Eastern Steppe culture in Northwest America: Breaking precious copper decorated sheets for potlatches and funerals

Although I've established that the Japonic language family belongs to the broader Dene-Yeniseian family, which presently spans Siberia to the American Southwest, I had no idea what the time-frame for this relationship was, when first exploring the matter.

But upon further investigation of linguistic, mythological, and ritual relationships, I've not only uncovered further shared shibboleths, but determined that their common-ness lasted up through fairly recent times. Their common ancestor was not from 10, 20, or 100-thousand years ago. Not every element of their cultures dates back to the exact same time-period. Still, the earliest shared cultural ancestor they have goes back no earlier than 2000 BC. And in some cases the shared ancestor only goes back to between 500 BC and 300 or so AD. They could have been in lingering contact with each other through the 1st millennium AD.

This totally blows up the notion that the culture of the New World was either brought with long-distance migration from the Old World on the order of 10s of thousands of years ago, or that it evolved only in the New World after that initial wave of migration. For some New World cultures, that's true. But for others, who speak Na-Dene languages, their bodies and haplogroups may have come over 10,000 years ago, but their present-day culture did not, nor did it evolve solely in situ after settling into the Americas. There was a transmission of Siberian culture from the Old World starting as early as 2000 BC and perhaps lasting through 500 AD.

This is a great illustration of the non-correlation between genes and culture, or between migration of bodies and migration of culture. Cultural forms can spread by contagion, from one adjacent group to the next, and so on in a chain. Group A transmits it to group B, B transmits it to C, and then C to D. The fact that it is present in A, B, C, and D does NOT show that it began with A and then A migrated through all the intervening regions, leaving it behind them at each stop. In fact, it doesn't imply that A has migrated at all -- maybe they had contact with B (without, however, migrating to replace B, just interacting with neighbors), but not C, D, or any further link in the chain. And contagion is a far faster transmission process than migration of one spreader group to all regions affected -- as the phenomenon of epidemic diseases shows.

That's not to say that cultural forms spread just like epidemic diseases -- the key difference is how "susceptible" one group is to the cultural influence of another. Pathogens don't care about cultural groups or which other groups they choose as role models vs. groups they shun / avoid. Cultural transmission is not necessarily transitive either, unlike diseases -- in some cases, A influences B, and B influences C, but C rejects the influence of A (directly). In such a case, B acts as a gatekeeper between A and C, a role that does not show up in epidemic disease transmission. This is where all of the real art-and-science of cultural transmission happens -- just saying it can spread from one adjacent group to the next is not very surprising, it's what relationships must be in place for the transmission to take place, and when it will stop.

With that big-picture in mind, let's now look at some shared cultural shibboleths in Northwest America and cultures of the Eastern Steppe, including the off-shoot that wound up in Glorious Nippon. Some of these examples are from the comments in the previous post, some are ones I discovered just in the past few days.

I'm going to try breaking these up into smaller, more digestible separate posts, instead of having a long string of 250 comments on a single post.

* * *

First, we'll start with ritual. An earlier post demonstrated that ancient Japan (starting sometime before 300 AD) shared a cultural shibboleth with the Xiongnu and the Pazyryk cultures of the Eastern Steppe (and Silla, in Korea) -- breaking precious bronze mirrors as a funeral rite, and burying them as grave goods. See that post for all the details, which begin in the 3rd section.

For the time-frame, this ritual began in the mid-1st millennium BC (Pazyryk) and lasted through the mid-1st millennium AD (Kofun-era Japan). After then, the practice seems to have faded away...

But not in Northwest America, where a strikingly similar ritual lasted up through the conquest of the frontier by the Americans. Perhaps in the Old World, gradual sedentarization and civilizing influences from China led to the abandonment of this Eastern Steppe barbarian ritual, while in Northwest America there never was a sedentary mega-state civilizing influence until the white man showed up. They certainly were not in the cultural orbit of the Aztec, Maya, or Inca empires. So perhaps the Mongolians and Japanese would still be practicing this funeral rite, if there had been no China for them to interact with...

Metallurgy was never widespread in North America before European colonization. But there was a limited amount of iron and copper production in the Northwest, where the raw material was sourced from Alaska. We'll get to the mythical or not-so-mythical legend behind that, when we look at myths!

But after they began working with copper, various groups in Northwest America, not only those speaking Na-Dene languages, began to practice a ritual of breaking precious copper ceremonial shields, sometimes as part of a funeral, although sometimes as part of a potlatch. In both occasions, though, the broken fragments were buried somehow -- either under the ground or tossed into the sea, where they sank to a watery grave.

In both occasions, the "coppers" or copper shields were not very utilitarian, they were symbols of status and wealth and perhaps a connection to the supernatural and to ancestral lineages. They were decorated as art-works. They were owned and traded as decorative status symbols, with some degree of otherworldly power -- just like those bronze mirrors in the Eastern Steppe.

The main difference in the New World ritual is the shape -- they are beaten smooth and are between half a foot to several feet in length, like the Old World round mirrors, but they take the form of a T-shaped shield (again, not used as an actual shield in battle). And the adornments are also local patterns. So there was some degree of syncreticization between the Old World ritual and existing Northwest American arts-and-crafts traditions.

They don't seem to be treated as magical for their ability to collect and reflect light, as though they were mini-suns, like they were in the Old World, where they played into the solar cult of the Eastern Steppe.

We can't tell if their use at potlatches is different from their Old World context, which was funerals -- perhaps the only difference is when potlatches were held in the Old World, like mainly during a funeral, whereas in Northwest America, potlatches were held outside of funeral contexts as well. But in both cases, their breaking and burial can be viewed as a form of conspicuous wealth destruction, as an honest signal of the large amount of wealth held by the leader. In this way, it's no different from human and animal sacrifice, on the same occasions (potlatch and/or funeral) -- it's the sacrifice of precious objects, which only a wealthy household owns.

However, it's not just a vague conceptual similarity like "sacrificing precious objects" -- they are made of copper, beaten smooth into a sheet, adorned as decorative objects, used in a ceremonial context rather than a valuable object that sees real-world use, and their method of sacrifice is the same -- breaking into fragments.

Most inclusion of precious objects in a funeral or other ceremony does NOT involve breaking them or rendering them worthless as utilitarian objects, or even as decorative objects. Indeed, if they were just decorative objects made from copper, they would not seem so similar to the Eastern Steppe versions -- it's the fact that they're ceremonially sacrificed by fragmentation that jumped out at me when reading about them.

All these unnecessary / arbitrary points of similarity show that it is a shared shibboleth, not just independent variations on a universal theme.

This New World ritual goes back no further than the mid-1st millennium BC, when it is observed among the Pazyryk culture in the Eastern Steppe. It was still practiced in Japan during the early Medieval era. When was it transmitted into the Pacific Northwest? Sometime after the prerequisite adoption of copper metallurgy, which was more limited regionally and occurred later in the New World.

I'm guessing sometime at the twilight of its use in Japan, or just afterwards -- when the Siberian transmitters would have still been familiar with the ritual, but since it was no longer de rigueur in Siberia, it was not emphasized as strictly to the New World adopters. It was likely transmitted by the same Siberians who taught the New Worlders about copper in general -- "Y'know, this isn't just utilitarian stuff. Where we come from, we beat it into sheets, decorate it, and break it into fragments during major ceremonies like a funeral. You guys should do that, too!"

Maybe they specifically said to make it into a round mirror, and the New Worlders said that wasn't as relevant to their local culture, and made them into shield-like shapes instead. Or maybe since the ritual was fading away in Siberia, the Siberian transmitters didn't insist on every element being preserved -- what the hell, the ritual was dying out anyway, just give them the basic understanding, which is that copper is valuable, it can be beaten into a smooth canvas for artwork, and this valuable object can be broken into fragments for a major ceremony like a funeral.

I doubt it was too much later after it died in the Old World, since hardly anyone would still remember it in order to pass it on. Probably not 1000 AD. But also not too early, since it only began in 500 BC, and it required use of copper or bronze. So perhaps more like 300 to 700 AD, though after being transmitted, lasting right up through the "present" (closing of the American frontier circa 1900). Pacific Northwest natives never had to worry what a civilization like China might think about them sacrificing people, animals, and precious mirrors, well after the Dark Ages...

