Some interesting words came up during the chat today: (1) coney-catching 'a kind of Elizabethan confidance trick', Parsi 'a Zoroastrian', and, during a conversation about Mithraism, tauroctony 'the artistic depiction of Mithras engaged in the ritual slaying of a bull', which is different from the act of taurobolium.

Thanks, z. It was a good chat today with more of a focus on words than usual. I was hoping we'd get a few posts out of it.

I found the Mithraism discussion fascinating, though I didn't contribute much because I don't know much about it. I have been reading about it online. If anyone has a good link, I'd surely appreciate it.

Oh...and don't forget we talked about cuneiform, too. By the way, I did find that the Random House Dictionary says you can spell it cuniform, too. There was a discussion that it is often misspelled.

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I found the Mithraism discussion fascinating [...] If anyone has a good link, I'd surely appreciate it.

Oooo, have I got the book for you: Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries by David Ulansey. This is a fascinating analysis that connects the iconography of Mithraism with an astounding astronomical discovery made by Greeks in the late 2nd century B.C.E.
As interesting as the subject itself is the light that it sheds, by analogy, on Christianity's contemporaneous metamorphosis from a tiny Judean apocalyptic cult into a thriving Greek religion.

I tried to get in but the firewall wouldn't let me.
C'est la vie.

Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries by David Ulansey

Thanks for the suggestion, neveu, I shall push this one down on my book stack.

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I shall push this one down on my book stack

Excellent! Remember, LIFO.

What's "LIFO?"

Asa the ignorant - and that's no bull, slain or otherwise

BTW, can't one draw parallels between that Judaic cult and Prometheus too?

Last In, First Out. A stack is a data structure that acts like a stack of stuff: you can put stuff on top, and take stuff off the top, but you can't take stuff from the middle. So it means he'll read it next, unless of course he puts more books on top.

Compare to a queue, which is a FIFO data structure.

Thanks, neveu, I will search for it.

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can't one draw parallels between that Judaic cult and Prometheus too?

Ulansey's thesis, if correct, means that there was very little that was actually Persian about Mithraism apart from the name. The Greeks borrowed a bit from another culture, one they considered ancient, and then spun a whole new Greek religion out of it. According to Ulansey what the average educated 2nd century B.C.E. Greek believed regarding the creation, the soul, death, and the afterlife was much more similar to orthodox Christianity than it was to Homer or Hesiod. I think it is interesting to reassess Christianity from that perspective.

Finally, the astronomical story blew away. It changed the way I look at the sky.