#aestivetic

[lailoken]

What is the distinction between a mage, a wizard, a sorcerer, and a witch? Is there one?

Hello there.

I think it's a question many have, and understandably so. I'm no expert in the anthropological distinction between traditions, but I'll do my best to answer.

To a certain degree, all the terms are somewhat conflated, but there is some nuance to the meanings behind the words.

Where my usage is cocnerned, Mage is a name that essentially describes any practitioner of any kind of magical tradition. It is basically synonymous with magician. Though, the former has become associated with fantasy fiction to an extent, while the latter has become more closely associated with illusionist performers.

Wizard is a term that was often historically associated with Cunning Folk, and Cunning Men in particular. The etymological roots of the word amounts to 'wise individual.' Though myth, folklore, and modern fiction have all done much to fantasize the term, the core connotation of the word is still—so far as I'm concerned—a member of the Wise.

A Sorcerer is a bit vaguer in its specific meaning, but it ultimately amounts to an individual who practices magic—particularly magic seen as "dark" in nature. Though the original meaning of the word referred to 'one who casts lots' (told fortunes/performed divination,) sometime in the 15th century, that meaning was displaced by the definition of 'one who conjures evil spirits.' With all that in mind, I would say that sorcerer and witch are the most closely aligned of the terms mentioned here.

Finally, and possibly most difficult to pin down precisely, is the title of Witch. Though the word does have posited etymological and historical roots in prophecy, necromancy and in generalized magic, its ultimate meaning became more clearly delineated as 'one with malignant supernatural knowledge and skills' As such (and for others reasons I'm sure you can find plenty of people discussing on the internet,) I would say that witch is a title that mostly accurately reflects a magical practitioner with the ability to use baneful power, and whose practice is generally associated in some way with Sabbatic Flight and rites of Initiation.

I hope that can help.

[yellowmonday]

9 ppl to get to know better

tagged by @meatmensch tyy

list 3 ships you like: of course mrs. destiel. and spirk. and also julian bashir and data they banged in the ds9/tng crossover. on my mind

first ship ever: i dont think i shipped characters for a long time. maybe it was destiel at the tender age of 16. maybe deep down it was frodo and sam when i read lotr age 11

last song you heard: free - kara jackson. i love her sound so much also the fact that she is one of the few artists who publicly speaks about covid and uses a mask

favorite childhood book: picture book i really liked the rainbow fish. when i was a little older i liked ghost in the noonday sun it was about pirates.

currently reading: dont ask me that…. Too many books that i havent picked up. I cant read anymore

currently watching: nothing really. rewatching d20 fantasy high and unsleeping city. waiting to get a job til i can drop $6 on a subscription. i started watching rings of power and its bad but maybe i will continue

currently consuming: my own tail 🐍

currently craving: weed ☹️

i will tag some people and it will not be 9

@inesathammar @passivetimber @aestivetic listen i dont remember who my mutuals are

[loving-n0t-heyting]

What should one do if one regularly fails the Sally-Anne test?

I fear any answer I could give could be accused of the blind leading the blind

[oldshrewsburyian]

I've seen a lot of the idea that most people in Medieval Europe didn't actually believe in any kind of Catholicism, it was just enforced by fear? And that the only reason it appeared popular was because of misogyny, and again, more rule by fear, until Protestants and pagans stood up to them? I want to doubt this, but I feel like I should ask you, to be certain.

“Oh Jesus Christ,” I said aloud in my kitchen, and then felt guilty. Yeah, doubt this. Do more than that. Deny this. Reject this. For starters (and this isn’t an ad hominem to you; these are very widespread misconceptions, and I’m glad you’ve brought them up), please consider the logic of all three of those claims for 0.2 seconds.

“enforced by fear” HOW, exactly? Totalitarianism and punitive imprisonment and constant observation techniques are very much technologies of the modern era. If you’re thinking about burning of witches and heretics: that was the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Blame them, please. Not to say that the logic enabling that wasn’t laid out in the late C15. It’s complicated. I’m not trying to say “the Middle Ages did nothing wrong,” at all; appalling beliefs are easy to find at all times and in all places; but heretics were much more likely to be put on bread and water and given some form of public penance than executed.

