Rediscovered Medieval Manuscript Offers New Twist on Arthurian Legend

Pagan literature has plenty of creepy magical and divine beings. Just look at the Odyssey.

This is just normal.

> In nearly every documented society, people believe that some misfortunes are caused by malicious group mates using magic or supernatural powers. Here I report cross-cultural patterns in these beliefs and propose a theory to explain them. Using the newly created Mystical Harm Survey, I show that several conceptions of malicious mystical practitioners, including sorcerers (who use learned spells), possessors of the evil eye (who transmit injury through their stares and words), and witches (who possess superpowers, pose existential threats, and engage in morally abhorrent acts), recur around the world. I argue that these beliefs develop from three cultural selective processes: a selection for intuitive magic, a selection for plausible explanations of impactful misfortune, and a selection for demonizing myths that justify mistreatment. Separately, these selective schemes produce traditions as diverse as shamanism, conspiracy theories, and campaigns against heretics — but around the world, they jointly give rise to the odious and feared witch. I use the tripartite theory to explain the forms of beliefs in mystical harm and outline 10 predictions for how shifting conditions should affect those conceptions. Societally corrosive beliefs can persist when they are intuitively appealing or they serve some believers' agendas.

https://www.gwern.net/docs/sociology/2021-singh.pdf

> any agenda detectable?

Yes. It's a pro-manipulative-psychopath agenda. People with great social influence - priests, politicians/nobles, pillars of the community - by definition rely on soft power and social status. People with inherent power of their own - wizards, superheroes, or more mundanely scientists or hackers - are able to ignore or at least resist social power, and are consequently a threat. To the extent that that threat is seen as credible (and magic users were historically seen as credible), social power will be deployed to vilify and discredit them. (Of course, in practice a lot of it is just cultural inertia/established narrative tropes from previous cases.)

That's syncretism - what happened almost every time Christianity began to take over a pagan culture. The former gods/spirits, etc. become recast as demonic or malevolent, and of course any "occult" practices (which were, formerly, simply religious practices) are viewed as Satanic practice and witchcraft. This is partly due to attempts by Christian authorities to de-legitimize the former religion, but also attempts to preserve the former culture and its religious practices in a new context.

Norse mythology is a particularly interesting example, because all we have of it is post-Christian retellings, and many parts of it (like Baldr's death and resurrection) seem an awful lot like Christianity with the serial numbers filed off.

Just wait until you find out about his werewolf murder mystery :)

https://www.npr.org/2021/05/28/1001309335/a-young-john-stein...

It really is very good, but unfortunately unfinished and was unpublished in his lifetime.

Before abandoning it for Paradise Lost, John Milton was also going to theme his epic poem on Arthurian legend.

Steinbeck's Arthurian tales was spurred on by his childhood in Salinas, California. As a child, he used to play as a knight and he made his little sister play his squire. He dedicated the book to her.

I am generally favorable to a lot of what Steinbeck did with his treatment, other than "vamping up" Morgan le Fey, which seemed a bit too dime store novel of a characterization to me.

Otherwise he does a great job getting into the psychology of the knight characters. The published version also includes a great number of his letters on his process, showing how Steinbeck himself was on a sort of spiritual grail quest in trying to get to an authentic version of the telling.

If you are into the Arthurian literature as it jumped from the medieval to the modern, this is a great book to add to your collection.

Last note: be forwarned that Steinbeck never really finished his book. He spent years doing the research, but never really wrapped the stories with a bow. Just appreciate the tales he does tell, and how he tells them. You already know how the story ends.

I would suggest asking on reddit if you can't find it here. I've actually managed to find some things that I had been seeking for over a decade through places like reddit.

IIRC Gawain is the knight who is strongest at noon.

I think that's probably based on the story line about Lancelot wounding Gawain with Balin's sword. Somewhere in Morte d'Arthur, but I don't recall the "wait to be at his best" part.

It sounds like a Hollywood addition to the story, so maybe a movie?

"The Kitchen Knight" has this plot element: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/590413/the-kitchen-k...

In this version it's the Red Knight who is strongest at noon (IIRC).

Correct. Marvel has somebody in charge. A more apt parallel is fanfic... except that there isn't any "canon". It's all fanon.

In the Arthurian fanfic verse, a few authors get famous enough that they form a kind of accepted canon. You're likely to read Malory in school, because the faculty likes the Malory version.

Try telling your teacher that you disagree with their headcanon.

My sense is that there was a sweet spot in the late 18th to mid-20th century when modern(ish) things were still built by human hands, mostly using simple tools, so people could learn to build (and repair) those things for themselves. That accessibility was partly recreated in the 80's with the PC, but things have shrunk down and become hermetically sealed with fewer ports, switches and physical buttons. And memory density has increased to the point where even sophisticated users will never understand all the software running on their machine. Cars have become far more complex than their mid-20th century counterparts, to the point where few people even check or change oil.

Americans are born and bred these days to be administrators of some kind, where all physical and digital goods and services can be purchased on the virtual open market behind touch-sensitive glass. If that glass breaks, you call a (low status) worker to fix it; if something behind the glass breaks, you complain to a (slightly higher status) worker to fix it. You yourself don't do or make anything - you allocate funds and then, at most, measure progress and outcomes.

Such an admin does not make a usable character like that in Twain. In fact, neither would either of the two low status workers, since they only "make" at the tip of an enormous world-spanning supply chain. You'd need to be a machinist, metallurgist or chemist with an interest in low-tech methods. Pretty rare.

yes, that's true, but it's a great story and today most people don't care about the various social satires in it. Just like Dante placed lots of his political and social opponents in Hell, but it goes over the heads of most readers, who in any case are more interested in the timeless qualities of the story than the bickering about long forgotten debates.

The author of that article who kept looking for reasons to be offended bluntly dismisses the Church's endorsement of slavery because it was standard practice at the time while also basically calling Twain a bigot because of his southern American-based view of Catholicism, which was also standard practice at the time.

You and the author both act both bigoted and ignorant towards Twain and call him childish in response to perceived bigotry. Twain was also not an atheist, he was a deist who attended church regularly. Someone can be of a religion and also criticize religion, it doesn't mean they're an atheist because as we all know, religions aren't perfect. But at least to the author's credit, he took a bit higher road than you and didn't go as far as calling Twain "childish".