Esoterica

The Day the Sun Stood Still

Besides Father's Day this week, the other interesting event was the summer solstice.  This event kicks off summer with warm weather, bbq's, and summer vacation for legions of school-age children.  Sadly in much of the States, the weather if cold, rainy, and cloudy.  In other parts of the country, there is a serious heat wave.  Hmm, remind me to talk another post about what the Romans thought about global warming!

Our Latin word here today is actually a compound.  The first word is Sol, the sun.  It is a simple 3rd declension chart like this:

sol the sun
solis of the sun
soli to the sun
solem the sun, direct object
sole with the sun [Hint, in Latin every letter must be pronounced, so this word is like the circus and not the fish.]

The plurals are translated the same of the singulars. 

Soles
Solum
Solibus
Soles
Solibus

The stice part is from the verb stare, to stand.  Verbs in Latin have a simple chart, and Spanish verbs still look very close to Latin.

Stare to stand
sto I stand
stas you stand
stat he/she/it stands
stamus we stand
statis you all stand
stant they stand

Thus the word Solstice means, "The sun stands.". 

The part I find fascinating is the idea that millions of people believe that the sun orbits the earth and then for a few days of the year it appears to just "stand there" over our heads, motionless.  In all our modern science, we thought that the solstice was important because it meant we have more daylight on the, "longest day of the year," but the real significance is how the Roman world view colored our vision of reality.  It took over 1, 000 years of science to move Western civilization from the Roman world view.  In school, you learned about Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton who spent the vast part of their lives wrestling with questions of the universe.  All four of them were fluent in Latin so much so that they wrote hundreds of pages in Latin to help understand a Roman concept like the sun standing still.

Spend some time today contemplating yourself and your place in the universe with your new bit of secret knowledge about the solstice!

Roman Fathers

As America celebrates another Father's Day, I want to offer some tidbits about what the Romans thought about fathers.

First, the linguistic root.  Latin for father is pater.  From this we get paternity, paternal, and patriot.  Through similar Latin roots we can all derive patron and patronize from the Latin word patronus, a patron. 

We we speak of the founding fathers, they are often called the, "Fathers of the Country."  This phrase has gotten much bad press in recent years as it seems exclusive with the retort, "Where are the mothers of the country?"  The original phrase is more keyed to the concept of patriot.  The early Revolutionary soldiers and statesmen get the moniker, "Founding Fathers" as a play on the Latin word pater and its derivative patriot.

Roman fathers claimed vast power of divine origin which was passed from Jupiter to Romulus.  Fathers could arrange marriages, divorce their wives for almost no reason, and even kill their own children if they deemed it just.  In this vein we get words like patriarchy and patriarch.  In actuality Roman fathers didn't exercise the extremes of their power.  A Roman marriage, to borrow a line from the movie Sparticus, was a "mating of eagles."  The symbolize is a marriage of strength and equals, and as eagles mate for life, pious Romans were supposed to mate for life also.

Roman fathers help power over their sons until they died or the formally released their son from obligation.  This meant that a Roman of 50 years still had to do everything their father said if they weren't emancipated.  In other words, Roman dads are the staple of Roman comedy!  Many Roman families were like episodes of sitcoms like The King of Queens or Everybody Loves Raymond as fathers had to listen to their fathers who had to listen to their own fathers.  Also as a Roman comic plot is the "bungling father" who seems to know best, but really just screws everything up under the guise of family leadership.

Next, a Roman father was ipso facto a priest.  Every Roman father as the head of the family (paterfamilias, one long Latin word) was automatically a priest.  This custom continues very much in the world today via the Roman Catholic idea of priesthood and also simple traditions like dad saying grace at meals or carving the holiday turkey.  Roman houses all had altars, and more formal than today, the father led the religious rites at the altar. 

So this Father's Day, reflect some on your own father.  Was he more or less like a Roman father?  How much power did he have in the family?  Were there any comic elements where dad's "power" was really just a motif for laughs?  Although the role of father has evolved since Roman times, I hope you still see some of the core Roman ideas still present in the present day concept of father.

Magna, Summa, and other Laudes

Around this time of year some of my favorite Latin phrases appear everywhere.  You can't open a newspaper or talk to a proud parent without hearing the Latin academic honors phrases.  I'm often asked what they exactly mean, where they came from, and how do you get them.  Here is the story.

cum laude with praise
magna cum laude with great praise
summa cum laude with the highest praise

The word praise is laus in Latin.  It is a 3rd declension word, so it's chart declines like this:

laus  praise
laudis of praise
laudi  to/for praise
laudem praise (direct object form)
laude with praise

laudes  (same translation as above, but these are plural)
laudum
laudibus
laudes
laudibus

The chart of magnus is a first/second declension adjective chart.  It has 30 total endings, and when I get around to blogging about how to easily learn Latin, I'll write them out for you :)

The simplest form of the chart to go with the above chart is this:
magna
magnae
magnae
magnam
magna

magnae
magnarum
magnis
magnas
magnis

The word cum is a preposition that means with, and it requires that the words associated with it use a specific ending.  So laude matches up with the fifth form, magna, on the the above chart.  In Latin, the preposition cum as a special grammatical rule that the adjective comes first, then the preposition, then the noun.  Thus magna cum laude is literally, "Great with praise."  Isn't that cool?  Romans talked like Grandmaster Yoda from Star Wars, i.e. Yoda's word order is in Latin word order.  I hope this is easy with understanding and that you reading this much with fun.

