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karmicdragonflyTook this photo a few days ago of a Monarch on the Asters --
The temperature is dropping day by day. One wasp nest is now abandoned - presumably queen is hibernating. The other 2 nests are still occupied. I'm sitting on the porch in coat and gloves, probably for the last time until next Spring!
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I needed a break from Old English, so back to reading Roman Religions by Mary Beard, et al. It's dense, textbook like, so slow reading. The latest section is a discussion of when Roman 'religion' started to define what was prescribed religion and what was considered magic, etc.
Additional paragraph breaks and bold are mine --
Beard, M., North, J., Price, S. (2013). Religions of Rome (p. 154). Cambridge University Press.
The temperature is dropping day by day. One wasp nest is now abandoned - presumably queen is hibernating. The other 2 nests are still occupied. I'm sitting on the porch in coat and gloves, probably for the last time until next Spring!
***
I needed a break from Old English, so back to reading Roman Religions by Mary Beard, et al. It's dense, textbook like, so slow reading. The latest section is a discussion of when Roman 'religion' started to define what was prescribed religion and what was considered magic, etc.
Additional paragraph breaks and bold are mine --
Definitions of 'magic' have always been debated. There have been many ambitious modern attempts to offer a definition that applies equally well across all cultures and all historical periods; we shall discuss some of these in chapter 5. But it is worth emphasizing now that many of these attempted definitions miss the point. It is not just a question of different societies understanding magical practice in all kinds of different ways, offering different explanations and theories of how magic originated and developed, and disagreeing about what in their own world is to count as "magical", rather than (say) 'religious'.
It is rather that (despite modern attempts to generalize across cultures ……) 'magic' is not a single category at all; but a term applied to a set of operations whose rules conflict with the prevailing rules of religion, science or logic of the society concerned. And so, for the historian, the interest of what we may choose to call 'magic’ lies in how that conflict is defined, what particular practices are perceived as breaking the rules, and how that perception changes over time.
Beard, M., North, J., Price, S. (2013). Religions of Rome (p. 154). Cambridge University Press.