planetofsillyhats - Tumblr blog

planetofsillyhats · 3 years

Text

(CW: General mid-antiquity misogyny)

Today is Transgender Day of Visibility, so I'm re-upping one of my short essays about one particular trans-woman particularly worthy of visibility: Ancient Rome's loopy god-queen, Elagabalus.

Elagabalus was the 25th Emperor of Rome--and also its first Empress. Born Sextus Varius Avitus Bassianus, she was by modern standards very obviously transgender, and would probably have been delighted to be addressed as Sexta Marcellina, her proper feminine name by Roman conventions.

She was raised in Syria, and was already the head of a major state religion: the worship of the solar deity El-Gabal, whose pedigree is entwined both with Christianity and with Islam. She ascended to the throne at the age of fourteen, succeeding the man who killed her cousin Caracalla and tried to rule in his place--because this was the tail end of the Severan Dynasty, and things were starting to go downhill for Rome. She did this by personally leading the final charge at the Battle of Antioch in 218 AD, actually helping to rout the usurper’s army and claiming Imperial honors for herself that very day. Picture that for a minute: a charging Roman legion led by a fourteen-year-old girl, then the same legion hoisting her on their shields and proclaiming her Imperator. The fact that everyone thought she was a little boy doesn’t really make it any less badass.

Unfortunately, this would be both the high point of her career, and the last time she’d ever have much real power. Once Marcellina settled down, she was little more than a puppet for her grandmother, Julia Maesa, who had tremendous ambition and, as a cisgender woman, no legitimate way of fulfilling it. This gave the Empress a whole lot of spare time to explore her identity--and while her strict henotheism ruffled feathers, and she may not have made many friends in high places for possibly inventing the whoopee cushion, what really made her unpopular was her sexuality.

Romans were a fairly enlightened bunch for the ancient world; they really didn’t care about race or religion one bit. If your faith didn’t involve infringing on the rights of others, they left you be---and the only religions they ever persecuted outright were the ones that involved human sacrifice (like the druids), theft (like certain Dionysian cults who supposedly ran around the countryside naked and slaughtered other people’s cattle), or sedition (like the Christians, who didn’t just refuse to pray to the deified Emperors, but wouldn’t even pray TO their own god FOR the living ones). Their only real social vices were their class issues--which were somewhat lessened by the fact that even the Senatorial elite were little more than a rubber stamp for the Emperor--and their staggering, galloping, ludicrous misogyny.

And when I call the Romans misogynistic, I don’t mean they were “just” sexist the way most modern Americans are, with our sometimes invisible biases and quietly nasty patriarchal worldview. I mean they really, flat-out, openly despised women and anything feminine. To illustrate the difference, Americans are homophobic partly because we have often unthinkingly sexist biases that make us see sex with a man as feminine and femininity in a man as bad. The Romans had the same attitude toward homosexuality, but they were so massively misogynistic that they went and romanticized certain types of gay relationships anyway, because keeping little boys as sex slaves at least proved you weren’t mooning away over--gag--a girl. And lesbianism was considered a form of frigidity; you weren’t really attracted to women, you were just being irrational and man-hating, which could be cured by sufficiently vigorous rape.

This was not a good environment for a teenaged transgirl with unlimited executive power, is what I’m getting at.

One of the things that I think people don't think about enough with regards to the ancient world and its cast of Great Men is how incredibly young a lot of these legendary characters are. Alexander the Great, for example, was... well, first off, he was basically Genghis Khan, but we root for him because he was a rich white guy. But more importantly, he was younger than me when he conquered Persia--which explains a lot about him, like the time he got really, really drunk in 330 BC and burned down Persepolis, probably resulting in a morning-after scene that looked like Cecil B. DeMille's The Hangover. All the the legendarily loony Roman Emperors were also twentysomethings at best--Caligula was the old man of the Bad Princeps Club at twenty-five, and his reign was less about real tyranny than sexual experimentation and snarky performance art. Nero was sixteen, and reading actual accounts of his reign, it very much shows--he was dramatic, emo and bratty, and desperate for attention and approval.

