Notices by Nate Cull (natecull@mastodon.social), page 9

@leadore @InvaderXan @dredmorbius @anarchiv

Yep! Wikipedia says that China borrowed the Chaldean weekday-planet-names from the Romans sometime in the small-numbers-centuries AD.

so yeah, 'Fire Day' = 'Fire Star Day' = 'the day whose first hour is governed by Mars' = 'Tyr's Day' = 'Tuesday'

Woden's Day (Mercury's Day) becomes Water Star Day

Thor's Day (Jupiter's Day) becomes Wood Star Day

also: Proud Citizen of Dirtball.

@anarchiv Portuguese is something similar! Just numbers. Instead of whacky old Chaldean astronomy.

ah: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_hours

It's pretty screwed up that we have a 'Saturday' but Thursday isn't 'Jupitday'

I mean pick one pantheon and stick with it, Roman/Germanic people!

also what's with the weird ordering, seriously?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_days_of_the_week#Days_named_after_planets

I kinda wanna know what the six are though! Cos everyone's got an idea and they're all different! You'd think this would have been a very important bit of data to preserve but whoops!

It should probably also worry me that I now find a statement like this perfectly normal

but seriously, the 'six + 1' structure is pretty central to Jewish thought, six days of creation plus Sabbath, so

@Rich_Graham The second rule of Fight God Club is, you do not talk about Fight God

or Fight God will want fight you

@drh I think I have seen enough squelchy bits now

I would like it if they had less squelching in future

@Rich_Graham then there's Avalokiteśvara, who became a woman (Guan Yin) after he moved to China

@Rich_Graham while in Kabbalah, it's very definitely 'nope, the male side concerns itself with intuition and compassion and wholeness and unifying energy... the female side is about concrete details and rationality and getting in your face and causing you karmic pain if you make a tiny mistake'

@Rich_Graham Interesting!

What seems especially weird to me is that even the ideas of unity and multiplicity seem to have swapped genders at least by the 20th century ie Western thinking.

ie: that men are concerned with being 'rational', which means, acting as one tiny isolated unit seeking its own gain (or that of a very small nuclear family)

while women are the ones who are thought of as embodying holistic, whole-system, thinking, balancing the good of all.

even in New Age circles

I find it really fascinating that in Jewish Kabbalistic thought, 'Judgement' is a *female* quality while 'Compassion' is a male quality.

I can understand, I think, how the metaphysics of this works (ie: male represents unity, female multiplicity)

but it's still startling to a 21st century Western mind, where we've been trained to think of men as archetypically violent and women as archtypically merciful... and of Jewish culture as being patriarchal in a way we think we understand.

also, here's that 2016 paper about the authorship of the Zohar that Halperin linked, which I think is really cool to see the scholarship starting to open up like this

https://www.academia.edu/29907202/33._An_Unknown_Version_of_Zohar_Sifra_Ditseni_uta_with_an_Unknown_Theology_about_Creation_and_its_Destruction._See_also_33-a_above

It's not even *grey*! Which is really funny. The prototypical Grey Alien image, the one which pretty much launched the phenomenon, isn't grey.

Also: that painting on the cover of Whitley Streiber's Communion must have been pretty good, because it scared a LOT of people in exactly the same way it scared young teenage me. (and still scares 40-something me)

I wonder why that is.

It's not, when I force myself to look at it, a particularly "scary " face. I've seen plenty of fictional alien faces. But somehow.... a deep, automatic, 'ick no creepy' reflex.

what is up with that?

https://www.davidhalperin.net/alien-abduction-erotic-mysticism-the-strieber-and-kripal-challenge-part-2/

The reason why I find this fascinating is that I think there's good reason to believe that some of the weirder parts of early Christian Gnosticism (or is it Gnostic Christianity?) were drawing from existing Jewish tradition.

And/or, from direct spooky contact with the wibbling wossnames of beyond, because today's chatty ghosts seem to present a world-picture that resembles some of those old Zoharic speculations. A sort of cosmic layer-cake made out of consciousness and a few lumpy bits.

and immediately I find myself in a new sub-rabbithole: the idea (which heavyweight Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem believed) that 'the Book of Dzyan' might be the Sifra di-Tzeniuta, from the Zohar.

which is less interesting in itself, to me, than the whole thing about the academic Kabbalah studies pendulum tilting away from Scholem's frankly weird belief that Moses de Leon just faked all the multiple documents in the Zohar.

https://www.davidhalperin.net/sifra-di-tzeniuta-the-book-of-concealment/

@Rovine It's a foundational part of the.... very weird and hairy... Theosophy mythology. That is, the mythology *about* Helena Blavatsky's Theosophical Association rather than the mythology that organisation itself created. Both are big and tangled.

Blavatsky was a bit, uh, how to put this politely: she didn't prioritise citing her sources, and her 'deeply occult sources' were often popular reference books.

But 'Dzyan' might have been real-ish? I find this blog fascinating anyway.

also:

by the way, if you're interested in a search for the 'strange and terrible pages' of the actual Book of Dyzan (such as it may have been): best guess, as far as I can parse from this website, is that it would be located within the Tibetan Tantric Buddhist sub-tradition.

and I think 'Dyzan' comes out mostly as just a really bad Victorian translation of 'Zen'?

http://prajnaquest.fr/blog/