Tag: From my diary

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m still working on the Roman cult of Mithras site.  The what’s new page indicates roughly what I’ve been doing.  The list of artefacts – monuments and inscriptions -(with photographs) is growing ever longer.  The various scripts that I use to manage the site are getting more stable, and adding extra tweaks is getting easier too.

The collection of Mithraic materials by Vermaseren is now more than 50 years old.  That means that there is quite a lot of material that has been uncovered which is not in that collection.  I tend to come across this, when I see some striking image, look for it in the CIMRM, and find … nothing.

So I need some means to handle non-CIMRM artefacts.  At the moment I’ve just got a few at the bottom of the page of all artefacts.  Today I adapted the wizard slightly to give these some kind of structured name.

Really we need to assign numbers to the items; a sort of CIMRM supplement.  To do this, tho, I would need to have a list of items found since 1956.  Doubtless such a list could be compiled from publications … but how?

Share

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Just busy working on the Roman cult of Mithras pages.  Adding comments using Discus is easy.  Adding “like” buttons for Facebook or Google+, etc, is much harder than you might think!

I spent a little time today on Picasa, the online photo sharing site.  I searched for “Mithras” and added a comment with the CIMRM number to a few of the photos.  That way they will come up if people start using the CIMRM.

I realise that I need to learn more about how scholars interact with monuments.  What is the “bull. ep.”?  What is AE, where a monument gets an AE number.  So much to do.

And on Monday I have to go back to work, and will be, once again, reduced to doing dribs and drabs of useful work online in spare moments in the evenings.  It is remarkable how much more progress I have made with the Mithras site in a week, than in nearly a year before that.

Share

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A correspondent reminds me that letter 100 in the Collectio Avellana, a medieval collection of papal letters, is a letter by Pope Gelasius to the senator Andromachus, justifying the abolition of the ancient Roman festival of the Lupercalia.  I mentioned it here, but then forgot all about it.  By chance another correspondent wrote on a different issue today, and from his role, he may know of someone competent to do the job and who might be glad of the money.  I’d do it myself if I ever had any time away from working.

The letter is interesting, not just for itself, but also because it quotes from the lost 2nd decade of Livy, on the origins of the Lupercalia.  Which is something that should be made more widely available, all for itself.

In other news, the vandal attacking the Mithras pages made another attempt yesterday, but not today.  I infer that the wretch has had to go back to work.  I wonder who he really is, and where from?

Share

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve spent some time working on the security of the Mithras site.  This now seems to be working, but we will see.  On Saturday I logged out and made sure that every page had some kind of security check.  No vandalism occurred yesterday, therefore.  Today I added a login page and password.

The vandal made two more attempts to edit today, one from an IP address supposedly in Sweden, the other using an IP address supposedly in Germany.  Clearly the IP addresses have been spoofed, and tell us nothing, therefore.

I’ve now started to think once more about how best to display the CIMRM data for monuments, inscriptions, etc.  Probably the thing to do is to experiment with one or two downloadable solutions, and see if these can be adapted.  I have a dreadful cold, however, so I may just go back to bed!

Share

Update on the Rollston saga

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I learn from Paleojudaica that epigraphist Christopher Rollston has resigned from his post at Emmanuel Christian Seminary.  In this he has acted quite properly; the views he espoused cannot be compatible with the post he held.

Instead he has accepted a post at George Washington University.  When I opened the website for this institution, I was confronted with a large picture of a demonstration (poster: “four more years” and an Obama campaign logo) and the text, “At GW, politics is not a spectator sport”.  I fear that it must be very politically correct, and pretty intolerant of any deviation from orthodoxy. But of course everyone must earn a living, and GWU has done rightly to offer him a post.

Let us wish Dr Rollston all the best at what must be a more congenial, if less tolerant, location.  In particular he states:

During my time at George Washington University, I will also be completing my monograph (tentatively) entitled “Forging History: A History of Epigraphic Forgeries from Antiquity to the Modern Period,” …

Such a work should be of wide interest!

Share

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve continued to add a few photographs of Mithraic monuments, with their entry in the CIMRM, to the new Mithras site, The Roman cult of Mithras.  It’s become increasingly clear that the approach that I have been following with these is not quite right.  What I have at the moment is one web-page per monument.

You have to attempt some things before you really understand what you’re trying to do.  It’s become clear to me, for instance, that much of what I do when I add a photograph is repetitive, and the process of generating the page for the CIMRM entry is one that could be automated, and therefore should be.  I need to write a wizard to do the uploads, much like that in Wikimedia Commons, but targeted at my special process.  That will help.