Marcellina was fourteen years old, trapped in a male body, and ruling a city-state where just wearing what would be considered normal men's wear back in Syria--colorful silks, some tasteful jewelry, and a practical bit of eyeliner to keep out the sun--got her ridiculed as a foppish, Oriental despot. But undeterred by legendary Roman normative biases, she took advantage of her Imperial prerogative to do what, to my knowledge, no other person in Western history had up to that point: live openly as a transwoman. She wore women's clothing, took male lovers, and famously offered huge sums of money to any doctor or wizard who could transition her. Of course, this was the Iron Age, so nobody took her up on it, and she still had protocols and traditions to follow--so she got married, tried to produce heirs, did all the usual Pater Familias stuff. But at some point, after the first year of her reign, she seems to have just given up and, like Caligula, entered a rather mean-spirited "just fucking with everyone" phase. She executed people, gave out cabinet positions to lovers, and didn't seem to care about actually ruling anymore.

Now, Romans were really, really nasty to people who didn't fit within their sexual norms--but they also used sexual deviancy as a form of slander in itself, so it's very hard to say just how much of the legend of Elagabalus the Crazy Syrian Drag Queen(tm) is really true. It's doubtful, for example, that she actually held a banquet at which several tons of flower petals were dumped from the rafters, smothering many guests. It's a safe bet, though, to say that she didn't take her marriage vows seriously at all, and seemed to enjoy taking the mickey out of Roman sexual mores. On one occasion, she married a virgin priestess of Vesta, left her for the wife of a man she'd had executed, and then dumped her to go back to the vestal virgin--who she may have married just for the sake of a joke about siring divine children. She went through five wives over the four years she reigned--but the whole time, her true love and only real companion seems to have been her chauffeur, Hierocles, who in my mind's eye is always portrayed by Darren Criss. She wasn't allowed to marry him--there are some things even an Emperor can't do--nor was she allowed to make him her co-ruler. But she did stick with him, and it looks to me to have been genuine teenage puppy love--just about the only thing in her life that was just right.

Now, isn't this just a little bit first-world-problemy? What can really go wrong if you're the ruler of all Western civilization? Well, if you recall, I said that Sexta reigned for only four years--in 222 CE, she and her mother were murdered by their own elite bodyguards, her kid brother Alexander was installed as the new Emperor, and the Romans set about trying their darnedest to erase her from history, or at least paint her as the worst thing since the RIAA. Does her reputation as the worst ruler Rome ever saw hold water? Not really. Could she have been better? Maybe--but so could Rome.

#elagabalus #history #ancient rome #LGBT+

2 notes · View notes

planetofsillyhats · 4 years

Text

A Guide to 40k Naming Conventions

General Notes on Angels, Elves, and Aliens

Our modern, western sense of what an otherworldly entity’s name should sound like--and, thus, the typical 40k fluff writer’s idea of same--draws primarily from a handful of major sources.

First is the body of supernatural fiction written in the 16th and 17th centuries by Christian mystics. The most famous of these texts is the Lesser Key of Solomon, which contains the infamous Ars Goetia--a list of demonic names that has been so ruthlessly plundered by novels, movies, comics, video games, and tabletop RPGs that it’s almost impossible to find a name on it that you don’t already recognize from somewhere else. All of these texts are, themselves, informed by the Bible--specifically, by the Greek and Hebrew transliterations of the many, many local deities that competed with Yahweh in the character’s early incarnations, and were subsequently retconned into being demonic (and thus, formerly angelic) entities. Another mystical name to know is John Dee--a contemporary of Shakespeare who claimed to communicate with angels, and learned from them a vaguely semitic conlang called Enochian, which formed the basis for many subsequent demonic and angelic names.

The second major influence on how the supernatural sounds is, of course, Tolkien--his legendarium, and the several constructed languages it was built around, are nowhere near as old, but their sheer depth and ubiquity has led them to inform our sense of the fantastic ever since they were published. It helps that Tolkien (a language nerd of incredible dedication) deliberately designed the various Elvish languages to be pleasing to the Anglophone ear, and constructed the Black Speech of Mordor to sound especially abrasive and unpleasant to same.

Both of these cultural touchstones, of course, are in turn rooted in the structure of English itself--which, simply by being familiar to its speakers, also establishes a set of linguistic elements that come across to us as unfamiliar. You can see this both in the way we parse certain other languages--like Latin and Hebrew, which each carry cultural connotations that color anything we read or hear in them--and how we try to make words and sounds that feel fundamentally ‘other.’ This is why the cliched evil space lord always has a name like Zorblax or Glorbitron or something equally silly; all those Xs and Zs and -or sounds stick out to us as obviously not-from-around-here, both because they show up so rarely in English and because they’ve been so heavily used in other, earlier “outsider” names. In short, they are the Space Noises--learn to love them.

