iwritewithanaxe

[iwritewithanaxe]

Was looking for this for the longest hour

who else knows the feeling of being extremely underrepresented in a very specific debate in a very specific fandom

[iwritewithanaxe]

Wow useful for that ttrpg I’m playtesting.

Known Hun Names and Their Meanings

Map of modern Turkic language distribution

For these etymologies I relied on the writings of Hyun Jin Kim, linguist and author of The Huns, and Omeljan Pritsak, linguistic specialist in Turkic and Altaic languages. Given that the Hunnic language was most likely a Turkic language (specifically Oghuric Turkic, according to Kim), all of the following etymologies save for two, which rely on Mongolic stems, are Turkic. Although many Hunnic names were Gothicized/Germanicized, their origins are still in Turkic language. 

Attila or Astila = universal ruler; from the old Danubian-Bulgarian title attil-; or great old sea, from the Turkic es, til, and -a; or, father, from the Turkic ata 

Note: a pretty popular post going around about his name connects it back to the Gothic atta and the suffix -ila, thus giving it the meaning little father. While it’s true that some Hunnic names were Gothicized/Germanicized, this post is concerned with their origins as Turkic names.)

Balamber or Balamur (Hun ruler of Gothic legend) = greatest among the venturous; from Mongolic balamad and the Turkic suffix -mat Basik (Hunnic noble) = governor; from Turkic Bârsiğ Dengizich (son of Attila) = ocean-like, heavenly; from the Turkic teɲez and dêɲri; or, more simply, great lake Donatus or Donat (Hunnic sub king) = horse; from Turkic yonat Edeco (high-ranking ally of Attila) = good; from the Turkic ädgü or the Mongolic Edgü   Ellac (son of Attila) = to rule; from the Turkic el and lä Emmedzur (relative of Attila) = horse lord; from Turkic title ämäcur Hernac or Ernakh (youngest son of Attila) =  small man, heroic man; from the Turkic ernäk Karaton (Hunnic supreme king) = black cloak; from Turkic Qarâton Kursik (Hunnic noble) = either noble; from Turkic Kürsiğ; or belt-bearer, from Qurŝiq Mundzuk (father of Attila) = pearl/jewel; from the Turkic Munčuq Oebarsius (brother of Mundzuk, uncle of Attila) = leopard of the moon, from Turkic Aıbârs; or a dun leopard, from the Altaic bars and the Turkic oy Oktar or Uptar (brother of Mundzuk, uncle of Attila) = brave/powerful; from Turkic Öctär Rua or Ruga = wise man, from the Altaic ögä Uldin (Hunnic sub king) = six; from Turkic alti (given that the suffix -in was a Greek addition, and the true name was likely the shorter Uld/Ult) 

[iwritewithanaxe]

[iwritewithanaxe]

Only Gordon can roast just by eating a hamburger

[iwritewithanaxe]

@salticid​ you’re amazing and I love ur cryptic spambot convo I hope u like this!!

[twitter]

[iwritewithanaxe]

Chirin no Suzu

Chirin’s Bell (Ringing Bell) by Yanase Takashi

This post is very image-heavy.

After 100000 years, I’m finally done translating this book. 

A quote mentioned by Kaneki during Arima’s death and the quote used for that one illustration of Arima, which you can view here, is from the book version and the line wasn’t really in the movie. There are also a couple of differences between the book and movie which you’ll notice as you go along the story.

This is a children’s book btw. Trust me, it is.

I will not be putting the full images here for certain reasons but if you want to purchase the book, you can do so here. 

Keep reading

[iwritewithanaxe]

I've seen some posts regarding the Celtic Zodiac Animals floating around, with thirteen zodiac animals given to people based on when in the year they were born. I remember you said that there is extremely little people know for sure about old Celtic culture, and most pages I got on google came from non-trustworthy sites, so I wondered if you knew if this was an actual thing or not.

*sweats nervously* in short, nope. 

There is a preconception, and it’s very popular in neo-Celtic and Celtic revivalist groups, that the Celts were somehow tied to nature and the animal world by a beautiful, spiritual bond. Images of Celtic women frolicking in the fields naked and covering themselves with flowers and communing with wolves and deer are all over the damn place. Wherever you look, there are multitudes of people talking about how ‘Celts didn’t perceive a separation between man and beast’, or how ‘the Celts used a tree calendar… they were masters of astrology!!’  