But one page per monument doesn’t work.  The value of having this material is the ability to skim over it easily, to get an overview, to understand common features between dozens of images.  With a click per image, and a couple of thousand entries, this isn’t going to work.

Obviously I need some kind of image gallery, like that in Wikimedia Commons, or Google Images.  I was thinking of generating a thumbnail (using ImageMagick) as part of the upload wizard, and then using the wizard, not only to create the web page, but also to add an entry to the gallery.  That still seems like a good idea.

But it occurred to me just now … image gallery scripts must already exist.  Can’t I adapt one somehow?  It’s worth looking into.  A task for tomorrow, perhaps.

The material must be accessible.  We see so many academic sites where it is quite clear that the designer never stopped for a moment, imagined what a user might want to do on the site, and then reflected on how to make that easiest to do.  I don’t want to do this myself.

One other thing that I need to fix on the site.  I’ve got to make it easier to add Greek text!

Share

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have spent the day with the new Mithras site, to its great profit.  It is by no means complete, nor is it intended to be.  It is merely a starting point, based on the more reliable elements of the old Wikipedia site.  Much in it needs to be reverified.  Much will be worked on, ad hoc, as time and energy permit.

The most enjoyable part of the process was working with the pictures.  These days we have all sorts of photographs of Mithraic monuments and inscriptions online.  But these images are useless, because they are not tied to Vermaseren’s Corpus Inscriptionum et Monumentum Religionis Mithriacae, which assigns a number to each monument and describes it.  What I did, for several of the pictures from Wikimedia Commons, was track down the CIMRM number, and the entry, and write a page containing image and data.

Much of the imagery is inscrutable on first glance.  If I do very much of this, it will get much less inscrutable.  And I did rather enjoy doing it.  Adding data to the web (rather than opinion) is what I do, and what I want to do.

I’ve emailed someone online, and asked them to take a look.  I can see various problems with the site; but a fresh pair of eyes would be invaluable.

Share

Greek Wit 1

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Merry Christmas!  Here’s a snippet of ancient life that appealed to me this morning.

Antigonus the elder communicated to his son Demetrius his intention to put Mithridates to death, but bound him by a solemn oath “not to speak of it.” Demetrius took Mithridates a walk by the seaside, and wrote on the sand with the end of his spear, “Run.” Mithridates took the hint, and escaped to Pontus, where he afterwards became king.

 — Plutarch, Apophthegms, or Sayings of Kings and Commanders: Antigonus, 18.

I find that there is a version of this complete text online here.  Of a similar kind is the Sayings of the Romans here.

Share

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have continued to work on the new Mithras pages.  Today I have found myself mostly working on PHP scripts.  Naturally I want to see if there are any hits on the pages, so I have written a simple statistics script.  I will beef it up once it goes live and I have more interest in seeing who (other than myself) is looking at the site.

I’m still getting useful snippets out of Macrobius.  Here is a bit of book 2, chapter 6:

[1] Let me turn back now from stories of women to stories of men and from risque jests to seemly humor.

The lawyer Cascellius had a reputation for a remarkably outspoken wit, and here is one of his best known quips. Vatinius had been stoned by the populace at a gladiatorial show which he was giving, and so he prevailed on the aediles to make a proclamation forbidding the throwing of anything but fruit into the arena.

Now it so happened that Cascellius at that time was asked by a client to advise whether a fir-cone was a fruit or not, and his reply was: “If you propose to throw one at Vatinius, it is.”

Share

Nicht Christus folgen, sondern Horst Wessel!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Now for something completely different.  This evening I came across a purported quotation from an anti-Christian Hitler Youth song.   I was suspicious, for it seemed a little too good to be true, but it appears to be genuine.  It ran in part as follows, in English:

We are the happy Hitler Youth;
We have no need for Christian virtue;
For Adolf Hitler is our intercessor
And our redeemer.
No priest, no evil one
Can keep us
From feeling like Hitler’s children.
Not Christ do we follow, but Horst Wessel!
Away with incense and holy water pots…[1]

A little experimenting with German leads us to the original, of which the translation seems somewhat inaccurate:

Wir sind die fröhliche Hitlerjugend,
Wir brauchen keine christliche Tugend,
Denn unser Führer Adolf Hitler
Ist stets unser Mittler.

