Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
Reading the Cranmer blog this evening, I find that the good archbishop has been obliged to place some limits on who can comment. His Grace is now forced to devote more time each day trying to stem the tide of offensive and irrelevant comment than he is able to dedicate to each morning’s missive. When […]
I forgot to mention that at breakfast I found myself in the queue, and talking to a chap who, like myself, wasn’t wearing his name badge (the name badges this year were excellently readable). It turned out to be Mark DelCogliano, who has translated a number of the prefaces to books of the Vulgate and […]
Out after work this evening, and bought a new, disposable laptop which I can take to Oxford and lose without heartburn. Now setting this up. At the moment it is creating recovery disk(s), and taking ages to do so. Next I shall have to remove all the crapware and install the stuff I want to […]
An email reached me last week from someone claiming to have experience of translating Cyril of Alexandria. I have dusted off the Apologeticum ad imperatorem, therefore, and asked him to do the first page as a sample. If it is OK, then perhaps we will at last get that work in English. The text is […]
Today I learned from a post by Jim Davila that Isaac Casaubon, the celebrated 17th century philologist, determined that the works transmitted from antiquity under the name of Hermes Trismegistus were not the ancient items that they professed, but rather belonged to the Hellenistic era. I knew that the “Hermetic corpus” was bogus, but not why. […]
We all know Franz Cumont’s Textes et Monumentes, which collected all the ancient sources on Mithras known a century ago. What few realise is that a translation was made of most of the literary fragments that he published. It’s A. S. Geden, Select passages illustrating Mithraism. It was published by SPCK in 1925; and since Mr. […]
Still busy with dull stuff, but I have been revising the Wikipedia article on Areimanios. “Who he?” I hear you cry? Well Areimanios is the Greek name for Ahriman, the Persian evil spirit, used in descriptions of Zoroastrianism in Plutarch and the like. Except … there’s more. There are some odd traces of a non-evil […]
I happened to see this claim in an online puff for the curious theories of Acharya S: The salvific death and resurrection at Easter of the god, the initiation as remover of sin, and the notion of becoming “born again,” are all ages-old Pagan motifs or mysteries rehashed in the later Christianity. The all-important death-and-resurrection […]
I’m looking at Preisendanz’ edition of the Greek magical papyri. I thought some notes on one of them, PGM IV, also known as the great magical book, or the great spell-book, might be useful. This is the codex that contains the so-called Mithras liturgy — in reality merely a spell-ritual. The so-called “great Paris magical […]