It may be unsurprising to hear that both these things are bullshit.

Get these animals off my lawn

SO. Let’s tackle the Zodiac theory first and foremost. The ‘Zodiac animal’ theory, showing 13 animals and giving them a corresponding period in the year, was developed largely by Helena Paterson, in this book here.

(This is also a pretty good time to say this - just because a book is listed in the Mythology / Anthropology / Folklore section of Amazon, doesn’t mean it’s reliable!!) 

Let’s see what else this Llewellyn Publications is responsible for, shall we?

Oh.

Oh gosh.

Oh my. This whole Celtic Zodiac theory seems to have debunked itself, to be honest with you. I mean, when you’re putting ‘Celtic’ astrology on the same listicle as UFO and alien encounters, it must be super authentic, right? (PS there is actually a very very interesting theory about alien abduction and Celtic theories of the Otherworld - it’s unrelated to the astrology topic, but if you’re interested, you can find an article on it here!) 

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. Most common notions of Celtic astrology are based on Robert Graves’ theory of a Tree calendar. Now, those of you who are familiar with Robert Graves might be thinking ‘but that famous Classicist dude doesn’t even go here!’ and you would be 100% right, because Graves does not go here. Unfortunately, he does linger outside the gates a lot, sighing irritably and wishing he had club membership. Graves had a real tendency to use things that he actually knew about - the Classics - to try and extrapolate theories about things he didn’t know about. This is a bit of a dangerous thing to do, because his reputation as an actual Classicist unfortunately lends credence to his bullshit about Celtic studies - and yes, it really is all bullshit. 

Graves’ methodology was essentially to look at Celtic ideas, find a point of similarity with Classical ideas, and dig a huge hole into it until the two ideas were linked by some kind of dirt tunnel. Thanks to this methodology, we have his book The White Goddess to blame for his alarmingly popular theory about an Ancient Goddess, which caught on in a Very Big Way and makes studying the truth incredibly difficult, because his almost utopian ideas are often a little more intriguing than the facts. I’ve written more about that here, but in short, it’s not possible to use one culture as a template for another. You can’t fill in the blanks about one society by looking at another. Societies are not the same. Ideas are not necessarily transferable. 

Anyway, without going into boring detail, Graves used the (unproven) idea that the Celtic alphabet was based on Greek and Latin, and reconstructed a ‘calendar’ from a battle image. There is a very thorough debunking of Graves’ ‘Tree calendar’ idea here, written by actual Celticist Peter Berresford-Ellis, which goes into detail about how he made it up - even asking a world-renowned Celticist whether or not his theory was possible, and ignoring him when he was told that it wasn’t. Nice. 

To cut a (very) long story short, after Graves came a whole bunch of thoroughly wank zodiacs, one of which was Paterson’s - they’re all debunked very nicely here by Celticist Joseph Monard and iconographist Michel-Gérald Boutet, and summed up with the caustic ‘In this light, this book can only please the fringe romantics and the misinformed of the Neo-pagan, New-Age and Neo-druidical circles.’ Ouch.

The actual thing

The best idea that we actually have of any Celtic calendar is the Coligny calendar. Warning: it looks like this: 

Not something that you’d want to hang up in your office. The calendar was found in Gaul (now France) and is written in Latin and Gaulish, dating from the 2nd century AD. The extent to which this calendar applied across the Celtic world is completely open to speculation; Ireland and Gaul are not exactly next-door neighbours, so it would be a bit specious to assume that they all followed the same calendar. That doesn’t mean that they didn’t, but it’s important to be aware that we’re dealing with conjecture here!

From this calendar, the structure of a five year cycle has been reconstructed - even though it looks like a shitty jigsaw puzzle that you’d give to your worst enemy, it has a repetitive pattern, so it’s been possible to reconstruct it on that basis. Monard, one of the authors of that previous article, has theorised a possible zodiac based on the Coligny calendar, which has the benefit of being based on, y’know, an actual calendar, which the other theories are not. His reconstruction is listed at the bottom of the article. 

