- Joined
- Apr 6, 2022
Currently reading a great book called "Brother-Making in Late Antiquity and Byzantium". Evidently the brother-making ritual that was falsely interpreted as a same-sex marriage rite in "Same-sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe" (author died of AIDS before its publication) was actually something that developed out of skete monasticism. Sometimes you'd get a group as small as two guys deciding they want to go be monks together.
The book is valuable for being very specific and rigorous about making it clear what dynamics are at work and where, and how they fit into the societies under discussion. It talks about how different societies (particularly Byzantium) understood eros in relation to different forms of friendship. It's also responding to a lot of what's in "Same-sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe".
Evidently there's a lot more literature out there about this stuff than I thought there was, although I think some of it can be pretty pricey (upwards of a Benjamin) if you're getting them legally. I found this book because I wandered off the street into a comparative religion library and looked up something like "social dynamics in Orthodox monasticism" on the computer they had next to the scanner. Lo-and-Behold, they had exactly what I was looking for.
I've assumed for a while now that the human element in homosexuality is really just the emotional dynamics of common initiation into some kind of spiritual tradition; the weird hypnosis cults and overt satanism over in the gooner thread seemed to confirm that (along with a random gnostic dude in the 4chan thread confirming that there's a bunch of occult activity in furry cons and ren-fairs).
Need to crosspost this here, it's good.