Space Marines

The Astartes are a ridiculously diverse bunch--culturally, at least--and a full accounting of the naming conventions of every major chapter would be a paper in itself. A few trends, however, do stick out across the vast sea of pauldrons that makes up the face of 40k.

Firstly, they tend to default to a slightly generic Greco-Roman theme, with little regard for correct Latin conjugation or (in some cases) the actual established naming practices of a chapter.

Canon: Lucius; Gaius; Titus; Vitus; Julius; Marius; Cornelius; Galba; Otho; Vitellius; Vespasian; Erasmus; Odenathus; Pertinax.

Original: There aren’t any. They’re all taken. Every single one.

Secondly, Black Library loves their Goetia; since space marines are angels of death, and lists of demons are by definition lists of angels, the writers of 40k have given themselves carte blanche to sprinkle Hebrew and Enochian (or just Hebrew- and Enochian-sounding) names across the galaxy.

Canon: Azrael; Asmodai; Belial; Mephiston; Astorath.

Original: Also all taken by one franchise or another, but a few more obscure names, like Focalor and Paimon, haven’t been used for Astartes. Yet.

Thirdly, a few chapters, like the Salamanders, draw on a sort of implicit language (an “implang,” as I’ve started calling it just now and nobody can stop me) for their names; not a fully developed conlang, but a set of phonemes and syntactic conventions unique to that chapter, which evokes a shared culture without laying out the specifics of how their language or society works.

Canon: Tu’shan; He’stan; K’gosi.

Original: Nar’tesh, 3rd Company Lieutenant and famous ASMRtist.

Chaos Space Marines

Traitor Astartes sometimes follow the same general pattern as their loyalist cousins--but they rely more on Greek and Hebrew for their inspiration, use a good deal more Space Noises, and are much more likely to dip into a legion-specific implang.

Word Bearers, in particular, mix Mesopotamian and north African influences with their own Colchisian conventions to create characters that people raised in a Christian milieu can identify as baby-eating diabolists just by reading their names.

Canon: Eliphas; Sor Bakphal; Ankh-Heloth; Marduk.

Original: Tal Berath; Usor-Kehelit; Kor Lugash.

Iron Warriors love imposing sounds that evoke statuary, sieges, and lumbering prehistory, and mix a little German in for extra industrial dehumanization.

Canon: Berossus; Barban Falk; Promodon; Volk.

Original: Tallisk; Cullus Rieg; Idric Therion.

Night Lords have a particularly developed implang, thanks largely to Aaron Dembski-Bowden--there are no concrete rules, but Nostraman names and speech are very evocative of who they are and where their screwed-up childhoods happened, combining soft and harsh syllables to eerie effect. Also, bats. Batsbatsbatsbatsbats.

Canon: Jago Sevatarion; Kellenkir; Uzas; Gendor Skraivok.

Original: Mithrak; Delekiir Surmod; Tadarias.

Chaos Daemons

By the time the actual otherworldly entities of this setting got to the big pile of public domain names, the Astartes had already made off with almost every resource traditionally used for malevolent spirits and the like--so the servants of the Ruinous Powers have had to make do with bespoke names furnished for them by GW's finest edgelords. In general, this means a wild grab bag of Space Noises and more apostrophes than an Austronesian phone book--but certain trends do emerge among the followers of the different Chaos Gods. Supposedly, daemonic names are often tied to their patron deity’s sacred number, but this is rarely adhered to in the fluff.

Khornate Daemons tend to have names that sound like synonyms for anger or types of wounds, like “wrath” or “scar” or “gore.” As the daemons most likely to look and act like Balrogs, they’re also the most likely to have names that sound like Morgoth came up with them. When all else fails, just fall back on the dumbest edgy nineties bullshit you can come up with.

Canon: Skarbrand; Ka’bandha; Hakk’an’graah; An’ggrath; Doombreed.

Original: Rath’gor; Bludskar the Irritated; Skullgoroth Bloodmassacre (Blood Lord of the Skulltaking Goremurderers of Violenceheim).