Beyond that, we don’t know. We don’t have a surviving Celtic zodiac, because not all of the writing of the time - the little that survives - has been translated, and most of it is from secondary or later sources. We don’t have anything that says ‘hey, if you were born in this year, then you’re a cat!’ or ‘if you were born under this type of moon, you’re a wolf!’ or even ‘if you were born on the sixth Saturday of the fifth month in the fourth year of the calendar, then you’re half snail and half antelope!’ - anything that claims to be the definitive ‘Celtic calendar / zodiac’ is lying through its teeth, because we don’t have a definitive Celtic calendar / zodiac. 

But that’s not pretty

One general rule of thumb when you’re looking at anything online that’s touted as ‘Celtic’ is to follow this handy checklist. 

is it accompanied by any of the following terms or similar: ‘Celts were notoriously in tune with nature and basically grew dandelions out of their armpits’; ‘Celtic women were well-known as being free and unchained and basically spent all day frolicking naked in fields’; ‘Celts saw animals as people and were probably all vegan because they loved animals so much and gave them the vote’; ‘Celts were masters of the sky, and honestly, if spaceships had been invented back then, we’d be all the way to Pluto right now’?Anything that is supposedly ‘Celtic’ but reinforces the idea that Celts lived in total symbiosis with nature, had an egalitarian society, or were all amateur astronomers - that’s total wank, basically. It’s based on an idea that I quite like to term the ‘noble barbarian’, which actually relates to the Romans’ crush on the Celts and other ‘barbarian’ tribes, but really fits in with a lot of modern thinking about them as well. Essentially, modern Western people love to look back at any tribal society and say ‘gosh, look how naive and simple their lives were! How cute. They liked trees and everything. If only we could go back to that utopian age. War would cease to exist. Capitalism would die a death. Trump would never win. Those tribes really got it right’. Subsequently, the culture is turned into a cutesie bunnies-and-puppies simulacrum of its actuality. Indigenous tribes, particularly those of America, suffer from this Western fetishisation as well - look at any music festival. So, any Celtic, Native or otherwise tribal ‘calendar’ which is based on puppies and seahorses and the idea that people and animals were best buds and lived in fields of primroses together is probably wank. Soz. 

does it claim to be ‘the Celtic zodiac’? Because that’s easily debunkable - there is no surviving Celtic zodiac, and everything is speculation. Easy peasy. 

does it name the months after trees? It’s a Graves-type calendar, and it’s wank. 

does it name the months after non-Celtic deities (e.g. Paterson’s names one of them after Persephone)? It’s based on interpretatio graeco / romana, the idea that Celtic culture was just lifted from a template of Classical culture, and it’s completely inaccurate. This methodology is a load of old cat poo. Celtic deities functioned differently to Classical deities, and they weren’t just carbon copies with Celtic names. 

does it include animals that wouldn’t have been native to any Celtic region? I shouldn’t even have to say why this is a red flag, but I’ve seen some ‘Celtic zodiacs’ with lions as one of the months. No no no no. No. Please no. 

I have to catch a bus now (I’m late oh no) but yes. No, basically. 

Sources:

Boutet, Michel-Gérald. “Celtic Astrology: A modern Hoax”

Ellis, Peter Berresford. “The Fabrication of ‘Celtic’ Astrology.”

Monard, Joseph (1996). About the Coligny Calendar.

[iwritewithanaxe]

I've seen some posts regarding the Celtic Zodiac Animals floating around, with thirteen zodiac animals given to people based on when in the year they were born. I remember you said that there is extremely little people know for sure about old Celtic culture, and most pages I got on google came from non-trustworthy sites, so I wondered if you knew if this was an actual thing or not.

*sweats nervously* in short, nope. 

There is a preconception, and it’s very popular in neo-Celtic and Celtic revivalist groups, that the Celts were somehow tied to nature and the animal world by a beautiful, spiritual bond. Images of Celtic women frolicking in the fields naked and covering themselves with flowers and communing with wolves and deer are all over the damn place. Wherever you look, there are multitudes of people talking about how ‘Celts didn’t perceive a separation between man and beast’, or how ‘the Celts used a tree calendar… they were masters of astrology!!’  

It may be unsurprising to hear that both these things are bullshit.