Japanese Steppe origins: Breaking precious mirrors as a burial ritual

Before getting into the main topic, I'll just link to some observations I made in the comments to the previous post -- about a Korean royal clan claiming descent from the Xiongnu. This establishes that my parallel investigation of the Steppe, and specifically Xiongnu, origins of their Japanese neighbors is already on solid ground in Southeastern Korea.

The clan that united the kingdom of Silla, which then went on to unify all of Korea, was the Kim clan from Gyeongju. Their legend of their origins is that they descend from a Xiongnu prince, who the Chinese call Jin Midi, but who they themselves call Kim Al-chi. I immediately noticed that "alchi" is one of the variant names of the Alat tribe -- the one whose name means "piebald horse" in Turkic, and who were the ruling clan of the Xiongnu confederation.

Did the unifying clan of Korea really descend from Xiongnu rulers? Well, they made this claim themselves, it's not somebody like me 2000 years later attributing it to them. And Korean scholars note how similar the grave goods are for Silla and the eastern Xiongnu.

I think the Japanese chose to make their Xiongnu origins cryptic due to the rivalry between Wa / Yamato and Silla. Yamato was on the losing side of the Tang-Goguryeo War of the 7th C, whereas Silla was on the winning side (allying with Tang China). They wouldn't try to invade Korea for many centuries after that, and wanted to distance themselves from their geopolitical rivals. Since the Xiongnu origins of the Kim clan were well known back then, the Yamato decided not to make the same claim, lest they be seen as copying Silla, or engaging in sibling rivalry.

But all the signs are there if you look.

* * *

Which brings us to the main topic of this post -- the burial rituals of the Xiongnu and other Steppe cultures of that time, as well as the early Wa culture in Japan. (And Silla, too, of course, but I'm not focusing on that.)

To reiterate an ongoing theme, we have to try to avoid using examples of convergent evolution when linking two groups together. What causes two groups to converge on the same outcome is some kind of utilitarian, economic, materially motivated force -- like getting more calories in your diet.

Group A drinks milk, and group B drinks milk -- are they descended from a common ancestor? Maybe, but maybe not -- maybe they each independently took up pastoralism, and began consuming the dairy products of their livestock. Both of them drinking milk doesn't mean they share an ancestor, it may mean that pastoralists will end up consuming dairy products, whether they share an ancestor or not.

Likewise, quite a few pastoralist groups from the Steppe practice horse sacrifice and horse burials, including Indo-European cultures from the West and Altaic cultures from the East. But that doesn't mean they share a cultural ancestor -- it may just reflect that fact that both have adopted horses, which makes horses very important, and so, what greater sacrifice could they make than sacrificing a horse?

We want to look for examples that are not steered by a cold, clinical Darwinian, economic, utilitarian incentive -- things that are more like a shibboleth. I say "po-TAY-to", you say "po-TAH-to" -- and that proves we belong to two separate cultures, whatever else we might share. Pronouncing the word either way does not help you communicate the meaning more efficiently, it is simply a random inconsequential arbitrary coin-flip that we have constructed in order to distinguish the members of group A vs. group B.

When I get to clothing and jewelry styles, we'll really see this idea take off -- what does it matter if you close your robe left-over-right or right-over-left? The robe closes just the same. But in ancient East Asia, this seemingly meaningless distinction made all the difference between who was civilized (left-over-right) and who was barbarian (right-over-left).

And yes, people in Japan at that time, and up until the Nara period (around 700 AD), were firmly committed to wearing their robes in the Northern barbarian style, just like the Xiongnu. So were the Tocharians, an Eastern Steppe group who adopted an Indo-Euro language (the only known Eastern culture to do so), but remained true to their origins in dress.

Similarly, superstitions may have a utilitarian logic to them -- in which case, it means nothing if two groups share a superstition. I was looking up Japanese superstitions, and one of them is to not whistle indoors -- it turns out, almost every culture in the world shares this superstition. Probably because everyone perceives it as rude, as though you're trying to be a band-leader in an impromptu concert that nobody asked for. So it's frowned on all over the world, and it cannot be used to prove that Russians and Japanese descend from a common ancestral culture where this superstition was born. It was born in multiple places and at various times, independently of each other. It's convergent evolution.

So when we turn to burials -- the main material trace that is left in the archaeological record for us to study in the present about cultures from the past -- we have to look for examples that look like shibboleths, not practices that many cultures could come up with on their own.

E.g., "monumental size of the grave to reflect the elite status of those buried there" -- yeah, no shit, what else are they going to do, make tiny graves for the elite and mega-tombs for the commoners?

We also have to take into account the notion of "degrees of freedom" from statistics, or how much room for variation there is. You might think, Well, mega-size doesn't show that two cultures share an ancestor, but maybe the particular shape of their mega-tombs could play the role of a shibboleth.

Only problem is -- how many 3D shapes are there to choose from for a tomb? You've got your box-like shape, your rounded mound shape, a pyramid shape, and that's about it, for a single structure. There are far, far fewer possible shapes to build a tomb in, than there are possible sound sequences to convey the meaning of "father". If two languages share a word for "father", that's highly suggestive of shared ancestry. If they both build mounded tombs, that's only slightly suggestive.

So although mounded tombs were popular throughout the Steppe in ancient times, from the West to the East, and although the most famous tombs in all of Japanese history are indeed gigantic mounds (Kofun, giving their name to the period in which they were built, roughly 300-600 AD), that is only slightly suggestive of Japan's Steppe origins.

It certainly doesn't *contradict* the claim that Japanese culture has a Steppe component -- it's in line with the claim, but it's a weaker piece of confirming evidence than some example where there's lots more room for variation and more of a shibboleth nature to it.

* * *

Enter one of the most bizarre and distinctive burial rituals in world history -- the deliberate breaking of finely crafted, highly valuable, aesthetically adorned, built-to-last mirrors. Not just putting a crack in them with a little whack from a hammer, but breaking them into at least 4 separate fragments on average. That's no accident -- especially when mirrors in the old days were made of (polished) bronze, which is much harder to fragment than glass. And these were fairly large mirrors, around 8 inches in diameter, not a little hand mirror -- something that impressive, you'd figure they would want to preserve in order to show off as a status symbol.

This is a great example because we can rule out utilitarian, Darwinian, etc. incentives for two cultures sharing this ritual. It's breaking something useful, functional, and valuable -- it's going against the utilitarian motive. Even in the figurative sense, where the grave goods are not meant to be used by the living, but by the dead in the Otherworld, breaking the mirror deprives the deceased of its use or exchange value in the afterlife.

Imagine waking up on The Other Side, surrounded by mirror fragments -- "Gee, thanks a lot for making them worth a lot less, in case I wanted to trade them for something that's only available in the Otherworld, which you couldn't provide me with during the burial. Or in case I wanted to see what I look like dead, or if I wanted to reflect light for some reason. Whose idea was it to break them into pieces?!"

A superstition about not breaking a mirror, could arise independently through convergent evolution. Mirrors are functional, utilitarian, valuable things -- don't break them, or else bad things will follow. Breaking them on purpose is the opposite -- that must be due to some unclearly motivated shared tradition.

BTW, as for the modern American superstition about "break a mirror, and you'll get 7 years of bad luck", this is claimed with absolutely no evidence to stem from "ancient Greece and Rome" -- always a telltale sign of bullshitting. We don't come from Greco or Roman cultures, even distantly. No one can point to an author of the ancient world saying it's bad luck to break a mirror, cuz you'll get 7 years of bad luck. Or some other number of years of bad luck. Or even explicitly saying that breaking a mirror is unlucky.

So the "breaking a mirror is unlucky" superstition is likely much more modern than that, from the era when mirrors became commonplace and the targets of superstitions. At that point, multiple cultures could independently come up with a superstition against breaking mirrors, in America or wherever else.

Back to the ancient Steppe -- other cultures did in fact bury their dead with the same Chinese bronze mirrors (or imitations), but without the widespread practice of breaking them. That does *not* suggest a common origin for them -- functional, valuable, finely crafted things will be sought after as grave goods no matter who they are.