According to the Wikipedia article So recent! the idea of Latin honors didn't start until the 1880s when Harvard and Amherst College introduced them.  For something that is such a part of academia to have begun so recently is a pure testament to the power of Roman ideas and Latin.  I'll leave you now with this thought:  what can you contribute in your lifetime that within 130 years so mainstream as magna cum laude?  Start thinking and make sure it's in Latin!

Modern Day Olympians

If you haven't read any of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson novels, give them a try.   Bard of our times  Rick recently came out with the fifth novel, The Titan's Curse, and the publishing world honored it with a 1.2 million book first run.  Rick has spent over 100 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list for adolescents.  Practically every teen that I've talked to loves these books, and I sat down earlier this year to see what all the fuss was about.  They are charming with interesting characters, plot, and full of modern allusions.  In short, they are a fast and fun read, especially if you like Latin and mythology.

To me, the most important thing about the novels is the World View.  For Rick, the Olympian gods are real and never died.  They just faded away as fewer and fewer people worshiped them.  Mount Olympus remains the "heart of Western Civilization" and it moves as the heart of the civilization moves.  Currently the Mount is a penthouse suite in New York atop a skyscraper.  I know this sounds crazy, but they don't call it fantasy literature without good cause!  Rick uses many slights of hand to cover up any logical fallacies.  For example, regular people (you and me) can't see the true nature of reality because an invisible fog obscures anything Olympian.  If a medusa attacks a demigod, we might see an angry woman swing her pocketbook at a studly man hitting back with a baseball bat

Once the cosmology is established, Rick has all sort of fun and thoughtful episodes in his novels.  The Underworld exists, and it is currently located in gangland LA.  Now that is definitely a scary place to be, but imagine that someone where in LA we could find an abandoned subway tunnel that leads to, well, Greco-Roman hell!  Maybe we could add the, "Abandon all hope ye who enter here," sign to a freeway or something?  Let's get back to cosmology.  What these novels do is remind us that our world is shaped by our actions.  If we adhere to the butterfly effect that tiny deeds multiply exponentially, then all of us have the power to honestly shape the world.  Butterfly Effect-I'll write on this another day The general idea is that we want to shape the world for the better of the human race.  These novels remind us that we are gods in as much as all of us have that power to affect reality. 

Percy Jackson is the lead character in the novels.  In The Lightning Thief Percy realizes that his father is Poseidon, and as a demigod, Percy has the power to control the water.  Part of Rick's world view is that, since the gods of Olympus are alive and well, they have been having affairs with mortals for the last 2, 000 years.  Much of the progress of human history is explained via some god or other having sex with a mortal and then their offspring is a demigod.  George Washington is a son of Athena, for example.  You did wonder why George had gray eyes like Athena, didn't you?  We'll skip the idea of Greco-Roman gods for thousands of years having sex with mortals.  Back to Percy.  Percy follows the hero cycle of discovering his parentage, struggling with his role in the world, and then questing to stop the ultimate evil.  In this case, the Titans are alive, just imprisoned in the Underworld for the last few thousands of years.  They are trying to break out and it is up to Percy to save the world and the "reign" of the Olympians.

I won't spoil any more of the series, but let me give you some pabula to mull over.  Cosmology is very important.  Cosmos is the Greek word for world, and when you meet people, try to discover their world view.  Also, take some time this summer and examine your own world view.  Politics, ideologies, and movements are simply the combined world views of groups of people united behind a leader.  When we look at the competing election results in Iran today, it is simply two cosmologies battling it out for the future, as personified by the leaders of each side.  Following the adage, "Know thyself," once you figure out your world view, apply carpe diem to it.  Go out and make the world in your image.  Note I'm not applying a value judgment to this by adding make the world your image in an Olympian way, Judeo-Christian way, or a nihilistic Nietzschian way.  For today's Esoterica, we can leave morality out but I assume you are committed to making the world a better place, a place for good. 

Second, we are all gods in a way.  Many theologies grant humans a spark of the divine inside each person.  On a more secular manner, humans have grown to dominate the earth.  In about 99.999% of all circumstances we are the top of the food chain and the architects of our own destiny.  Part of our divinity includes the ability to destroy our whole race with a series of godlike actions such as nuclear war (North Korea), environmental pollution (practically all of us are responsible), or manipulating science (run away genetic experimentation).  Futuristic cosmology hasn't codified a good side and a dark side yet, but there is a movie coming out this October called, The Road,  which will be a blockbuster must see. Must see movie this fall  The Romans routinely believed themselves to be divine.  Julius Caesar claimed that he was descended from Venus as Venus gave birth to the hero Aeneas.  Aeneas was the prince of Troy who fled to Italy after the Trojan War.  Aeneas's son was Julius, the ancestor of the Julian family from which Caesar is descended.  Even today you can meet "demigods" who walk around exclaiming, "My family came over on the Mayflower," or "I'm related to the Kennedy's," or, "My grandfather founded this company."  In Rick Riordan's world there are different degrees of demigods.  Surely the daughter of Zeus is more powerful than the son of Artemis, and in today's mythology, I guess, there is a hierarchy to all of us being divine.  Bill Gates, when he reaches out to Africa, heals millions as if he waves godly hand and removes the plague from the masses.  For simple demigods like us, we must cherish our humanity while wielding our power for good.  Again for today, we can define good has helping preserving our planet and helping our fellow human.

