Trash!

There is a song from Sesame Street’s Don’t Eat the Pictures in which Oscar finds himself in a room of Greek and Roman art. As we know, some of the statues from this period were intentionally ruined by Christians because they depict our gods; most were damaged by other means. Oscar is amazed that the museum stocks something he’s interested in: a room full of beautiful “trash.”

I was reading up on the argument between Star Foster and Andrew Bowen (who is totally not appropriating Wicca, um, right ... >_>) and eventually clicked around to Erik’s Sightless Among Miracles. There, I discovered something way more productive than fighting the hateful actions of the New Apostolic Reformation or updating myself on various arguments/controversies in other pagan/polytheistic online communities.

It’s all about trash. Well, that and an Egyptian city called Oxyrhynchus:

[....] At first, the site did not look promising for extracting papyri. Then they began to excavate various mounds around the city, which turned out to be the ancient garbage dumps. [....] The flow of papyri began. Within a few years not only Thucydides and Plato were delicately pulled from the sand, but also Greek lyric poetry that had not been seen or read in about 1000 years. Further, the private documents of this vanished city were collected en masse: private letters, accounts, wills, marriage certificates, land leases, etc. Ancient garbage became a modern treasure. [all emphasis added]

[link]

We can talk until our faces turn blue about the legacy of Constantine and the systemic destruction of Western polytheistic cultures. Technology, though, is giving us the potential to do something about it. We might not have time machines that we can use to save things and learn about our spiritual predecessors firsthand, but a new project called Ancient Lives is now using crowdsourcing to help transcribe the characters into a more readable format. Why? So we can get more awesome fragments!

Quite honestly, this is the kind of stuff that shows technology’s better side. Social platforms and the Internet have such potential to bring out the best in all of us, but often only expose the worst pieces.

If you want to get your hands on some ancient rubbish and maybe help scholars discover new/awesome things about the past, head on over. If you create an account, I’m on there as therini.

It’s also really, really hard. ;__;