Ancient Literature Discussion (History, Myth, Philosophy &c.)

[Castellan]

Not sure when I wanted to interject and ask, but I was curious about Castellan's or anyone else's opinion on the Lebor Gabála Érenn. Specifically its inclusion of a deluge myth, which I can't seem to find anywhere else in Irish myth in my few minutes of research.

The Book of Invasions is what it is - it's an attempt to create a 'creation myth' for Ireland that deliberately draws on both Biblical and Classical sources. It starts with Genesis, and is sort of a microcosm of Irish mythology (such as we have it) as a whole, where it is a fusion of some distant ideas the monks may have heard from fíli or other learned storytellers, their own training in the Biblical stories and Christian apocrypha (particularly the lives of saints) and Classical mythology imported via Latin translations of Greek works.

Thus, it's not very useful for reconstructing what the mythologies (there would have been many, the Irish couldn't agree on anything, much less a pantheon) of Ireland, but very useful as a lens by which we can analyze the sagas as, essentially, medieval Ireland writing the story of itself.

(laughs) The latter, I gathered. :-) Thanks, though! Is Fáil-Inis's story available in English anywhere?

The story in which she (briefly) appears is the Fate of the Sons of Tuireann. You can find an old translation here, although I wouldn't pay too much attention to the preface - Celtic Studies has moved a long ways in a hundred years and a lot of what they're talking about there is really profoundly unapplicable to the field today. Just read through the translation.

[SpoonyViking]

Awesome! Thanks!

[Castellan]

A very brief fact that might also interest people: Like most places, medieval Ireland had different words for "King" and "Queen."

Consistently, whenever she's mentioned, Medb is referred to as "King" rather than "Queen," because the King was automatically assumed to be the authority above the Queen and Medb was the true authority of Connact rather than her husband Ailil.

So more accurately she should be "King (female) of Connacht" in the game.

[Ideofago]

Sexism strikes again

[Ideofago]

Five_X you motherfucker, if you're going to redirect me here you better answer:
Did or did not Hades exist to further cement the olympian gods as the main deities of worship?
Were previous, (even more) archaic versions of Zeus and Poseidon a duality between Earth and Sky?
Was Archaic Greek myth ever influenced by christianism?
Were greeks geeks? Are there geek greeks? Are there geeky greek geeks? Are there greeky geeky greek geeks witha cherry on top?

[Five_X]

Also, is there any old-school influence from christianity? I'm aware many of the perceived similarities in contemporary works are probably a consequence of christian dominance, but did any of the influence happen in the worship days?

A good reference text here is Decline and Change in Late Antiquity: Religion, Barbarians and their Historiography. As it happens, Greco-Roman religion by late antiquity (ca. 384-430 AD, per the speech of Praetextus) was evidently unrecognisable compared to what we usually think of when we imagine their beliefs and pantheon. The pantheon itself has been done away with, and Roman pagan belief resembled neo-Platonic Christianity pretty strongly: there was one creator God, and all other "gods" were simply emanations of the One. To tentatively connect it to the previous discussion of nature deities, scholars like in the referenced book suggest that the Romans stopped believing in individual portfolio-deities per se when they became unable to see them in the natural world: Rome was a very urban, literate, peaceful (not in the borderlands, sure - but most citizens didn't live there), and technological civilisation, and gradually people became less invested in rituals to gods they were increasingly disconnected from: what's the importance of an agricultural goddess in a city, or on a massive slave-powered latifundia? How powerful do chthonic deities really seem when Roman engineering ripped the earth apart so thoroughly we can still see the scars of their machines today?

To be sure, this isn't to say the Romans became a civilisation of atheists - quite the opposite. Their reasons for worship instead became more personal and more spiritual. Much like today, beliefs that seemed to offer new answers about life and the world were very attractive, more so if they seemed like ancient, foreign wisdom. At the same time, people wanted a sense of community within huge urban centres. Mystery cults provided all of these: the Eastern cults of Isis, Mithras, and Jesus all offered spiritual and social relief. People didn't think of the individual pagan gods so much, but they absolutely believed in magic and sought it out as a way of predicting their future and achieving material gain. Gods based in the physical, natural ex-urban world seemed to lose their sway, but there just so happened to be one part of the natural world that influenced human life more than any other, yet was fundamentally untouchable: the Sun. Being up in the sky and having so much control over human society as it does, people more and more began to attribute to the personified Sun a universal divine power. Everything radiated from the Sun: without it crops wouldn't grow and people couldn't see in the dark, so it only naturally followed that everything was an extension of the Sun - like the old gods. And beside the Sun as a divine, celestial being were of course the stars: by late antiquity, Romans had become fascinated with the signs of the Zodiac and astrology generally, and treated the Zodiacs roughly as deities themselves. It was very much in vogue to read the stars and try to predict one's future from them.