Last, just take a minute today to reflect how current and modern Greco-Roman ideas are. Rick has made many millions of dollars just resurrecting some simple Latin ideas, to wit, their cosmology and the fact that demigods exist.  Not bad for utilizing a supposedly dead language and their long dead ideas!  What can you do right now in your life with some Latin?  How better can you today make your mark on the world (cosmos) by applying something Greco-Roman?  I'll leave you with that for your daily dose of Esoterica!

Modern day Indiana Jones

Smithsonian magazine published a marvelous article about Bruno Tassan.  You can find this article in print in the July issue, and for those web fanatics, please go read the article. Online article on Bruno  On the website there is also the photo gallery of pictures which appear in the magazine.  Please go skim the article, then come back for the commentary.  If you have the time, here is another awesome article by the New York Time.  The article's focus in on Roman France.  Wonders of Roman France

The former very news-worthy article resonates with me (and you) in a number of ways.  First, Bruno is fulfilling the ideal of, "Carpe diem."  Bruno, age 61, as found a passion of restoring and preserving the ancient Via Aurelia.  Most of us can't be bothered to trek more than a few miles daily as we repeat the hum-drum routines of modern existence; Bruno travels dozens of miles searching, sifting, and exploring the ancient Roman highway.  By putting this highway back on the map, he is connecting the present day area of modern France in which he lives back to the Romans who build the highway some 2, 000 years ago.  He isn't just seizing the day, he is synthesizing days of yore to the days of tomorrow.  In an existential way, learning history and learning about our past, I find, has gives meaning to life by letting us know our place in the grand scheme of humanity.  The preservation and restoration of the Via Aurelia gives a focus to the people of southern France in as much as it helps anchor the area in history.  Today's battle to restore Roman ruins isn't just against wind and rain, but it is also versus the winds of progress through the bulldozer and the rain of indifference as people forget their heritage.

Did you read the article from last week on the Golden Milestone on this blog?  Admire the picture in the photo gallery of Bruno uncovering a Roman milestone. Bruno in the brush with milestone

This area of France between Arles and Aix-en Provence has some of the best preserved Roman ruins on Earth.  The Vandals bypassed this area in favor of crossing the Pyrenees into Spain.  The Goths moved to sack Rome in 410 and leave this sleepy area Gallia more or less alone.  By 451 the Goths had allied withe Aetius, the last of the great Roman generals, and together they fought off the Huns well north or Arles.  The regions hilly and mountainous nature left the barbarians to follow the natural routes of the plains.  This, in turn, let the region develop.  Peace and prosperity has a way of leading to technology and the advance of technology.  Did you know that this area of the Roman empire was actually mechanized?  Yes, mechanized!  This cities had dozens of waterwheels which ground thousands of tons of grain into flour.  We think of the great age of windmills in Holland or the age of water power in America, but the Romans of the 4th century, in their oasis of security and prosperity, has water and wind power here at Provence.  My conclusion is this.  The well-preserved Roman roads and ruins tells you how highly developed the whole region was.  Today economists laud the construction of transportation grids like India's new Quad India's 21st century Epic highway.  Having a great road network can return double the cost of creating it, lay the foundation for development, and in the case of ancient Rome, it can give successive generations something to marvel.  It's now wonder that every phase of economic development and recovery comes with a huge public works project whose center piece is a better transportation grid.

As you head out today, reflect on your own milestones, and I hope you enjoyed a daily dose of Esoterica!

Homo Herbivorosus

When you look at pop culture trends, Japan strikes me as similar to ancient Carthage.  In fact, the last 200 years witnessed Japan influence the Earth much more than you'd think.  For a country the size of Montana with a little more than 100 000 000 people to have accomplished so much reminds me of a sleepy little village in Tunisia where a long, long, long time ago some Phoenician traders began the great civilization of Carthage.

America was Japan's Rome, and we did a complete Roman conquest of Japan.  It was America that burned Carthage/Tokyo to the ground with the firestorms of 1945 much in the same way Carthage was burned to the ground.  Did you know that the emperors much later actually rebuilt Carthage, and Carthage rose to become, yet again, a thriving center of intellectual and material commerce?  Remember it was Carthage and their intrepid Hannibal to did a surprise attack on Rome by marching through the Alps.  This I parallel to Pearl Harbor.  Carthage was the supreme sea power of the era, much like Japan.  Like Carthage, Japan found it's navy out-produced by an industrial super power.  Did I set the stage enough?  If I whetted your appetite for more, add some books about the Second Punic War to your summer reading.

The ashes of Carthage and the diaspora of Carthaginians left the people one thing--intellectual capital.  We see that in the comedies of Terence.  Terence brought and practically invented (with Plautus) the next synthesis of ideas to Rome.  From Carthaginian Africa and a slave, he found his way in the circus of ideas to influence history.  His comedies are like an unripe apple--crisp, tart, and almost make you want to spit them out.  In them we see echoes of sitcoms, everything from Gilligan's Island to Frasier to Seinfeld.  Fast forward to post WW II Japan.  The country is bombed out, their mercantile empire is crushed, their colonies liberated.  Pretty much like Carthage, they have to adopt a foreign constitution, a foreign system of government,and then endure foreign occupation.  The only thing left is the commodity of ideas.

