Ancient Hangover Cure Discovered in Greek Texts

Talk about a wonderful window into our past, not matter how small it is. This proves something that I've always said. No matter the time period, a good hangover cure is always needed. Check out this article that I found on Yahoo.






 Picture Above: This recent translated papyrus, dating back to the second century, contains a recipe for several ailments. 

Hiding a hangover in ancient Egypt would've taken some work. Rather than popping an ibuprofen for a pounding drunken headache, people in Egypt may have worn a leafy necklace.

That's according to a newly translated and published papyrus written in Greek with the recipe for a "drunken headache" cure. The alcohol victim would have strung together leaves from a shrub called Alexandrian chamaedaphne (Ruscus racemosus L.), possibly wearing the strand around the neck, the text revealed.

Though people in the ancient world believed Alexandrian chamaedaphne could ease a headache, whether the cure really worked, let alone on a drunken headache, is unknown. [Myth or Truth? 7 Ancient Health Ideas Explained]

Largest collection of medical papyri

The 1,900-year-old papyrus containing the hangover treatment is one of over 500,000 such documents found in the ancient Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus by researchers Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt about a century ago.

 The study and publication of so many papyri is a long and slow task that has been going on for a century. Recently, volume 80 was published, containing studies and decipherments of about 30 medical papyri found at Oxyrhynchus, including the papyrus with the hangover treatment.

This newly published volume represents "the largest single collection of medical papyri to be published," wrote Vivian Nutton, a professor at University College London, at the beginning of the volume. The collection includes medical treatises and treatments for a wide variety of ailments, including hemorrhoids, ulcers, tooth problems and even some fragments discussing eye surgery. 

The writers of these ancient papyri relied heavily on Greek knowledge. The ancient residents of Oxyrhynchus strongly embraced Hellenistic (Greek-influenced) culture, something that spread throughout Egypt, and the wider Middle East, after the conquests of Alexander the Great, Nutton said.

Eye recipes

Some of the most interesting treatments in the texts deal with the eyes.

One text contains about a dozen recipes for an eye-cleaning lotion called collyrium. One such recipe meant to treat rheum, a discharge of mucus from the eyes, contains a medley of ingredients, including copper flakes, antimony oxide, white lead, washed lead dross (produced in smelting), starch, dried roses, rainwater, gum Arabic, poppy juice and a plant called a Celtic spikenard.
That treatment seems relatively mild compared with techniques for eye surgery laid out in the collection. One fragment contains what appears to be a first-person account of surgery performed on an everted eyelid, an eyelid that has turned inside out causing irritation. The text is fragmentary, and some of the words are uncertain; however, it's clear this was not an operation for the faint of heart, especially given that anaesthesia hadn't been invented yet.
Part of it reads: "… the eye … I began … by the temple … the other from the temple … to remove with a small round-bladed knife … the edge of the eyelid from outside … from within until I scooped out …" (translation by Marguerite Hirt,  a researcher at the University of Cambridge who analyzed the text).

The medical papyri are now owned by the Egypt Exploration Society and are kept at the Sackler Library at Oxford University.

 

Picture above: This papyrus, found in Oxyrhynchus in Ancient Egypt, contains a tooth powder recipe said to help with gum problems.

Mounichion Begins (2015)

So tonight, at sundown, the Athenian month of Mounichion begins. I was setting around, thinking about the coming month, and I decided that it was time to blog about something that I've been wanting to blog about for sometime. And that is 'how you knew that this was your religion.' I think that this is a question that comes up, a lot, among different people. I don't remember being asked this question but I figure that it's time to stop and consider how I knew that this was my religion.

One religion that seems to be the 'gateway' religion to most is Wicca. Now, unless your feel really drawn to the Greek Gods and want to honor them based on how historians believe they were worshiped, then you usually take the Wicca route. I began my pagan path when I was eleven. I was introduced to the religion when I walked into a New Age store. This was back when they didn't allow children, or teens, in without a parent. They wanted parents to know that they wouldn't allow children, or teens, in and I think that there might of been some reason behind that.

Well we all know how different that is now days.

It took time for me to find out what my religion was going to be. I've tried many different paths since I left Wicca in my mid twenties. I've done Celtic Reconstructionism, Kemetic, Nova Roma (I'm still a member of their group), Norse (I'm no longer involved for certain reasons, including Racism connected to certain groups) and Hellenismos. However I've come to the conclusion that this is my path. I feel like I'm back home. A term that those that find Wicca will use.

However I believe that term is appropriate in this case.

