d like to imagine that she was buried with them so that she could continue to play in their afterlife. Humans can be so cute… sometimes
Then she only came back for each half year because people complained about nothing growing anymore, and thus Zeus sent Hermes to get her.
My head canon is that she wasn’t tricked by Hades to eat the pomegranate, but did it deliberately knowing very well that she would have to return to him because of it.
The myth varies wildly by who retells it but the pg version is he tricked her into eating a pomegranate seed which somehow was part of his domain, indebting her to him. She wasn’t interested in him as a potential husband at first because he was the loner who was never on olympus while other god/heroes were making a name of themselves.
He may have been one of the most poweful gods but his reputation was that of a basement dweller without any great deeds or cool stories attached to him, since he spent most of his free time keeping all the dead people, ya know, dead.
I’m always a bit torn on these modern revisions. Medusa, Persephone, etc, they all promote an interpretation of myths that simply aren’t true from most records, and thus portray an inaccurate version of the societies that told them, but, on the other hand, these myths never really had much in the way of “official” versions anyways.
If people change them to match the values of the times, that’s more than a traditional way of doing things. Hell we KNOW the versions we have are culturally biased, especially towards Athenian interpretations.
It was a silly joke they keep laughing about over dinner.
According to OSP, Hades got permission from Zeus to kidnap the girl, which more or less how things were done still. (Yes, we had ritual kidnappings.) It was Demeter and her codependency on her daughter that caused problems. So Persephone is essentially doing caregiving service for mom every othern six-month interval.
Old-timey pre-Hercules Disney paints Hades as kinda Satany which informs 20th century interpretations. Curiously in the Percy novels, Hades is more true to Hellenism, but gets a touch of the diabolic for the Lightning Thief movie.
I mean, if you ignore that women were very much property to be traded in Hellenic/Mycenaenian society.
It was hardly a unique problem in those days, of course, but the simple reality is that, even under the ritual kidnapping interpretation, which is very, very debatable, what Persephone wanted never really entered the discussion.
Yes. Even the OSP on Persephone and Hades ( on YouTube ) starts with Red saying Okay, let’s not kid ourselves here. Relationships in Greek mythology are almost unilaterally really bad. And Red then details out some of the less offending examples since the more offending ones are just too extreme to safely talk about without trigger warnings.
I should add, consent is terrifyingly new. In the 1970s, there was a controversy regarding wife rape id est, whether it was immoral or illegal to have forcible sex with your spouse, and in the 2010s we’ve finally admitted sex should be opt-in (e.g. you can be legally liable if you don’t get affirmative consent, Yes, I totally am game for sex tonight. ) And biblical scholars have to explain to people no-one ever had consensual sex, rather the penetrator was the active participant and the one penetrated was passive. (In the case of a gay coupling, the bottom was innocent of wrongdoing but still had to be killed to prevent the region from being polluted by the act of gay sex because reasons.)
So yes, we can presume that any relationship in classical Greece or in mythical Greece is going to be dysfunctional all to Tartarus and involve some crimes against humanity, and features a lot of far from consensual. We, today, in 2023, are at the dawn of humankind taking women’s autonomy and clear, informed consent in relationships seriously. (Maybe after the fact, we’ll notice that all our contracts with commercial interests should get some of that clear, informed consent as well.)
But – silly me – I was on mobile and got distracted and posted without getting to the part I thought was interesting.
The hymn in which Hades traps Persephone with the pomegranate seeds is a single hymn and the part about the seeds is torn and unclear what all was going on there, so whether or not it was a ruse by Stalwart Hades and D͙̻̋ͧͪ̈́ͯȑ͍̮ͩ̒̈e͎͇̦͛̋ả̰̖̐͊d̦̙̆͒̒̒̚ ͔̻̿̃P͈̋ͯ̒ͮĕ̮̥̈̚r͈̻͎̤ͅs̲͕̣̿ͥ̈͂e̍́͐ph͚o̱̭̖͑n͖̺̆̋̇e̫̹̝͂̾̆̒̅ or some kind of magic to seal her commitment to the underworld is now up to us. But Persephone isn’t the goddess of spring so much as the goddess of keeping Demeter from being sad. Springtime is the result of Demeter getting to see her daughter once again.
But then Persephone’s rule of the underworld predates Hades. Demeter and Persephone was around in the Mycenaean days, but it was Poseidon that was king of the dead, and Persephone was queen.
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