Daily Archives: April 22, 2024

Top Tens – Miscellany: Top 10 Youtube (Special Mention) (6) Pax Romana

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Youtube channel banner as at 22 April 2024

 

(6) PAX ROMANA (USA 2020)

 

 

“The guy who updates you daily on the status of the Roman Empire, now brings you his sh*t posting in video form.”

 

How it started – it’s gone.

 

How it’s going – it’s still gone but mostly on X (not the Roman numeral but the artist formerly known as Twitter).

 

It all started with the Daily Roman Updates page on F-book and the first post “it’s gone”, echoing the rise of Rome itself from humble origin to empire as Daily Roman Updates grew to a virtual empire of humorous memes on Roman history. First in the Italy of F-book, through the mare nostrum of social media on Twitter and Instagram, and ultimately to the titular Pax Romana of Youtube.

 

Sadly, this Roman memepire – and yes, I borrowed that from the title of one of its videos – has declined and fallen somewhat, not unlike the empire itself. The Youtube channel is presently dormant, not unlike that other Roman special mention Dovahhatty but in Pax Romana’s case apparently due to demonetization. Hopefully to rebound like the empire did (until it didn’t) but the beating heart of Daily Roman Updates remains its profile on X, in terms of post activity and subscribers.

 

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

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Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Mancy (Special Mention) (6) Arithmancy

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Yes – it’s one of my favorite memes, the math lady / confused lady featuring Brazilian actress Renata Sorrah playing Nazare Tedesco in a scene from Senhora do Destino

 

(6) ARITHMANCY

 

Lucky numbers and sacred geometry!

Also Pythagoras – whom I used to think of as a grounded philosopher and mathematician from his theorem at school, because schools don’t teach how much of a mystical kook he was as well. Mind you, the same goes for Greek philosophers in general, as E.R. Dodds propounded in The Greeks and the Irrational.

And yes – apparently numerology was known as arithmancy prior to the 20th century, and frankly still should be rather than coopting a name more appropriate to a science to itself, similarly to astrology. Also – numeromancy was sitting right there!

In fairness, similarly to astrology contributing to astronomy, numerology may have contributed to science, albeit more numerology in the broader sense of numeric patterns – as per British mathematician I. J. Good, “there have been a few examples of numerology that have led to theories that transformed society…It would be fair enough to say that numerology was the origin of the theories of electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, gravitation….”

Arithmancy or divinatory numerology essentially involves “a belief in an occult, divine or mystical relationship between a number and one or more coinciding events” – or that certain numbers have certain mystical or symbolic properties. Or in short – lucky (and unlucky) numbers. The same concept can also be applied to the mathematical properties of geometry – hence sacred geometry.

As for the numbers themselves, they may come from some process of random selection (not unlike modern lotteries) or from assigning numeric values to other things, such as an alphanumeric system for letters in words or names (overlapping with my previous special mention for nomancy or onomancy).

That last is also known as gematria, a practice dating back to ancient history and (in)famously appearing in the Bible as 666 or the Number of the Beast in the Book of Apocalypse – or as I like to quip, that sixy beast – for which the scholarly consensus is that it is an alphanumeric key to the Roman Emperor Nero. (It’s a little more messy than that – I understand it wasn’t the actual Nero, but some sort of projected supercharged revenant Nero back from the dead, and could also be rendered alternatively as 616, as it was in some versions).

The strength of arithmancy or numerology as both method of divination and school of magic lies in the elegance and explanatory power of mathematics to explain the fundamental properties of our reality – something which is ever more so in modern science, where whole swathes of reality only seem explicable entirely as increasingly arcane mathematical formulae.

To the point that our physical reality often seems a coalescence or crystallization of mathematics or numbers – it is not so much that everything has a true name but a true number.

I can’t resist closing with two of my favorite incarnations of arithmancy in science fiction.

The first is the basic arithmantic principles underlying the Laundry series by Charles Stross – where the magic is essentially arithmancy or mathematics (and where the growing computing power of humanity and its machines will reach a threshold drawing the attention of hostile Lovecraftian entities).

The second is my favorite version of arithmancy in a charming (and characteristically horny) short story by Fritz Leiber – in which the number seven assumes a sexy female personification. Hot damn – that would have made maths classes more interesting at school!

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
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Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Mythologies (Special Mention) (6) Magic

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1 The Magician from the Rider-Waite Tarot illustrated by Pamela Colman-Smith

 

(6) MAGIC

 

Abracadabra!