“popular because of misogyny” uhhhh... for one thing this suggests monolithic things about ~The Church~ that weren’t really true, and for another, how, HOW, would misogyny need bolstering or find a distinctive social home in a religion distinguished by saying “Hey, news, your gods aren’t actually real, sorry/not sorry, we have one you might like, he’s very nice”? Fun fact, women celebrated the Eucharist until the 12th century and priests could be married until about the same time... in other words, about the midpoint of the Middle Ages. Also, medieval Christianity gave women some pretty neat distinctive options for just NOPE-ing out of marriage. The 12th century also saw the elaboration of the doctrine that any vow, including marriage, was invalid without the full and free consent of both parties, not influenced “by force or fear.” Anyway.

“until Protestants and pagans stood up to them” I’m howling! Amazing. The most improbable linking. Anyway. This idea is due in large part to very, very effective Protestant propaganda, particularly in 16th-century England. For more on Protestant propaganda and misconceptions about medieval Christianity, see here. On pagans... that I would locate more in the Romantic revival of the C18/C19. Violent Christian suppression of indigenous/”pagan” beliefs is, again, much much more a modern than medieval thing, for which we can absolutely blame European colonialism and racism, chief villains of modernity as far as I’m concerned. (And yes, European racism has medieval roots, but that’s another topic.)

Moreover! Enlightenment rationalism (think Voltaire) and 19th-century secular movements for political and social freedoms (think Verdi) had a lot of extremely justified critiques of The Church™. But their church and their society were, of course, hugely different from those of the Middle Ages. And a combination of historical fiction and meliorist/Whiggish views of history contributed to the view that however bad (repressive, corrupt, etc.) things were in the present, surely they were worse in the past. Also, about misogyny: yes, of course, there’s a long, long, long tradition of misogyny within Christian thought and Christian institutional structures. But I think to identify this as the singular dominating strain of thought, belief, and/or practice in church history does a huge disservice to the women who were influential as theologians, mystics, abbesses, saints; who corresponded with kings and queens and emperors and popes; who were honored as speaking directly to God, thus neatly bypassing the male ecclesiastical hierarchy. Let’s direct that rage and alarm at the contemporary strains of Christianity that deserve it instead.

...Whew. You’ve found possibly the Most Enraging Medieval Misconception in my individual ranking, and I hope it doesn’t seem that I was shouting at you from my soapbox.

[forthegothicheroine]

So, I'm finally watching Midsommar, and while the criticisms leveled at it are valid, as an anthropology major myself, everybody falls into the Too Dumb To Live category. Like, I know it's a horror movie, so people have to be SORTA that, but still. "Under Operation Admit The Dumb" from MST3K: Riding With Death, but it's every single character.

Oh man!  I would love to hear from an anthropology major what they should have done!  (Personally, I never forgave that one guy for knowing what attestupa meant and not warning the others ahead of time.  That’s a traumatic thing to witness!)

[eightyonekilograms]

That MIDI thread feels like I am reading a Deep Lore slapfight bitchfest, and none of it makes any sense. Glad it translates to you.

This is deep lore, yeah. Rambling, including #cw sexual assault, to follow.

The most annoying thing about this is that I agree with, like, 90% of what LS is saying (and obnoxiously implying). I actually have a pretty low opinion of MIRI: I think their research agenda is mostly useless, that they have contributed basically nothing of substance to the field of AI in nearly 20 years of existence, and that if superintelligence risk turns out to be a real concern (which I do not grant, I think it is possible but far from certain), MIRI will have done very little to help mitigate that risk.