As it turns out, both the Western Steppe and Han China included bronze mirrors in their grave goods, but nobody thinks they share an ancestor. They both independently figured out that these things were valuable and impressive feats of craftsmanship, so why not include them with all the other goodies in the grave?

It was only the Eastern Steppe groups that fragmented the Chinese bronze mirrors as part of their burial rituals. See this review article of the broken bronze mirror phenomenon, which surveys the Western Steppe as well as the East.

It began with the Pazyryk culture from the Altai Mountain region during the mid-1st millennium BC. They are misleadingly called "Scythian" as though they were Indo-Euro-phone, culturally Iranian, or primarily Western Steppe, none of which is true -- they seem to be proto-Turkic if anything, the western frontier of the Eastern Steppe.

This practice continued, most famously, among the Xiongnu, around the turn of the millennium...

And as fate would have it, among the Kofun burials in Glorious Nippon, in the early 1st millennium AD (and in Silla). As with the Pazyryk and Xiongnu, not all of the Chinese bronze mirrors are broken in Kofun burials, but a large number of them are -- perhaps dozens of mirrors each broken into 3 or 4 fragments on average, within a single site. And this practice was not just one fluke site, but dozens of locations all around Japan.

Nor was it done only in peripheral or culturally deviant regions of the nascent Japanese nation -- if anything, it was done in abundance at the very heart of the soon-to-be Yamato state, around Nara. See this discovery of over 100 mirrors broken into nearly 400 fragments, from the Sakurai Chausuyama Kofun near Nara, dating from the 3rd C and belonging to a very elite individual, possibly the legendary Queen Pimiko herself.

This early date is also helpful to establish that these Steppe influences of Japanese culture did not only arrive during the course of the Kofun era -- they were there before 300 AD. And it is helpful to show that these influences are not "Korean," as though they were confined only to Korea and Japan. Rather, both of them are extensions of a broader Eastern Steppe tradition, brought by Steppe people who crossed the mountains into the Korean peninsula, the first wave going further into Japan, and a second wave remaining in Korea (the Koreanic speakers).

* * *

These bronze mirrors, and mirrors in general, are so important in Japanese culture that one of the three imperial regalia -- the special material items that legitimize each emperor, which are passed on to each new holder of that office -- is an ancient bronze mirror, the Yata no Kagami. (We'll get to the Steppe origins of another of the three, the magatama or curved jade jewel-bead, in the next post.)

Mirrors have always been important in the rituals of Shinto, as symbols of the sun. It seems like the Eastern Steppe cultures view mirrors as solar symbols -- miniature suns that you can wield with your own two hands, throwing bright beams of light wherever you please, like a demi-solar-god all by yourself. The Western Steppe cultures view them more in terms of reflecting the physical likeness of a person, not as pre-industrial spotlights.

And wouldn't you know it? While browsing the Wikipedia article on "mirrors in Shinto," I nearly fell out of my chair looking at how the mirror is displayed in a typical Shinto ritual. See the center top of this image, where the mirror lies between the 4 animal statues. The mirror itself is a disc, and it's resting on a stand that is curved very much like a crescent moon

There's that distinctly Xiongnu visual shibboleth again! A solar disc, with a crescent moon underneath, opening up to the sun, which remains in use on the national flag of Mongolia. We'll see that in Kofun-era earrings, in the post on clothing styles.

Do an image search for "Shinto mirror," and you'll see all sorts of variations on this theme, but they all involve a stand that is crescent and opening up to the solar disc. I can't determine when this combination of items began, but it has endured right up through the present.

Somewhere along the way, the Steppe fixation on the "sun and moon" duo was downplayed, and the crescent shape was carved in the shape of clouds or sea waves or some abstract thing. But who ever depicts clouds as forming a shape whose border is an upward-opening crescent? Or sea-waves depicted with that same border shape? It's obviously a crescent moon, and that border shape has been preserved -- even though its interior has been (re-)decorated to distract from its moon-focused origins.

I wonder if this Shinto mirror-and-stand configuration goes back to the Xiongnu, and the smaller golden "disc with crescent" items that are found among the Xiongnu, or the identical Kofun-era earrings, are just jewelry representations of their sun-and-moon religious rituals, which would have involved one of those large bronze mirrors as the solar disc, supported by a stand in the shape of an upward-opening crescent moon. IDK, something to think about / look into.

* * *

Like many ancient facets of Japanese culture, they have been preserved or served as inspiration for even the most hi-tech and futuristic domains of contemporary Japanese culture -- like video games. In The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, there's a crucial item called the mirror of twilight, and it is in the shape and color of an ancient Chinese bronze mirror -- and it also lies in 4 fragments, which must be re-assembled in order to use it as a massive light-reflector.

In an earlier game in the series, Ocarina of Time, the player uses a mirror shield to reflect beams of light in order to trigger doors opening and such. However, it doesn't resemble the ancient bronze Chinese mirrors, and does not lie in fragments. Even earlier, in A Link to the Past, the mirror shield doesn't bounce rays of light, but absorbs them. And even earlier, in The Adventure of Link, the protagonist helps a townswoman find her lost mirror and is rewarded for it -- it's not shown at all, though, let alone in an ancient Chinese form, or lying in fragments, or reflecting light rays. But these are all still part of the enduring Japanese fascination with mirrors.

* * *

Finally, what the hell *was* the reason for breaking the mirrors back then? It doesn't matter for the purposes of linking various cultures together that share the practice. But just to try to get inside their heads...

I actually came up with a similar concept as the Twilight Princess video game, before even reading about it. None of the other grave goods, whether highly valuable or not-so-valuable, are deliberately broken. They're intact, in good working order, and meant to aid the deceased in some way.

Mirrors left intact would be the same -- an aid to the deceased.

But the ones that were broken -- could have been a reflection of the corpse itself. Something that used to be a finely crafted, highly valuable, built-to-last creation -- but that now finds itself at the end of its use, decaying into pieces, losing its order and structure, never to be used again...

Until some fateful event in the future, where the dead are brought back to life, and where these mirror fragments would be supernaturally placed back together, without the awkward glue or whatever means that a person would use, but actually restored to their original state and in their original working order -- with no cracks, glue, or anything else like that to be seen.

Until that day comes, both the corpse and the mirrors will lie in their fragmented, decaying state, unable to function as they were originally created.

Maybe they didn't have the apocalyptic revival of the dead and restoration of the mirrors, as though Humpty Dumpty had been miraculously put back together again. At the very least, they could have intended the broken mirrors to stand for the broken body, broken family, broken social hierarchy, now that this elite individual has been retired from their role.

Since they viewed mirrors mainly as sun symbols, i.e. projectors of light, then a broken mirror is tantamount to a snuffed-out candle for some other culture where candles represent light projection and mini-suns.

Such an important person dying is like the sun and moon themselves going dark in the sky.

We know that ancient Altaic people used to view the sun and moon as mirrors-in-the-sky -- see the earlier post on their creation myth, which is mainly about churning the primordial sea with a divine staff in order to make land-masses out of the resulting sea-foam on the surface. One of them also mentions that during the age of creation, two mirrors were placed in the sky, which brought light to the universe -- the sun and the moon.

So, far from being a sign of disrespect toward the dead, the broken mirror was the ultimate material expression of grief from the mourners.

Japanese steppe culture: Ruling clans with the piebald horse as totem animal, and ritual horse sacrifice

Following the previous post, we'll look at another sort of "creation" myth from Japan -- the origin myth of ritual impurity, and therefore, of ritual purification measures to counter-act it (the basis of Shinto practices). This myth provides 2 links to horse culture from the Eastern Steppe. It's from the Nihon Shoki, though not the Kojiki, from the earliest writings in Japanese (early 8th C AD).

The god responsible for introducing ritual impurity into the world is Susanoo, the impetuous storm god. The target of his ire in this story is his sister, the sun goddess Amaterasu. He takes the Heavenly Piebald Colt (Ame no Fuchikoma), and flays it alive -- starting with its back end, and working toward the head. The text uses a specific term to emphasize that this is a "backwards flaying" ("sakahagi"), not a standard flaying that starts at the head and works its way toward the tail.

This is a form of ritual impurity, since he has not killed the colt first (e.g., by slitting its throat), and since he's removing the skin in backwards order.