Japan and Carthage both rebuilt to rule their areas again.  Japan's prosperity post WW II is Epic, but reflect on their cultural success.  In just the last twenty years we have Hello Kitty, Wii, Pokemon, the Prius, Sushi, and even viral game shows like Ninja Challenge.  The Japanese Phoenix has risen from the ashes of WW II on the cult of ideas.  Herbivore Man is the pop culture idea I'd like to chat about today.

You can find references to Herbivore Man all over the internet, although it is still esoteric to the layman.  In breve, the Japanese definition of man includes eating meat as a concept of being manly.  Eating meat has everything associated with it in a classical sense--hunting, killing, roasting, fighting, etc.  All of those concepts are tied into the definition of man.  Here is a fun blog that references it: Herbivore Man

The story is almost myth and legend now, and I know how you love myths and legends, otherwise you wouldn't be here.  Maki Fukasawa, a pop culture icon in Japan,  noticed that a lot of the available pool of Japanese men were rather weak.  Weak is a loaded term, and from what I gather she saw that they were effeminate, soft, non-combative, vegetarian, passive, not-aggressive, etc.  They definitely were not from either the WW II "Greatest Generation" who could attack wave after wave of American soldiers who were supplied by prodigious amounts of Chrysler jeeps and General Motors tanks.  They were not from the post-war generation who rebuilt Japan by starting with great ideas (Sony, Nissan, Toyota), hard work, and burned out factories.  Rather, this generation of Japan has grown up in the 1990s Great Japanese Depression.  Gone are the days of being number one in so many areas.  When France dealt with this in the 1950s, they embraced with Sartre, Camus, and a whole host of nihilist, existentialist philosophers.  Europe as a whole even invented and propagated the advanced version of the, "God is dead," argument.  Japan in the 1990s is in many ways like Europe in the 1950s.  Not being a Christian nation, they didn't have a God to kill, but many of the intellectual challenges have exact parallels.

It's hard to say what America women think of such men Maki confronted.  You see someone in their 20s at a bar.  The man is softly spoken.  He agrees with everything you say. He is a bit flabby with no muscle tone.  His clothes are a bit androgynous. He talks about his father; hell, he talks period!  The man doesn't play sports and isn't interested in banking, politics, or the military. He is more apt to wear a Curious George T-shirt with the slogan, "What, me curious?" rather than know who George Will is.  He is non-committal on practically every hot-topic issue. He watches the cooking channel instead of the military channel.  Maki saw this type of man and coined the phrase herbivore man, a sort of homo herbivorosus.  The phrase caught on like wildfire, and all over Japan man are being compared to this moniker.  Perhaps Japan lacks a Hollywood to turn Herbivore Men into Leonardo di Caprio?  Regardless, Maki makes the point that this type of man is asexual, neither hetero- or homosexual.

Alright now to hit the nail with the intellectual hammer for your daily dose of Esoterica.  Herba is Latin for grass.  (We also have carnis for flesh and omnis for all.)  Vorare in Latin means to greedily eat.  I'm not making the point that a herbivore man is more likely to indulge in illicit drug use by smoking grass, although those dots aren't too far apart to connect.  Rather, I want to look at a more Roman definition of man. 

The Latin word for man is vir.  Homo as in homo herbivorosus is man as a human being.  Vir is a much more serious word.  Vir is a man, exclusive of woman or child.  In other words, you have to become a vir and once a vir, you never have any traits of being a femina (woman).  Roman humor also includes that the definition of vir includes poison, which is where we get the other Latin word virus.  Women can smirk as you know well that man and poison can go hand in hand, especially in a bad relationship. Nothing poisons a relationship faster than a man who is a total jerk.   I'm not going to rewrite all the bumper stickers about wars being caused by men, but the Latin definition of man includes violence, competition, struggle, and an in-your-face attitude.  Even today some of the best representations of the Roman male are in Hispanic culture with the attitude of machismo.  Also I find that Italian men (and many Italian American men) still have that ancient Roman combination of vir and virus.  In the English meaning of virile, we entertain the idea of being powerful, potent in a sexual way, or just flat out manly. Go too far and our Fabio turns into that complete jerk with the adjective virulent.  Virulent can mean deadly or poisonous, but also has the secondary meaning of antagonistic or hostile.  Thus our modern concept of that age old quote, "Be a man," owes itself to the Romans, and now also to Earth's new, romanesque Carthage, i.e. Japan. Romans couldn't have invented, coined, or conceptualized the idea of Herbivore Men because they didn't see the reality of manhood in degrees.  There were men and then there were women.  Part of Maki Fukasawa's genius was building on the Roman definition of men, by recognizing the emergence of a new type of man in 1990s Japan, and then coining the opposite, Herbivore Man.

Between the Scylla of the virulent jerk and the Charybdis of the peaceful grazer whom I dub homo herbivorosus, I hope all my male readers can find a happy medium.  For all my female readers, I hope you relook at the men in your life, and better understand how 2, 000 years of history have molded their image. Don't forget to pass on this daily dose of Esoterica!  Gratias!

Commencement time: O the Applause, O the Yawns!