This isn’t even their fault, per se. In the past, I have compared MIRI’s efforts to like if Ada Lovelace realized that computer hackers would eventually be a problem, and spent the rest of her life trying to develop theory and praxis around computer security. It wouldn’t have worked. No matter how smart she was, she just wouldn’t have been able to contribute anything useful: the availably knowledge in her day was just too far behind; she could not possibly have known what actual, realized computing was going to look like. That’s not her fault or impugning her abilities, it’s just the gap between when she was around and when the technology was ready.

Similarly, while I think we will have “strong AI” eventually, right now we have no idea what the architecture of that is going to look like. I have a high degree of confidence that it won’t be neural networks, RL, or anything else that’s state-of-the-art in the industry right now, nor will it be the weird-ass quasi-GOFAI formalism that MIRI’s research tends to emphasize. In my estimation, if and when strong AI emerges, it will be as a result of a complete paradigm shift, and all the literature MIRI has produced on the subject will be totally irrelevant to it.

The unpleasant reality is that there may not be anything we can do at the moment to meaningfully reduce AI X-risk (although I have trollingly suggested that advocating for worldwide Communist revolution might help). People in the orbit of MIRI don’t consider this possibility nearly as often as they should, for reasons about identity and institutional blind spots-- IME, in the past a lot of LWers tied up too much of their identity in “being the only ones taking AI X-risk seriously”, forgetting pg’s “keep your identity small” advice. And what happened was exactly what pg warned about: people really resist the implication that a big part of their identity, and the thing they’ve been passionately working on, is a waste of time. But it is what it is.

So, point #1 I agree with l-s on: MIRI is kind of dumb.

Point #2 I agree with l-s on: Peter Thiel is a goddamn Saturday morning cartoon villain. No argument from me there.

But it doesn’t necessarily follow from that that he has sinister motivations for donating to MIRI. I mean, he has also donated to climate change organizations in the past. Couldn’t he just be genuinely concerned about AI X-risk? Plenty of people are, especially in the Valley. Even if you think Thiel’s motivations are purely selfish, billionaires probably have just as if not more interest in reducing X-risk as the result of us: you can’t enjoy your spoils of capitalism if the world has been destroyed.

Frankly, I can’t see what sort of sinister agenda you’d advance by giving money to friggin’ Eliezer Yudkowsky. At the end of the day, the rationalists are just not that important. It’s a small number of weirdos-- many whom infamously have giant executive dysfunction issues! If you want to manipulate the world by handing out money, anyone-- lobbyists, politicians, the media, universities, anyone other than the damn rationalists-- is going to give way better bang for your buck. And Thiel, scumbag though he is, is a shrewd investor; it’s safe to say he knows how to allocate his dollars. The MIRI donations really are about the X-risk.

And I suspect l-s knows this: my reading of that thread was that she kept on Darkly Hinting about Thiel’s true motivations for donating to MIRI, over and over, until argumate got fed up and just asked her to state plainly what she meant, at which point she hurriedly switched the conversation to Kathy Forth.

And yes, what happened with Kathy Forth was incredibly shitty, and I’m still angry about it to this day. That’s agreement with l-s #3. Not only because of what happened, but also how in the immediate aftermath, several trusted people quickly used their platforms to slander her as having always been a liar. That was fuuuuuucked up.

But everything else about what l-s said/implied about that was just wrong:

- That and the Brent Dill affair around the same time actually did cause a bunch of reforms. The “whisper networks” were replaced with more formal processes at REACH, the Alumni Committee at CFAR was dissolved after that godawful memo, and a whole bunch of missing stairs and several generally awful people were banned from events. 

- My reblog was admittedly angry and reflexive, but her reply to me was projecting so hard it could illuminate the far side of the moon. I’ve already said I don’t like MIRI nor what happened, but I’d bet good money she dismisses equally serious problems in her own camp all the time. And trying to handwave that away by saying “well my group is much bigger so you can’t take sexual assault problems as systematic, but for your group I can infer all your evil intentions from one incident” is both groundless and despicable.

