Food, Politics, and Music 1/29/24
Salsa, Sabbats, and Stoner Metal
Welcome to The Plenum, where all the arguments are strong, all the takes are witty, and all the readers are above average. This weekend was a great break - we went up to the Ice Castles in Lincoln, NH, and it’s even more impressive than the last time I was there.
The addition of a bar and an artistically crafted quarter-mile trail with tons of lighting made it well worth the ticket price.
Next time I go I’ll make sure to get tickets for after sundown - but even in the bright daylight, it was an awesome time.
But now it’s Monday, and after spending this morning shoveling many square feet of a few inches of rather heavy snow, I think my brain is warmed up enough to do some writing.
Food: Somos Salsa Macha
Everyone has different cravings - no one (ok, probably someone, but very few) would enjoy eating a spoonful of sugar by itself, let alone sit down in front of a box of sugar and look up 30 minutes later to find it mysteriously empty. The sweetness can’t do much on its own - it needs texture, temperature, or some other flavors to make it really satisfying. A pile of flour mixed with nacho spices and drizzled in fat is pretty unappetizing - but if it’s baked into crispy triangles and deep fried (adding crunch and unctuous greasiness), you have one of the most popular snacks of all time.
This is why chili crunch has become such an indispensable condiment - it can transform a food with a one-note textural experience (scrambled eggs, a chicken breast, whatever) into a Neil Peart percussion section of textural excellence.
But if all that chili oil is giving you heartburn, chili crunch has a slightly more chill, more fruity relative - salsa macha.
I like all of the Somos products I’ve tried, but the pictured Mango & Pineapple Salsa Macha takes the pastel (cake, for those of you who are not harangued daily by an anthropomorphic cartoon owl to learn more Spanish). The sweetness of the dried fruit in this salsa macha can be a bit startling if you’re not ready for it, but it’s the perfect counterpoint to a one-note savory ingredient like the aforementioned eggs or chicken. The sesame seeds and pepitas give it a pop - not quite the tectonic crunch of an Asian chili crisp, but a more low-key, subtle experience. Buy two jars when you pick this stuff up - you’ll run out quicker than you think.
Politics: Witchcult Today
Today’s political thoughts are not as ripped from the headlines as usual - while current events are a great prompt to put one’s thoughts together, today I’ll be talking about something we moderns think of as hidden in the mists of history.
I recently finished Norman Cohn’s book “Europe’s Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired By The Great Witch-Hunt” - it’s an exploration of the origins of the “witch” stereotype in Western culture, and the social and political forces that leveraged that stereotype into official prosecutions and mob massacres of those who were accused of being witches.
Cohn wrote the book under the aegis of the Columbus Centre at the University of Sussex - the research group’s original name was “The Centre for Research in Collective Psychopathology” (which I like rather a bit more), founded in 1966 to study “how persecutions and exterminations come about; how the impulse to persecute or exterminate is generated, how it spreads, and under what conditions it is likely to express itself in action.” The subject matter has never been more timely, as rising tides of illiberalism threaten to wash away the safe harbors for individual liberty that have been constructed over the past centuries. I can’t recommend this book (and another of Cohen’s in the series, “The Pursuit of The Millenium”) highly enough. I’m planning on working my way through the Columbus Centre’s entire catalog - if they’re all as thoughtful and thorough as Cohn’s contributions, it will be well worth the time.
Shorn of many, many pages of historical research and truncated to the best of my ability, Cohn’s thesis in “Europe’s Inner Demons” is as follows:
In Roman antiquity, the elite classes of Rome were confused and annoyed by religions that could not admit the Roman pantheon and religious rites that were seen as part of the Empire’s cultural glue. Most of the lands they ruled were polytheistic and could find a place for the residents of Mt. Olympus in their theology. The exceptions were the Jews and the Christians. These recalcitrant monotheists were scabrously resistant to Hellenization - the Jews even had the gall to deny the Romans entry to their holy places, and engaged in terror campaigns targeting individual Romans and their symbols of rule. These strange, insular people were the topic of much speculation in Roman high society - and their refusal to participate in Roman civic life made the Roman elite suspicious.