June has so much going for it from beautiful weather, relaxation, more daylight, and commencement speeches.  I did a quick poll of twenty people, and about two-thirds of them hate commencement speeches.  I'll agree as much as I hate bad commencement speeches.  What makes a speech good or bad?  We could just go with the yawn factor in the title.  Horace would agree, and wouldn't mind that I ripped off one of this famous quotes, but you already caught that right? (O tempora, O mores)

The problems with the times and the customs is that a good commencement speech should fit in with the times and the customs.  Commencement speeches in 1942 all echo Pearl Harbor.  Speeches in 1944 spoke about the sacrifices at D-Day.  Addresses in 1945 celebrated V-E day.  Speeches in the 1950s did the same with the United Nations struggle in Korea--the great retreat to the last bastion of a free Korea, then the brilliant invasion behind enemy lines that stabilized the peninsula.  Again in Vietnam, dark as that war was, you couldn't find an archived commencement speech that wasn't filled with serious thoughts about the war and the future peace.  So today, we oddly find ourselves in two wars--Iraq and Afghanistan.  This doesn't count the menace of a nuclear north Korea (technically we are still at war with them since the armistice doesn't count as a peace treaty), a nuclear Iran, Darfur, and several other problems, which, if they aren't wars, they certainly should have our attention.  Maybe war is overused since LBJ gave us the war on poverty and now we have the war on aids, the war on drugs, etc.  Maybe we need a war on war or to at least rewrite the song, "War, what is it good for? Absolutely every slogan you'll ever need UHH!"

But in all seriousness, commencement is about tradition.  The speech should connect the present class to the previous class and then set the tone for the juniors and lower classmen in the audience.  Commencement unites, ties, binds, foreshadows, and above all ties the mores with the tempora.  You'd think, then, that a good commencement speech would actually have concrete action of a specific nature and then specifically tie the audience with real life historical events.  This is a big assumption, and let's assume that the college graduates in the audience have actually taken and passed history classes!  Remember, the speeches of 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s referenced above actually MENTIONED the very wars that Americans were fighting and dying in.  Students aged 18 to 22 are eligible to actually fight in those wars, and today we are involved in at least two wars.  This commencement season, simply, you can measure the ipso facto success of a commencement speech by tying the content of the speech to present history and present battles.  Between the yawns and the applause, I'd clap for hopeful discussion of the current wars and yawn for almost anything else.

Now onto something light and humorous.  Doonesbury ran a cartoon this week with college grads chatting. (Doonesbury's Latin joke)  One student asks the other, "Are you auditing commencement?"  The other replies, "I've been training all week--brushing up on my Latin, learning the school song, working on my tan..."  I love it!  I hope you, too, enjoy those snippets of Latin at commencement.  Sure, you may think that the use of Latin is more of the yawn factor rather than the applause factor, but Latin like no other language connects our times to history.  Latin also sets the stage for the universal and university tradition of passing the torch from one class to the next.  Use of Latin is perfect at commencement, and when done well is masterful.  Let's look at one masterful use of Latin. 

One of the greatest speech makers of modern times was Bill Clinton.  Here is the intro of his speech to Princeton University in 1996 at commencement.  This speech can be found all over the web with google. 

June 4, 1996

Thank you very much. President Shapiro, members of the faculty, alumni, to parents and friends of this graduating class, especially to the graduates of the class of 1996. Let me thank your co-presidents, George Whitesides and Susan Suh, who came to say hello to me this morning, and compliment your valedictory address by Bryan Duff and the Latin address by Charles Stowell. I actually took 4 years of Latin in high school. [Laughter] And even without being prompted, I knew I was supposed to laugh when he was digging me about going to Yale. [Laughter]

We surely have something esoteric going on.  Bill is getting lots of laughs using Latin, and in the first 10 seconds of his speech.  Wow!  Bill took four years of Latin at Little Rock High School.  In fact, practically every American President took Latin, but that is for another blog.  The only one I am not sure of is George Bush.  Don't chuckle, after all he went to Yale and he MIGHT (I emphasize MIGHT) have taken Latin.  If anyone knows for sure one way or another, email me.  Gratias!  I've heard or read dozens of commencement speeches, and I don't know any that get heartfelt laughter while they are doing the introductory convention of thanking so-in-so and so-in-so for being there.

So what's the genius in Bill's speech?  Simply the opening address by Charles Stowell was in Latin.  In that address that the whole audience understood, Charles insults (playfully) President Clinton in Latin since Bill went to Yale.  Technically Bill shouldn't be at Princeton, especially to deliver the top speech of the year, the commencement address.  Thus, he gets digged.  Clinton, however, that wiley Southerner, turns the tables by not only understanding the Latin address, but throwing the dig right back at the Princetonians.  I'm smiling right now just thinking about it.  Can you see all those people so finely dressed in the audience laughing and smacking their knee with the thought, "Oops, the President got the joke!" or, "OMG, he took Latin too!"  I emphasize the "too" since having some Latin is almost still a prerequisite of attending Ivy League schools, hence the actual graduation address in Latin.

Time for me to sign off. May your June be ripe with meaningful speeches deserving of applause. I hope you take the chance to reread this blog and forward it to all your friends so they get their dose of Esoterica before the commencement season heats up!

Cross Channel Invasion

June 6, 1944 is a date all serious history students know well.  This invasion at Normandy was epic, regardless of how revisionist histories have downplayed the event's significance in recent years.

