CAS: Classical Studies: Scholarly Works
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Item Response: expert or intellectual? other views of legal and medical expertise(Oxford University Press, 2023-07-01) Uden, James; Bubb, Claire; Peachin, MichaelItem Introduction: pluralized voices in women's travel writing(Ilex Foundation, 2022) Uden, JamesThis chapter surveys recent approaches to travel and mobility, women's writing, and the study of travel literature in languages beyond English.Item Gothic travel in Northanger Abbey(ILEX Foundation, 2022) Uden, JamesThis book chapter explores the relevance of travel literature for understanding Jane Austen's posthumously published novel 'Northanger Abbey'. The novel was shaped by the fashion for 'Gothic travel', a mode of travel discourse in the late 1790s that sought to rediscover historical locations in Britain as sources of exciting gloom and terror. The experiences of the central character in the novel have also been shaped by Austen's reading of contemporary travel literature in the period. Travel, it turns out, is central to understanding both the plot of the novel and its cultural context.Item Egnatius the Epicurean: the banalization of philosophy in Catullus(Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2021) Uden, JamesThis article offers a new examination of the place of philosophy in Catullus’ Carmina. It focuses on Egnatius, the ‘smiling Spaniard’ of poems 37 and 39, and argues that Catullus’ attacks on this character make use of many standard invective tropes against Epicureans in the late Republic. More than merely an opportunity to show off his whitened teeth, Egnatius’ smile may well have been proof of his philosophical detachment and ataraxia. Yet Catullus maliciously misrepresents this mark of Epicurean virtue as a social gaffe, and an unflattering reminder of Egnatius’ provincial origins. I then reinterpret poems 37, 38, and 39 as a poetic series unified by the ‘banalization’ of philosophical ideas. Ultimately, Catullus creates his own singular voice – the arbiter of style and taste – by representing aspects of other people's behaviour as trite and ordinary. To banalize is an act of power, and it is a weapon that Catullus wields to articulate a sense of difference from other poets and thinkers in his intellectual world.Item Sunshine and Matricide: Dionysus and the Electra plays(Entheomedia) Ruck, Carl A.P.Ancient Greek drama is often discussed in isolation from the fifth-century Athenian Theater of Dionysus, where for the most part it was first produced, and commonly without regard for the religion and rites of Dionysus, the patron deity of the playwrights who composed its dramas, and without consideration for the nature of the festival experience afforded their audiences in the daylong sequences of enactments. Primarily lacking in the centuries of scholarship that have attempted to understand and evaluate the corpus of surviving dramas is an understanding of the nature of the ancient intoxication accessed by the god’s drink of wine, its relationship to the plant-gathering rituals of the bacchanalian revel and the herbal psychoactive fortifying agents added to the drink, making it a sacramental Eucharist, an entheogen, whose symbolism mediated the dichotomous antithesis of the wild and the cultivated, both botanical and social. Three playwrights, each the prominent exponent in each of three succeeding generations, dominate the history of Greek tragedy—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Each composed at least one play on the mythical figure of Electra, who was pivotal in urging her brother Orestes to commit matricide, to kill their mother Clytemnestra, the sister of Helen, for whom the Trojan War was fought. The two later playwrights were aware of the work of their great predecessor, and commented on it, as well as each other in their dramas. The story of Orestes’ matricide, moreover, has a quasi-historical referent in the dynastic succession for the kingship of Mycenae, whose disputed token of sovereignty was a golden lamb, a zoomorphism for an intoxicant that accessed shamanic empowerment. The controversy over possession of it involves the societal transition of the royal house from a queendom to a kingdom, from matriarchal to patriarchal dominance—the dawning of a new day, hence the coincidence of matricide with the rising sun. The murder of Clytemnestra and her chosen mate or paramour the goat-man Aegisthus, symbolically sometimes presented as a decapitation, has