Get these animals off my lawn

SO. Let’s tackle the Zodiac theory first and foremost. The ‘Zodiac animal’ theory, showing 13 animals and giving them a corresponding period in the year, was developed largely by Helena Paterson, in this book here.

(This is also a pretty good time to say this - just because a book is listed in the Mythology / Anthropology / Folklore section of Amazon, doesn’t mean it’s reliable!!) 

Let’s see what else this Llewellyn Publications is responsible for, shall we?

Oh.

Oh gosh.

Oh my. This whole Celtic Zodiac theory seems to have debunked itself, to be honest with you. I mean, when you’re putting ‘Celtic’ astrology on the same listicle as UFO and alien encounters, it must be super authentic, right? (PS there is actually a very very interesting theory about alien abduction and Celtic theories of the Otherworld - it’s unrelated to the astrology topic, but if you’re interested, you can find an article on it here!) 

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. Most common notions of Celtic astrology are based on Robert Graves’ theory of a Tree calendar. Now, those of you who are familiar with Robert Graves might be thinking ‘but that famous Classicist dude doesn’t even go here!’ and you would be 100% right, because Graves does not go here. Unfortunately, he does linger outside the gates a lot, sighing irritably and wishing he had club membership. Graves had a real tendency to use things that he actually knew about - the Classics - to try and extrapolate theories about things he didn’t know about. This is a bit of a dangerous thing to do, because his reputation as an actual Classicist unfortunately lends credence to his bullshit about Celtic studies - and yes, it really is all bullshit. 

Graves’ methodology was essentially to look at Celtic ideas, find a point of similarity with Classical ideas, and dig a huge hole into it until the two ideas were linked by some kind of dirt tunnel. Thanks to this methodology, we have his book The White Goddess to blame for his alarmingly popular theory about an Ancient Goddess, which caught on in a Very Big Way and makes studying the truth incredibly difficult, because his almost utopian ideas are often a little more intriguing than the facts. I’ve written more about that here, but in short, it’s not possible to use one culture as a template for another. You can’t fill in the blanks about one society by looking at another. Societies are not the same. Ideas are not necessarily transferable. 

Anyway, without going into boring detail, Graves used the (unproven) idea that the Celtic alphabet was based on Greek and Latin, and reconstructed a ‘calendar’ from a battle image. There is a very thorough debunking of Graves’ ‘Tree calendar’ idea here, written by actual Celticist Peter Berresford-Ellis, which goes into detail about how he made it up - even asking a world-renowned Celticist whether or not his theory was possible, and ignoring him when he was told that it wasn’t. Nice. 

To cut a (very) long story short, after Graves came a whole bunch of thoroughly wank zodiacs, one of which was Paterson’s - they’re all debunked very nicely here by Celticist Joseph Monard and iconographist Michel-Gérald Boutet, and summed up with the caustic ‘In this light, this book can only please the fringe romantics and the misinformed of the Neo-pagan, New-Age and Neo-druidical circles.’ Ouch.

The actual thing

The best idea that we actually have of any Celtic calendar is the Coligny calendar. Warning: it looks like this: 

Not something that you’d want to hang up in your office. The calendar was found in Gaul (now France) and is written in Latin and Gaulish, dating from the 2nd century AD. The extent to which this calendar applied across the Celtic world is completely open to speculation; Ireland and Gaul are not exactly next-door neighbours, so it would be a bit specious to assume that they all followed the same calendar. That doesn’t mean that they didn’t, but it’s important to be aware that we’re dealing with conjecture here!

From this calendar, the structure of a five year cycle has been reconstructed - even though it looks like a shitty jigsaw puzzle that you’d give to your worst enemy, it has a repetitive pattern, so it’s been possible to reconstruct it on that basis. Monard, one of the authors of that previous article, has theorised a possible zodiac based on the Coligny calendar, which has the benefit of being based on, y’know, an actual calendar, which the other theories are not. His reconstruction is listed at the bottom of the article. 

Beyond that, we don’t know. We don’t have a surviving Celtic zodiac, because not all of the writing of the time - the little that survives - has been translated, and most of it is from secondary or later sources. We don’t have anything that says ‘hey, if you were born in this year, then you’re a cat!’ or ‘if you were born under this type of moon, you’re a wolf!’ or even ‘if you were born on the sixth Saturday of the fifth month in the fourth year of the calendar, then you’re half snail and half antelope!’ - anything that claims to be the definitive ‘Celtic calendar / zodiac’ is lying through its teeth, because we don’t have a definitive Celtic calendar / zodiac. 