The point I want to make today is that the Romans successfully did two cross-channel invasions that are well-documented.  The first was more of a raid by Julius Caesar.  In the end, his invasion was more of a show of force to the Celts in Britannia as well as a propaganda move to impress the folks back in Rome.  The second invasion was three generations late by the Emperor Claudius.  This one was a true invasion that significantly impacted the planet Earth.  If it wasn't for this invasion, we wouldn't have the English language today.  One of my friends commented on the June 6th invasion with the lines, "Thank god the Germans lost otherwise we'd all be speaking Deutch today."  Fair point, but let's add, "Thank god the Romans won otherwise we wouldn't be speaking English today!"

Caesar invaded Britannia in 55 BC.  He was a middle-aged and successful general.  Romans had been trading for British tin, lumber products, and other goods for years, so Caesar had a good idea of the land and what to expect.  His main reason, as stated above, was to show the Celts a lesson in Roman warfare and make them less inclined to send any aid to rebels in Gallia.  He was also looking for cheap gold, but found none.  In his triumph back in Rome, Caesar had to content himself with a statue decorated in freshwater pearls!

Claudius, an Emperor with a club foot and lisp, deserves more praise.  He rose from the ashes of the Caesar family by pure luck.  Apparently all the assassins and king makers thought he was a simple idiot, thus he escaped the bloodbath which killed most of his family.  Claudius's mind was keen and his memory keener.  He wrote histories, managed the global economy, and ruled well.  Today, it takes a major piece of legislation (The Americans With Disabilities Act) to remind modern America that handicaps do not necessarily fetter the human spirit.  People who know Latin already knew this from reading Claudius's biography! 

The club-footed Claudius landed in England a little more than 100 years after Caesar's assassination on the Ides of March.  There was no "growth in technology" and the British were just as "barbaric" as when Julius Caesar attacked.  In about seven years, the Romans carved out all the juicy parts of Britannia, founded London as a colonia (It's Latin name is Londinium.), and then began the process of cultural assimilation we know as civilizing.  Considering the lag of America's Iraqi invasion and the "growth of democracy" in the Middle East, Claudius's achievement still ranks high on the chart of historical accomplishments.

Before we move on, once the English Channel was secure, there were really dozens of "invasions" over the next centuries as rival Roman armies crossed back and forth with impunity in their various civil wars.  It is only with the Dark Ages and then the rise of England as a nation that the myth of the Channel's invincibility takes shape.  In other words, Hastings is so significant because it is so post-Roman.  In the Roman days, armies crossed back and forth regularly!

Let me make another point you won't read anywhere else.  What if I said that both Nazi Germany and the West (as defined by the Allies at D-Day) were both emulating the Romans?  Their struggle at D-Day was part of the vast Epic of world history that still is in the shadow of Rome.  Some of the documentation is easy--practically every major general in the battle had taken Latin and read Caesar's Gallic Wars.  Patton himself had a "Caesar complex" where he imagined himself as Julius.  In fact, the D-Day invasion could be called the "Gallic Wars, World War II edition."

Long before D-Day, the Germans coined, "Operation Sealion," their invasion plans for England.  They studied Caesar's and Claudius's plans.  Although paratroopers substituted for legions, the plan was more or less the same.  We have the RAF and the British navy to thank that this plan never went operational.  Most of Germany's heavy ships were knocked out of action in the Battle of Norway, so Hitler didn't get past assembling invasion boats.  We can conclude with the lesson that there are Romans, and then there are bad Romans, evil Roman wannabees.  The Nazi's with their twisted ideas of Empire follow in a long line of "evil empires" who took the worst of Rome's government with the best of Rome's military science.  When you see those black and white clips of German soldiers lines up with their eagles shining, it is a haunting reminder that we need to always teach every generation the good and bad of the Romans, lest they fall in the trap of emulating the bad Romans!

But what about the Allies?  How Roman were they?  Here is your daily does of esoterica.  These are the Latin army mottos for some army units.  Sure they drove across Europe with Sherman tanks, jeeps, and under the cover of air support, but they also mentally connected to the legacy of the Roman war machine.  These are borrowed from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Unit_Mottos:_United_States

United States 3rd Army--Terita Semper Prima (The Third Always First)
United States Signal Corp--Pro Patria Vigilans (Watchful for the Country)
Sub units of the 1st Armored division--Animo et Fide (Courageously and Faithfully)
45th Infantry Division--Semper Anticus (Always Forward)
7th Infantry Regiment--Volens et Potens (Willing and Able)
18th Infantry Regiment--In Omnia Paratus (Ready for Anything)
26th Infantry Regiment--Palmam Qui Meruit Ferat (Let Him Bear the Palm Who has won it)
27th Infantry Regiment--Nec Aspera Terrent (They don't fear hardship)
33rd Infantry Regiment--Ridentes Venimus (Smiling We Come)
52nd Infantry Regiment--Fortis Et Certus (Brave And True)
76th Regiment--Experto Crede (Trust One Who Has Had Experience)
80th Regiment--Nunc Ut Olim (Now As Before)
84th Regiment--Quod Facio, Valde Facio (What I Do, I Do Well)
85th Regiment--Praeparatio Et Cooperatio"(Preparation and Cooperation)
91st Regiment--Paratus"(Prepared)
100th Regiment--Sic Jurat Transcendere Montes(Thus He Swears To Cross The Mountains)

I could easily quote another fifty army units, and, remember, this is just the American army.  Army units on both side, i.e. the evil Romans and the good Romans all had Latin mottos besides their usual French or German ones.