Honoring the gods as separate deities, instead of archetypes, feels so much more smooth. I have come to believe that the concept of archetypes for the gods came from the Romans. I might be wrong, but I look at their history and I just see it. I look forward to continuing my relationship with the gods and to fully understand them.

An Interesting Article about Female Statues

Found this on the Guardian, which I don't normally follow. Thought that you all might find it interesting.

It hit me on a fairly ordinary Wednesday afternoon, when on a whim I decided to visit the Greek and Roman galleries of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art; but what hit me was not that, after 20 years, the curation shifted to show an organic progression in the development of the form. It’s that none of the forms showed the reality of female genitals.

There are, of course, nude statues of Greek and Roman women, usually standing in a three point pose – a bent knee, a curved hip, a tilted shoulder to accentuate the form. One has a hand over a breast to communicate modesty; her hoohah is smooth. In fact, all the hoohahs are smooth: there are but modest dents around the pelvic bones of the statues, but no openings or slight separations of the pelvic mounds to be found anywhere. The forms are all Barbie-doll blank down there, like female bodies just sprung out the head of Zeus, fully formed, sometimes clothed and vulvaless.

Meanwhile, the male statues rock out with their cocks out; dicks are everywhere. Penises of all sizes surround me: curled and flaccid, pert and alert, balls dropped and shrunken. I wandered around, looking closely at all of the female nude statues and fragments. There are no vulvas, no protruding labia, anywhere. There’s no suggestion that vaginas existed.

I wondered for an instant, whether the plethora of penises was the work of male archaeologists so enamored that the male member was rendered in excruciating detail centuries before – so concerned at the thought of emasculating their forbearers – that their recovery efforts spared only the minutiae of marbled male bodies. How is it that marbled penises survived the sacking, that for nearly three millennia the penis survived in all its barely tumescent glory and nary a stray labia caught the attention of a curator?

Patriarchy has tried to erase imagery of the feminine since time immemorial. Destroy the image and you can control the narrative. Easter was appropriated from the pagans celebrating the return of Astarte. Before her, the fertility goddess Inanna descended to the underworld not to rescue her beloved male companion but to extend her own power; she banished her husband there in order to return to earth. Even the Venus of Willendorf has a vulva.

Yet, somewhere along the line, the vulva became synonymous with the obscene. As ancient Greek society – Athenian society – developed, feminine power and, by extension, the vulva was denigrated.

The surviving sculptures enforced Greek male ideals of the female body, and recorded history shows a shift in attitudes toward women. Sex and female sexuality were now rendered as symbols of shame, carnality became inconsistent with “reason”, and reverence for fertility in the culture was shattered.
Scholars believe that this shift is tied to the patriarchal urge and successful campaign to erase goddess cultures in antiquity. Written language helped to shape those ideas concerning women. Leonard

Schlain argued in his fascinating book, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, that the ascension of literacy and the alphabet in antiquity correlated with cultural shift in the treatment of women. We see this most notably in the works of Plato and Aristotle, who fundamentally believed in the inferiority of women, as memorialized in their written works.

Representative art reflected this change. Men, and by extension their bodies and their sex, were venerated. Jane Caputi wrote in her 2004 book Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power, and Popular Culture that “while the phallus is deified, its female symbolic equivalent […] is everywhere stigmatized.” It became synonymous with “irrationality, chaos, the depths, and the common.”

These marbled statues represented a value – an idealized value – of male and female roles in society that codified a power dynamic and a social order that persists in so many ways today. It’s such a gesture that seems thoughtless until you see it repeated over and over; it becomes clear that it is intentional and deliberate, and the lasting effect, erases feminine humanity. Even the most enlightened of us still have to unlearn cultural definitions of our sex that cast our vaginas as profane, obscene, ugly.

It makes total sense why Georgia O’Keeffe painted flower petals so obsessively, why Gustave Courbett voraciously embraced painterly realism voraciously to shock the art world with a universal truth, why Hannah Wilke kneaded erasers into vaginal shapes and affixed them to architectural and landscape postcards, cleverly titling the series “Needed to Erase Her”, why Judy Chicago decorative plate settings for her famous Dinner Party emphasize anatomy, or why Mikalene Thomas updated Courbet’s painting with her “Origin of The Universe”. The longer you study art, the more you understand what ought to have been there but wasn’t.

Rare is the graffiti of vaginas even today. I’ve seen it once, scrawled furiously on the tile walls of the Bleecker Street subway platform. But penises (and their twin companions) are everywhere: scaffold walls, subway advertisements, bathroom walls. Maybe that was why it was so startling to see that someone took the time to furiously scrawl a female form in bold sharpie strokes something close to Courbet’s masterful work.

Maybe it’s I never noticed that those marble statues never presented female genitals with any accuracy.