But that’s not pretty

One general rule of thumb when you’re looking at anything online that’s touted as ‘Celtic’ is to follow this handy checklist. 

is it accompanied by any of the following terms or similar: ‘Celts were notoriously in tune with nature and basically grew dandelions out of their armpits’; ‘Celtic women were well-known as being free and unchained and basically spent all day frolicking naked in fields’; ‘Celts saw animals as people and were probably all vegan because they loved animals so much and gave them the vote’; ‘Celts were masters of the sky, and honestly, if spaceships had been invented back then, we’d be all the way to Pluto right now’?Anything that is supposedly ‘Celtic’ but reinforces the idea that Celts lived in total symbiosis with nature, had an egalitarian society, or were all amateur astronomers - that’s total wank, basically. It’s based on an idea that I quite like to term the ‘noble barbarian’, which actually relates to the Romans’ crush on the Celts and other ‘barbarian’ tribes, but really fits in with a lot of modern thinking about them as well. Essentially, modern Western people love to look back at any tribal society and say ‘gosh, look how naive and simple their lives were! How cute. They liked trees and everything. If only we could go back to that utopian age. War would cease to exist. Capitalism would die a death. Trump would never win. Those tribes really got it right’. Subsequently, the culture is turned into a cutesie bunnies-and-puppies simulacrum of its actuality. Indigenous tribes, particularly those of America, suffer from this Western fetishisation as well - look at any music festival. So, any Celtic, Native or otherwise tribal ‘calendar’ which is based on puppies and seahorses and the idea that people and animals were best buds and lived in fields of primroses together is probably wank. Soz. 

does it claim to be ‘the Celtic zodiac’? Because that’s easily debunkable - there is no surviving Celtic zodiac, and everything is speculation. Easy peasy. 

does it name the months after trees? It’s a Graves-type calendar, and it’s wank. 

does it name the months after non-Celtic deities (e.g. Paterson’s names one of them after Persephone)? It’s based on interpretatio graeco / romana, the idea that Celtic culture was just lifted from a template of Classical culture, and it’s completely inaccurate. This methodology is a load of old cat poo. Celtic deities functioned differently to Classical deities, and they weren’t just carbon copies with Celtic names. 

does it include animals that wouldn’t have been native to any Celtic region? I shouldn’t even have to say why this is a red flag, but I’ve seen some ‘Celtic zodiacs’ with lions as one of the months. No no no no. No. Please no. 

I have to catch a bus now (I’m late oh no) but yes. No, basically. 

Sources:

Boutet, Michel-Gérald. “Celtic Astrology: A modern Hoax”

Ellis, Peter Berresford. “The Fabrication of ‘Celtic’ Astrology.”

Monard, Joseph (1996). About the Coligny Calendar.

[iwritewithanaxe]

Rebloging to remember everyday and to everyone that I can.

I've seen some posts regarding the Celtic Zodiac Animals floating around, with thirteen zodiac animals given to people based on when in the year they were born. I remember you said that there is extremely little people know for sure about old Celtic culture, and most pages I got on google came from non-trustworthy sites, so I wondered if you knew if this was an actual thing or not.

*sweats nervously* in short, nope. 

There is a preconception, and it’s very popular in neo-Celtic and Celtic revivalist groups, that the Celts were somehow tied to nature and the animal world by a beautiful, spiritual bond. Images of Celtic women frolicking in the fields naked and covering themselves with flowers and communing with wolves and deer are all over the damn place. Wherever you look, there are multitudes of people talking about how ‘Celts didn’t perceive a separation between man and beast’, or how ‘the Celts used a tree calendar… they were masters of astrology!!’  

It may be unsurprising to hear that both these things are bullshit.

Get these animals off my lawn

SO. Let’s tackle the Zodiac theory first and foremost. The ‘Zodiac animal’ theory, showing 13 animals and giving them a corresponding period in the year, was developed largely by Helena Paterson, in this book here.

(This is also a pretty good time to say this - just because a book is listed in the Mythology / Anthropology / Folklore section of Amazon, doesn’t mean it’s reliable!!) 

