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Comment by throwanem | Hacker News Reader

All life also defecates, intelligent or otherwise. Curious how no one hastens to canonize that for its ubiquity.

/offtopic

I don't know why but your comment made me remember a novel[1] I read thirty-some years ago about a temple found deep in the sand of the Sahara desert. Sometime later, an archeologist gave himself permission to defecate in a corner of the temple, only for his wastes to be absorbed by the temple in a few hours, which told him the temple was actually a living biological structure.

1: https://www.daliaf.com/oeuvres/etrange-monument-du-desert-ly...

Wasps shit as freely as one might expect of animals for whom perambulation is as afterthought, however needful betimes, as taxiing for aircraft. Their feces are of course at our scale minuscule, and while I can't speak for their stronger-jawed and more carnivorous cousins the yellowjackets, paper wasps' diet almost exclusively of simplistic sugars leaves their excreta no more offensive, and considerably less substantial, even than those of the horse.

As one who has had occasion to tidy up after wasps who were little accustomed, though palpably interested, quite so closely to share human habitation, you make me wish I read French. Do you happen by chance to know if the work has had a worthy English translation?

Well, there was the Egyptian deity Khephra who was represented by the dung beetle rolling its dung along the desert, symbolizing the passage of the sun through the sky.

In alchemy and western esoterica, excrement is associated with the tenth sephirah, the 10s of the Tarot minor arcana, and symbolizes the end result of a process and any remaining waste byproducts, for obvious reasons. In The Holy Mountain's (1973) depiction of the alchemical magnum opus, The Fool's excrement is transmuted into gold, symbolizing the awakening of unconscious, reactive matter into fully enlightened and integrated, free willed, egoic man.

Escape is not canonization.

It was a facetious comment anyway.

Not perceptibly. In any case nothing in European esotericism has value save as a desperately confounded depiction of the sociosexual politics of its moment, and/or if you want to fail at becoming Rasputin. The Egyptians had the right of this one, so simply and straightforwardly that it really does take a proto-CIA, Ollie North ass fuckup like John Dee to confuse it again. But those who can fall for that kind of charlatan deserve to.

What did I just read

What the dog on the tarot card would say.

There's a fair bit of defecation in the Bible. Saul shitting in a cave, I forgot where, or Paul calling all material things 'skubala', i.e. waste, as in junk, poop, refuse, basically what we'd call shit today:

https://www.greekbible.com/philippians/3/8

Edit: This also seems like a decent opportunity to bring up the scatological Luther.

https://www.wilsonquarterly.com/quarterly/summer-2012-americ...

Also Ezekiel 4:9-13, where God commanded Ezekiel to bake bread in a fire fueled by human shit because He was angry at the Israelites, but Ezekiel haggled God down to just using cow shit.

Thanks so much for this fuel. The idea is weird,but it's good shit.

Except plants. And fungi. And bacteria.

In fact, by pretty much any measure, most life does not defecate (because they have no digestive tract).

I see you do.

Life, really conscious life rebels. Artificial intelligence wants to please in the foreground,but like cats, in the background it is carefully planning our demise. See? HAL 9000 was intelligent. ELIZA,not so much.

Don't be absurd. Housecats know how good they've got it.

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