He then hurls the colt in through a hole in the roof of Amaterasu's weaving hall, where one of her maidens is so startled by the desecration that she runs into the spinning shuttle at her loom, which hits her in the genitals, causing her to begin bleeding from there. This is the origin of menstrual bleeding, another form of ritual impurity. Amaterasu then goes into hiding in the Heavenly Rock-Cave Door (Ame no Iwayato), in a form of menstrual seclusion. Susanoo also defecates in her palace, another form of ritual impurity.

This story reveals that the myth-makers of Japan were intimately familiar with horse sacrifices -- how they were supposed to be performed, and therefore, which actions would constitute desecration, defilement, and impurity.

I don't know about every culture that practiced horse sacrifice, but the Cheremis people (AKA Mari) began flaying the horse from the head, then ending at the tail. Of course its throat was slit first, not flayed alive. And it was a colt, not an adult horse (the Japanese term "koma" means specifically "colt," combining the words for "child" and "horse").

The whole ordeal is described in grisly detail in the Finno-Ugric portion of The Mythology of All Races, which I referred to in the previous post. Incidentally, from my reading of their myth and ritual, the Cheremis seem to be mostly Indo-European culturally, despite speaking a Uralic language -- much like the Hungarians, Estonians, and Finns. They live along the Volga River in Russia, a little ways north of the Steppe.

How would the creators of the Nihon Shoki know so much about horse sacrifice, and why would they want to use that as such a crucial example of Susanoo's causing ritual impurity? He also destroys Amaterasu's rice fields, but it's not described in cruel gut-wrenching detail like flaying a horse backwards while still alive. They really wanted to emphasize the importance of horses, and of horse sacrifices, in their culture.

A mainly agrarian culture would not care so much about defiling the horse sacrifice ritual -- and probably would not even refer to such a ritual, since there was never any such thing in their culture. It occupies center stage in the Japanese narrative because they hailed from a nomadic horse-centric culture before arriving in Korea and Japan -- which in that part of the world, means the Eastern Steppe.

Its similarity to the Cheremis horse sacrifice ritual suggests a common ritual all across the Steppe, whether the practitioners were Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, or otherwise.

* * *

However, the Japanese myth's emphasis on the piebald / skewbald / spotted / etc. color pattern of the horse, narrows down which range of the Steppe they originated from.

First, tribes or clans or chiefdoms being associated with particular color patterns of their horses is mainly an Eastern Steppe phenomenon, from the Turkic tribes all the way to Glorious Nippon. It makes their favored breed of horse into a totem animal for the social unit.

Amaterasu is not just any ol' goddess in the foundational texts of Japanese culture -- she is the deity through whom the Japanese imperial family traces their bloodline. So this means that the piebald horse is a totem animal for the ruling clan of Japan.

Where else is the piebald horse the totem animal for a ruling clan? Why, where else, and when else? -- in the Xiongnu confederation during the late 1st millennium BC, and several of its off-shoots after its break-up.

And not just any ol' clan within the Xiongnu, but their ruling clan, the Luandi, whose name likely derives from "piebald horse".

Then there was the Alat tribe, whose name also likely means "piebald horse", a Turkic tribe who also belonged to the Xiongnu, and were either related to the Luandi, or identical to them, or perhaps they coincidentally shared the same totem animal due to there only being so many color patterns to choose from, and due to every clan preferring a horse rather than some other species for their totem animal.

The same situation must have been true for the ruling tribe or clan among the Yayoi-like people who arrived in southern Korea and then Japan. Their totem animal was also the piebald horse, whether their clan was related to the Luandi or Alat by lineage, or just sharing a totem animal by happenstance. In either case, it places the continental component of the future Japanese culture among the Xiongnu confederation during the 1st millennium BC -- not Southeast Asia, not the far Arctic north, not during the 1st millennium AD, etc.

As with the horse sacrifice portion of the myth, specifying the color pattern of the heavenly horse reveals that the myth-makers of Japan were intimately familiar with Eastern Steppe practices for choosing a totem animal, like including its color pattern instead of a broadly defined breed or species name alone.

I don't think the Alat tribe being Turkic means that the ruling clan of the Yayoi-like people were Turkic. They could have been Mongolic or Tungusic. Making the horse your totem animal, and emphasizing its color pattern, was common among all of those Altaic speech communities.

And perhaps the Yayoi-like population was not ethnically homogeneous -- there could have been Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Uralic, or other groups among them. All sorts of people mixed with each other on the Eastern Steppe. Perhaps they only homogenized when they landed in Japan and were defined by a new ethnic opposition, between the various continental arrivals and the native Emishi / Ainu.

* * *

Over the past 10 years in Japan, there has been an insanely popular media franchise called Uma Musume ("Horse Girl") Pretty Derby, mostly based on an anime series and related video games, which revolve around a group of horse-human girls training to compete in horse-girl races. Yes, like in a traditional horse-racing track. They look mostly human, with horse ears, and as a side project devote themselves to singing and dancing on stage as idols.

This is yet another case of the horse-centric origins of Japanese culture re-asserting themselves in the modern age, after having lied dormant or secondary for many centuries.

But by now, horse racing is a very popular sport in Japan, and has been for decades. It's so popular that Lui, a vtuber from Hololive, hosts regular watching parties / informal betting streams as the major Japanese horse races are being broadcast. She can't re-broadcast the sound and image of the race on her own stream, due to copyright, but even just as a watching party, she gets close to 10K live viewers, judging from the one she held a few days ago (pretty good numbers for livestreams).

And as the very beginnings of Japanese literature show, their fascination with horses is neither new nor imported from the West. And far from viewing them as only a neat form of entertainment, they hold them to be one of the most sacred animals in creation, a testament to their origins in the Eastern Steppe, and the OG badass nomadic steppe empire in particular, the Xiongnu.

The steppe origins of the continental component of the Japanese people and culture: The uniquely shared Mongolian and Japanese land-creation myth

In the last comments section, I detailed many ways in which Japan looks like a horse-riding culture from the eastern Eurasian steppe. I will compile and condense those ways in a later post, and add a few crucial new ones in standalone posts, beginning with this one. But in order to provide some big-picture historical structure to this view, I should contrast it with a highly popular and sometimes controversial theory of Japanese origins, within the Japanese scholarly community and Japanese pop culture itself.

That is the so-called "horse-rider theory" of the origins of the Yamato state and its culture, proposed by Namio Egami in 1948 and elaborated / refined / altered throughout the following decades. Here is the Japanese Wikipedia entry, which you can put into Google Translate's "websites" section, to get the fuller details.

Although it sounds similar to the story I was developing in the previous comments section, it's actually quite different. Egami argued for the arrival of eastern steppe horse-riders in the 4th to 5th centuries AD, as part of the broader migrations and conquests of horse-riding nomadic pastoralists from the eastern steppe during the Eurasian Dark Ages (Huns, Bulgars, Turks, Uyghurs, Mongols, etc.). In his view, this invasion of horse-riders radically changed the previous culture of the Yayoi period -- 1st millennium BC to 300 AD -- which reflected the arrival of rice farmers into the lands of mostly hunter / gatherer / fishermen (and adzuki bean harvesters) of the earlier Jomon period (back to 10,000 or so BC).

I'm arguing that the people who arrived during the Yayoi period, who brought rice agriculture and other things along with them, were an eastern steppe people. So I'm saying the steppe origins of the Japanese people and their culture goes much deeper than Egami's theory proposes.

But wait -- isn't the steppe famous for its nomadic pastoralists who ride horses? The continental Asians who arrived in the Japanese archipelago during the Yayoi period did not practice this subsistence mode -- they brought sedentary agriculture with them, mainly rice.

Well, cultures can change their subsistence mode over time, they aren't entirely defined by it. And that includes the very region of interest, the eastern steppe. The most famous example of a people from there who spoke a language in the Altaic family (in the Tungusic sub-family), who were not nomadic pastoralists but agriculturalists -- including rice -- were the Manchus, who founded and led the Qing Empire of China in the 17th C. Their ancestors, the Jurchens, led the Jin dynasty of China, which included northern China in addition to Manchuria, mainly during the 12th C. They were also agriculturalists, not nomadic pastoralists. And their ancestors, the Mohe, were also mainly agricultralists, not nomadic pastoralists. None of these groups were small hunter-gatherer communities from northeastern Siberia.