- Tying it to Peter Thiel makes no damn sense. What would he possibly gain from such a thing? That is l-s trying to lump together all the things she dislikes into one Vast Conspiracy and harrumph away any objections by saying that anyone pointing out how and why it makes no sense must be In On It. That’s QAnon-tier crazy nonsense.

[thegrapeandthefig]

What leads people on Tumblr to obsess so much over Apollo? I'm not saying he isn't worthy of worship, it's just that Tumblr seems to prioritize him for some reason.

If only I knew xD . My guess is that he’s extremely charismatic and his domains are attractive to a lot of folks. I know a lot of people also enjoy the fact that he seems quite approchable and from what I’ve seen he tends to be very straightforward. 

My experiences with him are limited but all have been good. Maybe you should ask someone who knows him better and see why they think he’s gathered so many worshippers to him. 

[ask-a-vetblr]

Is it possible to take classes in care of a certain creature, or type of creatures, without becoming a vet?

Probably, but they’re not single electives out of a veterinary degree.

- Dr Ferox

[brahkest-fr]

2. Least favorite perma dragon? (from the-belows-128375)

Definitely Aga here. Like, I love her because she’s a relic from the olden times but she’s also a combo of my least favorite colors and I honestly can’t remember why I bought her because even back then I didn’t like her that much lmao

Each time a gene update rolls around, I’m always looking to see how I can regene her into something I like but I’ve yet to find something that satisfies me. But, she’ll always have a home with me regardless

[bills-pokedex]

Laddie and Riley and all here! Our trainer has been doing really good since he evolved that Dragonite, and is back and safe with me! Laddie! If anybody tries to take him, well, I'll roar and bite and CRUNCH them!

It’s excellent to hear that your trainer’s doing better, but his past behavior may still be of concern, as sometimes, these can be cyclical in nature. Keep your eye out, and don’t hesitate to reach out to a nurse pokémon if he shows any further signs of treating you any less than his dragonite.

[earlgraytay]

🔥 for the playlist?

psalms 40:2 - the mountain goatsheart of fire- the megas arsonist’s lullabye - hozieremperor’s new clothes- panic! at the discolight up the night - the protomen

[i-m-snek]

Would you recommend Mediterranean house geckos as pets? Or are Cresteds, Leopards, and Leaf tailed geckos more pet-ish?

Hmm, if you’re looking into geckos that you want to handle I would recommend Crested geckos, leopard geckos, or gargoyle geckos :) MHGs are super cute and small, but their attitude is similar to that of a tokay gecko and they much prefer being left alone.

[destrukcja-serca]

@destrukcja-serca

[loving-n0t-heyting]

What is the scam Graeber is furthering?

none, sorry, overcomplicated syntax also typos, was referring to scam journals you pay to publish with, bad post gone now

[oldshrewsburyian]

THERE IS NO BETTER WAY TO DESCRIBE MERLIN THAN BEST WORST SHOW. THANK YOU.

Ha, thank you! I can’t even claim originality for that, I’m afraid -- I was talking with a former colleague about fantasy novels/shows, and I asked her if, as a medievalist, I should watch Merlin. She started laughing uncontrollably, and eventually gave it that descriptor. Then I watched it, and @queeringcamelot let me rant about it as I did so, and now I’m on a rewatch, so there it is.

[forthegothicheroine]

Finally watched The Witchfinder General to complete the Folk Horror Trilogy. To the YouTuber that said it's folk horror but Midsommar isn't, wtf. Why Witchfinder General would be folk horror is...I don't get it. It doesn't have the open weirdness of The Blood On Satan's Claw, nor the worldbuilding of Wicker Man. It is a decent movie with a MST3K-worthy budget. Midsommar is absolutely folk horror.

The thing that gets me is that the of the “Unholy Trinity” that are said to have started the folk horror subgenre, each one has reasons people have argued that it isn’t really folk horror- Witchfinder because it’s a drama, The Wicker Man because it takes place in the then-present day, The Blood on Satan’s Claw because there are real supernatural happenings.

I do agree that Midsommar is folk horror!  There’s certainly no other real word for it.