Western civilization, at its root, indoctrinated shame around the feminine anatomy, and by extension sexuality, and we still carry that shame in unconscious ways. The male nude body is so normalized in heroic art that it doesn’t shock or shame. But this is bigger than anatomy; it’s an argument for a way of thinking. The heroic male struts his stuff; the woman, even the sexualized woman, hides hers away.

Is this why – could this be why – there’s a preoccupation with us waxing down there? Why some women got attached to the idea that they must bleach down there because it is too brown, or why others believe their labia too enormous and seek to surgically alter them? Do all the times our genitals been erased in art and culture, wiped away and smoothed flat, contribute to our sense that they ought to be invisible or absent?

Artist Jamie McCartney recently told The Guardian that he was motivated to create Great Wall of Vagina to address the trend in labiaplasty, noting that “There’s nowhere to go for information [on the vulva], so someone can easily be persuaded for surgery ... If you look at medical texts of genitals, they’re not very broad, so TGWV presents 400 women and what you see is that someone in there’s going to look a little bit like you.”

Yes, I thought, if only we are not too ashamed to look.

Libations to Artemis (2015)

Today we pour Libations to Artemis, if your following the Hellenion libation calendar. I know that some groups might have a different libation calendar. However, I follow the Hellenion one. Artemis is the goddess of the Hunt, Childbirth, and the sister to Apollo. The incense that's burned to Artemis is Frankincense. I have, however, decided against burning frankincense. The stuff is too strong for me and gives me a headache.

I've also given up on burning incense, period, until September. Give my body time to recover from the smoke. I hope that all of you have a good one and my Artemis watch over all of you.

Finding Myself Incense Intolerant

I tried this a couple months back, due to discovering that my headaches came on when I burned incense, and it didn't work. I went back to burning incense. Now I've had enough. I have come to the conclusion that I'm incense intolerant. Though in my soon-to-be Libations to Artemis post I will be talking about taking a break from incense until September. I sit here and think about how important the role of incense was in ancient times.

Cultures all over the world burn incense, or burned incense, to their gods and even to Jesus. The ancient Egyptians burned incense three times a day (Frankincense, Myrrh, and Kyphi). Incense was used to cover up the smell of sacrificed animals. Roman Catholics use incense by the boatload, and I mean that. So if your stuck in one of these incense hothouses, and your intolerant to the stuff, lets hope it's not a throat closing nightmare or even a headache nightmare. I don't know when I became incense intolerant.

I use to burn incense when I was Wiccan and I never had this problem. Heck there are some Wiccans, who I still follow, that can't imagine life without incense. Incense was used as an offering to the gods and in modern Hellenic circles it still is. So how do you offer smells to the gods when you can't burn incense due to not being able to handle the stuff? Simple, oil burner and it's accompanying oil. When I became incense intolerant I went out and bought oil.

I already had an oil burner that I had brought down from MA, but I had put it away believing that I would never need it. Well now I'm finding myself using it. I even have a scented candle as another way to keep from burning incense. Looking at the gods, and what certain groups burn as incense, makes me realize that, even though we look up to those groups, we must come to the conclusion that not everyone will be able to burn the kind of incense that they do.

Some people have spouses that can't take incense and we must respect that. So while I don't mind letting my brother borrow a stick of incense I won't be burning it until September comes. If I find that I'm still having problems then I will drop it completely.

Found something New

So I was on Facebook and I found a page that I thought was really interesting and has led me to do a blog post. Hellenismos Israel has a page and I was surprised to find that Hellenism has returned to Israel. I had heard about Hellenism being in Israel through the two banned books of the Bible, the first and second book of the Maccabees. I'm guessing that it was banned, though some denominations do read the first book, because of its intense violence. Or maybe because they were being jerks that day.

Anyway, we know that there was practicing Hellenism in Israel. And to see it coming back is wonderful. In-fact the site of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was once a Temple to Venus (Aphrodite) and I still view the site as being a holy site to Venus, even if it's been polluted by Catholics. Another interesting thing happened a couple of years ago. A hole was found in the mountains in Israel and inside this hole was several in-tact Venus statues.

Now I don't know if one of them was the cult statue of Venus, but it was a very interesting find. It was clearly stated by an Archeologist that this is clear evidence of revolt, to give it better word, against the rise of Christianity and the destruction of the statues of the gods. Personally it's one thing to read about it, but to see proof, is something else. I wish them all the luck in practicing their religion in Israel.

I know that it most likely will be better than in other parts of what use to be the Hellenistic world, but their still in a Monotheistic country and a very violent one at that. May they be protected and may they be watched over.