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hextiger · 3 years

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More Research Excerpts

This time it's Der Alptraum in Beziehung zu gewissen Formen mittelalterlichen Aberglaubens. (English: The Nightmare in Relation to Certain Forms of Medieval Superstition).

You can find the PDF here via Project Gutenberg, but it's in German.

For context though: this appeared in 1902 in a magazine published by Sigmund Freud. That fact is very much apparent throughout.

Introduction

"My focus is not on the historical side but the deepest psychological meaning" phrases that clue you in that there's a lot of nonsense coming

Nowadays the word "Weib" really just reads as "woman (derogatory)"

Dream and Belief

"the breath soul and the shadow soul" I'm sorry what. What! Shadow soul?????

"Freud's discovery of psychoanalysis" I don't know that I'd call it a discovery rather than "wholesale invention" or maybe "ass-pull" but sure

You can at times REALLY tell this is influenced by Freud. Example: "The more people have a certain type of dream the more likely it is that its' subliminal content is of a sexual nature" good (?) news for all the people who dream about their teeth falling out

Something something dreaming of your dead mother or father something something oedipus complex repressed in childhood

You can really tell this was written in the early 20th century. Take me back to the 18th/19th century weirdness please

"In a court in 1516 the jury of Trojes admonished the caterpillars who had devastated some distracts on punishment of curse and excommunication to leave within a certain number of days" I have SO MANY questions

The source for the above is "Cesaresco. Essays in the Study of Folk-Songs, P. 183" which I now have to read

Nightmares

"It is generally known that nightmares have a greater influence on the fantasy of waking life than any other dream" my dude you JUST went on for a whole chapter abt sex dreams so like are you sure

"I have added that the repression of female masochistic sexual urges is more suited to the creation of the typical nightmare than that of the male one, a view that Adler agrees with" I just wanna read abt weird hairy creatures sitting on people's chests, not this nonsense

Ok HERE'S something interesting. Dude's talking about how nightmares express deeply repressed wishes like yes. This I can vibe with

"Digestive problems do not explain the appearance of beautiful women from keyholes" sure but if that were a thing I'd sure as hell take the digestive problems

Incubus and Incubation

"In the middle ages the belief was generally that there were evil spirits whose sole function was to have [...] intercourse with sleeping people" HE JUST SAYS THIS. WITHOUT A SOURCE

"A favorite form that incubi took was that of clergy. Hieronmyus reports the story of a young lady who called for help against an incubus which her friends found under their beds in the form of the bishop Sylvanus. The reputation of the bishop would have suffered if he had been unable to convince them that the incubus had taken his form"

People at the time reacted by saying "Oh an excellent example for the wizardry of Sylvanus" so I don't think this bishop was believed

Anyway I WISH that had been an incubus but it really sounds like it was just a creepy old dude

Sir why do you keep randomly throwing untranslated French quotes in this German text

Oh hey another mention of people who were supposedly children of incubi. This time it's Alexander the Great, Caesar, Martin Luther, Plato, all of the Huns and everyone who lived on Cyprus

You're right, it would be unnecessary to linger on how snakes are phallic symbols thank you for not doing that

"The belief that the soul leaves the sleeper in the form of a snake which escapes through the mouth" UM HOLD ON

I checked the source and yeah, that sure is a thing

This one's from Thorpe. Northern Mythology, 1851, Vol I. P. 289f https://archive.org/details/northernmytholog01thoruoft/page/n309/mode/2up

The Vampire

"The wish for reunion, which has its origin in the living person, is here partially projected on the dead" FINALLY some good content

"Widows can get pregnant by their vampiric husbands visiting" uhuh sure

"After the transformation into a vampire is complete it can be discovered by finding the unburied body with red cheeks, tightskin, full blood vessels, warm blood, grown hair and nails and open left eye"

May have found another source on alps here. Features slut-shaming of sphinxes as far as I can tell

"The Wallachian myth wherein dead redheaded men appear in the form of frogs, bugs etc. and drink the blood of pretty girls"

So depending on which church you were a part of before committing heresy you'd either become a werewolf (roman-catholic) or a vampire (greek)

"Like the vampire the Alp can be the soul of a dead person and suck the blood of sleeping people" whhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhy do I only read this now

The Werwolf

Apollo's apparently associated with wolves, which I did not know

Oh yeah I forgot about the part of werewolf lore that's like "Yeah they turn their human skin inside-out cause the other side is a wolf pelt"

If you're born on christmas day you're apparently destined to become a werewolf as punishment for your parent daring to deliver on the same day as Mary

"The seventh son is destined to become a werewolf, the seventh daughter a mare" mmmmmmmmm there's Something here I may be able to use

Quick gallows, wow what's that? Oh. Oh it's a gallows where the person has their hands bound behind their back, is pulled up by their bound hands on a pulley and then dropped from great height??????? That's uh. That doesn't sound like a good experience

Armenian werewolves are women who sinned and were thus punished by having to live for seven years as a werewolf.

