Oh, you’re going to hear a lot of it approaching 2012. And I just saw one of the most atrocious pieces of reporting on the History Channel: they ought to be ashamed of themselves.
a. Ever actually read Nostradamus? He lived during the Black Death and right next to religious upheaval, the Inquisition, and other cheerful topics, not to mention oncoming war. He didn’t compose this stuff in a paradise on earth. Small wonder he wrote what he saw—literally. AND his verses are couched in a one-size fits all disaster. Great storms. Great quakes. Wars. Plagues. Gimme break. You’ll never go broke forecasting storms, quakes, wars, and plagues. Every generation has found something to fit it.
Classic, of course, is the Delphic oracle, of whom we have a few prophecies cited from semi-Â historic times. One is the king in Asia Minor who sent to the oracle to know what would happen if he pursued a war of conquest against his neighbor. The Sibyl replied; “If you go to war, a mighty empire will fall.” Of course it was his. He was pretty upset. She said, “I told you so.”
In point of fact, I’ve always viewed that as a cautionary tale probably as old as Greece, because I can’t believe any head of state who really believed the oracle would be quite that stupid.
b. They cite the Roman Sibyl and her verses available today and revered by Christians… Hey, even the Romans admitted they blew it with the Sibyl and lost her original books, save one, which was incomplete without the rest of the set. And then the thing got burned, in a later disaster, so they gathered every prophecy they EVER heard of from all over their empire and put THOSE in a book for consultation. So when Vergil cited the Sibyl about the birth of the miraculous child, you have to take that with a grain of salt, particularly recalling in another section of the Aeneid he had (realworld) caused his patron Augustus’ wife to collapse in tears, referring to the ‘miracle child’ who would be born someday and yet again, namely her lost son, Marcellus. It was lucky, however, because the early Christians liked that passage and ranked him with the prophets, or we might not have Vergil today. A lot of other books weren’t passed down. Oh—and the collection of books that are currently called the Sibylline Books: written AD, the whole lot. Probably not an original Sibylline prophecy in the collection.
c. Merlin. We are told to dismiss the ‘fictional Merlin’ and are introduced to ‘the real Merlin’, about whom the TV writers seem to know an amazing lot that mediaeval researchers would love to know…I rest my case. There are some prophecies attributed to Merlin, but mostly he turns up in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Arthurian legends, and history does not know another ‘real’ Merlin.
d. The Aztec Calendar. Yep, 12/12/12…bad stuff. The world ends. Actually it’s end of cycle. Pretty long cycle, like 28,000 years, so they say, but remember, these are the people that cite Merlin and the Sibyl, so we’re not sure. In point of fact, when you have calendars based on lunar/solar observations and go on a lunar year, you get REAL long cycles, and when you play games with astronomical observations, you can get, yes, really big circles. The old Celts—I’d have to dust off my knowledge of the festivals, but 5-year cycles of 62 months, and then something involving an 84 year cycle, etc, etc. Lunar observation and eclipse data, maybe: it’s been way too long. But I’m expecting them to drag the Druids and the Babylonians (both sky-observers) into this any day now.
Go ahead and book your New Year’s Eve party for 2012. I’m pretty sure you won’t have to take a raincheck.
^Glastonbury during the solstice would be a lot of fun, it’s a cool place.
The Romans likewise viewed time as a series of ages, the creation of Gaea/Chronos, the creation of the current gods (Jupiter, etc), and they considered there would be other ages of the earth.
By the time of the empire, there was a widespread belief in reincarnation, plus a few mystery cults (the Elusinian Mysteries, etc, which promised immortality), and…the old ancestral belief that restricted male names in the family to two or three in alternation, because the Name was a really big thing, implying a one-ness with the ancestors who had carried it before. It was a very Bad Deal if you disgraced a Name, and it had to be taken out of the rotation permanently. In the Brutus family, the name Marcus was removed after Caesar’s assassination.
The year 1000 also saw a huge concern with the end of the world – with lots of people selling/giving away their property -often to the Church of course. I recall reading somewhere that there were lawsuits trying to recover the property because the world had NOT ended, that went through the courts for several hundred years!