its analogue, in the foundational myth for the citadel of Mycenae, with the heroic task of Perseus, who first imposed masculine control over the city when he harvested the head of the Gorgon Medusa at the site of the fortress—as a mushroom.Item Toxic Eucharist(Stash Press) Ruck, CarlThe eating of deity as flesh and blood is the ritual that characterizes the Christian Mass, although denominational dogma is divided between the real or substantial presence. It is supposedly a commemoration of the Last Supper as recorded in three of the canonical Gospels. The Gospels, however, do not specify that the rite should be repeated, only that the supper will occur again in the otherworld. The disciples after the Crucifixion shared property and ate together, but not the sacramental flesh and blood of deity. The first evidence of a sacred meal is Paul’s First Corinthians about twenty years after the Crucifixion. He reprimands the congregation for doing the rite incorrectly, which is the reason that quite a few of them have sickened and died. He defines the Eucharist of flesh and blood as different from common food and claims that the misuse of it is the reason for its poisonous effect. He then proclaims the Christian Mystery. This is something defined in Mark as stories whose meaning is accessible only to the elite. To Paul’s Corinthian congregation, the immediate referent for Mystery would be the great Eleusinian rite celebrated nearby, where the divine flesh was materialized as the grain of Demeter and the holy blood of sacrifice was the wine of Dionysus. Wine is an intoxicant and the Eleusinian Mystery was a vision accessed via a psychoactive potion of grain. Paul’s reprimand about the toxic Eucharist suggests the recreational abuse of a sacred shamanic drug or entheogen. The earliest evidence for the Eucharist indicates that the psychoactive agent was a mushroom. As such, it was perpetuated as a secret rite in certain monastic orders and monasteries, perhaps even in the catacombs beneath St. Peter’s Basilica.Item Horace Walpole, gothic classicism, and the aesthetics of collection(2018) Uden, JamesScholars of eighteenth-century literature have long seen the development of the Gothic as a break from neoclassical aesthetics, but this article posits a more complex engagement with classical imitation at the origins of the genre. In Horace Walpole’s formative Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto, his Gothic drama The Mysterious Mother, and in the curiosities in his villa, classical elements are detached from their contexts and placed in startling and strange juxtapositions. His tendency towards the fragmentation of ancient culture, frequently expressed through the imagery of dismemberment, suggests an aesthetic not of imitation, but of collection. Moreover, rather than abandoning or ignoring the classical, Walpole reconfigures literary history to demonstrate elements of monstrosity and hybridity already present in Greek and Roman texts.Item Archias the good immigrant(University of California Press, 2020-11-01) Čulík-Baird, HannahCicero's Pro Archia has historically been taken as a bona fide expression of humanism. In this article, I demonstrate how this reading of the Pro Archia has allowed the political and cultural tensions in the speech to remain hidden. Cicero's vision of Archias as an idealized amalgam sanitizes both the poetic and the cultural identity of his Syrian client in favour of a projection which combined generic “Greekness” with a politicized invocation of the Roman poet, Q. Ennius. Contextualizing the Pro Archia within its contemporary political moment reveals that Cicero is consciously constructing a narrative of Archias as a “good immigrant.”Item Complex inferiorities: the poetics of the weaker voice in Latin literature(2020) Uden, JamesItem How we write plagues(JSTOR, 2020) Uden, JamesItem The margins of satire: Suetonius, satura, and scholarly outsiders in ancient Rome(Project Muse, 2020) Uden, JamesScholars have long been interested in Suetonius' De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus for the evidence it preserves of the history of education and philology at Rome. This article focuses on a different aspect of the work: its repeated links with satire. Suetonius' grammatici are presented both as authors and targets of satirical attacks, and fragments of their work preserved in the De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus reveal a wider, sub-elite field of satirical writing occluded in the