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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3561 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 23, 2022

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I discovered a fascinating thing.

There's this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quintus_Valerius_Soranus who was executed for revealing the Secret Name of Rome. By the way, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome doesn't mention that Rome had a Secret Name. It's that secret.

Now look, here's this website https://hwlabadiejr.tripod.com/ straight from the pre-2000 internet, apparently selling or renting out some property in Hawaii?

But then! Then! Somehow it has this! https://hwlabadiejr.tripod.com/roma.htm

Here is an interesting question, (one that Tiberius need not have asked nor would have condoned if asked) noted by Sir Thomas Browne in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, (Book 1 Chapter 3), as arising in consequence of a statement of Pliny the Elder (Nat. Hist. III.65 ):

How do you not go and read everything that that guy wrote on the subject? Also apparently this website is literally the only place we can get this stuff from, there are no other hits in google or google books or ya.ru.

Lunaranus, whatever is your new name, you will enjoy it a lot.

Stupid question, perhaps, but: what, then, is the Secret Name of Rome?

The linked essay makes a convincing argument for what it is.

It’s the she-wolf, Hirpa.

Rome’s famous origin story was Romulus being suckled by a she-wolf, whose statue featured prominently in Rome. Lupus was the vulgar Latin for wolf, probably because the earlier word for wolf (Hirpus/Hirpa) was basically made a matter of national security which was relegated to obscurity on purpose:

Supposing for a moment that the swineherd Faustulus was of the Hirpini, then we would have to conclude that Romulus was adopted into the Hirpini tribe and that their tutelary god, Hirpus/Hirpa, became his own. To say that he was suckled by the wolf would then be as much as saying that he had been adopted into the clan. This could be a legendary reading of the historical relationship of the Romans to the native people of the area. The Romans, as newcomers, may have made a pact or treaty with the Hirpini, and part of the mechanism of treaty might have included the adoption of the Romans, through their chief, into the Hirpini clan, thereby giving the Romans natural rights. The wolf-god or goddess then became the tutelary spirit Roma who gave her sacred name to the city, binding the Romans to the Hirpini eternally.

Excellent find, I wish there was a subreddit for obscure quality rabbit holes like this.

or ya.ru

I appreciate the mention of yandex, it is something that is easy to forget but google only shows a chunk of the internet, unfortunately I don't speak russian but yet I was able to find a unique find, inexistent on google, the roadmap towards the VVER supracritical nuclear reactor, coming this decade (IIRC) and that will disrupt nuclear fission economics.

BTW

how did you find this website?

Did you notice the main page?

https://hwlabadiejr.tripod.com/ENIGMAS.HTM#TOC

The author has made a whole book apparently

here's his (was?) email address hlabadJr@aol.com

I wonder what Horace W. LaBadie, Jr. is doing nowadays, would love to see him go on substack :)

Also one might be interested in using a "website auto explorer", a tool which automatically find sub-URLs on a website.

how did you find this website?

By googling "secret name of rome".

The author has made a whole book apparently

That's another enigma (within an enigma): if you google Horace W. LaBadie, you find his books on technical subjects such as building a laser printer from scratch, but no "On the Roman Religion", which, it seems, exists only as a (partial?) transcription on that website. Maybe it's not a real book at all.

Absolutely fascinating.

I took Latin in high school; we watched “I Claudius” on Fridays in class which gave us a flavor to the language we were learning. I really hadn’t kept up with such entertainment, such as HBO’s Rome, until recently reading Robert Harris’s Cicero trilogy. What stunned me the most about those books was not just his scholarship on the cultic nature of life in ancient Rome, the historicity of the plot to turn the republic into the empire, or the focus on the daily lives of high and low class slaves. What, impressed me was his ability to weave everything together into a coherent reality, as real as my own daily life.

In that context, I see a Rome which treated its relationship with the gods as transactional and just part of the business of a city. It also now makes sense to me why the early Christians were called atheists by the Romans: they had no rituals other than feasts and sharing, no sacrifices, no negotiations with the gods. They treated other gods as simply not existing, unlike the usual civil courtesy of treating other peoples gods as their business and a relationship that was not to be impinged upon.

I’m going to go read more from that website; linking here for my convenience. It appears the Roman religion pages are all sub-pages of this page on The Enigmas of Tiberius.

By the way:

One and one half millennia later, Sir Thomas Browne noticed those questions in his essay Hydriotaphia, Urne-Burial, remarking that they, "though puzzling Questions, are not beyond all conjecture." It is notable that he did not mention the first of the questions, confining his reference to the latter two, and resisted himself the urge to answer any of them, if only by conjecture. Herewith. we attempt what he would not.

Check this out too: https://fantasticanachronism.com/2021/02/09/urne-buriall-in-tlon/

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