I have to admit that I’ve lost track of all the dates the world was supposed to end. And there were quite a few of them, plus the calendar has shifted a bit over time, and some of the calculations were a bit unclear… I think it’s pretty safe to say that if the world didn’t end the last seventy or so times, it won’t end in 2012 either.
There were also lots of pilgrimages – many to Santiago as the Holy Land was a bit dicey, which shrine managed an extensive rebuild on the proceeds!
But Brutus was an honest man. When we were studying The Roman Republic, Dr. Daly (Bowling Green) was adamant that the reason they assassinated Caesar was because he was too powerful, having been given Dictator for life. The early dictators were limited to 6 months tenure, after which time they had to step down. Since their powers were unlimited, only the most trusted and honorable men would have been considered, those who held the welfare of Rome first. Since Caesar now had unlimited power for life, he could dissolve the Senate, execute any of them for whatever reason he chose, well, do anything, and NEVER be prosecuted for it. Can you imagine how WE’d react to someone like that? For nothing else, even if they were being somewhat self-centered in trying to maintain their own power as a body of Senators, they still were looking at the consequences of having given one man unlimited power. I think the Brutus family was forced by Octavian into removing that name or face severe penalties.
Name was everything to a Roman. Some of them traced their lineage back to the founding of the city, and if I recall correctly, the Julius family traced theirs back to Venus. I never said the genealogy was correct, we know that it was made up, but the fact that Caesar said he was descended from Venus made it true, because polite company would see the pretense but would not remark on the falsity of the statement. Like Tristan calling the lords of the South to Winterfeast, everyone knows why, but nobody will mention the real reason.
Well, and Caesar is said to have been presented a list of persons who had spoken or acted on the Optimates side, and he is said to have detroyed it unread. The Roman people had seen unbridled power not on the side of the Marians but on the side of Sulla.
What we have here, imho, is a ‘constitutional crisis.’ The government is paralysed with problems involving the Italian citizenship (and the assassination of the 2 Tribuni Plebis, the equivalent of our whole House of Representatives) and the corruption of the senate by successive waves of assassinations and exiles, until the old balance of power was shot, and there was nothing yet to replace it.
When Augustus took over, he used a legal maneuver to claim the Tribunician Power, without quite holding the office (though he was commonborn, as I recall, but adopted by a patrician)as the sole power of what we call the Roman emperor. They actually had no word for what he was, but First Citizen was the title he claimed.
Whether Julius could have ressurected the Senate as it had been was rendered unanswerable by his assassination: he had publicly declined the option to do what both his predecessors (Marius and Sulla) had done: no assassinations and no exiles except those that ran for it.
It’s an interesting argument, what the difference in Rome would have been.
There’s an old radio preacher (Harold Camping of Family Radio) who is dead certain that the world is going to end on May 21st, 2011. He uses all kinds of numerology pulled from the Bible to make his point — and claims that God has opened up his spiritual eyes and ears to the coming day of judgement.
I’ve never been able to follow his line of reasoning, but a lot of people have bought into it. They’ve donated their life savings to his ministry, taken their kids out of school and basically put their lives on hold in anticipation of Camping’s predictions.
These kind of people do not scare me as there are many. The bothersome part is that many good and well meaning people end up getting hurt while being taken in.
Save for an astronomer who has evidence of a planetary body on a collision course with Earth, no one can predict the end…
…except for maybe my old 8th grade math teacher who claimed that the end was near when I actully scored a 100% on one of her algebra tests. (I was the dumbest kid in the class) I’ll never forget that day and was convinced the apocalypse was near as well…
I am skeptical to a fault when it comes to interpreting ANYTHING from the Bible. With all of the translations that have been handed down from Aramaic through Greek to Latina Vulgaris, to various forms of English, I’m not sure that anything is certain.
One of my professors in college mentioned the fact that in the monasteries where the scrolls were copied, the copyists sometimes objected to the use of a particular case or tense, or number, or mood, and would “amend” the copy to the way he felt it should read. Of course, then his copy is copied by someone else, who may or may not be as erudite in the language as the copyist is/was, and so the error is compounded. So many prepositions can have multiple meanings, any one of which could be used correctly, but significantly alter the meaning of the sentence in which it’s used. Plus, there was no guarantee that the person who copied a scroll had the best eyesight, and might have misread a letter or four, and changed things that way.