Slaaneshi Daemons are soft, sensuous, and sibilant, evoking corrupting luxury and puritan sexual terror. They’re ostensibly sexually ambiguous, but they tend to come off as feminine, because only women can be evil and sexy at the same time--at least, before the watershed.

Canon: Luxuria(!); Mistress of Spite; N’Kari; Lushcrix Lashtongue; Kyriss.

Original: Sulatari; Ivress; Scivia the Weirdly Wholesome (secret identity of @jetblackraider).

Nurglite Daemons evoke medical terminology and bodily effluvia, and are the only breed of daemons whose names are even more extra than Khorne’s.

Canon: Epidemius; Horticulous Slimux; Rotigus; Scabeiathrax the Bloated; Maggotgurgle fucking Pukeslime I swear to god that is actually a real character.

Original: Count Thergothon (Lord of the Chronic Court and certified tax attorney); Phagovile the Viscuous; Gribbulous Taintsac (Founder of the Gribbulous Taintsac Institute for Excessive Medical Horror, and head of the accreditation board for Death Guard Plague Surgeons).

Tzeentchian Daemons often have Egyptian-sounding names--or, at least, Egyptian as transliterated into Greek, which is the way most people know the Ancient Egyptian language. They also have the highest letter-to-apostrophe ratio of any Daemon breed.

Canon: Kairos Fateweaver; K'tzis'trix'a'tzar; Aetaos'rau'keres; Shim'dre'lex'kazar.

Original: Azoth Flickerflame; Kheper’atos; Ix’il’kak’iz’it’xyk’ik’ak’it’l’zy’xyx the Unpronounceable (holds the current record for most planets destroyed by failed summoning attempts).

Aeldari

The original name of this faction was lifted directly from Lord of the Rings--in fact, one of the most iconic themes in the movie soundtrack is literally called "The Host of the Eldar." Accordingly, the majority of the sounds and conventions that go into an eldar name come from the Tolkien legendarium (and the many other fantasy worlds that have sprung up around it), with the occasional angelic or Space Noise element--but there’s also a good dash of both Vedic and European pagan (or at least, reconstructed Romantic-era neopagan) mythology mixed into their lore, and allusions to such sometimes pop up in their names as well. In particular, it’s normal for Craftworlds to be named after either goddesses we stopped praying to or holidays we stopped celebrating.

Canon: Eldrad Ulthran; Taldeer; Yriel; Mauryon; Craftworld Biel-tan; Craftworld Os’tara.

Original: Gilthoniex (ranger of Ulthwe who died of shame after being tricked into starring in Drukhari cuckold porn); Athembra (Iyanden Farseer who follows Tyranids around and narrates their behavior in a posh British accent).

Drukhari

The Dark Eldar are a modern take on the Fair Folk--both directly by way of being decadent evil elves, and by the more roundabout route of being alien abductors with a thing for weirdly sexy science-torture--and their lexicon reflects this by replacing the Quenya- and Sindarin- inspired sounds of the Craftworlds with lots of fey, witchy imagery (largely derived from Celtic culture) and a more sibilant, angular set of Space Noises. They also help themselves to a bit of Sanskrit and Enochian--but with a demonic slant where their cousins might have a hint of the angelic.

Canon: Asdrubael Vect; Lelith Hesperax; Kheradruakh the Decapitator; Arhra.

Original: High Excruciator Ekritar (rose to become Archon of the Kabal of the Ludicrous Edge thanks to a body of spectacularly depraved PornWeb videos); Rinatha Heartrend (Prima Succubus of the Cult of the Severed String, the Dark City’s foremost NTR specialists);

Necrons

Necrons are Egyptian space robots. That’s really all there is to it.

Okay, so there’s a little more to it. Necrons draw on Egyptian themes--but like Tzeentch Daemons, it’s Egypt as parsed through Classical Greece. The heyday of Egypt occurred during the misty prehistory of Greek civilization--Pharaohs like Thutmose III and Amenhotep III knew of, and traded with, the Mukinu (Mycenaeans) on the opposite shore of the Mediterranean, but serious diplomatic contact was fairly limited. By the time the Greeks started writing anything down about the Egyptians, it was the 5th century BC, and Egypt’s sun had set. Greeks like Herodotus knew it primarily as a fading power--a helpless subject of one empire after another, fought over by foreign kings in the shadow of crumbling pyramids that nobody even remembered how to build.

