it’s a spoiler but….check this game out
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@Mewtamer: Shades of Grey: An Adventure in Black and White also has a sometimes hallucinating PC.
Here’s one relevant to the current TALJ!
The idea of the “Mummy’s Curse”—that is, an ancient Egyptian ruler putting a curse on their tomb to attack anyone who disturbs it, making no distinction between tomb robbers and archaeologists—is a very popular one in the West. But it was mostly invented by newspapers in the 1920s. It’s true that the ancient Egyptians didn’t want anyone robbing their tombs, but they usually didn’t turn to curses to enforce that (or at least, if they did, they didn’t write them down: most people were illiterate, and that included most tomb robbers!).
Speculatively, they’d also probably prefer modern archaeologists over ancient tomb robbers. They believed that souls needed to be sustained in the afterlife through offerings and remembrances; being forgotten was worse than death, because it meant completely ceasing to exist. So even if we’re not making proper ka-offerings any more, they’d probably appreciate having their valuables on display in a nice protective case that ensures thousands of tourists learn their name.
But! That doesn’t mean that this sort of ancient curse didn’t exist. The Mesopotamians (and to a lesser extent the Hittites, but the Assyrians especially) loved placing curses on anyone who interfered with their stuff. All sorts of written things, whether they were books or statues or foundation stones, had curses written on the bottom threatening anyone who stole, damaged, or took credit for them. Here’s one from a library book, for example:
He who breaks this tablet or puts it in water or rubs it until you cannot recognize it [and] cannot make it to be understood, may Ashur, Sin, Shamash, Adad and Ishtar, Bel, Nergal, Ishtar of Nineveh, Ishtar of Arbela, Ishtar of Bit Kidmurri, the gods of heaven and earth and the gods of Assyria, may all these curse him with a curse that cannot be relieved, terrible and merciless, as long as he lives, may they let his name, his seed, be carried off from the land, may they put his flesh in a dog’s mouth.
These mostly went on written things, because if someone’s reading the text, then they’ll also read the curse, and be warned not to mess it up. I’ve recently been studying carvings on precious jewels from the Neo-Assyrian period, and even on these fairly tiny artifacts, you get carvings like:
From the Palace of Sennacherib, King of Assyria. A gift presented to me by [name]. Whoever erases my inscribed name, whether in the service of gods or men, may Asshur destroy his name and his seed!
If you’re a king carving your name on something to prove your dominance over the whole world, whether it’s a glorious statue or a priceless gem, you want to be very sure it lasts forever—and one of your scheming rivals doesn’t have it scratched out so he can write his own name instead!
So if you’re excavating an ancient Assyrian palace, just make sure to convince the ghosts that you’re a reputable archaeologist working to preserve their name and show their glory to the world, not a treasure-hunter looking to profit, or a rival ruler trying to bring loot back to your own kingdom, or worst of all a vandal trying to destroy things. They had archaeologists and museums of artifacts in Babylon around that time, so hopefully the concept isn’t too unfamiliar to them.
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Not psychedelics, but hallucinations all the same: Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem
honestly, ancient assyrian/Babylonian curses hitting name and seed (that is, descendants) is rather interesting, in light of what happened to the late saddam hussein and his late sons… interesting enough for a “monuments men” style story set in 2000s Iraq, I daresay.
(side point, Italy actually deployed “monuments men”, that is, the Carabinieri’s Art squad with good, if not excellent, results…)
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio
An “angel” is anything that carries out a mission for God. This includes forces of nature. […] Photosynthesis? That’s an angel. Gravity? An angel. Magnetism? Angel. The Midrash in Bereishis Rabbah (chapter 1) says than an angel only performs one job. That job doesn’t have to be destroying Sodom; it could be peristalsis, centripetal force or condensation.
- Rabbi Jack Abramowitz
I have no idea how widely-accepted this idea is (I imagine not very), but I came across the quote on a Tumblr post speculating about the angel who carries out the Maillard reaction and thus gets to be in charge of caramelizing onions, toasting bread, browning the cheese on pizza, and crisping up bacon. Which is just a delightful idea. For IF in particular, having a patron who controls one and only one fundamental aspect of the universe seems like a great mechanic to build puzzles around.
For those less monotheistically inclined, I suspect if the ancient Romans had understood the Maillard reaction, they would have immediately personified it and started building shrines. They loved their gods of extremely specific and nonetheless very important aspects of daily life.
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Actually, RC church and Islam kept and integrate the ancient Genius Loci (Ginn; the origin of the word is rather evident…), and these minor deities of phenomena, in form of Saints and Ginns.
Naples is a case in point: St. Januarius was Janus, which cult was strong in naples during, or tbh, since, the Roman times. And not few cities with St. Martin as patron was originally veteran colonies (Mars)…
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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I’m reminded of the fact there’s a TTRPG reference out there that expands the concept of elementals from classical elements to the entire periodic table… I believe its titled the Periodic Table of Elementals, though I forget who made it and have no idea if its still in print or readily available digitally.
there’s a sort of TTRPGdb:
But seems that there’s nothing with that title. Sure of remembering well the title ?
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
That rings a bell…
Also, this might be more appropriate in the Linguistics trivia thread, but I have no clue how to easily find threads on Discourse that haven’t had new posts in the last few days… but today I learned that Placebo comes from the Latin for I please and got its medical meaning from useless treatments old time doctors would give patients seeking treatment where no effective treatment was available. That Placebo has latin roots isn’t surprising… what is surprising is that Nocebo, which sounds like a portmanteau of no and placebo, actually comes from the Latin for I harm.
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Yeah! Though it was definitely chosen because it sounds like “placebo”. These same words show up in “placate” and in the Hippocratic Oath, primum non nocere (“first, to do no harm”).
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