As you watch the D-Day memorials today, share your esoterica with others and reflect on the legacy of  "cross channel invasions" from Julius Caesar to all those modern Romans. 

The Politics of E Pluribus Unum

Obama gave a great speech today.  The speech was great for many reasons.  The first of which is the audience, to wit the entire Muslim world.  From the modernized hall of a university in Cairo, Obama laid out America's relationship to Islam in our post 9/11 world.  Second, Obama makes a clear departure (yet, again) from President Bush.  Could we honestly see George speaking to the Islamic world?  I could see Condi, perhaps, but not George.  His "political capital" was more bankrupt than GM, so to speak, and his street cred could amount to enough asphalt to pave an elementary school parking lot.

If you're one of the post 9/11 crowd who ran out to buy a copy of Thucydides or Sophocles in those turbulent days of September, then I applaud you.  You (like me) love speeches.  Speeches are almost always fake, contrived, spun, misleading, but we love them all the same.  Reading Pericles as he addresses the Athenians is just pure winsauce.  Curling up with Sophocles to hear Odysseus or Ajax defend their actions is the taproot of 2, 300 years of speech making.

Speeches from the West to the Islamic world have been going on for eighteen centuries, longer than the Islamic world existed.  How?  Don't forget in the 240s the Romans had an emperor named Philip the Arab.  Arabia itself, long before Ibn Saud took his American-donated 50 caliber machine guns, was a Roman province.  Semitic desert people and Romans exchanged speeches for hundreds of years.  We don't have Phil's speeches to the Roman senate or the speeches or Roman legionnaire commanders explaining to Arabic people the "detente of the West," but let's frame Obama speech in just another long line of Latin speeches which try to relate the Euro-centric world to the world of Arabia.

How crazy is this?  Let's quote Barack from this morning, "We are shaped by every culture, drawn from every end of the Earth, and dedicated to a simple concept: E pluribus unum: 'Out of many, one.'"  Now I didn't see anyone in the audience pull out a dollar bill when he uttered those lines.  In fact they didn't show the audience at all.  I kind of wanted to see Egyptian teenagers in typical America college gear.  Was there anyone with a Che Guevara T-Shirt, holding a Starbucks coffee, with her blue eye shadow glimmering in the camera light?  Probably not, but one can only hope. Here is a link to the whole speech: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/04/obama-speech-in-cairo-vid_n_211215.html

So yes, this Latinesque speech and that line I quoted above.  Let's digest it.  Unum is the neuter nominative adjective from unus, una, unum.  It means the one thing, or simply the one, much in the same way Neo from the Matrix series of movies was, "The One."  Like most Latin quotes, they are cryptic and esoteric, i.e., there isn't a verb.  We can assuredly supply EST (there is).  Now we are getting somewhere.  I'll fill in Obama's intent.  Out of many races, there is ONE American people.  Out of fifty states, there is ONE America.  Out of many social classes, there is ONE equality before the law.  Out of many religions, there is ONE overarching concept of religious freedom.  This is pretty intense stuff--too intense to start minting Egyptian dinars with E pluribus unum on them.  However, it is a great place to start the dialog with Islam.  We believe in religious freedom, how about you? 

Can you take one part of the Latin on the dollar bill and not the other?  One of the other quotes is this, "novus ordo seclorum," which is translated as the following, "new order of the Ages."  That's pretty deep.  If we go back to our Cro Magnon past with all those Latin names such as homo habilis, homo erectus, homo sapiens, and now us.  We ourselves are technically homo sapiens sapiens. [Maybe you didn't realize that humans have evolved a bit in the last century or two. That's right we are NOT homo sapiens, we are homo sapiens sapiens.  How's that for your daily dose of esoterica?]  These ages I am talking about include the Copper Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Age of Greece, Age of Rome, Dark Ages, Middle Ages, Renaissance Age, Age of Exploration, Age of Reformation, Age of Enlightenment, etc all the way to NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM.  What is the new order of the ages?  I'll throw it out there.  It is the American Age.  Yes, the Age of America.  As Obama says, we have fought for centuries for our ideals, for this age, and his main point is this age isn't over yet, and it isn't about to roll over post 9/11, but rather it's ready to talk on a more civil tone.  For all our sakes, let's pray that the America Age doesn't fade like the fallen columns of the Roman Senate building or that the America Age isn't punctuated any of the catastrophes that marked the end of Rome.

Also let's hope that history isn't too much of a guide here.  Poor Philip the Arab had a tumultuous rule.  His comrade Decius revolted and usurped the legions.  Philip died defending Rome, then Decius became sole ruler of Rome.  The next year Decius led the legions against the barbarians.  In a heated battle in the swamps of Romania, Decius and the entire Roman army fell to the barbarians just after Rome celebrated it's 1, 000th anniversary. 

Obama also said today, "But if we choose to be bound by the past, we will never move forward," and he is right, but quoting a dead language as our present raison d'etre bears with it certain risks of being misunderstood unless he means we are using the past as a foundation to look forward rather than being bound by the cords of history.  In the end, he had my applause and the applause of Cairo University.  Let's see how he navigates the slipstream of history; let's remember the long shadow of the Rome vs Arabia conflict, and let's hope that the America Age has some new life blown into it today.