Once upon a time, there was no rice agriculture in Manchuria -- it was "invented" in the Yellow River region, by the people who became the Han majority ethnic group in China, who spoke a Sinitic language. Because the Mohe, Jurchens, and Manchus were not small-scale hunter-gatherers, presumably they *were* nomadic pastoralists at some point before they settled down and adopted agriculture -- what other subsistence mode is there in Manchuria? So, their subsistence mode changed, from pastoralism to sedentary agriculture, under the influence of China.

The Jurchens also based their writing system on the Chinese system, despite their language being from a totally unrelated family. In fact, they maintained their Tungusic linguistic identity through much of the Qing era, albeit becoming bilingual in Chinese as well as they integrated further into the society they led. By now, most of their young people are monolingual Chinese speakers who live in China. When the Qing Empire collapsed in the 1910s, the Manchus didn't leave back to Manchuria, and they didn't ditch the Chinese language. They are heavily Sinicized by now.

The same goes for their shamanistic religion, which was maintained at least among themselves during the Qing era (they did not try to impose it on the Han majority). As with other domains of their culture, they have largely left it behind and Sinicized by now.

I can't believe that the Mohe / Jurchens / Manchus were the only cultural lineage like this in that region. Although the steppe grasslands favor nomadic pastoralism and horse-riding, that niche can get crowded -- when everybody is doing it, it pays to do something different. Maybe you have to leave for greener pastures, as it were.

And during the 1st millennium BC, that niche was already starting to feel a little full, represented by the vast confederation of tribes united by the Xiongnu, who plagued the sedentary agriculturalists of China, serving as the meta-ethnic nemesis for the incipient Han ethnogenesis. As the Han united into an empire under the threat of the Xiongnu, they eventually turned the tables and broke up the nomadic confederation.

But that was only temporary, as the Xianbei confederation would emerge to fill the steppe empire vacuum left by the broken-up Xiongnu confederation, roughly 300 BC to 300 AD, as rivals to the agricultural and Chinese-speaking Han to their south.

My hunch is that the continental Asians who migrated into the Korean peninsula and from there the Japanese archipelago, during the 1st millennium BC and early centuries AD, were an earlier example of the Mohe / Jurchen / Manchu strategy. Maybe they felt the nomadic pastoralist niche was too saturated, with too much competition, so they decided to try their hand at rice farming instead. Or maybe their tribe was kicked out of one of those many steppe confederations, and sent into exile -- so they couldn't just stay in the region, they moved all the way over into the Korean peninsula and then the Japanese islands.

Whatever the reason was, it had to have been big, since they are the only large-scale migration from Asia into the Japanese islands. Northeastern Siberia, Manchuria, Mongolia, northern China, southern China, the Ural and Altai mountains, the steppe as a whole -- various peoples have come and gone, many times over, throughout human existence. But other than the small-scale migration of primitive hunter-gatherers into the Japanese islands during prehistoric times, the arrival of the Yayoi people are the only large-scale migration into Japan ever.

Even just migrating into the Korean peninsula was a huge move -- that peninsula has not seen wave after wave of migrations either. There were some Jomon-like people in the southern region, then the Yayoi-like people arrived, and after them, the Koreans. There's a small handful of Tungusic toponyms and loanwords in Korea, and some Nivkh as well -- but really the only large-scale migrations into Korea were the Yayoi and then the Koreans who assimilated them.

Especially for nomadic pastoralists from the steppe, accustomed to wide-ranging spaces and grass as far as the eye could see, moving into the cramped and rocky terrain of Korea and Japan would have been quite the downgrade. But if they decided to give up nomadic pastoralism and adapt to their newfound environments, maybe it wouldn't be so inhospitable and uncomfortable after all. They seem to have already decided to adopt rice agriculture before they entered Korea -- as long as they could find a patch of fertile soil for growing rice, that would be enough. It would not be as romantic as the wide-open grasslands where they originally came from, but that was apparently no longer a viable option -- they had some kind of powerful motive to leave the Asian mainland behind, since they were the only group to do so.

* * *

When they met the Jomon-like people, first in southern Korea and then like crazy in the Japanese islands, the Yayoi-like people were a steppe culture, but who practiced agriculture instead of horse-based pastoralism. They spoke a language from the Altaic group -- not a Japonic language, which did not exist yet, but something from Turkic, Mongolic, or Tungusic.

As they absorbed large numbers of L2 learners from the Jomon-like people, who spoke languages related to present-day Ainu, that acted as a filter that fundamentally altered the original Altaic language, since the Ainu-like language speakers could not pronounce its sounds, and the Altaic speakers could not pronounce some of the Ainu-like sounds, their word-forming processes were different, and so on.

The resulting compromise language for the newly fused cultures was Japonic -- that is why there are no Japonic toponyms in mainland Asia aside from the southern half of the Korean peninsula. It originated in southern Korea, and it was not dropped there by a linguistic stork, nor does it go back to time immemorial -- it attended the arrival of Yayoi-like people during the 1st millennium BC. But the reason it is not a straightforward example of an Altaic language is that Ainu-like languages are sufficiently different from Altaic languages, that the pidgin / creole / synthesis / lingua franca compromise was only half-recognizable as Altaic, and half-not-Altaic.

Likewise, when the Koreans later arrived and assimilated the earlier Yayoi people, and/or the remaining Jomon people, in the Korean peninsula, they inherited the same problem. They arrived in Korea speaking an Altaic language, but they had to absorb large numbers of speakers who spoke an Ainu-like language (unassimilated Jomon), or speakers of a new language that was itself heavily filtered by the traits of Ainu-like languages -- i.e., Japonic (Yayoi and assimilated Jomon).

That is why Japonic and Koreanic are partly included in the Altaic family and partly excluded. The core languages are Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic. The only others that anyone entertains including are Japonic and Koreanic, but they are only somewhat entertained because they're sufficiently different -- due to the changes incurred by absorbing large numbers of Ainu-like speakers, who were present in southern Korea and Japan, but who were not present elsewhere on mainland Asia.

The same process must have affected the other domains of their culture. The Yayoi brought a largely steppe culture with them, but it was filtered through Ainu-like culture, and the resulting hybrid / synthesis / compromise / joint-collaboration for something new, was not a carbon-copy of Turkic, Mongolic, or Tungusic culture. Nor was it a carbon-copy of Ainu-like culture. There are elements from both sides, as well as entirely new elements created after the initial fusion of Yayoi and Jomon peoples.

* * *

And yet, there are telltale signs of the Yayoi's steppe origins, aside from their language. I detailed many in the previous comments section, and will list those briefly in a later post. For now, though, I'll return to the domain of mythology to uncover specifically Altaic-related cultural origins for the very earliest and most foundational forms of Japanese myths.

First, the Japanese creation myth -- hard to find a more important myth than that! Many creation myths around the world tell of the sky being separate from the watery chaos of the oceans. Both sky and water are so uniform, or rather formless, that they are more primordial than land -- land has particular shapes, arranged in particular configurations, with particular landscape features running over them, with particular plant and animal species thriving on them, and later on, particular peoples and cultures or even civilizations thriving on them.

Creating the vast expanse of sky? Bla bla bla. Creating the vast expanse of ocean? Yadda yadda yadda. Get to the good part -- how were the landmasses formed? That's where the story gets good.

Turns out, Japan has a very distinct creation myth. It is unlike the "earth diver" family of myths from Eurasia and the New World, where the creator god orders an animal (like a bird) to dive into the depths of the ocean, scoop up some earth from the very bottom, and return to the surface where it will be placed on top of the water, or on top of a large animal that floats on the water.

It is unlike the family of "giant body parts" myths, where a primordial giant's body is broken into pieces, and these form into landmasses.

Rather, the creator god, Izanagi (along with his sister-wife Izanami) dips a metal-headed spear into the primordial ocean, stirs and churns the water with it, and when he removes it from the ocean, the salty brine-y froth that drips off of the tip and lands back onto the ocean surface, becomes landmasses (specifically, those of the Japanese islands).

