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Seva Khusid

@sevakhusid.bsky.social

130 followers 200 following 500 posts

οἴμοι From Classics & Philosophy into making indie games. Play my latest jam entry: https://vsevolod-khusid.itch.io/plan-e-t Or visit my website to see what's cooking: https://www.sevakhusid.games/

vsevolod-khusid.itch.io

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Seva Khusid @sevakhusid.bsky.social · Mar 16

The winter has been productive. After the prototype for the Burning Sky, I have spent two months working for the studio Trioskaz on a project that I am very excited for.
(Trioskaz: trioskazgames.tilda.ws)

trioskazgames.tilda.ws

Seva Khusid @sevakhusid.bsky.social · 5h

Congratulations!
Try to keep at that, it gets worse quickly after.

Seva Khusid @sevakhusid.bsky.social · 6h

But if we go naive Gorkian, we just open up the way towards the eleventh Chaos god, Graham Priest, since the explicit and, most certainly, implicit Gork-significant beliefs will create all kinds of contradictions.

Seva Khusid @sevakhusid.bsky.social · 6h

But is it real-world folkloric and real in-universe, or is it diegetic folklore and brass has nothing to do with anti-magic? Or is it a Gorkian realization of mass belief?

Seva Khusid @sevakhusid.bsky.social · 7h

Even with a finite number of both, it only took them a negligible 85 million years this time

Seva Khusid @sevakhusid.bsky.social · 7h

On the one hand, yes
On the other, Brass Citadel feels decidedly more brass than the idea of brass, no?

Seva Khusid @sevakhusid.bsky.social · 7h

This sort of reply puts into question the myths about Khorne -- the size of the throne is as heretical as Shi'ur Qomah, the Skarbrand fable is but a metaphor -- and implies that WH40k runs on metaphysics far more interesting than anything they actually write. Would that GW had their own Kirkbride!..

Seva Khusid @sevakhusid.bsky.social · 1d

Anyhow, I wouldn't trust K.'s conclusions, but his instinct is impeccable. Arguments via astronomy (so underappreciated in the field! At least the study of Mithraism seems to have circled back to it), parallels, immense erudition.

Seva Khusid @sevakhusid.bsky.social · 1d

All in all, now *that part* of Kerenyi's argument reads as more legitimate, maybe even close to the truth. An aside: K. was a close associate of Jung and shared a habit of taking a handful of reasonable steps towards a wildly overzealous conclusion (see e.g. their Essays on a Science of Mythology)

Seva Khusid @sevakhusid.bsky.social · 1d

So, the bulls and the snakes are confusing here, but Kerenyi could point to the phrase, if it is relevant to the Mycenaean Greece -- a bit over a millennium away from these accounts.
Yet the same Athenagoras quotes Orphic verse, sufficiently coherent with the Derveni text: continuity over 500 years.

Seva Khusid @sevakhusid.bsky.social · 1d

The version of Athenagoras has two serpent-births. Both Rhea and Zeus are transformed and produce a horned, possibly-bovine Persephone. Even then, as the cow-Persephone births Dionysus, D. is not serpentine. And the symbolum does not work either, unless it got streamlined to use all-male forms.

Seva Khusid @sevakhusid.bsky.social · 1d

The ritual practice seems to be clear enough: a serpent effigy passed through the clothes of an initiate until it leaves from the bottom. (I couldn't confirm if it was gender-exclusive though!) So, the serpent-father obtains, but I am still confused by the bull fathering the serpent.

Seva Khusid @sevakhusid.bsky.social · 1d

So, as the Christian authors focus on the myth that Zeus rapes first his own mother Demeter/Rhea (in the form of a bull or a serpent), produces Persephone (on one account, with a second, horned bestial head -- cow?), and then rapes her in the form of a serpent, we cannot be sure in their retellings.

Seva Khusid @sevakhusid.bsky.social · 1d

De Jauregui also notes a third apologist, Firmicus, who "calls the two lines about the bull and the serpent a symbolum", a way to assert faith in the cult. In Firmicus, other symbola of this cult take a modernized and streamlined form, implying some loss of understanding even by the actual mystics.

Seva Khusid @sevakhusid.bsky.social · 1d

But when taken with the mention of Ceres, it can finally be found in two places: Clement of Alexandria, and later a more obscure Christian apologist Arnobius. Both relate the phrase as a generally-known poetic expression.
(pp.155-156 in Orphism & Christianity in Late Antiquity, MH de Jauregui, 2010)

ia801009.us.archive.org

Seva Khusid @sevakhusid.bsky.social · 1d

"In the mysteries of Ceres and Proserpine, the grand secret communicated to the initiated was thus enigmatically expressed: Taurus Draconem genuit, et Taurum Draco; <...> The bull, as already seen, was a prominent emblem of generative force, the Bacchus Zagreus,..."

BUT NO ATTRIBUTION AGAIN

Seva Khusid @sevakhusid.bsky.social · 1d

I first stumble upon a 1889 Anonymous and self-published (!) treatise Opholatreia, on the worship of snakes in human culture. It is itself a secondary text to

'one already issued bearing the title “Phallism.” '

And lo, there is the line:

Ophiolateria, or Serpent Worship—A Project Gutenberg eBook

www.gutenberg.org

Seva Khusid @sevakhusid.bsky.social · 1d

And it's impressive, and later on Carl Jung would go on to use it in his entirely non-academic activities, and it has no clear attribution. And so I haven't been able to find a justification to use it.

UNTIL 13 HOURS AGO

Seva Khusid @sevakhusid.bsky.social · 1d

In his book on Dionysus, Kerenyi says (broad strokes) that Cretan Dionysus was a bull-son of snake-Zeus. He has good superficial evidence, but his real heavy-hitter is a line from some cultic source:

The bull has begotten a serpent, and the serpent a bull.
Taurus draconem genuit et taurum draco.

Seva Khusid @sevakhusid.bsky.social · 1d

There are three lines that haunted me, all found in K. Kerenyi, a good mythologist and a widely overreaching philologist.

One is in the quoted post -- an obscure name of Prometheus.
Another is one Iachim, allegedly an Egyptian priest.
The third one I just managed to chase up.

Seva Khusid @sevakhusid.bsky.social · May 23

my personal white whale

Seva Khusid @sevakhusid.bsky.social · 1d

These memes convince me there is only one type of gamer worth designing for

bsky.app/profile/null...

Null convention @nullconvention.bsky.social · 4d

I would basically do anything the woman on the right asked me to do.

Seva Khusid @sevakhusid.bsky.social · 1d

Bloodborne 2 early announcement campaign is wild

Seva Khusid @sevakhusid.bsky.social · 1d

ah yes, the distant relative of Ivan Maksimovich Poddubniy — note the familial mustache

Seva Khusid @sevakhusid.bsky.social · 1d

It’s only blood libel if they portray it as essential to the religion. Otherwise it’s just sparkling antisemitism.

Seva Khusid @sevakhusid.bsky.social · 1d

(probably shouldn't be giving them ideas)

Seva Khusid @sevakhusid.bsky.social · 1d

At this point I am just waiting for the meme to do a full circle back to blood libel