It wasn’t long before stories began to spread among the literate Romans - dark, sordid tales of the midnight sacrifice of Roman children, of the bestial Jews and Christians who ate the flesh and blood of children, who worshipped a man with the head of a donkey, or maybe the genitals of their priests, who had incestuous orgies at their secret midnight meetings and pledged to one another the absolute destruction of all that is right, good, and Roman. As Cohn says on p. 14 (emphasis mine),
"In all their ways, Christians negated the values and beliefs by which the pagan Graeco-Roman world lived. It is not surprising that to pagan eyes they looked like a body of conspirators intent on destroying society. ‘A new and maleficent superstition’, ‘an immoderate and perverse superstition’ - the phrases of Suetonius and Pliny show clearly enough the mixture of contempt and anxiety with with Christians were regarded. The very presence of such people was felt to be an offence to the gods, such as might well induce them to withdraw their protection; in which case a whole civilization would be engulfed in earthquake, revolution, or military defeat.”
He continues:
“To sum up: The explanation of the defamation of the early Christians is a complex one. When the Christians were a small minority, their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviour were a denial of the values by which Graeco-Roman society lived and to which it owed its cohesion. Because of this, certain real Christian practices, notably the Eucharist and the Agape, were misinterpreted in the light of traditional stereotypes, so that a dissident religious minority came to look like a revolutionary political conspiracy… these practices were misinterpreted to such a point that they seemed absolutely anti-human, and those who indulged in them were put outside the bounds of humanity. And this mechanism could sometimes be used to legitimate persecutions, to which other motives, such as avarice and sadism, also contributed.”
Hm. “Anxiety and contempt.” Does that seem like a familiar posture in today’s political scene? In our fractious culture, we don’t have a coherent elite defined by birth and occupation like the Romans did - we have many different subcultures and many “elites” within those subcultures. But what unites them all is a sense of anxiety and contempt about their perceived opponents. Our professional opinion spreaders have all adopted the outlook of the Roman elites within their little slice of culture - they’re sure that MAGA/Antifa/The Other is out there, doing terrible anti-human crimes that destroy the foundations of the world.
The book goes on to describe how the increasingly bureaucratized and regimented Christian church took these sources from antiquity at face value and assumed that they were referring to some real, awful group that was actually doing the things that early Christians were accused of. The early church scoffed at the power of demons and witches, confident that Christ had defeated them (and death) on the cross, but the mood darkened as the years marched by. Combining indigenous European beliefs about “maleficium” (evil witchcraft) and sorcery with the Roman texts, they came to formalize a belief in the “witch” stereotype. While peasants frequently accused one another of witchcraft and sorcery (which undoubtedly resulted in more than a few small-scale mob murders), the large-scale, bureaucratized killing didn’t begin until elite European society had fully bought into the idea of malicious witches working against Christendom.
As an aside, the discussion of indigenous sorcerers brought up this fascinating tidbit, which makes German “sorcerors” sound more like mafia extortionists:
“Other sources, older than the Corrector, refer to another, more dreaded form of rural maleficium. People claimed to be able to conjure up storms which would ruin the crops. This kind of maleficium too was commonly thought of as being directed against a particular individual… But at times storm-making could become an organized racket. The sixth-century laws of the Visigoths deal with tempestarii who were touring the countryside, intimidating the peasants; people were paying them to spare their fields and blast the next man’s instead… Around 820 Agobard, bishop of Lyons, noted that almost everybody - nobleman and commoner, town-dweller and peasant - believed in the supernatural powers of storm-makers; but naturally it was the peasants who paid them to save their fields from magical storms.”