The Sun as deity was pretty much universal in some form or another by Constantine's time. Not only in the form of Sol Invictus Mithras, but also Christianity: its worshippers met on dies Solis and faced East in prayer, the direction of the rising Sun. Much used to be made by Christians of Constantine's miraculous conversion to their religion, but more likely he just adopted their patronage and supported them financially; he continued to use the Sun as his symbol, and as a Roman probably wouldn't have seen Christianity as exclusive to his regular beliefs - just another religious sect he could give homage to.

Christianity was very popular in its first centuries, but not exclusive or unique. It was deeply influential on Greco-Roman paganism, but in the sense that it was part of a broader movement of religious cults within the Roman Empire that were drastically changing personal and public belief. Kind of like competing brands, each of them influenced and was influenced by the others, trying to give people what they craved from spirituality. This made them fairly homogeneous in a way: if you were to get into a cult in the 4th century AD, you could generally expect them to have a network of social communities that met in designated (often underground) sites of worship, followed initiation rituals and held secrets revealed only to insiders, offered salvation to the soul and blessings in life, had recognisable symbols and signifiers, and presented the worshipper with a personal relationship with a singular deity associated with the Sun. The rest was flavour depending on preferences: women loved Isis; soldiers loved Sol Invictus; Greeks loved Jesus. Can you connect this all the way back to the Eleusinian Mysteries? Probably, in a way. Fundamentally, they all offered community, privacy, salvation, and a personal relationship with the deity. Beyond that, I'm not informed enough to know. These are all just my personal deductions.

[Ideofago]

One thing I've noticed more as a personal deduction with virtually no true education in the matter, is that in linguistics, the spread and distribution of different languages is pretty similar in level; what truly set them apart in irregular fashion was political organization. AKA Castellan, Portuguese, Basque, and Catallan are all roughly similar to the same degree, give or take, but 3 are 75% of Spain's national languages whereas Portuguese is Portugal's. I could maybe also mention the different german or gaelic languages( I was going to say I'm not experienced enough to talk about those, but I'm not experienced to be saying anything at all so what the hell), they are about as different as dialects in a bigger country, such as the indigenous languages of South America, but, thanks to Europe's division of nations on a scale we brasilians divide states, they're considered different, national languages. This is a very edge of my seat way of saying that dialects are accents with a navy and languages are dialects with an army, and their differences, specifically nowadays with globalization, is dispersed mostly evenly. Could this be the case with religion? Assuming of course the whole thing isn't blatantly wrong.

[SirGauoftheSquareTable]

Yeah, this does resemble what I've come across in terms of information about Late Antiquity religious practice. In a sense, it sort of resembles our own religious landscape, in which religion has become increasingly fragmented, decentralized, and personal, and people are taking foreign gods and religions as their own.

[Five_X]

The city of Rome was basically ancient LA, huh.

[Ideofago]

More like LA is a pale current imitation of Rome.

[Five_X]

One thing I've noticed more as a personal deduction with virtually no true education in the matter, is that in linguistics, the spread and distribution of different languages is pretty similar in level; what truly set them apart in irregular fashion was political organization. AKA Castellan, Portuguese, Basque, and Catallan are all roughly similar to the same degree, give or take, but 3 are 75% of Spain's national languages whereas Portuguese is Portugal's. I could maybe also mention the different german or gaelic languages( I was going to say I'm not experienced enough to talk about those, but I'm not experienced to be saying anything at all so what the hell), they are about as different as dialects in a bigger country, such as the indigenous languages of South America, but, thanks to Europe's division of nations on a scale we brasilians divide states, they're considered different, national languages. This is a very edge of my seat way of saying that dialects are accents with a navy and languages are dialects with an army, and their differences, specifically nowadays with globalization, is dispersed mostly evenly. Could this be the case with religion? Assuming of course the whole thing isn't blatantly wrong.

I think this is mainly true with language but only recently, in the era of nationalism. The old saying about language and dialects you paraphrase is true, but not in the conventional sense: it's more that a national language has the "army and navy" of state institutions, especially public education, and can so thoroughly eradicate or assimilate other languages and dialects within state borders that they have little power to assert themselves and self-reproduce. When minority languages and dialects have institutions to maintain them - typically local autonomy - then they maintain themselves pretty well. In times like the 19th and early 20th century Europe when allowing regional autonomy was seen less as a smart state management decision and more like a shot in the foot and humiliation in bowing to minority nationalisms, it made sense to try to eradicate all other languages within state borders in order to assert cultural homogeneity and thus social solidarity and stability. In hindsight this doesn't seem to work so well, but in places where local institutions were weak and the central government had an especially strong hand, like post-Prussian War France, state institutions like public education and the centrality of bureaucracy and administration within the capital obliterated provincial languages without comparable institutions. In other cases, mass immigration from core regions of a country to the periphery, like poor English moving to Wales for coal mining and dockworking jobs, led to the decline of local languages in urban centres and their relegation to institutionally weak countrysides.