polished, literary genre of Roman satura. Through analysis of Suetonius' biographical vignettes and related passages in Juvenal's Satire 7, this article sheds light on a vision of grammatici as outsiders who critique Rome—and each other—from the social and literary margins.Item Femtheogens: women and sacred plants in the classical world(2016) Ruck, Carl Anton PaulTypical of male reluctance to accept the role of female involvement with entheogens, one recent authority on ancient wine has cast doubt on the very existence of the otherwise well-documented ecstatic rituals of the mountain revels of the women called bacchants for their celebration of the god Dionysus/Bacchus, since it would not seem in the best inter-ests of the town for the men to allow their mothers, wives, and daughters to behave in such a liberated and profligate behavior. These women in actuality wereengaged in the ritual gathering of sacred psychoactive plants, which involved the experience of divine possession by the deity and was described in a vocabulary of traditional sexual metaphors, such as are common among herb-gatherers. The performance of these rites was seen as essential for the identity and very existence of the city and for maintaining the proper relationship of the civilization and its culture with the female-dominant matriarchal religions and peoples from which it evolved into the patriarchal revision over which the twelve Olympian deities presided in the Classical Age. The rites were also elemental for perpetuating the hybridization of edible foodstuffs from their toxic and primitive antecedents and for assigning and mediating the polarity of socially assigned sexual roles and identities. They indoctrinated the family in a metaphysical communion that spanned the grave and opened contact with the realm of the ancestors. As a beneficial transmutation of ghostly possession, the rites underlay the emergence of drama. It was the performances in the Theater of Dionysusin Athens that were largely responsible for the iconic role of the city in the future traditions of Europe. Mythical accounts traced the origin of the Ionian tribal group of Greeks to a similar rite of plant-gathering.Item The spiritual lover in the cult of Dionysus(2019-11-01) Ruck, CarlItem Mushroom Sacraments in the cults of early Europe(NeuroQuantology Journal, 2016) Ruck, Carl Anton PaulIn 1957, R. Gordon Wasson, a professional banker and amateur mycologist, inadvertently launched a profound cultural change that has come to be called the Psychedelic Revolution, by publishing an account of his experience with a Mazatec shaman in Hautla de Jiménez in the mountains of central Mexico. The article appeared in Life magazine and was intended as publicity for his forthcoming Russia, Mushrooms, and History, in which he and his Russian-born wife Valentina Pavlovna pursued their lifelong fascination with their dichotomous attitudes toward fungi, which had led them to suspect a cultural taboo upon a sacred object. In 1968 he traced this taboo back to the Vedic Soma, which he identified as a psychoactive mushroom. The identification, if correct, implied that there should be evidence for a similar sacred role for the mushroom in other regions in antiquity where the migrating Indo-European people settled. In 1978, he proposed such a role for the visionary potion that was central to the mystical experience of the Greek Eleusinian Mystery, that was celebrated annually for two millennia at a sanctuary near Athens. The possibility that the ancient Greeks indulged in chemically altered consciousness is antithetical to Europe’s idealization of Classical antiquity and the proposal was largely ignored. Mushrooms, however, were fundamental to social norms and religious observances in the celebration of Dionysus, and figured in other Mystery cults and in the foundational traditions of many cities, including Mycenae and Rome. The Soma sacrament as the Persian haoma was proselytized to the West by the Zoroastrian priests of Mithras and became a major cohesive indoctrination for the Emperors, army, and bureaucrats who administered the Roman Empire. It survived the Conversion to Christianity in the knighthoods of late antiquity and the medieval world, and was assimilated to the Eucharist of certain of the ecclesiastical elite.Item The wolves of war: evidence of an ancient cult of warrior lycanthropy(NeuroQuantology Journal, 2016) Ruck, Carl Anton PaulArchaeological evidence indicates that naturally occurring megalithic structures that resemble