I got to that Wikipedia article from Samson, where I had gone to read about the famous haircut:
[Samson] tells Delilah that God supplies his power because of his consecration to God as a Nazirite, symbolized by the fact that a razor has never touched his head, and that if his hair is cut off he will lose his strength.I was thinking about Samson's haircut because of something I saw in an old episode of "Friends." As you may remember, I'm working my way through a box set of the complete episodes of "Friends" and I ran into the one with Chandler's third nipple, which is not the official title of the episode. After a woman with one leg freaks out at his extra body part, he has it surgically excised, and then when somebody else makes a joke, he says, "That was an obvious joke, and I didn’t think of it. Why didn’t I think of it? The source of all my powers. Oh dear God, what have I done!"
Delilah then woos him to sleep "in her lap" and calls for a servant to cut his hair. Samson loses his strength and he is captured by the Philistines who blind him by gouging out his eyes. They then take him to Gaza, imprison him, and put him to work turning a large millstone and grinding corn.
Samson, according to the Wikipedia article, is sometimes thought of as "a euhemerized solar deity," because his "name is derived from the Hebrew word šemeš, meaning 'sun,'" and that "his long hair might represent the sun's rays."
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Blind or not, Samson's hair grew back and he had the last word.
Exaggeration in transmission or interpretation. Myths encompass history and science, where assumptions/assertions are indulged, and inference replaces deduction.
Samson is the emblem of Lungau, Salzburg and parades in his honor are held annually in ten villages of the Lungau and two villages in the north-west Styria (Austria). During the parade, a young bachelor from the community carries a massive figure made of wood or aluminum said to represent Samson. The tradition, which was first documented in 1635, was entered into the UNESCO list of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Austria in 2010.
Wiki
Sounds like something related to "theory of collective memory" (translated from Norwegian and not exactly accurate since "minne" in Norwegian goes much farther than "memory" in English, depending on the context). It is about how the stories, mythical or accurate, that a society believes in are very important for how individuals view themselves with regard to national identity, social cohesion, etc.
It is all very scientific though the cloud of jargon is not easily penetrated by the layman.
Fowler, 2nd Edition, Metaphor, 2c. spoilt metaphor
"Yet Jaures was the Samson who upheld the pillars of the Bloc"
...Samson's way with pillars was not to uphold them...
I totally believe in this euhem...thing. I've always thought various gods and epic heroes had been real people, from prehistory. Dynamic, high energy leaders.
It's fascinating to think about, anyway.
There must be a euphemism for euhemerism.
“How Societies Remember” by Paul Connerton
Every conquering hero, or horde, in history have immediately gone to to work attempting to obliterate all folk memory of what existed before their arrival.
In our own time, see Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and now, the "woke" left.
I saw Chandler's Third Nipple open for Samson's Haircut at the Orpheum in '89.
robert graves wrote that ALL our myths are stories that people wrote to explain existing artwork (which came from before 1177bce, the year civilization collapsed).
people had a pot or a wall with a picture of it of something
a guy in feathers falling from the sky, and they made up a story to explain it (Icarus)
but that's got a different word: iconotropy
I've made it 67 years without needing it. I suspect I'll go a few more.
The Gipper Lives said saw Chandler's Third Nipple open for Samson's Haircut at the Orpheum in '89.
neither of those bands could shine a candle on
Blackbody Radiation and the Ultraviolet Catastrophe
which i STILL think is The Best Name for a Band: EVER
God is a Nazi, rite?
Aren’t archeologists always looking for traces of the city of Troy to reinforce that the Trojan War was a real event?
The son of Sam’s strength came from his faith in God. That hair cut bs was the myth. Ask a Marine.
What I find interesting about Samson and the other judges is what idiots they were in the stories. If you are writing myth, and embellishing, like the Egyptians did, (they never "lost" a war)you get rid of the parts that make your hero look like an idiot.
The Bible leaves in the human parts. Abram claims his wife is his sister, Moses claims he can't speak, I could write a book with all the examples. Genesis seems to include strange fragments of stories without attempt to make sense of them.
The most interesting story is Noah. It includes the ocean breaking through the gates of the deep. I had always thought it metaphor, until the idea that this is the story of the Black Sea flood came up. That would be a very real description of what happened when the ocean got high enough to erode what would have been the path to the deep. That happened thousands of years before it was written down by both Sumerians on clay tablets, and the author of Genesis.
Oh, not God, SAMSON was a Nazi. Rite, I get it now.