Because our idea of Egypt was, for centuries, mostly informed by Greek sources, a lot of people and places have been transliterated from Egyptian to Greek--so gods whose original names were closer to User, Sutih, and Heru became popularly known as Osiris, Seth, and Horus, respectively. This slight detachment between the pop cultural image of Ancient Egypt and their actual spoken language is why Necron names can sound as much Greek as Egyptian--and sometimes, they roam even further into the Balkans and start rummaging through the Baltic and Slavic language families for spare phonemes. They also tend to be studded with Space Noises of a particularly electronic nature.

Canon: Szarekh; Imotekh; Anathrosis; Trazyn; Varagon Drakvir

Original: Nefertronus; Inenoth; Tombworld Per-Ma’akh

Orks

Like the space elves, the space orcs draw heavily on Tolkien--but they eat the hot dog from the other end, with names rooted in the Black Speech and a penchant for vaguely problematic thuggery. Orks, like Uruk, are horrible brutes who exist mostly to die in vast, anonymous hordes at the hands of a protagonist.

Unlike Uruk, Orks are funny.

Yes, I’ve read The Beast Arises. Yes, I remember the dead civilians in Space Marine. The occasional serious outing is simply the exception that proves the rule: Orks are as much British football hooligans as they are the hosts of Mordor, and every time they take center stage, it’s as shamelessly wacky comic relief that's equal parts mad science and Mad Max. Orks are the demented lovechild of Wile E. Coyote and the Mythbusters, and I love them dearly for it.

To make an Orkish name, start with either a few Mordor-ish syllables or a descriptive sobriquet, and record yourself shouting it while (timing is very important here) you’re drunk enough to fight a mailbox, but sober enough to walk away when you lose. Orks have lots of hard G and K sounds and long vowels, giving you all sorts of opportunities to shout at people and hit them over the head--and if you’re not doing either of those things, you’z not speakin’ Ork proppa, ya git.

Canon: Nozgrot; Snagga-Snagga, Wazdakka Gutsmek, Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka.

Original: Killdoza (voted Best Cuddler in the Calixis Sector fifty years running, but mostly because only gretchin are smart enough to actually spell 'Calixis Sector'); Goffmawg (once stole an ultraberry pie from Marneus Calgar's windowsill); Lugnutz Boomkrasha (semi-mythical mekboy active during the Great Crusade, said to still be hurtling through interstellar space, clinging desperately to a planet-cracking warhead aimed in the general direction of Segmentum Solar).

Tau

The Tau ostensibly have their own codified naming scheme--but before that was laid down, they inevitably developed a handful of characters with silly alien-ized versions of famous Asian names. Modern Tau names are usually assembled from long sequences of one-syllable words, in imitation of the modular logograms used in Chinese and Japanese writing. Unfortunately, as it’s currently implemented, it’s kind of shallow, and there isn’t much room for different names--as evidenced by the number of Tau referred to as “Kais” in various media, some of whom are different people and some of whom aren’t.

It’s sad, honestly. There’s so much potential here, and they don’t even scratch the surface--even without leaving the Sino-Japanese Sphere of Generic Asian-ness, there’s all sorts of fascinating, lyrical things you could do with a naming scheme like this, but there’s, like, six Tau books and everyone in them is either a noble space-samurai or an inscrutable space-mandarin, so they’re all one syllable apart.

Canon: El’Myamoto, El’Hassai, Shas'la T'au Kais, Shas'O Kais, Shas'O Vior'la O’Shovah Kais Mont'yr, Aun’Va, Aun’Vre, Aun’Shi.

Original: Por’La Xiu (minor Water caste diplomat and star of the first human-Tau interspecies erotica recorded under the official auspices of the Tau’va), Fio’El Tra Buo’ren (Senior Earth Caste programming director, responsible for developing the endearing behavior subroutines now installed on all frontline drones to prevent frivolous use of the savior protocols), Kor’O Da’he Li’Lian Sou (Revered fleet strategist, architect of some of the greatest space battles of the Second Sphere of Expansion, died in his bed without ever meeting a gue’la).

7 notes · View notes