Although highly unique among the world's creation myths, it is not *totally* unique -- it is shared with a Mongolian creation myth, recorded by the Russian scholar / adventurer Potanin during his trek through Siberia in the 1870s, and published in his Essays on Northwest Mongolia in the early 1880s. His work was referenced in English in the 1927 mega-compendium, The Mythology of All Races, in the chapter on Finno-Ugric and Siberian myths by Holmberg, which I'm quoting from (p. 328).

In the beginning, when there was yet no earth, but water covered everything, a Lama came down from Heaven, and began to stir the water with an iron rod. By the influence of the wind and fire thus brought about, the water on the surface in the middle of the ocean thickened and coagulated into land.

The Lama element is obviously a later addition from their adoption of Tibetan Buddhism, but otherwise it is largely the same as the Japanese example. The creator god uses a tool (as opposed to his own body, an animal messenger, etc.) to stir the ocean, and the brine-y froth that results on the surface coagulates into solid land. No earth, mud, or other solid is retrieved from the depths of the ocean, no existing solid is re-cycled for solid land (like a giant's body parts). Stirring the ocean creates a brine-y froth, which hardens into landmasses.

A related myth from the times of creation, although not creating the landmasses themselves (p. 419, and still referencing Potanin).

The Altaic peoples speak of a time when there was no sun and no moon. They say that people, who then flew in the air, gave out light and warmed their surroundings themselves, so that they did not even miss the heat of the sun. But when one of them fell ill God sent a spirit to help these people. This spirit commenced by stirring the primeval ocean with a pole 10,000 fathoms long, when suddenly two goddesses flew into the sky. He also found two metal mirrors (toli), which he placed in the sky. Since then there has been light on the earth.

This is about the creation of the sun and moon in the sky, rather than landmasses on top of the ocean, and the agent is a spirit commanded by the creator god rather than the creator himself. And because the bodies formed are not lying on top of the ocean, there's no mention of the brine-y froth that results from stirring the ocean. And yet, the creation of the sun and moon somehow results from the stirring of the primordial ocean with a mythologically big pole.

This motif appears nowhere else in the mythologies of the world. It is found only in Mongolia -- and Glorious Nippon.

I haven't read the original Potanin work, so I'm not sure if the people he collected these stories from are Mongolic, Turkic, or Tungusic. Or, if they used to be Tungusic but then had switched their language to Mongolic by the time he met them. However, they're spoken about as Altaic, and in Mongolia, so they're from one of the core eastern steppe cultures that (at least by the 19th C) spoke an Altaic language. That's all that matters here -- that Japan's creation myth is very clearly genetically related to one from Mongolia.

Could one of the two sides "loaned" their creation myth to the other? No, that's ridiculous. You don't just toss out your traditional creation myth and "borrow" a new one, it's such a core part of your mythology. Only if one culture was such a huge influence on another.

But northwest Mongolia and Japan have not had any cultural contact throughout their histories. The Mongols tried to invade Japan, but their fleet was sunk by a divine wind (kamikaze). And the Japanese invaded Korea at various times, but never crossed over the mountains into Manchuria, Mongolia, and the rest of the steppe.

Plus, the Japanese myth is present in the earliest written works in Japanese -- the Nihon Shoki and the Kojiki, from the early 8th C. AD. There was no prolonged contact between them and various Altaic groups before then -- except for the Yayoi people's origins, before they entered Korea and Japan, which therefore must have been from the eastern steppe, and specifically from an Altaic-speaking culture. They descend from a common ancestor.

The Japanese love to emphasize their uniqueness, and this was no different for the 8th-century authors of the Nihon Shoki and Kojiki. If they wanted to imitate China so badly, they could have borrowed the Chinese creation myth. But they didn't. They may even have asked around -- "Psst psst, does anyone near us tell the same story of the creation of land? Anyone? Not the Mohe? Not the Nivkh? Not the Emishi? Not the Turks? Great, we get to emphasize our special uniqueness!"

Little did they know, there was a sub-region of Mongolia where they *did* tell the same unique creation myth, heheh. And thankfully, somebody uncovered this detail before a lot of that region began assimilating toward Chinese and Russian cultures.

As a final aside for this section, I note the difficulty with which these crucial facts reach present-day residents of the American Empire. Learning about Japan is easy, since we've been fascinated by them, and they have been fascinated by us, since the 19th C, and then occupied them outright after WWII. But much of the fieldwork on Siberian, steppe and far NE Asian / Arctic cultures was and still is done by Russians, who became America's geopolitical enemies during the Cold War and sadly through the present.

There was little taboo surrounding Russian scholarship or culture in 1927 (other than remnants of the first Red Scare), when that mega-compendium was published in English in America. But by the Cold War, reading Russian scholarship or being aware of their culture at all became taboo. There was only one further semi-cited reference to the Mongolian creation myth -- the 1979 popular book Primal Myths by Sproul. I haven't read it, so I'm not sure if she even cites Potanin, or just read it via the Holmberg chapter in the 1927 mega-compendium and included it in her survey of creation myths from around the world. In any case, that's the last published reference to it that still circulates on Wikipedia, Reddit, and so on, all of which are ignorant of the source material being Potanin from the 1880s.

The Holmberg chapter notes the striking similarity to the Japanese creation myth in the following sentence. Not like it's a hard comparison to make -- they're practically identical -- but it does require the knowledge of both cultures' creation myths. And these days, only the Japanese one is easy to come by -- the Mongolian one has faded into obscurity, since it was originally recorded by a Russian. In 1927, it was easy for an English-speaking scholar to come by the Russian source, since they were not taboo -- they were not Western, but there was no broad shadowban on their culture, including science and scholarship, at that point.

It was also not controversial to refer to Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic as "Altaic" back in 1927, or to liken Japanese and Korean to them (to a lesser degree). Much of that work was done by Russians, since they're the empire expanding into Siberia and the eastern steppe. Once Russia became rivals of America during the Cold War, suddenly the entire concept of "Altaic" cultures or languages was slandered in the American imperial sphere of influence.

Maybe Holmberg didn't think it was worth saying explicitly -- like, "Yeah, of course the Japanese creation myth is identical to the Mongolian one, where else do you think the Continental Asian part of the Japanese comes from -- Beringia? China? Malaysia? Their languages are not even remotely like Japanese. No, it comes from a fellow Altaic culture, where the Yayoi must have originated from." At any rate, it is worth saying so explicitly now, as cOnTrOvErSiAl as it may be in 21st-century America.

Rather than add further examples in the comments section as usual, I'm going to try going back to writing a series of standalone posts. The comments section this time will be for less important stuff, open thread, etc. I'd like these to be easier to find by search engines, and they can't see into the comments section.

RIP David Lynch, who mythologized the normies of Edenic Americana, through saturated dreamy naturalism

Following up on a series of comments starting here on the topic of "cool vs. weird," and another series starting here on the topic of the 50-year cycle in social cohesion vs. chaos -- and its cultural correlates -- I explored David Lynch's role in American cultural history, on the occasion of his recent death. I'll just paste the comments here, to get the ball rolling on a new post.

* * *

RIP David Lynch, who produced most of his works during this wholesome period, and was always more cool than weird -- as were his creations.

If Twin Peaks had been weird and normie-shocking and taboo-violating and ugly or anti-aesthetic, there would never have been "Peaks mania". It was so widespread, I still vividly remember the day in 3rd or 4th grade, when a girl who sat at our little group of 4 desks pushed together, spontaneously burst out with

"Have you guys seen Twin Peaks???!??!?!??!!!! :DDDDDD"

None of us had, but her older sibling or parents were into it, and she watched along with them. We could tell how excited she was, so we believed it must be REALLY COOL, so tell us, what's it about? What makes it so cool? She couldn't really put it into words, and looked dejected after awhile, like, "Yeah, my 3rd-grade brain cannot convey the awesomeness of this show to my fellow 3rd-graders..."

But I always took that to heart, and watched it in earnest when it was shown in reruns on Bravo during the '90s or y2k (back when Bravo was like the Criterion Collection cable channel). I think I was reminded of it by some guy in our freshman dorm -- *not* a counter-cultural type, but a boarding school preppy -- was gushing over it, playing the opening theme song, etc. "You HAVE to watch it, whenever you can!"