Going to the links provided by Althouse and then poking around a little further, what I found interesting was:
1) In the link on the Nazarite vow,I found:
Abstain from wine, wine vinegar, grapes, raisins, intoxicating liquors, vinegar made from such substances, and eating or drinking any substance that contains any trace of grapes.
The inclusion of grapes, raisins, & vinegar as prohibited along with the intoxicants themselves is an interesting application of the rabbinic notion of Building a Fence around the Torah. A common example of these concept is the keeping of separate sets of milk & meat dishes in a Jewish household so that one honors the true extent of "Thou shalt not boil a kid in its mother's milk".
2) Sampson was, like John the Baptist, "consecrated [to God] in his mother's womb" by his mother's vow. This survives into Christian practice as Oblation, where a child is promised to the monastic or clerical life by his parents, often as an offering to God who helped I forget exactly when the Roman Church ended the oblation of children, but I think it was late Middle Ages or early Renaissance.
Hermeneutically (not euhemeritically) speaking, I think that the point of this bible story is that God is a contract lawyer.
Ooops!
Got a phone call in mid-posting!
"often as an offering to God who helped"
should be:
"often as an offering to God who helped the family in a dire situation, such as through a difficult childbirth."
I always thought the Biblical flood had something to do with water trapped between layers of the Earth's crust during formation and what would happen during a major cataclysmic subsidence.
Samson's followers, the Samsonites, carried a lot of historical baggage.
I can think of three deities that are likely to have been based on real men: the Irish god Lugh, Hercules, and Gilgamesh (though Gilgamesh was probably not worshipped as a deity).
OK, tcrosse @3:24 wins the thread.
@tcrosse,
Samson's followers, the Samsonites, carried a lot of historical baggage.
You know you're going straight to Hell for that one, don't you?
They then take him to Gaza, imprison him, and put him to work turning a large millstone and grinding corn.
'Cause them Philistines sho' luved their corn bread & grits for breakfast, in spite of the fact that corn is a New World crop not introduced to the Old World until years after the Spanish Conquest of Mexico.
Much confusion is introduced when readers of the King James Bible do not realize that it uses the word "corn" as a generic for any kind of grain.
Well, what else could they do to reassure Sampson not to "bow himself with all his might" between the pillars of the Temple of Dagon to bring it down?
They, ahem, Euhemered him.
Corn is the Germanic word for grain
Maize is "Indian corn."
gilbar said...
"robert graves wrote that ALL our myths are stories that people wrote to explain existing artwork"
Did he? Because he also claimed, with some fairly persuasive examples, that stories about battles between gods were the traces of historical conflicts between the peoples who worshiped those gods.
See the insidious way that the Patriarchy turns what is properly a story about Delilah's accomplishments as an empowered woman into a sob story about some male loser?
Dowd on Hillary
After the White House, the money-grubbing raged on, with the Clintons making over 700 speeches in a 15-year period, blithely unconcerned with any appearance of avarice or of shady special interests and foreign countries buying influence. They stockpiled a whopping $240 million. Even leading up to her 2016 presidential run, Hillary was packing in the speeches, talking to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, the American Camp Association, eBay, and there was that infamous trifecta of speeches for Goldman Sachs worth $675,000.
“What scares me the most is Hillary’s smug certainty of her own virtue as she has become greedy and how typical that is of so many chic liberals who seem unaware of their own greed,” Charlie Peters, the legendary liberal former editor of The Washington Monthly, told me. “They don’t really face the complicity of what’s happened to the world, how selfish we’ve become and the horrible damage of screwing the workers and causing this resentment that the Republicans found a way of tapping into.” He ruefully worries about the Obamas in this regard, too.
That's what Rachel Maddow, CNN, and the rest of NBC are for... to cover for all that Clinton greed.
Jupiter corrected me, saying...
with some fairly persuasive examples, that stories about battles between gods were the traces of historical conflicts between the peoples who worshiped those gods.
sorry! i shouldn't have said ALL are iconotropy. You're right, he said that a lot was Euhemerism.
I was just trying to say he said that they were all misunderstood as fairy stories
"Jupiter corrected me, saying.."
Sorry, didn't mean to get all up in your grill. Graves was a brilliant author and scholar, but he had a way of blandly stating his sometimes far-fetched theories as if they were evident fact, leaving it to the reader to decide how seriously to take him. I was wondering if he had, in fact, made the sweeping assertion you attributed to him.