Let’s see what else this Llewellyn Publications is responsible for, shall we?

Oh.

Oh gosh.

Oh my. This whole Celtic Zodiac theory seems to have debunked itself, to be honest with you. I mean, when you’re putting ‘Celtic’ astrology on the same listicle as UFO and alien encounters, it must be super authentic, right? (PS there is actually a very very interesting theory about alien abduction and Celtic theories of the Otherworld - it’s unrelated to the astrology topic, but if you’re interested, you can find an article on it here!) 

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. Most common notions of Celtic astrology are based on Robert Graves’ theory of a Tree calendar. Now, those of you who are familiar with Robert Graves might be thinking ‘but that famous Classicist dude doesn’t even go here!’ and you would be 100% right, because Graves does not go here. Unfortunately, he does linger outside the gates a lot, sighing irritably and wishing he had club membership. Graves had a real tendency to use things that he actually knew about - the Classics - to try and extrapolate theories about things he didn’t know about. This is a bit of a dangerous thing to do, because his reputation as an actual Classicist unfortunately lends credence to his bullshit about Celtic studies - and yes, it really is all bullshit. 

Graves’ methodology was essentially to look at Celtic ideas, find a point of similarity with Classical ideas, and dig a huge hole into it until the two ideas were linked by some kind of dirt tunnel. Thanks to this methodology, we have his book The White Goddess to blame for his alarmingly popular theory about an Ancient Goddess, which caught on in a Very Big Way and makes studying the truth incredibly difficult, because his almost utopian ideas are often a little more intriguing than the facts. I’ve written more about that here, but in short, it’s not possible to use one culture as a template for another. You can’t fill in the blanks about one society by looking at another. Societies are not the same. Ideas are not necessarily transferable. 

Anyway, without going into boring detail, Graves used the (unproven) idea that the Celtic alphabet was based on Greek and Latin, and reconstructed a ‘calendar’ from a battle image. There is a very thorough debunking of Graves’ ‘Tree calendar’ idea here, written by actual Celticist Peter Berresford-Ellis, which goes into detail about how he made it up - even asking a world-renowned Celticist whether or not his theory was possible, and ignoring him when he was told that it wasn’t. Nice. 

To cut a (very) long story short, after Graves came a whole bunch of thoroughly wank zodiacs, one of which was Paterson’s - they’re all debunked very nicely here by Celticist Joseph Monard and iconographist Michel-Gérald Boutet, and summed up with the caustic ‘In this light, this book can only please the fringe romantics and the misinformed of the Neo-pagan, New-Age and Neo-druidical circles.’ Ouch.

The actual thing

The best idea that we actually have of any Celtic calendar is the Coligny calendar. Warning: it looks like this: 

Not something that you’d want to hang up in your office. The calendar was found in Gaul (now France) and is written in Latin and Gaulish, dating from the 2nd century AD. The extent to which this calendar applied across the Celtic world is completely open to speculation; Ireland and Gaul are not exactly next-door neighbours, so it would be a bit specious to assume that they all followed the same calendar. That doesn’t mean that they didn’t, but it’s important to be aware that we’re dealing with conjecture here!

From this calendar, the structure of a five year cycle has been reconstructed - even though it looks like a shitty jigsaw puzzle that you’d give to your worst enemy, it has a repetitive pattern, so it’s been possible to reconstruct it on that basis. Monard, one of the authors of that previous article, has theorised a possible zodiac based on the Coligny calendar, which has the benefit of being based on, y’know, an actual calendar, which the other theories are not. His reconstruction is listed at the bottom of the article. 

Beyond that, we don’t know. We don’t have a surviving Celtic zodiac, because not all of the writing of the time - the little that survives - has been translated, and most of it is from secondary or later sources. We don’t have anything that says ‘hey, if you were born in this year, then you’re a cat!’ or ‘if you were born under this type of moon, you’re a wolf!’ or even ‘if you were born on the sixth Saturday of the fifth month in the fourth year of the calendar, then you’re half snail and half antelope!’ - anything that claims to be the definitive ‘Celtic calendar / zodiac’ is lying through its teeth, because we don’t have a definitive Celtic calendar / zodiac. 