There's also a creature that's somewhat between werewolf and vampire which, apparently sucks blood from the soles of the feet of people walking by

Very rough translation but "One has to burn the werewolf because otherwise he will rise from his grave a few days later. In ravenous hunger he will eat the flesh from his own hands and feet and when he has nothing else on his body to consume he will burrow out from his grave at midnight, fall into the herds and steal the animals or even go into houses, lay down by the sleeping and suck their blood from them" this is good, actually

I cannot stress enough how openly freudian this thing is

Werewolves can apparently also leave behind their bodies and wander about at night

Devilworship

"Belief in devils can be traced back to an oedipus complex" ok. sure

Apparently the devil used to be a close parallel to jesus. The whole deal: twelve apostles, went to hell and was reborn, hot bod

The devil had his own bible which was written down in Bohemia and is now in a library in Stockholm k so who's down for a trip to Stockholm after [waves hands] all this is done

"One of the later bynames of the devil was Grendel (english Grant)"

The devil is canonically bisexual and bigender

He can only impregnate folks if he previously acts as a succubus

....Merlin was a son of the devil? He was born because the devil was imitating God? His purpose was to defeat Jesus? Is this what Fate Grand Order is about

"if a woman sleeps alone the devil sleeps with her" well good for her

The devil has a second face on his butt that looks like a beautiful woman's face. He sits the wrong way around in chairs. His genitals are on his back

The Witch Epidemic

Witches like to eat babies, especially unbaptized ones

Witches apparently sometimes turned men into horses to ride to sabbath??? rad

Or they rode the devil himself in form of a horse or goat. sure

Why would witches have stigmata. I want to know, but not enough to check the source that's cited for this

The roman-catholic church is at fault for witchcraft

Apparently 40 year old witches turn into Drude which are also similar to alps

In Conclusion

This entire thing was a trip but I cannot recommend reading it or a translation. It's far too Freudian for my tastes. At least there's a little bit here that I can use for A Pale Imitation and its potential sequels.

#Mu speaks #hey did you know #The next thing I'm researching is philosophy #which should be fun #And then some more on mares and stuff which I'm also looking forward to

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tanadrin · 4 years

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You seem to really like EU4, which, as it happens, is the one Paradox Grand Strategy game which I have *not* played (not counting Imperator, but then, does it really count as a Paradox game before the 4th DLC is released?), and I'm a little apprehensive about the usual 40-hours-to-familiarize-oneself investment which Paradox games tend to require. Would you mind selling me on it?

EU4 was the first Paradox game I played, funnily enough; I got into it before the first big DLC was released, although it must have been just about the time PDS was breaking out if its niche market with the release of CK2.

I actually have a lot of complaints about EU4: the modern DLC model incentivizes a bunch of tacked-on systems that don’t integrate with one another well, parts of the game get a lot of attention in one DLC and then are abandoned permanently. E.g., natives in CoP were given the ability to colonize without westernizing, I think so you could mimic, for instance, Iroquois expansionism in the 17th century, but it never really worked and now natives just... sit around. Institutions only kindasorta replicate the function of the old Westernization system--which was terrible! don’t get me wrong--but if anything getting institutions is a bit too frictionless now. And of course there’s the infamous lack of attention or balance to anything other than the 1444 start date, which is an artifact of the Great Error in developing EU4 (i.e., that there is anything other than a 1444 start date). And, of course, EU4 is a war game above all else: it does not simulate internal politics well (or at all), and it does not simulate economics well, and I crave, crave different forms of government that more profoundly affect how you play the game. And even in war, I crave systems that even permit the existence of asymmetrically distributed power between opponents to have a complex outcome, to say nothing of model it well. Historical example: East Frisia maintained its independence from the HRE for ages because the fens of the North Sea coast were super hard to invade and control for outside powers; but in EU4 that province just gets the bland “marsh” modifier, and Oldenburg or West Frisia conquers it in 2 seconds flat. There are ways you could model this! There are even ways you could model this within the constraints EU4 presents (province-based gameplay, generic battlespace), but the longer I spend with the game the more I realize just how much it leans, not in the “game about history” direction but the “game with historical coat of paint” direction.