mushrooms throughout the region identified as Thrace in antiquity were the foci of religious observances, sometime with the fungal likeness of the stone structures intensified by human intervention. Thrace was considered the probable origin of Dionysian rites. Wine was recognized in antiquity as the product of fungal growth and the drink was a cultivated version of wild intoxicants, among which was the mushroom. The rituals in celebration of the deity commemorated his primordial identity as resident in these wild plants and mediated his evolution into the intoxicant grown upon the cultivated grapevine, and the wine itself was fortified beyond its alcoholic content by the addition of these wild antecedents of viticulture. The legendary wine of Thrace was particularly potent through the addition of a psychoactive mushroom. The rituals of the women known as bacchants enacted the fantasies of root-cutters in commemoration of the deity in his persona that predated viticulture. This fungal persona represents the same intoxicant that was known to the Persians as haoma and represents the spread of an Indo-European sacrament into the Classical world, with its association of lycanthropy and the bonding of warriors into brotherhoods as packs of wolves, better known in its manifestation in late antiquity among the Nordic peoples as berserkers. In Greece, Apollo originally presided over such wolf packs, but as he evolved into Classical theology as a member of the Olympian family, Dionysus assimilated that association, inasmuch as he better represented the mediation with the past through his magical drink that combined both the wild and the cultivated intoxicants. This freed Apollo from the burden of the past, allowing him to become transmuted from wolf to light, the basis of pseudo-etymological derivations of his identity in antiquity.Item The new Aphrodite(2017) Ruck, Carl A.P.The tale of Eros and Psyche is known from its Latin version as Cupid and Psyche, encapsulated in the novel titled the Metamorphoses or Golden Ass (Asinus Aureus) of the second-century CE Apuleius from a Roman colony in nort-hern Africa. It survived antiquity perhaps in a single manuscript and excited great interest in Florence of the Medici Renaissance because of its Neoplatonic motif of the transcendent mystical escape from the Cave of delusionary appearance. Apuleius was an initiate into the Egyptian Mystery religion of Isis, and probably also the great Mys-tery of Greek Eleusis. The tale had been told as well by his Syrian Greek contemporary Lucian and was already sacred in fourth century BCE Magna Graecia at certain cave sanctuaries where the promiscuously sexual love goddess Aphrodite was jointly worshipped with Demeter, the goddess of fertility, and her daughter Persephone, as patrons of the union between husbands and wives. The tale employs the peculiar monogamous mating of the butterfly and its metamorphosis within the cave-like excreted exoskeleton of its golden chrysalis. It is an allegory of the incarnation of spirit in physicality that produces a new version of sexuality as love, rewarded with immortality, and a superior version of beauty endowed with mortality.Item Reorienting the shamanic axis: Apollo from wolf to lightRuck, CarlDelphi was the universal axis mundi or central connection with the theological cosmos for the ancient Greco-Roman world, the seat of the most renowned shaman of antiquity, the Pythoness prophetess. The long sequence of priestesses who held the office delivered oracular responses from mythical times as early as the mid second millennium BCE until the last recorded pronouncement around the year 395 CE. During this expanse of time, Greece transitioned from Pelasgi-an/Minoan worship of a goddess to the Indo-European evolution of the patriarchal family of Olympians, over which the male deity Zeus presided as father or sibling. The pathway of shamanic prognostication was reoriented from its former connection downward through the Corycian wolf cave on Mount Parnassos to the chthonic realm of Gaia and it was reassigned upon the building of the Delphic Temple sanctuary in the eighth century upward to Zeus, with the deity Apollo functioning as mediator, replacing his former pre-Indo-European persona with his new identity as son of the divine father, whose pronouncements the priestess thereafter delivered. The numerous mythical figures in the catalogue of those particularly beloved of the Apollonian deity and his twin sister betray their former role as recipients of