Nice field of beets ya got there, sure would be a shame if it were to be y’know BLIGHTED WITH MY MAGICKAL POWERS!
Eventually all these fears, anxieties, and stereotypes were applied to garden-variety heretics like the Cathars, the Waldensians, and other groups who considered themselves devoutly Christian, more Christian than the Church who burned them at the stake or hung them from scaffolds. Beliefs about witchcraft were doubly mistaken - first, in their stereotypes about what witches do, handed down almost in their entirety from Roman prejudices against early Christians, and second, in the fact that many whom posterity would view as devout Christians were accused of the basest evil by their fellow Christians.
But maybe more fascinating, some people embraced the wicked stereotypes of the witch and made them part of their identity. They forged a sense of self from the devilish detritus of ancient Roman fantasies.
“There is in fact no reason to suppose that most women accused as witches regarded themselves as such.
But some did. As we have seen, maleficia really were practised; some women really did try to harm or kill people or animals, or to destroy crops or property, by occult means. These things had been done since time immemorial… In a trial in Fortrose in Black Isle, north of Inverness, in 1699, a woman boasted of her power to harm as well as to heal; thereby accusing herself, it seems, quite voluntarily. The evidence reads as follows:
Margaret Bezok alias Kyle spouse of David Stewart in Balmaduthy declared she threatened John Sinclair using a phrase that she would quicklie overturn his cart and within a week thereafter his wife fell ill, and that she was brought to see the seek wife and touched and handled her and heard that thereafter she convalesced.
John Sinclair in Miuren declared that she and Margaret did threaten ut supra and that thereafter his wife distracted within less than a week and continued in that distemper till the said Margaret was brought to see her, and that she handled and felt his wife who thereafter grew better but continues something weak still and that it is eight weeks since the first threatening.”
This may all seem far afield from 2024, but there are some important lessons we can take from our forebears. First is the power of well-worn stereotypes when they’re applied to enemies. We have several varieties of cannibalistic mythos in our current politics, from the explicit Adrenochrome conspiracies of QAnon and David Icke world to the more symbolic but just as powerful Marxist image of capitalists consuming their workers. And just like our medieval brothers and sisters, some of us have embodied the worst stereotypes of their perceived enemies in an act of rebellion. They see an identity as The Destroyer, who will smash the pillars holding modern society together. People who are actual Adolf Hitler-loving nazis fit this description, as do people who are actual Mao/Stalin/Lenin lovers. They relish the opportunity to place themselves outside the bounds of common humanity and become an avatar of hate and destruction.
Learning to live with people who wish to act as avatars of destruction is sort of the price of a free society. Until they actually start destructing, there’s little you can do but argue with them and work to help them find a more constructive self-conception. Darryl Davis may be the patron saint of those trying to make the world more sane - he convinced over 200 KKK members and neo-Nazis to abandon their Destroyer identities with the power of friendship and love.
Humans may get new social and material technology, but we’re still the same naked apes that moved from trees to caves, from caves to camps from camps to pastures, and from pastures to towns to cities. The essence of the human animal is unchanged. We need to learn from the past, not disdain it as a foreign land filled with incomprehensible strangers.
Music: Witches Were Made Up, But They Inspire Pretty Awesome Music
All this talk of witches can mean only one thing - it’s time for a track from England’s premier purveyor of campy, expertly crafted occult metal. Green Lung takes all things dark and spooky, puts them in a blender, and pours out a frosty glass of pipe organ-inflected perfection. We’ve got the Wild Hunt, witches, Templars, midnight masses, and black cats - you have to turn towards the significantly more abrasive (yet excellent) Electric Wizard to pack more fun cliches into an album. They deploy twin guitars in a way that makes Thin Lizzy look trite. If modern music is missing two things, it’s electric/pipe organs and horn sections. While I still wait in vain for the inevitable Doom Ska band for my horn fix, Green Lung’s keyboard player absolutely tears it up. Enjoy!