Fragments #3: Trees Don’t Exist, Aryan Borat, Cosmic Swastikas, Mazel Tov & Rome’s Hidden Meaning, Toxic Black People
Thoughts and links from this week
Below is the third installment of a new format I am trying out of shorter-form content to come out weekly. Here are installments #1 & #2.Hopefully, this will break up the extended interregnums between my long-form pieces (I know you have been begging for more). If you like it: good; if you hate it: even better.
First off, some corrections: my wife has been pestering me because I stated her active labor was only 4 hours when it was actually 5.5 – I was a whopping 37.5% off, gave her short shrift, and am profoundly sorry.
Trees do not exist – at least phylogenetically. Many species of trees are more related to herbs or shrubs than they are to other trees. Overall, it seems that trees as trees (with wood, bark, and general tree-shape) have evolved and re-evolved over and over. On the Canary Islands trees have evolved independently over 28 times. This link gives a good overview and is a reminder that genetics aren’t destiny and things can be related in very unexpected ways….
Thursday is named after the ancient Teutonic/Norse/Marvel God of thunder Thor – also known as Donar or Thunar (the root of our word thunder) – unsurprisingly Thor is also the God of lightning. The Romans associated Thursday with their God of lightning too, Jupiter or Jove. This is why in Latin Thursday is Jovis, Spanish: jueves, French: juedi, Italian: giovedi. Perhaps one day a DC superhero will have its own day of the week.
Our name for day is linked to our conception of God. The Proto-Indo-European root word Dyēus means roughly daylight or sky-god. It is the root of our word day, deity, theology, divine, and the Greek Zeus - also known as Zeus-Pater, which relates to the Roman Jupiter; and the Sanskrit word for heaven (Dyaus).
The people who spoke the Proto-Indo-European language have gone by many names. Their most famous offshoots being the Yamnaya people, Doric Heraclieds (sons of Hercules), or potentially even the fabled Egyptian “Sea-Peoples.” Together they are called by the polite the “Western Steppe Pastoralists” or by the more lewd Aryans – yes, those Aryans. The etymological root of Aryan, *h₂eryós meaning “my own people” and is the root for the country names Iran and Ireland.
Plato placed the homeland of the Aryans in Atlantis, Herodotus in Hyperborea, and Nazi occultists in Thule – but more learned (and genteel) people today state that about 2000 BC or earlier they came from the Pontic Steppe – the currently hotly contested region stretching from the eastern border of Romania, across Ukraine, Southern Russia, to the western edge of Kazakhstan (hold a mental picture of Sasha Baron Cohen in a shitty suit with a battle-axe). Many cite these proto-Borats as provoking the Bronze-Age Collapse. VERY NICE!!
The swastika was chosen as a Nazi symbol because of its prevalence in many cultures descended from the Aryans. In its original form (the Nazi symbol is rotated 45°) it was considered a sun-symbol. A more interesting interpretation is that it represents a comet or even potentially a solar flare hitting the upper ionosphere. This video gives a fascinating overview of how sun-symbol petroglyphs “called the squatter” found the world over could be a memory of prehistoric cosmic events.
The ancients were very much preoccupied with the stars and believed they had direct impact on our lives. Gobekli Tepe, the oldest acknowledged megalithic site on Earth has been interpreted to have astrological symbols. The root of the ancient Hebrew Mazel-Tov – which we now mean as “good luck” originally meant “may your constellations be favorable.” Many more ancient meanings remain hidden from us.
There was a secret name given to most ancient cities. This esoteric knowledge was forbidden to be uttered in public and taken very seriously as the ability to name a thing was presumed to give the speaker power over it. Soranus (pronounced sore-anus) was put to death by the dictator Sulla for allegedly revealing Rome’s hidden name. Needless to say living under an authoritarian regime can leave one butthurt.
Under our own police state the practice of civil asset forfeiture has taken off. This is when law enforcement officers confiscate private property from people without having to issue a warrant or even charging someone with a crime, let alone finding them guilty of breaking the law. In 2014 the total amount of goods seized under civil asset forfeiture in the US surpassed the total value of actual burglary!
In other shady activities – The Climate Emergency Fund – a NGO that funds other NGOs like Just Stop Oil (UK based), Wandel Buendisnis (Germany), and Renovate Switzerland – helps “activists” glue themselves to art, throw mashed potatoes in museums, and dye historic fountains. The Fund’s founding member is Aileen Getty, heiress of the Getty Oil dynasty – how much vandalism does it take to cleanse a guilty conscience?[1]
Recall genetics aren’t destiny. The number of genes does not scale with the complexity of the organism. The animal with the most genes (31k total) is the water flea, wild rice has 1.5x as many genes as that, and the organism with the most genes is a Japanese perennial flower.
Certain corners of the internet ascribe to a level of genetic determinism – pointing to IQ scores and crime rates to espouse the genetic inferiority of black people. Is that really the whole story? Without going into apologia, it is worth noting that blacks are disproportionately exposed to toxic chemicals with up to 60% of black communities being around toxic waste dumps. This along with poorer diets, cultural factors, etc. may do more to explain difference in outcomes than simple tropes about ethnic hierarchies.
Derrick Jensen spoke about objectivity contra post-modernism – and how no matter how much we dislike facts, we can’t escape them. The interesting thing is that if we do look into these aspects a little bit more – whether Aryans, climate activism, or racial disparities – the truth behind the facts may tell an even more surprising story.
That’s all for this week and thanks for reading,
Zay
[1] H/T to Leo Caesaris for scrounging this and the bit about Rome’s hidden name out.