Religions of course have a much longer history with institutions, but it's a similar idea. A state religion reflects state authority, and so if some people aren't following your religion and seem to be making their own community with its own separate institutions, if you want to maintain the centrality of your authority it's pretty important to keep them in check or eliminate them. If your state is based on dispersed authority, like the early modern Dutch Republic, consequently religious solidarity isn't so important. It's similarly different depending on type of religion involved: confessional religions emphasise orthodoxy and expect people to be initiated exclusively into their community and follow their doctrine personally and socially. Outsiders are naturally suspect and have to be carefully contained, because any decline in number of observable faithful in favour of another can be seen as a failure of institutions, with plenty of implications on the state-level as a result. For non-confessional state religions like that of the Romans, all that really mattered was that people took part in public rituals, temples, and festivities. Jews and Christians were particularly suspect and seen as anti-social for the reason that they refused to take part in public religion, which was to the Romans a political statement; Pliny's letter to Trajan is a good example of how early Christians were understood by the Roman state. Very generally, it didn't matter too much what someone's personal religion was, as long as they kept temples and festivals busy and full, so if you didn't seem to be politically subversive like the Jews and Christians then it didn't usually matter all too much if you spent your nights in snake orgies or dancing around bulls. That's not to say the Roman state or traditionalist Romans were perfectly happy with new religious movements, but they weren't fundamentally a religiously persecuting society.

[Ideofago]

Very interesting. You're a wonderful teacher.

[Five_X]

I don't know if I'm a teacher, this thread and the other history one are just my academic hot takes containment zones. But eventually I'll be paid for them!

[Ideofago]

You speak well, with confidence, and more knowledge than me by a mile; that's enough for me.

[Castellan]

I just have infectiously enthusiastic PhD student friends and like to collect and retell some of the stuff they've told me, or other stuff I've found after digging into the Irish sagas or whatever else I've got on my reading table.

At this point I've read more of the Mahabharata than any sane person should.

[Skull]

Psst, Castellan. Not to pester you but I have one final question about Irish mythology to pick your brain about. In a different thread the other day the old nugget of Fionn defeating the god Nuada in battle was brought up again and it reminded me that I could never find a source for that. Do you have any clue what TM might be drawing from, or am I just dumb and it's obvious?

[Ideofago]

Shit, I forgot I wanted to read the Mahabharata. But my backlog is so big and I have been such not a reader in the last like 5 years.

[Castellan]

Psst, Castellan. Not to pester you but I have one final question about Irish mythology to pick your brain about. In a different thread the other day the old nugget of Fionn defeating the god Nuada in battle was brought up again and it reminded me that I could never find a source for that. Do you have any clue what TM might be drawing from, or am I just dumb and it's obvious?

You're not! This is merging two different stories about Fionn mac Cumhail together and also two entirely different eras of Finn Cycle stories.

So Nuadu is sometimes portrayed as being Fionn's grandfather because Fionn's grandfather was a druid named Nuadu and later generations of scribes went 'oh so his dad must be the god and not just Some Dude Named Nuadu,' so that's how he's connected to the Fionn Cycle.

Meanwhile, the 'god' that Fionn killed was Aillen, a musician from the Túatha Dé Danann who'd come to the High King's court at Tara every Samhain, put everyone to sleep and then light the roof of the Great Hall on fire. Fionn confronted Aillen when he was about ten years old by keeping himself awake either by stabbing himself with a red-hot spear or a poisoned spear that allowed the pain to keep him awake through Aillen's song, the accounts vary.

But to my knowledge, there's no primary source for a story about Fionn fighting Nuadu - Nuadu is already looooooooong dead by the time of the Fionn Cycle, his death is what allows Lugh to temporarily become king of the Túatha Dé Danann.

[SirGauoftheSquareTable]

Shit, I forgot I wanted to read the Mahabharata. But my backlog is so big and I have been such not a reader in the last like 5 years.

I do too. I haven't revisited the tale since I was 9...

[Skull]

You're not! This is merging two different stories about Fionn mac Cumhail together and also two entirely different eras of Finn Cycle stories.

So Nuadu is sometimes portrayed as being Fionn's grandfather because Fionn's grandfather was a druid named Nuadu and later generations of scribes went 'oh so his dad must be the god and not just Some Dude Named Nuadu,' so that's how he's connected to the Fionn Cycle.

Meanwhile, the 'god' that Fionn killed was Aillen, a musician from the Túatha Dé Danann who'd come to the High King's court at Tara every Samhain, put everyone to sleep and then light the roof of the Great Hall on fire. Fionn confronted Aillen when he was about ten years old by keeping himself awake either by stabbing himself with a red-hot spear or a poisoned spear that allowed the pain to keep him awake through Aillen's song, the accounts vary.

But to my knowledge, there's no primary source for a story about Fionn fighting Nuadu - Nuadu is already looooooooong dead by the time of the Fionn Cycle, his death is what allows Lugh to temporarily become king of the Túatha Dé Danann.

Mm'kay, interesting. Although I will clarify that Fionn's F/GO profile references him fighting Aillen and Nuada as two separate instances over the course of his life so it doesn't appear that they are confusing the two at the least.