Where else to feature magic but in mythology? Although…magic is not so definitive of mythology as it is of, say, fantasy. Yes – you have what might be termed (supernatural) magic throughout mythology, but usually as characteristic of divine or semi-divine beings, as part of their inherent essence or nature. You tend not to have magic in the more narrowly defined sense of functional magic – that is, magic as the human “application of beliefs, rituals or actions employed in the belief that they can manipulate natural or supernatural beings and forces”. When mortal humans or heroes tend to use magic in mythology, it is as a gift from the gods – because it was given to them by the gods or other supernatural beings.

Functional magic tends to occupy that eclectic middle ground (or perhaps no-man’s land?) between mythology and more general folklore or ritual. And even more so between religion and science. I like to quip that religion is organized magic. I stand by that quip, but religion tends more to the role of magic in mythology – as something that is given by divine power rather than manipulated by humans, indeed tending to see the latter as…competition at best. (I understand that historian Keith Thomas proposed a similar thesis, albeit in a narrower historical setting, in his Religion and the Decline of Magic).

I tend to see religion more as Sir James George Frazer did – as closer to proto-science, or an effort to create a system of cause and effect, albeit without science’s rigor to exclude personal beliefs from the results of observation. Indeed, beliefs are kind of the point of magic. Frazer coined the term sympathetic magic, dividing it further into magical principles of similarity (like affects like) and contagion (things that have been in contact continue to affect each other)

However, the classifications or types of magic could very well be the subject of their own top ten. White, grey and black magic. High and low magic. Modern magic (often styled as magick) – ceremonial and chaos magic. And of course stage magic – or illusion. Apotropaic magic. Blood magic. Elemental and natural magic. Wild magic. Alchemy – elixirs and potions. Incantations. Thaumaturgy. Theurgy. Magical objects – amulets and talismans. Magical symbols – runes and sigils. Curses. Grimoires. Runes. True names.

And of course the schools of magic popularized by Dungeons and Dragons – abjuration, conjuration, divination, enchantment, illusion, necromancy and transmutation.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****
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Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Books (Special Mention) (6) Sir James George Frazer – The Golden Bough

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Art by Simon Bisley for “Slaine: The Horned God” written by Pat Mills for the 2000 AD comic as one of my favorite adaptations of Frazer’s sacrificial sacred king in popular culture. Well, that and The Wicker Man (which also features in Slaine)

 

 

(6) SIR JAMES GEORGE FRAZER – THE GOLDEN BOUGH

 

“Who are these coming to the sacrifice?” –
John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn

Behold the monomyth of the sacrificial sacred king.

That is – the monomyth of a recurring or universal mythic archetype, as used by Joseph Campbell for his archetypal hero’s journey. But it doesn’t get much more monomythic that one of the original monomyths – Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough.

The Golden Bough proposed the monomyth or recurring mythic archetype of sacrificial sacred kings – or their surrogates once the kings wised up to it – as incarnations of gods or solar deities whose death and resurrection in turn represented fertility. And believe me, Frazer saw these sacred kings or fertility cults everywhere – including Jesus and Christianity, controversially at the time – such that he filled several volumes up with them, although more people (including me) tend to read his abridged single volume.

Now I think that Frazer was always entertaining and occasionally illuminating in The Golden Bough – his discussion of the principles of sympathetic magic, a term coined by himself, seems particularly definitive – but in terms of factual or historical accuracy…not so much as he’s much more mixed at best in this respect. As the old adage goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail – and when all you have is a theory of sacred kings, then by god or goddess, everything begins to look like a sacred king, even if you have to hammer everything into shape for it. After all, we all have to make sacrifices…

While Frazer is or was mostly dismissed as a footnote in academic study, The Golden Bough has been highly influential in literary culture, because whether or not it is true, his mythic archetype of the doomed hero or sacrificial sacred king has the elements of a ripping yarn.

Just for starters, there’s his influence on T. S. Eliot, who openly acknowledged the influence of Frazer on The Waste Land, although with the characteristic pessimism of that poem, proposed the cycle might be broken, leaving only violence and death without rebirth – and in which the dying god is just another buried corpse, perhaps even prompting to mind a Nietzschean murder victim or contemporary zombie apocalypse, rising writhing from their own resurrection – “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, has it begun to sprout?”

Or there’s his influence on Campbell’s own monomyth. Or on Sigmund Freud, lending itself to the segue of his influence on Camille Paglia, who described her primary influence as a fusion of Frazer and Freud (although doubling the inaccuracy of the former with that of the latter).

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
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