human victims, once enacted in the bull dance at the Minoan labyrinth on Crete and by the lover’s leap from the twin cliffs that loom above the Delphic sanctuary. They were prepared for their ordeal by the ingestion of a variety of psychoactive sacraments, prime among them was one associated with the wolf and its canine analogues. This entheogen was a mushroom, and the animals’ fondness for the ecstasy it induced set the pattern for the bonding of humans into packs of warriors and the institutions of society. It can be traced back to the haoma sacrament of the Zoroastrian Persian elite, and indications of it occur as early as the Homeric tradition and persist throughout Europe until the late medieval period, and perhaps even later. In the reorienting of Delphi’s shamanic axis, Apollo’s lycanthropic persona was displaced and rein-terpreted as related not to the ‘wolf’ (lykos), but to the ‘light’ (lux) of his solar manifestation. The deadly twanging of his toxic bow was transmuted into the harmonious, but equally entrancing, spell cast by the music from the plucked strings of his lyre. Apollo is paired with Dionysus as inspiring antithetical modes of human mentality, with Apollo presiding over the separation from Gaia and rational control over nature, and his half-brother finding the source of inspiration in the mediated encounter with the irrationality of the natural wilderness. At Delphi, Dionysus replaced his brother’s former role at the Corycian Cave.Item Persia, haoma and the Greek mysteries(CİSEATED-ASEHERT, 2019-09-01) Ruck, CarlIn the mythological tradition, the Greeks traced tribal affiliations with the Persians through Perses, the son of the hero Perseus, and with the Medes through the sorceress Medea’s son Medos. They also traced family ties with the Egyptians through the Argive Greek cow-maiden Io and with Phoenicia through Europa, abducted by Zeus metamorphosed into a bull, and through Perseus’ Phoenician bride Andromeda, and through Cadmus of Boeotian Thebes, and further ties with Egypt through Perseus’ visit to his great female ancestor’s African homeland. These traditions pertain to the Greek Mystery religions and to the psychoactive sacrament involved in the rites of initiation. One version of this sacrament was the Persian haoma, which in the Sanskrit Vedic rite was the not-personified plant deity Soma. The same sacrament seems to have originated in Africa, perhaps stimulating humankind’s first awareness of a spiritual dimension beyond the perceived reality. This was the psychoactive Amanita muscaria mushroom. Its assimilation into Hellenic theology underlies the identity of the Greek deities Dionysus and Demeter, and the various groups of dwarfish highly sexualized African grotesqueries that apparently materialized in the Mystery initiations of the Great Gods on the island of Samothrace and elsewhere, and in the great rite of the Eleusinian sanctuary.Item Soma and the Greek mysteries(2016) Ruck, C.A.P.Item Thracian Mystery Religions(2018-12-31) Ruck, Carl Anton PaulThe ancient Mystery mythological tradition links northern mainland Greece and the islands of Samothrace and Lemnos with Troy, Persia, Boeotian Thebes, Egypt, Crete, Etruscan Italy, the Peloponnesus, Athens, and the sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone at the Attic village of Eleusis. Common to this wide geographical matrix is the role of a psychoactive mushroom as a shamanic sacrament affording access to mystical experience. The Greek Homeric tradition knew of the plant as the Homeric moly, [h]omomi, and the haoma sacrament of the Zoroastrian Magi priests and the warrior brotherhood of Mithraism. This was expressed as a zoomorphic anthropomorphism in the figure of the Gorgon Queen Medusa, and the bovine and taurine metaphors for the Amanita muscaria mushroom. The role of Perseus, as the father of Perses, the eponymous ancestor of the Persians, and of Medea, as mother of Medos, the eponymous ancestor of the Persian tribal group of the Medes, is central to assimilation of the Persian sacrament into Hellenic traditions. Medea is an adjectival version of the same linguistic root that appears in the verbal participle Medusa and the noun Metis, signifying female empowerment though expertise in medicinal and sacred drugs, a wisdom assumed by the goddess Athena as a deification of Sophia. This fungal sacrament figured in the various Mystery cults of the Anatolian Goddess and her male attendant, and in the antithetical relationship of the gods Apollo and Dionysus.