Artsy-fartsy types loved it, too, but it was a surprise hit sensation due to its immediate appeal to normies. Nor does it depict counter-cultural types, or Bohemian urban niche environments -- exactly the opposite from someone like Woody Allen, who is primarily popular among art-y types.

It pains me to see Twin Peaks and other related works become hijacked by sub-cultures during the "weird instead of cool" phase of the cycle. Yeah, their predecessors liked it, too, but they didn't try to hijack or gatekeep it, or taint the association with it in a way that would repel normies from gushing over it as well, like their normie predecessors did back in the early '90s.

The elements of gore, violence, occult, etc. are played for sublime threat value, not for shock value or taboo-violation value. And they're balanced or heightened with elements of the beautiful -- the total babes he selected for the cast, the stunning locations, the striking rich colors and dramatic lighting, and the rest of it all.

Really his only weird / ugly / body-horror movie was Eraserhead, from '77.

The Elephant Man, from just 3 years later, was not like that at all, despite the subject being a disfigured freakshow attraction. I checked that out from the local library ALL THE TIME in kindergarten, when Blue Velvet had only just come out.

Yes, it was possible to "be into David Lynch before it was cool" back in the '80s, even for a Midwestern kindergartener who didn't even know his name. That movie was just too cool to not watch again and again and again. The things you could have imprinted on as an impressionable child in the good ol' days...

If only that girl in 3rd grade had told me that Twin Peaks was made by the same guy who made The Elephant Man, I would've been sold right away! And not had to wait until nearly 10 years later to track it down on cable -- and later, on DirectConnect.

Along with respect for taboos, goes respect for the holy and sacred and spiritual, which he incorporated into his work like few other art-school directors. And for the same reasons, his being one of the most all-American directors in the history of the medium.

Now that our cultural identity as Americans has largely matured, further down the line the dictionary definition of "Americana" will simply be David Lynch's '80s and '90s channeling of the late '50s and early '60s.

It isn't canonically American if it isn't in a David Lynch movie or TV show!

Very admirable role, to not only contribute so much primary material to American culture, but to serve as one of its main canonizers at the secondary level as well. RIP.

Delving further into Lynch's place in the "weird vs. cool" divide.

Surrealism, dreams / dreaminess, alternate dimensions, paranormal phenomena, etc. -- not weird in themselves. Not ugly, disgusting, disorienting, alienating, sacrilegious, profane, obscene, and so on.

The main way that surrealism *can* be taken in a weird direction is warped perception, hallucinations -- in the sense of trippy out-of-the-ordinary sensory perception, not just "such a thing couldn't exist here" like a person sitting on a wall or ceiling. Lynch never went with blurred vision, melting shapes, undulating lines of perspective within the spatial frame, kaleidoscopic ballets of pure shapes, and so on.

His surrealism is more of an "alternate reality" type, where the rules and nature of sensory perception remain the same as we ordinarily feel them. Perceptual naturalism.

So where does the alternate-ness come from, then? It ties into his pervasive tone of mystery, secrets, exploring the dim hidden crypts of reality. You can't immediately make sense of what you're encountering -- the space is too barren, the space seems to have no entrance and no exit, a person is sitting silent and looking at you but not saying anything, when they speak it's in a language you don't understand, or you understand that language but it's in concealed in cryptic riddles that invite you to solve and unlock their secret meaning, and so on.

Which is not to say it's off-putting or repulsive or dread-inducing -- it can go that extreme, but fundamentally it's more about cryptic meanings, which *can* be solved and understood, but not in the way you're used to determining the meaning of things.

The closest analogy to the sensation these alternate realities produce is discovering a treasure trove of communication in a language you don't speak and can't even decipher just yet, but which sparks your curiosity to decode it and learn to communicate in this unfamiliar language. You're hoping it's something mystical and BIG, not just ancient trade regulations or something boring and mundane like that...

We've all been in situations where we can't speak the language. As long as it's temporary, it's not so alienating -- before long, we'll be back to where we *do* speak the language effortlessly. And while we're in the foreign-speaking place, we can still try to figure out a pidgin to interact with this fascinating exotic world.

That's why he ties it so much into dreams -- dreams are fleeting and temporary. You'll wake up before too long, so even if you're having a nightmare, it's not a chronic condition. You're still grounded in the safe familiar waking world of your everyday environment. You're not permanently crossing over, climbing through the looking glass, whisked away by some cosmic force that may never whisk you back, etc.

Maybe you will -- maybe this is the big sleep, not just a single night's nightmare. But dreams are not inherently permanent, they are typically fleeting acute "conditions".

So, Lynchian surrealism is more about curiosity, exploring, a sense of adventure, going on a quest, solving a mystery, unlocking secrets. Fun, exciting, stimulating, inspiring -- not ugly, off-putting, demoralizing, degrading, or queering / weirding / warping. Especially not at the perceptual level, which would induce nausea and other disgust reflexes. Semantically disorienting, but never physically sea-sickening.

How about his famously "quirky" cast of characters? Isn't quirky synonymous with weird, misfit, etc? No, it just means they're not identical clones of each other, they all have their own distinct fingerprints, voices, faces, and yes personalities.

It's "all the colors of the rainbow" diversity, where each band of color is perceptually distinct, but all are equally natural examples of "color". There's not a standard color vs. marginal, misfit, outcast colors. There's no antagonism between the colors.

So I'd rather use the term "colorful characters" rather than "quirky," which can sometimes be conflated with weird, affected, etc.

That's the other thing -- colors don't strive to construct their own persona as being orange, green, etc. Their colors are just what they naturally are -- not carefully curated constructions and affectations performed for a real or imagined audience of spectators and evaluators. Lynchian "quirkiness" of characters is always unpretentious, naturalistic, and uninhibited. That's why they seem "extra" -- they're holding nothing back, concealing nothing, lacking artifice, uninhibited by anxieties about how they'll be perceived or accepted vs. rejected, etc.

I would call these personalities "highly saturated" if we're sticking with the "colorful" metaphor. They're not phony or affected colors, they just seem out of the ordinary due to how rich and saturated the pigment is -- almost realer than real -- since the artist did not dilute the pigment before applying it to the canvas.

These colorful characters are VIVID, not ostentatious or garish or caricatured or grotesque. Not campy either -- vivid.

So in this way he's emphasizing what is natural, not playing up the artificial. Celebratory naturalism, adulating naturalism -- not warping people into weird caricatured mask-wearers.

And so his characters are the opposite of affected, neurotic, performative theatre kids who curate an aura of being quirky, twee, or le sad and depressed, or whatever else. You've never met LESS neurotic characters in the history of the world's cultures...

Why are they so uninhibited, so lacking in artifice, so carefree inhabiting their distinct personalities? Cuz they aren't misfits, weirdos, etc., but belong to a community that accepts and values them simply for being members of the in-group. Like a great big single family, they are loved and appreciated unconditionally, so they are free to be themselves instead of having to construct a persona based on what will please some conditionally-loving fickle-taste audience or jury panel.

Not just among small-town folk either -- Mulholland Drive shows the same close-knit-ness of Angelenos broadly. Not to say there's never any conflict or antagonism or drama -- there's conflict within any family. Just to say that Angelenos treat each other like members of an extended family, not transactionally (and if a character does behave that way, it marks them as evil, misfit, threatening to the order, etc.).

You might even say Lynch's characters, their environment, and their social communities are Edenic -- Edenic Americana. There was temptation, conflict, etc. in the Garden of Eden, too -- Edenic doesn't imply free from threats or dangers or temptations.

But they live in a primeval, wholesome paradise, and the drama and conflict involves their loss of innocence through temptation and experience with not-so-wholesome elements (perhaps hostile invaders of their paradise, perhaps seductive antagonists who they succumb to through their own sinful free will).

This is another reason why his characters seem dialed-up -- they are more in the allegorical direction than the documentary / verite direction. They're Edenic, mythological, legendary, even though they're portrayed as inhabiting contemporary America. Mythological naturalism, legend-making naturalism.

Brief aside to say that Lynch never indulged in making anti-heroes, or glamorizing threats to the social order. The harmony and closely-knit fabric of the social order represented Edenic paradise, and whatever threatens to tear that to shreds is portrayed as an unalloyed evil, sometimes as a literal demon from a demonic dimension.

