Part 5 - Review of Modern Witchcraft with the Greek Gods by Astrea Taylor and Jason Mankey
Part 5 - Review of Modern Witchcraft with the Greek Gods by Astrea Taylor and Jason Mankey
Mankey makes the error of referring to Indo-European as a real language and cultural group. Indo-European is a hypothetical language. There are historical errors in his "timeline" chart.
Continuing with my review of Modern Witchcraft with the Greek Gods, I pick up where I left off, in Chapter 2, A Brief History of the Greek Gods, written by co-author Jason Mankey. To summarize part 4 of the review, which details part of this chapter, I identified, what I believe to be, possible unevaluated white supremacist thinking in the way the authors present the so-called “traveling” of the Greek Gods. Read Part 4 to read about that.
In Part 5, I begin to review the chapter starting on page 15, the section titled “Ancient Origins Through the Mycenaean Period.” The section begins with the following.
There are many ways to tell the story of how the gods of the Greeks spread across the earth. But instead of beginning our tale in the usual spot, Greece, we've chosen to start in the heart of Eurasia, in the present-day country of Ukraine (and surrounding environs). There, starting about 6,000 years ago, a group of people we today call Indo-Europeans began spreading out across Europe and Asia. The Indo-Europeans were not a racial group, but rather a cultural group. They lived primarily as herders of cattle, which necessitated their need to travel.
Since this is a Witchcraft book, it is overkill to go so far back in time to tell a ‘history’ of the Greek Gods since you are not actually talking about the Greek Gods but hypothetical Gods that may be the Greek Gods’ predecessors. Also, the practitioners who would be reading this book won’t be working with these hypothetical predecessors; they are working with the Greek Gods. How does this help a practitioner?
Mankey is wrong to describe the Indo-Europeans as a “cultural group” since it is a linguistic term. It is not a cultural group. I see Mankey cites M.L Wests’ Indo-European Poetry and Myth further down on page 15. What does M.L West say in the book that is not included by Mankey? West writes:
‘Indo-European’ is primarily a term of historical linguistics. It refers to the great family of languages that now extends across every continent and already two thousand years ago extended across the whole breadth of Europe and large tracts of central and southern Asia; or it refers to the hypothetical ancestral language from which all the recorded Indo-European languages descend. (Page 1)
Mankey fails to explain to the reader that Indo-European is a “hypothetical ancestral language” and writes in a way that assumes the language and people truly existed, and they had a culture and had Gods that are, without doubt, the forerunners of the Greek Gods. Everything that has to concern with “Indo-European” is hypothetical and reconstructed by scholars. When speaking of Indo-European people, Mankey calls them a “cultural group,” but West tells us, that to speak of an Indo-European people rests on whether or not there was an Indo-European language to begin with.
If there was an Indo-European language, it follows that there was a people who spoke it: not a people in the sense of a nation…The Indo-Europeans were a people in the sense of a linguistic community. (West, Indo-European Poetry and Myth Page 2)
Moving on to the rest of the chapter…
The Indo-Europeans are of primary importance because they spread their language and culture from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean and most points in between. The language this book was written in, English, has Indo-European roots, as do Armenian, Phrygian, Greek, Gallic, Italian, Balkan, and German. (12) Not only do these languages all share a linguistic heritage, but the original deities of these cultures are also related due to the Indo-European influence. The mightiest of the Greek gods, Zeus, was born on the steppes of Ukraine.
Mankey identifies Ukraine as the starting point of his Indo-European story and now claims Zeus was born on the Steppes of Ukraine. Again, Jason presents a scholarly hypothesis as true. Mate Kapović, in The Indo-European Languages, writes:
“The question of the PIE homeland (the “original” territory where speakers of PIE lived) is still a subject of debate. The most commonly accepted hypothesis in the last few decades has been the “Kurgan hypothesis” (Kurgans being a type of burial mound), which puts Proto-Indo-Europeans in the steppes of present-day Ukraine and South Russia, north of the Black Sea. The position of the PIE homeland is often deduced from certain linguistic indications…” (Pages 6-7)
Why does Mankey present a hypothetical language and hypothetical people as undoubtedly real in some concrete way? Is it to bolster his main goal of breaking the Greekness of the Greek Gods? It seems like it to me. It explains why Mankey writes “[t]he original deities of these cultures are also related due to the Indo-European influence…[t]he mightiest of the Greek gods, Zeus, was born on the steppes of Ukraine.” Mankey continues:
The earliest version of Zeus bears little resemblance to the god we know today. We probably wouldn't have even recognized him six thousand years ago. He certainly wouldn't have been dressed in a Greek toga, but even then he was a sky god and the bringer of thunder and lightning.
The earliest version of Zeus is who exactly? The hypothetical Proto-Indo-European sky god is reconstructed by scholars to be Dyēus. However, it is wrong to conflate Dyēus (which Mankey does not mention ) as an early version of Zeus. You can, however, write that Zeus possibly descends from the hypothetical Dyēus.
No, since the toga is Roman, Zeus certainly would not be in a toga. A small mistake, but to me, it is a sign that the author does not know the difference between Greek and Roman clothing. And we are supposed to trust that Mankey can explain correctly something so complex as the scholarship around Indo-European languages?
I am going to shift focus now to the “Timeline of the Greek Gods” on pages 21-23. There are four obvious historical errors in the timeline.
1. 850-800 BCE “The Modern Greek Alphabet in developed”
a. It is incorrect to call the Greek alphabet that developed in this time period as “modern.”
2. 490 BCE “First Persian War. The Spartans win the battle of Marathon, as told in the 2006 movie 300.”
a. The Athenians, along with their Plataean allies, won the battle of Marathon. Sparta was not involved. The movie 300, depicts the Spartans fighting the Persians at Thermopylae in 380 BCE.
3. 285 CE “Emperor Diocletian splits the Roman Empire in two, creating an Eastern Empire and Western Empire”
a. Emperor Diocletian did not split the Roman Empire into two empires. Instead, Diocletian implemented the creation of the Tetrarchy, a system of government in which the Roman Empire was divided into four administrative regions, each with its own ruler. The four rulers were known as tetrarchs and were responsible for governing their respective regions.
4. 476 CE “The Eastern Roman Empire is conquered by the Germans”
a. Incorrect. In 476 CE, the last Roman Emperor of the West, Romulus Augustus, was deposed by the Germanic king Odoacer, who declared himself the ruler of Italy.
I have not finished reading chapter 2, and by this point of reading the book, I am frankly tired of much of the nonsense in it; I am not sure if I will review it anymore. I will have to decide if it is worth more attention. I think in 5 parts, I have shown how problematic the book is; it is hard to image it gets any better.
For now, this concludes part 5 of my review.