But that’s not pretty

One general rule of thumb when you’re looking at anything online that’s touted as ‘Celtic’ is to follow this handy checklist. 

is it accompanied by any of the following terms or similar: ‘Celts were notoriously in tune with nature and basically grew dandelions out of their armpits’; ‘Celtic women were well-known as being free and unchained and basically spent all day frolicking naked in fields’; ‘Celts saw animals as people and were probably all vegan because they loved animals so much and gave them the vote’; ‘Celts were masters of the sky, and honestly, if spaceships had been invented back then, we’d be all the way to Pluto right now’?Anything that is supposedly ‘Celtic’ but reinforces the idea that Celts lived in total symbiosis with nature, had an egalitarian society, or were all amateur astronomers - that’s total wank, basically. It’s based on an idea that I quite like to term the ‘noble barbarian’, which actually relates to the Romans’ crush on the Celts and other ‘barbarian’ tribes, but really fits in with a lot of modern thinking about them as well. Essentially, modern Western people love to look back at any tribal society and say ‘gosh, look how naive and simple their lives were! How cute. They liked trees and everything. If only we could go back to that utopian age. War would cease to exist. Capitalism would die a death. Trump would never win. Those tribes really got it right’. Subsequently, the culture is turned into a cutesie bunnies-and-puppies simulacrum of its actuality. Indigenous tribes, particularly those of America, suffer from this Western fetishisation as well - look at any music festival. So, any Celtic, Native or otherwise tribal ‘calendar’ which is based on puppies and seahorses and the idea that people and animals were best buds and lived in fields of primroses together is probably wank. Soz. 

does it claim to be ‘the Celtic zodiac’? Because that’s easily debunkable - there is no surviving Celtic zodiac, and everything is speculation. Easy peasy. 

does it name the months after trees? It’s a Graves-type calendar, and it’s wank. 

does it name the months after non-Celtic deities (e.g. Paterson’s names one of them after Persephone)? It’s based on interpretatio graeco / romana, the idea that Celtic culture was just lifted from a template of Classical culture, and it’s completely inaccurate. This methodology is a load of old cat poo. Celtic deities functioned differently to Classical deities, and they weren’t just carbon copies with Celtic names. 

does it include animals that wouldn’t have been native to any Celtic region? I shouldn’t even have to say why this is a red flag, but I’ve seen some ‘Celtic zodiacs’ with lions as one of the months. No no no no. No. Please no. 

I have to catch a bus now (I’m late oh no) but yes. No, basically. 

Sources:

Boutet, Michel-Gérald. “Celtic Astrology: A modern Hoax”

Ellis, Peter Berresford. “The Fabrication of ‘Celtic’ Astrology.”

Monard, Joseph (1996). About the Coligny Calendar.

[iwritewithanaxe]

The Clown was purple cus the wizard did it.

[iwritewithanaxe]

“young adult dystopian novels are so unrealistic lmao like they always have some random teenage girl rising up to inspire the world to make change.”

a hero emerges 

[iwritewithanaxe]

now THIS-

quality content right there

[iwritewithanaxe]

[iwritewithanaxe]

I’ll never give up for what i intend to build and maintain, mark my words, the Devil King of the Sixth Heaven won’t tolerate defeat.

A bit of a venting resulting in art of my favorite smol lord, has I’ve been going through some rough patches, drawing this fool has really given me some strenght at some days ahah

[iwritewithanaxe]

[iwritewithanaxe]

ALL 👏🏾 OF 👏🏾 THEM 👏🏾

[iwritewithanaxe]

“I’m speaking to you from my heart. Look, I don’t know if I’m going to have a career after this, but fuck that. Today is about innocent people who were halfway through their process, we don’t know what George Floyd could have achieved, we don’t know what Sandra Bland could have achieved, but today we’re going to make sure that won’t be an alien thought to our young ones. Every black person in here remembered when another person reminded you that you were black. So none of you out there, all those protesters on the other side, protesting against what we want to do, protesting against what we want to try and achieve, burn you, this is so vital. I need you to understand how painful this shit is. I need you to understand how painful it is to be reminded every day that your race means nothing and that isn’t the case anymore, that was never the case anymore.” John Boyega at The Black Lives Matter protest in Hyde Park June 3rd 2020