Kein Pfaffe, kein böser, kann uns je hindern,
Uns zu fühlen als Hitlers Kinder.
Nicht Christus folgen wir, sondern Horst Wessel,
Fort mit Weihrauch und Weihwasserkessel!

Wir folgen singend unseren Fahnen
Als würdige Söhne unserer Ahnen,
Ich bin kein Christ, kein Katholik,
Ich geh mit SA durch dünn und dick.

Die Kirche kann mir gestohlen werden,
Das Hakenkreuz ist Erlösung auf Erden,
Ihm will ich folgen auf Schritt und Tritt,
Baldur von Schirach, nimm mich mit![2]

I.e.:

We are the happy Hitler Youth,
We need no Christian virtue,
Because our leader Adolf Hitler,
Is always our mediator.

No priest, no wrongdoer can ever hinder us,
From feeling like Hitler’s children.
We do not follow Christ but Horst Wessel,
Away with incense and holy water!

We follow our flags singing,
As worthy sons of our ancestors,
I am no Christian, no Catholic,
I’ll go with the S.A. through thick and thin.

The church can be stolen from me,
The swastika is redemption on earth.
I will follow it step by step,
Baldur von Schirach, take me with you!

We need merely imagine the environment in which such sentiments could be uttered without embarassment.  Such is the power of media control and suppression of any other opinion.

But where does this material come from? 

Among the search results is a court record of the trial at Nuremberg of Baldur von Schirach, the leader of the Hitler Youth.[3]:

Mr. DODD: Refer to p.228 of the daybook.  You will find that a chaplain, Heinrich Muller, and a parish priest, Franz Rummer, were charged because they had discussed in circles of Catholic priests that the Hitler Youth were singing the following song on the Nazi Party Day in 1934: …

Wait until I have finished.

VON SCHIRACH: I haven’t found it yet.

Mr. DODD: It is on p. 228a and b.  My apologies.

Perhaps you will remember the song if I read it to you?  You know the line, “We do not follow Christ, but Horst Wessel”?

VON SCHIRACH: This song I am seeing for the first time, I don’t know it.

Mr. DODD: Well, I won’t read on.  However you note that the last paragraph in the day-book reads: “The attorney-general noted that there could be no question that the poem in question had been sung or circulated in Hitler Youth groups.  He believes, however, that the claim could be denied, that the poem had been sung on the Party Day, under the eyes and with the approval, so to speak, of top party officials.”

VON SCHIRACH: The third verse is “I am not a Christian, not a Catholic, Go with the S.A. through thick and thin.”  This shows that this is not a Youth song.  If the Youth sang this song, I regret it.  On the Nazi Party Day in 1934, as stated here, the song was not sung at a celebration of Youth.

Mr. DODD: OK.

VON SCHIRACH: The combined programme for the Youth event for Party Day I myself have read through.

I don’t know the song: I have never heard it, and I do not even know the lyrics.

Mr. DODD: You’ll notice that the last line is “Baldur von Schirach, take me with you!”  It is above all very surprising to the prosecution to hear that you as Youth leader did not know that significant disputes were taking place during these years between the clergy of all the churches in Germany and the Youth organisation.

We need not bother with Von Schirach’s response.  A man on trial for his life before a tribunal of his enemies will say what he feels that he must, but we need not pay any attention now.  Likewise, immediately before this passage, he attempts to pass off various incidents of anti-clerical abuse, encouraged by the climate of the times, as a popular response to some supposed currency transactions of local priests. 

All this, by the way, with the aid of Google Translate.  I am very impressed with how well it now handles German.

The way that an overpowering cultural force impacts on the church is, sadly, a subject that we in the anglophone world may find it useful to revise.  There is more sustained hostility to Christianity in our days than there has been for centuries, and the manipulation of opinion to “justify” this is everywhere.

Share
  1. [1]Ernst Christian Helmreich, The German Churches under Hitler, 1979, p.267.  Google books snippet here.↩
  2. [2]Taken from http://www.digitale-schule-bayern.de/dsdaten/434/63.doc, which states that it was sung in the streets of Nuremberg in 1934, and contains a series of extracts from Nazi papers.  A reference for the song is given: Thomas Breuer, Verordneter Wandel? Der Widerstand zwischen nationalsozialistischem Herrschaftsanspruch und traditionaler Lebenswelt im Erzbistum Bamberg [=Obligatory change? The conflict between Nazi rule and traditional life in the archdiocese of Bamburg], Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1990, p. 131.↩
  3. [3]Friday 24th May, 1946, Online here.↩