Just Never on Time

People don't get the dates of things right.

I mentioned a while back that "shinigami" is not a Meiji-era idea, although it may have been imported from the West during the Sengoku Era (when the Grim Reaper was big over here, the Plague being a comparatively recent memory). It parallels several Chinese and Korean deities, and, more importantly, the word occurs twice in "Love-Suicides at Amijima", a 1721 play by Chikamatsu Monzaemon (portions of which text can be found here, if you need to prove it to anyone; just use your browser's "find" command and look for 死神).

But I've been noticing, a lot of things people think are new, or copied from the West/Christendom, aren't. For instance, a Cracked article was saying that all our knowledge of Norse myth comes from Snorri Sturluson, who was a Christian Icelander who died in 1241. But, no, Sturluson only wrote the Prose Edda; the Poetic or Elder Edda was written by an unknown author, sometime well before Snorri, though after 985 (it mentions Greenland). As for its content, there is no evidence whatsoever that Odin's pinning himself to the World Ash with Gungnir is a syncretic co-optation of the Crucifixion. If it were, Quetzalcoatl's resurrection of the humans in Mictlan, using his own ritually-shed blood, would be too, and we have images of that from long before Cortes. And Quetzalcoatl was saving humans by means of his self-sacrifice; Odin was just acquiring the 18 Runes, one of which is kept secret by the Edda.

Satanism? Lots of people who debunk those silly Satanism scares like to pretend Anton LaVey came up with the thing—but the word's first provenance is the 1560s, though it meant "being diabolical". As "worship of Satan" it dates to 1896, when LaVey was not yet a twinkle in the incubus's eye. And before that, by the way, we called the thing "diabolism" or "maleficence", and the concept is as old as humanity, if not, well, as old as Satan. As for LaVey, his Church of Satan is just Wicca for Libertarians—they're welcome to come spend the night on the Navajo Rez, they wanna know what the real thing looks like (hint, it wears only a wolf-skin mask, carries a bag full of dead men's fingerprints, and walks around your house counterclockwise).

People think Ouija only dates to the Parker Brothers patent in 1890, but planchette divination actually dates to roughly the 12th century in China. Plus, "select a piece of written material without conscious control" has been a form of divination pretty much since there's been written material; there's a reason the oldest form of Chinese writing is called Oracle Bones Script.

On the other hand, lots of things aren't as old as people think. Other than Long Fist, there are basically no Chinese martial arts any older than savate or Queensbury rules boxing. As for the rest of Asia, jujutsu, taekkyeon, sumo, and ssireum: if a Japanese or Korean martial art isn't one of those four (or a weapon-art like kyujutsu or kenjutsu), it doesn't predate the end of the Joseon Era or Tokugawa Shogunate. Just in general, people have this stupid idea that everything in Asia is ancient. If I hear one more person call the freaking Edo period (or worse, Meiji!) "ancient Japan", I can't be held accountable for my actions. (Also, it's not "feudal Japan"; the feudal period ended when Tokugawa took over the Shogunate.)

Speaking of feudalism, pace the laughable Marxism you learned in history class, European feudalism ended pretty much in 1350, and was replaced by aristocracy. Monarchy, similarly, to the extent it existed at all, dates to round about the Renaissance and Enlightenment—it is essentially the political theory of the Dominate Period of the Roman Empire.

The "Iroquois Confederacy as the precursor of the US" thing, similarly, is bullshit PC tokenism. The Iroquois Confederacy was an alliance of semi-hereditary warrior chiefdoms, and people's basis for saying it was a major influence on the Constitution is, well, "A letter by one of the founding fathers mentions the Iroquois Confederacy in a tangentially related context." Similarly people who think the Icelandic Althing was the oldest republicanism: the Reichstag was older. So was the États-Généraux. Oh, and since we're talking about "republics", how about Rome's? Much like the Althing, that, too, was a council of elders from noble families. That's a major point: if, motivated by halfwitted romantic nationalism, you loosen the definition of something, say "republic", to the point where the tribal moot of a Viking colony counts as the same thing as the US Congress, then under the same definition, the Parliaments of France, England, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire all count too.