The World is Hot, Flat, and Full of Latin

How many times do you actually read books recommended by other people?  Me?  I actually read most of them.  Now, true, there are recommendations and then there are recommendations.  Some recommendations come with a standard nod and a suppressed yawn, but other recommendations I treat as coming from the Budda.  I bow repeatedly and repeat the title of the book as my mantra, lest I forget it.  For those truly good recommendations, I go as old school as I can.  By this I mean I pull out a small Moleskine journal and write down the author and title.

This book by Thomas Friendman is titled Hot, Flat, and Crowded.  I guess a noob might think we were talking about a some level beach resort or maybe lobby of NBC studios, but it's actually a metaphor for the planet Earth.  It reads quickly and informatively with about the same satisfaction of eating a double cheeseburger after trying to watch your weight for a month.  After a dizzingly presentation of economic facts about the complete deep crap our world is in, Thomas offers solutions, witty retorts, and an enough hooks to keep the book moving.  In fact I'd give the book an extra star in the rating for the simple reason he doesn't reference Al Gore more than once or twice!

Anyway, the cheeseburger is going down fast--economic ideas of oil pricing (slurp), concept of modern capitalism (chomp), value of high speed internet to the 3rd world (gulp), and then I hit that gooey center of the perfect cheeseburger.

Here it is:

"Cities all over the world have caught America's affluenza--surely one of the most infectious diseases ever known to man.  Tom Burke, co-founder of the group E3G--Third Generation Environmentalism, a nonprofit green consultancy--likes to put it this way:  Think of America as a unit of Energy.  So one "Americum," as Burke puts it, "is any group of 350 million people with a per capita income of $15, 000 and a growning penchant for consumerism."  For many years, there were only two Americums in the world, says Burke--one in North America and another in Europe, with small pockets of Americum-style living in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East."

"Today," he notes, "there are Americums taking shape all over the planet.  China has given birth to one Americum and is pregnant with a second, which is due in 2030.  India has one Americum now and also has one due by 2030.  Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Korea, and Japan constitute another Americum, and parts of South America and the Middle East still another." 

"So, by 2030," says Burke, "We will have gone from a world of two Americums to world of eight or nine." (all quoted from page 36)

Ok, I'll be serious and won't joke about things like, "OMG EIGHT Disneyworlds!  Let's see we have Disneyland, Florida, Disneyworld, California, Eurodisney, France, and Disneyworld, Tokyo! Now we get about 4-5 MORE Disneys out of this!  Let's go to Disney World, Ho Chi Minh City in 2030!

The Latin geek in me stared long and hard at that word Americum.  Could it really be Latin?  This is a true bit of esoterica.  Remember it was Amerigo Vespucci who lent his name to the Latin adjective Americus, America, Americum.  Here is a quick quote from the Wikipedia article on Amerigo

Two letters attributed to Vespucci were published during his lifetime. Mundus Novus (New World) was a Latin translation of a lost Italian letter sent from Lisbon to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici. It describes a voyage to South America in 1501-1502. Mundus Novus was published in late 1502 or early 1503 and soon reprinted and distributed in numerous European countries.^[2] Lettera di Amerigo Vespucci delle isole nuovamente trovate in quattro suoi viaggi (Letter of Amerigo Vespucci concerning the isles newly discovered on his four voyages), known as Lettera al Soderini or just Lettera, was a letter in Italian addressed to Piero Soderini. Printed in 1504 or 1505, it claimed to be an account of four voyages to the Americas made by Vespucci between 1497 and 1504. A Latin translation was published by the German Martin Waldseemüller in 1507 in Cosmographiae Introductio, a book on cosmography and geography, as Quattuor Americi Vespuccij navigationes (Four Voyages of Amerigo Vespucci).^[2]

and a few lines later

Vespucci used a Latinised form of his name, Americus Vespucius, in his Latin writings, which Waldseemüller may have used as a base for the new name, taking the feminine form America.

So, yes, the word America is Latin.  Sorry I forgot to blog that the most powerful, best, and highly Epic country on the planet is named in a dead language, but you probably new that viserally, or at least felt the suspicion that something funny was going on when you noticed E pluribus unum on American money.  Welcome to Esoterica!

But I needed the final proof that Americum is Latin.  As a piece of Latin it is a neuter adjective of the first/2nd declension, and would properly be translated, "The thing relating to or standing for the United States of America."  It's use by Tom Burke would be pure genius, i.e., constructing an Americum as a unit of energy to sum up America's relation to the globe.  I won't keep you guessing.  I did want any self-respecting blogger would do.  I googled Tom Burke, found his website, appreciated it, and then emailed him.

A few days later he emailed me back.  He did take Latin, and he told me a very cool story about coining the term Americum exactly as I mentioned above--using Latin to summarize and idea.  Tom said that as a scientist he needs to find a succinct and clear way to express concepts for the lay masses, and that clear way here is in Latin. 

Tom also had a nice personal note.  He said that Latin was one of those subjects which was dry and dull going through, but much later, looking back, he realized the utility of it.  The ability to memorize, to transcend time, to connect cross disciplines...  That and so much more is Latin, and Latin itself takes a certain chutzpah to learn.  Yes, it takes a certain "initiation rite" of tedium, boring work, labor, laborious effort, etc. to get to the El Dorado of making connections and influencing the tides of humanity.  After all you wouldn't expect anything esoteric to cough up its secrets easily, would you?