I mean, some of the things he wrote about me ...
nope, he hadn't; you're right, some (many) were stories about tribes that worshiped (and priests that worked for) other gods. And NO! you weren't in my grill at all.
his interpretation of the old testament is interesting; and his version of the Gospel is fantastic (in Every meaning of that word :)
His greek myths, were mostly all greek to me :)
From what I've read, the real Daenerys Targaryen was nowhere near as good looking as Emilia Clarke.
Heinrich Schliemann believed Homer was based on fact and went looking for the historical Troy and found it. Eumerized!
“Heinrich Schliemann (German: [ˈʃliːman]; 6 January 1822 – 26 December 1890) was a German businessman and a pioneer in the field of archaeology. He was an advocate of the historicity of places mentioned in the works of Homer and an archaeological excavator of Hisarlik, now presumed to be the site of Troy, along with the Mycenaean sites Mycenae and Tiryns. His work lent weight to the idea that Homer's Iliad reflects historical events. Schliemann's excavation of nine levels of archaeological remains with dynamite has been criticized as destructive of significant historical artifacts, including the level that is believed to be the historical Troy.[1]”
along those lines:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/9438668/Israeli-scholars-claim-possible-evidence-of-Samson.html
and even earlier:
http://www.biblearchaeology.org/post/2008/07/24/Between-the-Pillars-Revisiting-Samson-and-the-House-of-Dagon.aspx#Article
I am pretty sure that the story of Ishtar stealing the me from Enki in Sumerian mythology was probably a very real account of early industrial espionage by a Honeytrap, writ large.
How is this UNESCO caper for funding different from SCA (society for creative anachronism)
Oops. The vernacular is 'honeypot'.
Dickin'Bimbos@Home said...
Dowd on Hillary...
MoDo also critiqued them for their "superannuated leadership"
and with Double A's 'euphemerism', the Funk & Wagnalls is getting a work-out. Yet 'garner' sticks in her craw.
I was oblated??!! for childhood skin condition ... Discharged with body weight equivalent 35 kg of vegetable at age 15
https://www.archanaskitchen.com/chenai-kizhangu-poricha-kootu-recipe-tamil-nadu-style-yam-cooked-in-coconut-gravy
For a contemporary example of euhemerism see this paper I am just now in the process of finishing on the Adam and Eve myth in its north Mesopotamian context:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/10q-cx2v05UnAsHb9BaRBZqYtPljiMZ52h6UxvHj0duA/edit?usp=sharing
Comments are welcome
with the Clintons making over 700 speeches in a 15-year period, blithely unconcerned with any appearance of avarice or of shady special interests and foreign countries buying influence
Blythe is his middle name.
"The Flood" dates pretty well to the melting of the glaciers and it’s a pretty widespread myth, so I always assumed it was a reflection of a prehistoric event.
Tying the Samson story, from the scriptures of a monotheistic people, to a sun-god legend seems to be something of a stretch, and unnecessary. Nazirites are recognized in the Hebrew scriptures, and one of the chief characteristics of the nazirite is the requirement that he not cut or shave his hair or beard. The idea that if you violate a religious requirement you will be punished is pretty common in many religions, certainly including Judaism. I suppose you could imagine that one of the authors of Judges heard some pagan story about a sun-god and was inspired to tell the Samson story, but even if that speculation were true, how does it enhance your understanding of the Samson story?
"The Flood" dates pretty well to the melting of the glaciers and it’s a pretty widespread myth, so I always assumed it was a reflection of a prehistoric event.
The Flood is a VERY widespread myth, but while I am a believer in God, how do you know when it is was temporally placed besides it is convenient to the theory?
Though one has to wonder if the Flood story of the North American continent is cultural contamination by Christian missionaries to the mythology of the Siberian American Ecological Wreckers who crossed over 12,000 years ago...or...
Or is uncomfortable to skeptics.
Flood skeptics?
Why do we think this is crazy we know about santorini, and what happened there how about farther on the past. We know what tsunamis do to coastlines in south asia.
It was not Samson’s hair that got cut off.
Yeah I always thought it was a euphemism for castration.
OK, tcrosse @3:24 wins the thread.
12/1/18, 3:33 PM
Blogger YoungHegelian said...
@tcrosse,
Samson's followers, the Samsonites, carried a lot of historical baggage.
I'm stealing this.
One thing I find interesting is that if - theoretically - there was a real Achilles the promise of glory if he fought and died at Troy was well fulfilled. People are still telling his tale thousands of years later. Of course you can't make a promise to someone who dissnt exist so that doesn't apply if he never existed in any manner.
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