felis_ultharus

So as of yesterday I have an altar from IKEA. Not that IKEA advertises it as such - rather, I've redeemed that most fallen of furniture-pieces, the TV table, and repurposed it toward a nobler end than the one it was destined for.

However, I'm quite sure that given the explosive growth of Neo-Paganism in Sweden as elsewhere, IKEA home altars are in the offing.

There is, of course, nothing new about Pagan holy sites that require assembly. Earlier this year, archaeologists uncovered a 6th-century Greek temple with assembly instructions in Italy.

And on Labour Day I was researching ancient Norse temples -- what else does one do on Labour Day, really? -- and was directed toward an article on heathen hofs and stave churches. For anyone who's never seen a picture of a stave church, they really are quite beautiful. Current thinking is that as soon as the Christians had burnt down the Pagan temples, they stole the architectural style. The Vikings had no DRM, so the copyright on their sacred architecture was easily bypassed. Stave temples became stave churches.

Anyway, I bring this up because the steps in building such a temple read suspiciously like the instructions to the Hemnes grey-brown sprucewood altar. Which explains why the Swedish are so good at this - they've been doing since Viking ages. Real Harald Bluetooth technology.

And you can just bet that the Vikings were furious after they waited ages by the warehouse to collect their DIY temples, only to be told that same-day delivery by longship was 85 ounces of hacksilver. Then they would undoubtedly over to collect their kids, who would have been screaming playfully in a small room filled of the skulls of IKEA's enemies.

And one day I'm sure, archaeologists will dig below the postholes and hearth sites and Frankish glass and gold figurines they always find in those buried Norse temple sites, and find the Allen keys. Because you know, once you lose the Allen keys, it will take you a thousand years to find them again.

From Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries, in the section dealing with Christian attempts to eradicate the "rustic" paganism of the illiterate country folk once they were done with the priesthood and temples in the cities:

"Take the learned Agobard of Lyons, bishop until his death in 840: he writes a treatise titled, though perhaps not by the author, 'Against the stupid opinions of the masses,' in which he begins, 'In these parts nearly everyone, noble or lowly, citified or rustic, old or young, thinks that hailstorms and thunder are within the control of man'; and from here he goes on to describe a universal belief in practitioners called tempestarii or weather-men who can be called in to control the source of the phenomena, which most folk say come from a sky-land called Magonia and are born along celestial ships.

"Now this, says Agobard, is madness, a great stupidity; and the most profound stupidity of all which he recently witnessed was the exhibiting of four people tied up and held in the public prison who, it was advertised, had accidentally tumbled out of the ships!"

Am I the only one who thinks that castaways from weather-controlling skyships into Dark Ages France would make a great basis for a fantasy short story? I'm filing this one away for later.

I've updated my historical website with something historical for a change. The new article is about homosexuality in the media at the end of the 19th and the turn of the 20th century in Canada.

Individual cases had been mentioned, but this was the first time homosexuality started to get talked about as a "social problem."

Doing this site has been really interesting. I've not only had to dig up LGBT history, but a lot of general Canadian history as well to do a background on these issues. There's so much out there that would be considered vital history to know in any other country, but which isn't even taught in our schools.

I just finished a book entitled Mysteries of the Middle Ages by Thomas Cahill. I gave it as a gift once and it seemed interesting, so I bought a copy for myself as well.

Cahill's built a career as the optimist's historian. What interests him aren't the wars, political struggles, glories, and evils, but the remarkable, positive moments -- like how Irish Catholic monks copied and preserved technically heretical Classical texts so as to keep them alive and in memory.

Mysteries is kind of a random sampling of the people and places he finds interesting, and which tend to get forgotten in the modern view of the Middle Ages as a sterile and superstitious age. He covers the City of Alexandria, the first universities, Hildegaard of Bingen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Francis of Assisi, Dante, Giotto, Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Héloïse and Abelard, among others.

( Review continues )

Here's the kind of stuff you stumble on to checking Wikipedia's list of "unusual articles."

Two of my favourites:

The BBC (no less) reported that the United States military briefly considered a bomb that would cause gay sex among enemy combatants:

"The plan for a so-called "love bomb" envisaged an aphrodisiac chemical that would provoke widespread homosexual behaviour among troops, causing what the military called a "distasteful but completely non-lethal" blow to morale."