So, being the agnostic that I am, I take the Bible as a source of history, the same as I would take any of the other histories that have been written through the years. The Romans had their history, which oddly enough, seems to neglect the amount of influence Greece had on their culture. Ancient cultures do seem to have destroyed alternative histories that were written by the losers.
I find it outrageous that a school, even a private school, would use a textbook that only touches upon George Washington twice. So, he was a slaveowner, there have been slaveowners throughout history. Stronger societies have preyed on weaker societies – the Aztecs did, the Incas did, the Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians did, I would not be surprised that tribes in Africa took slaves of other tribes. The accomplishments of any of the people who founded this country can be overshadowed by the phrase, “He owned slaves.” I don’t say it’s moral, it was a fact of the times. To give it more attention than it deserves is wrong, just as it is wrong to give it less attention than it deserves. So, our bowdlerized, er, freshly rewritten U.S. history is now de rigeur in our schools. Pfah!!!
Here,here,here! Let’s see — I was appauled about the textbook too — which was a regular public school in Phoenix, Arizona. On the African tribes issue — they were major factors in the slave trade. Just about every cultural group has had slaves at some point and with Africa some groups were actively grapping the neighbors and selling them off to the Portuguese and other Europeans for shipment to the colonies. Personally, as much as I’ve always been interested in and love history I absolutely detested US History in high school. Nothing but dates and wars and not even a nodding attempt to look at what were the driving forces or the social/cultural perspective of why things were happening.
When it comes to the Bible, at the risk of offending others in the group, I’m right with you. Here’s two other points for you. Just because a monk is working away in a sccriptorium does not mean he can read — anything. You don’t need to read to copy shapes, which is basically what letters are. So, more potential for weirdness. Additionally, you also get the problem that some words, phrases and terms simply don’t translate from one language to another — there’s too much cultural loading to some things. There can be instances where a single word expresses an entire cultural concept and simply finding a similar word in the new language will not result in an accurate translation; the reverse is true too, that a concept inherent in one language may not have anthing remotely similar in another. Going from Aramaic to Greek to Latin to German to English over several centuries just begs for serious screw-ups and subsequent cultural ‘colorings’ like you mention. Then you add in the editting because it doesn’t fit one’s sensibilities [which has shown up with some of the Old Testament books and the Dead Sea Scrolls] plus a few centuries of sorting thru which do we want/which do we toss, and totally ignoring the allegorical nature of things — sorta like Julius being decended from Venus and I’ll happily say here here to your skepticism.
that reminds me that julius and Augustus had a month inserted for themselves. BTW doesn’t “our” calendar end every December 31?
Just wonderin’
Well, there were months…it ran Ianuarius (for Janus, the two-faced god of beginnings and endings), Februarius (the Fever-Month, dedicated to the dead spirits, who might revisit the household to protect it); Martius, the month of the war god Mars, when the priests of Mars would take the sacred shields from the temple, symbolizing the time at which they could go to war if anybody wanted to; Aprilis, the month of openings, flowers, etc., and incidentally the first month of the new year, based on the sprouting of grape vines; Maius (dedicated to Maia, a fertility goddess); Junius (I forget, but dedicated probably to youth); then September (that we call July after Julius, who redid the terribly messed-up calendar); then Octavus, which is now Augustus, after his adopted son; then October, (8), November (9) and December (10-th month). You can see that they scooted September (7) over to 8th, then moved it to the 9th spot.
The old Roman calendar had 10 months, with a heckuva new years celebration, in which they turned the household upside down, had the slaves having banquets and the masters serving the slaves on one day, and bunches of parties and giftgiving. THis could go on for as long as 31 days. But it wasn’t very efficient having the priests tell you every year how long the intercalary days were to last. (This was the Saturnalia, the rule of the Old Gods, a festival of nothing-counts.)
