The Ash, the Elder, and the Hen Elm

This started off as the September book-blog based on Bihani Sarkar's Heroic Shaktism , then expanded to a two-month book-blog riffing on Banerjee and Wouters'  Subaltern Studies 2.0. Then it became neither, because I didn't enjoy either book that much even if the ideas were in theory interesting. (The whole post will probably be enhanced if you read Bret Devereaux' Practical Polytheism series first) When was the last time your PCs sacrificed to a god? If you're anything like me, the answer is 'never'. In my experience of playing, watching, running and reading a fair number of games, the interactions with divinity I tend to see are: The PC is a 'prophet' class, including D&Dalike Clerics/Priests/whatever, with direct and reliable access to divinity - either for chats or just for powers The PC otherwise has a conversation with a sympathetic or antagonistic god which wants them to do something or wants to reward them for having done something (Exal...

 Giovanni Arrighi's  The Long 20th Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times is a book in the tradition of World-Systems Theory and economics (of the broadly Marxian lineage), chronicling how cycles of capitalist development have shaped economic and political structures over the six centuries prior to its 1994 original release. I didn't love it as a book, but hoo boy has it given me an idea. Post should be about 40 mins if you read it all, though a lot of the mechanics are probably skimmable unless you're using them in play. In a first for the book-blogs, this isn't the edition I read (the reprinted 2010 version with a Currier and Ives printing of the Brooklyn Bridge ) but the abstract Paul Klee art of the original cover fits the rather cosmic topic of this post better  Arrighi argues at considerable and sometimes exhausting length - the book is quite dry - that there have been four great cycles in the growth of capital and the capitalist world-system. In each...

Here's the big deal of Ármann Jakobsson's The Troll Inside You: Paranormal Activity in the Medieval North - the thing that distinguishes (or at least elevates) it from any academic, critical work on myth and folklore: 'The first thing readers of this book must do is refrain from imagining that they know precisely what a troll is. While in the nineteenth century Icelandic trolls were taxonomised ... in a thirteenth-century narrative a troll has no such clear identity, not even within the human psyche. Trolls do not constitute a race or a species. The first step when considering the troll sighted on the ridge is to avoid the idea of a clearly demarcated group. ... Thinking like a nineteenth-century scientist will not further one’s understanding of the medieval troll. Furthermore, it might be useful to resist the glossarial impulse to treat medieval Icelandic words as concepts that are carefully defined as they are used. ... How could these men understand a troll? They accept ...