It actually sounds like the plot of a truly awful slash fanfic written by some pre-teen who'd been watching Dr. Strangelove after snorting powdered Tang.

Also, those of you who are interested in Classical history will be happy to know that in AD 1985, Rome and Carthage finally ended 2,248 years of hostility. No peace treaty was ever signed at the end of the last Punic War, what with Carthage being razed and all, so Mayor Ugo Vetere of Rome, Italy, and Mayor Chedly Klibi of Carthage, Tunisia, finally settled their differences more than two decades ago and signed a treaty. Who knew?

ETA: And now my website has an update here. Nothing specifically Canadian -- just stuff about changing views of homosexuality in the late 19th century. I was looking for a way to slip in why I don't agree with Foucault's theories, and finally found a context for it.

I made my concluding entry on New France, on my other journal. It's mostly a summary of everything else.

I keep stumbling across various bits of trivia.

One 19th-century treatise on legal history says that residents of Roman Gaul had a tradition of trial-by-combat (the theory being that God gives victory to the one who's right). If a peasant and noble fought, the noble had to arrive without any armor but a shield, and any weapon but a staff. If he tried to cheat by showing up in armour and on a horse, these were taken from him, and he had to fight unarmed from a chair. If he got up, he would've been put to death.

I work today -- hopefully not tomorrow, but I'm not sure yet. And tonight, there's a benefit drag show for the NDP at Cleopatra.

Today was the first day in seven that I didn't have to go into my regular job, though I was in training for my very temporary moonlighting one instead, giving Cambridge Exams. My first official day on the job for that is tomorrow afternoon. Then I'm back at my usual on Friday.

I also got my first heavy edit for my novel done today (checking for historical accuracy and internal consistency), as well as getting a little more research done. I stumbled onto a book of 19th-century pictures of British Columbia, which may prove helpful.

I also reread The Half-Blood Prince.

( Only of Interest to Harry Potter fans, otherwise nothing to see here and plenty of spoilers. )

So, I spent yesterday after work wandering the city in search of traces of history. Specifically, I was hunting down Griffintown.

I've had a nightmare of a time trying to get a hold of information on this vanished neighbourhood. It was an Irish slum that grew up around the Lacine Canal, but was pretty much rezoned out of existence after the war.

I went to the site of one of Canada's most infamous murders, the killing of prostitute Mary Gallagher, who was decapitated by her best friend with an axe in their little shack in Griffintown in 1879.

The shack is gone, and it's now a parking lot, but Gallagher's ghost is supposed to come back there every 7 years, looking for her head. In that dead industrial park, surrounded by rubble and empty buildings and abandoned by the world, it's easy to believe in ghosts.

Then I stumbled accidentally onto the ruins of St. Ann's church, the heart of Griffintown. Its stone foundations survive, so you can step inside and walk the aisle to where the choir and altar once were -- they're now a copse of trees, holier by far than any manmade site and yet seeming to add the ruins' beauty to its own.

Strange, the sort of eerie beauty that clung to that church that was becoming a forest, surrounded on all sides by expressway and factories. I'm always astonished at all the beauty around me, and how little it gets noticed.

It's Valentine's Day today. I'll spare you the full force of my bitterness -- I haven't had a non-disastrous date in about 5 years. However, I think I am adopting my roommate's name for it -- Dies Irae, the Day of Wrath.

The funny thing is, it's not even meant to be February 14th. It's supposed to be related to Lupercalia, an old Roman fertility holiday, but it actually comes from a story by Geoffrey Chaucer, on which Valentine's Day was the day on which all the birds chose their mate for the year.

Chaucer invented this tradition, and he seems to have been thinking of of May 2, the feast of St. Valentine of Genoa.

For some reason, it got moved/confused with the feast of a different St. Valentine, about whom nothing is known except that he was martyred.

So remember, Montrealers, when you're out there freezing in -25-with-the-windchill weather to go through the ritual date with your loved one -- or person you met last night online -- remember that this ritual self-flagellation for the coupled and the single could've been in May instead.

Now the only question is, why do the lovers get the chocolate when the singles need it more?