Julius talked to some scholars (could’ve been Egyptian, for what I know) who had a notion of straightening it all out and making a 12 month year, and having the clocks work right—
Rome functioned on a misset clock for a hundred and fifty years, until they figured the sundial they’d captured in a war had to be adjusted for latitude, so the story runs, but the Romans were fond of exaggerating jokes on themselves, so you don’t know if this was true, and the messed-up time system was a favorite sore point. It was a relief when they got onto a system that made sense, but it was too bad about the parties.
Isn’t June from Juno? That’s what I remember reading back when I was young.
It could actually be. Iun or Jun is a particle meaning young as well as being part of the supreme goddess’ name.
Curiously the Romans didn’t make too much of Juno, so you tend to forget her. I can’t even recall a temple belonging to her—it just struck me. I’ve hiked all over the Forums and adjacent areas, and just can’t remember one to her—oh, yes! The other hump of the Capitoline. One is Jupiter and the other is Juno, and the reason you can’t find her temple now is because the Church appropriated it for the Church of Maria in Ara Coeli, or The Church of Mary at the Altar of Heaven. So she was pretty prominent, but unhappily, it was right around her temple that they used to execute traitors by pitching them off the cliff. And I think it was her sacred geese that saved Rome by cackling like crazy when the Gauls tried to climb up the cliff to the Capitoline, or Arx (citadel.)
You may bet there has been a lot of fill in the area: the old Tabularium (city records department) stood between Jupiter and Juno, and so did the altar of a weird godlet that was dug up periodically (it was buried normally) and the priests would exhort it to be still, and then bury it again. It happens to lie right on the earthquake fault, which is WHY the two hills are split, and so is the forum, and so is half the Colosseum.
Anyway, yes, it could be Juno, who was either a greatly neglected goddess, or one that was Women’s Business, like Vesta, and therefore seldom mentioned too openly. (Not that the Romans looked down on women’s business, but that the fertility things were sort of hush-hush and not for guys to meddle with.) She really was supposed to be equivalent to the Greek Hera, (the Lady) but not really. She just has a different feeling.
Heh. If it sounds as if I have a personal investment here, remember I was a Classical scholar once upon a time, and my particular thing was Bronze Age migration and tribal divisions. And there’s not that common a feel between these two goddesses. Juno was a Roman matron, all dignity and propriety, and wasn’t really vengeful (except where Vergil had to make her equivalent to Hera in the Aeneid, and even so he worked hard to give her motivation. 😉 )
Hmm. So many peoples had calendars that left time between one year and the next, and this was usually considered time to celebrate. The Maya year was approximately 360 days long, which left five or so days over at the end. This period of time was considered extremely unfortunate, especially for births. Women due would just cross their legs hard during this time, or lie about the birth. Sometimes they would kill the child, as anyone born during these periods would be expected to be sickly and unlucky (at least) all their lives.
The Maya are the only ones I’ve run across that consider this ‘extra’ time negatively. Probably a result of their lovely collection of bloodthirsty underworld gods. Anyone know of any others?
I believe the Egyptians believed something similar.
Since I was already logged in…. It bugs me when the History Channel has a program on Nostradamus and reports an urban legend as truth. The supposed prophecy about the World Trade Centers was written by a college student in the style of Nostradamus. That was revealed in 2001! How many years does it take to get something right?
Didn’t he write almanacs? Maybe he was just saying what people wanted to hear. Gloom and doom. Happy is good filler, but it doesn’t sell newspapers for any length of time.
I ran into a good one this morning, in the medieval genealogy newsgroup.
Someone put in a post about Fabius Maximus Cunctator.
Read and weep (this is the first paragraph as posted):
“Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus Cunctator (ca. 280 BC–203 BC), was a
Roman politician and general, born in Rome around 280 BC and died in
Rome in 203 BC.His family was from the area now called iraq or Yemen
possibly , of the ‘ Sabian ” tribe , then a part of ROME / Roman
territories ”
Even I know more about Roman history than whoever wrote that ….
O. M. G.
Fabius would have had a cat.
Didn’t he write almanacs?
I read the Farmer’s Almanac a year or two ago when we interviewed its publisher. I am having fun now imagining it rewritten in the style of Nostradamus, or vice-versa.