That said, there’s a reason I have like 3800 hours played on Steam, and in comparison only 850 on CK2 and 1200 on Stellaris (aside from Stellaris being hella broken right now): I think the map-painting elements it has are done really well; wars are super fun; and I feel like I can play strategically in a way I can’t in, say, CK2. In CK2, the almost total reliance on event-driven systems, rather than geographically, economically, or politically-based systems, means that I very often feel like I’m being punished or rewarded solely on the basis of random chance. Even where some interpersonal contest is involved--say, my dastardly vassal trying to have me assassinated--it’s still often driven by random draws (% chance to discover a plot, etc) in a way that EU4 isn‘t. I think EU4 has had some of that, with events like the Iberian Wedding or the Burgundian Succession, but these are one-off artificial constructs meant to provide a point of reference to real-world history. They don’t drive the entire game. Personal unions are a big exception, as a mechanic, and one of my least favorite ones as a result; but even there you have a lot more control than it feels like you do in CK2.

And, of course, CK2 (along with, I gather, HOI4) has turned a bit more toward the “memey alt history” side of things than EU4 has. I’m not opposed to that in principle. Reforming the Germanic faith to become a religion of Amazonian cannibals, or electing a horse Pope or w/e is good wholesome fun for the whole family. But it’s not what drew me into EU4, which was basically the appeal of “here, let’s take all these disconnected things you vaguely learned about in history in school, remind you forcefully that they were happening at the same time, and give you a clear visual representation of them.” It doesn’t matter that the game itself probably isn’t a very good history teacher; its representations of history have made me much more interested in learning about, at different times, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the whole history of India, the succession of Chinese dynasties, and the history of central Asia. In comparison, CK2 suffers for being set at a time when a lot of the map has to be filled in by guesswork, and where it does touch on more clearly recorded elements of history, it filters them very much through a “this is what D&D nerds imagine the Middle Ages were like” lens. And maybe this is my bias for my exposure to medieval history showing through: but there is so much art and music and just general medieval Weltanschauung you could draw on to make a game about politics in the Middle Ages feel, well, medieval, and CK2 just... doesn’t. There’s a reason you can drop a total conversion mod like Elder Kings or that GoT mod on top of it and not have to change any of the art style or like 90% of the default events. EU4 does this a little better, via flavor events and specific mechanics like colonization and the layout of trade routes, that make it actually feel like you’re playing a game that has at least some contact with early modern history, instead of being a febrile hallucination by someone who fell asleep on top of some Penguin Atlases of World History.

This is turning into a generic rant about what I like and don’t like about PDS games, and before I go off on an enormous tangent about how I would design a history-based GSG, let me return to the original topic: if you like RTSes, and “strategy” as a game genre more generally, EU4 will have strong inherent appeal. There are a lot of DLCs, but several of them are deeply meh and totally skippable (especially Golden Century & Cradle of Civilization; and the single-nation-focused ones like Rule Britannia and Third Rome). I think a lot of people who get into CK2 but don’t like EU4 as much probably have a preference for RPG-style gameplay over strategy gameplay, which makes sense to me since I usually break the other way. But also, if you like the CK2 thing where you start as a count and work your way up to Roman Emperor or something, EU4 has a ton of opportunities for that extremely satisfying feeling of taking a tiny country and building it out to a big empire. The very late part of the game when you have defeated all your rivals and can blob freely can be pretty boring, but I’ve played to 1821 like twice, tops: the early and midgame are some of the most fun I’ve ever had in a single-player game. EU4 also deeply appeals to the Johnny in me, because I love stupid minmaxing strategies like seeing if it’s possible to go Coptic as the Mughals and massively reduce coring costs so you can conquer all of Asia for a handful of admin points. (DDRJake did a version of this back in the day with the Minghals IIRC, using the old faction system, that was pretty damn funny.)

Not sure how useful all that is, but I hope it’s worth something.

#eu4 #paradox

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