Corrections

Movement · The Ancient World○

Orphism and the Gold Leaves

Thin gold tablets buried with initiates, giving the dead instructions in their own voice rather than an outsider's report of belief.

What it meansThe leaves were the initiate's passport through the underworld: the soul must shun the spring of forgetting, drink from the lake of Memory, and declare itself a child of Earth and starry Heaven, of heavenly race, to escape the cycle of rebirth and join the blessed.

The FindingOrpheus was claimed by later writers as older than Homer. The earliest physical Orphic text — the gold lamella from Hipponion, found 1969 — is fifth to fourth century BCE, centuries after the figure it is supposed to predate everything about.

Thread · North American Traditions○

Plastic Shamans and the 1993 Declaration

A formal 1993 statement by Lakota elders naming individuals and practices they held to be exploiting their religion for profit.

SignificanceTwenty years after Vine Deloria Jr.'s written critique of the appropriation of Native religion, a Lakota summit issued a named, dated declaration of objection — the counterpart, from the side objecting, to material more often published from the ethnographer's side alone.