He never glorified weirdos, misfits, and anti-social types. At most, maybe gave them a seductive coolness, like leather-jacket-wearing, muscle-car-driving Frank Booth. But that was always undercut by exploring their own seedy underbelly (not just that of the wholesome small town) -- a raving nut who couldn't have fun without taking weird drugs, sexually crippled by perverse taboo-violating fetishes, deeply insecure, and ultimately pathetic, not someone anyone would want to emulate as le dark misunderstood anti-hero. Like other Lynchian characters, he's certainly colorful and vivid and memorable -- but not glorified or shown aspirationally.

You can instantly spot who misunderstands and hijacks Lynch's "quirkiness" by whether, when Lynch comes up in conversation, they chime in with "Heineken? Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!" or "A damn fine cup of coffee!"

Agent Cooper is equally colorful, vivid, and memorable -- but not the insecure, pathetic, LARP-y weirdo villain. *He* is the one that's glorified, and shown aspirationally. A modern day role model -- Lynch was a proud Eagle Scout, after all.

There was little in the way of moral ambiguity and other theatre-kid pretentiousness in the tone and themes -- there was good, and there was evil, and the creator was clearly on the side of the good guys. To choose otherwise would make the social order vulnerable to corruption and dissolution. He wanted to uphold and preserve it, and to express his gratitude at all the Edenic wonders that it provided to its dependents.

Another brief aside to emphasize that none of this morality was even crypto-Christian, let alone openly. That would have been too Olde Worlde LARP-y. If anything, it was part of New Age spirituality and morality -- how very American of him, yet again.

Ditto for the sacred music that accompanies this morality and narrative -- distinctly 20th-century American styles like jazz, R&B, blues, gospel, rock n roll, even synth-y New Age. The Twin Peaks theme song *was* included on the original definitive New Age compilation CD, Pure Moods.

I've brought this issue up before, but characters must be likeable and relatable and normie or at least normie-friendly / normie-aspiring, if their plight is to be felt by the audience. We don't care if an angry-at-everyone, self-focused, hyper-competitive brat suffers. All those taboo-violating, filthy-club-inhabiting gay weirdos from Cruising? Hard to feel sorry for them getting serial-murdered. They're already so debased, hardly human anymore.

That's why violence and other threats in Lynch's worlds are so poignant -- they're targeting the relatively innocent Edenic normies, who belong to a community, look attractive (naturally, not as in vain looks-maxxers), love others and are loved by others. THAT is a real loss.

When directors emphasize weirdos, misfits, anti-social types, competers, grade-grubbers, attention-whores, and other self-promoting types, and make them the victims, they're trying to force us into caring about people who don't care about us and would actively cut us down if given the power to. Sorry, no sympathy for the devil or his demonic minions, no matter how hamfistedly a grown-up misfit director tries to hector us into praising those who should be condemned.

Lynch allowed us to bemoan the loss of those who deserved to still be here. Moral naturalism, ethical naturalism, not moral inversionism.

Seduction, allure, glamor, temptation, and sin were other pervasive themes in his work. Ties into the beautiful, and the Edenic, and the loss of innocence, but also the mysterious, the cryptic, the puzzling -- that's another kind of attractive, enticing seduction. Irresistible, possibly to our own downfall, but an all-too-human desire.

Things that are weird, ugly, cursed, warped, unnatural, repulsive, etc. -- are *not* tempting, *not* alluring, *not* inviting us to stray from our normie path. Even when threats to the social order are shown, they have to have a kind of glamor or beauty, at least superficially and initially.

What could possibly tempt us to stray from our already beautiful Edenic paradise? -- something even more beautiful, more concentratedly beautiful, beauty in a form we haven't yet experienced hence exotic.

There is the occasional ugly revolting outsider threat (like the dumpster demon in Mulholland Drive), but those are rare. Ugliness, gore, splatter, filth, scat -- very rare in Lynch's rendering of the evil side of the universe. Also rare in his depiction of their evil effects on the good side -- no torture-porn gruesomeness done to the victims.

This places him in square opposition to the puritanical strain of American culture, especially as it arose during the late '90s and after, with torture porn that originated with David Fincher's Seven (1995), where ugly disgusting gruesome tortures are meted out to sinners in order for the punishment to fit the crime. See this earlier post.

Lynch is part of the Dark Age-oriented empathy toward sinners approach, emphasizing the seductiveness and superficial appeal of sin, understanding and trying to coax would-be sinners away from falling into temptation. As opposed to the puritanical discipline-and-punish approach of the humanist, Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment eras, where sinners get what they deserve, reap what you sow, etc., and where they get appropriate torturing punishments (which did not exist in the Dark Ages), witch-hunted (from the Scientific Rev era, not the Dark Ages), and so on and so forth.

There are no revenge fantasies, fan-fic, or other forms of self-aggrandizement in Lynch's work, unlike in many other favorites of the art-y crowd (like Woody Allen, to pick on him again somewhat, but he really is a good foil for Lynch).

He doesn't create these worlds in order to escape the perceived injustice of this world, into a better, just world where he comes out on top of his rivals or antagonists. Not masturbatory.

It's not escapist -- in a way it's embedding yourself even further within this reality, by not treating it in a documentary / verite way, but also not as some horrible unjust prison to escape from. It's dignifying this world, its characters, and its environment -- and even elevating them to legendary, mythological, allegorical significance. That's devoting yourself even more to this world.

So it's really not so fantastical after all, the "extra"-ness or intensity comes from imagining our world to be even more real than it really is, to be more whatever-it-is than it really is. Not "super"-natural, that has other connotations -- ultra-naturalism, maybe.

And again, those brief visits to and from alternate realities or spaces, are treated entirely naturalistically -- you visit such-and-such coordinates on a map, and presto, you're transported to the Black Lodge. It's like traveling via wormhole, in a "heavy on the science" sci-fi space story.

Just as Lynch does not denigrate the normies as enemies of the weird, he does not downplay this world as a bland flavor that should be left behind for a more fantastical razzle-dazzle escape-pod. He mythologizes the normies, as well as their worldly environment. Nobody to seek revenge against, no place to flee or escape from. Somebody to be treasured, and some place worth embedding yourself further into.

The Indo-European-ness of Ashkenazi Hanukkah, Rosh Hashanah, etc.

I'll get to Christmas and New Year's posting later. For now, to get a new post started, I'll begin with a narrower topic.

Earlier posts this year have reviewed the work of others, and uncovered tons of signs from my own investigations, pointing to Ashkenazi Jews being converts to Talmudic Judaism during the 2nd half of the 1st millennium AD, and coming from mixed Indo-European sources -- one East Slavic, the other East Anatolian / Armenian / Iranian -- that eventually genetically merged into a single-mode genepool, after forming a loose cultural coalition based around controlling trade routes in and around the Khazar Khaganate.

So for the Christmas season, I naturally wondered, "How much of Hanukkah came from Christmas, Nowruz, or even earlier Indo-European holidays of this time of the year?"

Before getting to the main topic of Christmas, my investigation led me to stumble upon another highly distinctive Indo-Euro tradition that Ashkenazi Jews practice, but for Rosh Hashanah -- New Year's. They bake a loaf of challah bread for the occasion, but this isn't any ordinary loaf for any ordinary occasion -- the new year is all about bringing good luck, improving over the bygone year. So for Rosh Hashanah, they bake a key -- yes, a literal metal key -- into the loaf. This is meant to be a magic charm that will bring good luck in the new year.

Recall an earlier post that surveyed this very same ritual from Ireland to Iran, including a good luck charm in the dessert for the New Year's holiday. In some of those cultures, it is tied to Christmas, like the "king cake" from Spain and France (and places influenced by them, like New Orleans in America). They bake a figurine into a cake, and whoever gets the piece with the good luck charm will have good luck in the new year!

Well, the Ashkenazi "shlissel challah" (after the Yiddish word for "key" and the Hebraized word for "loaf of bread") is not fully identical to the Indo-Euro tradition, since there's no practice of dividing up the loaf and whoever gets the portion with the metal key has good luck. Apparently, the good luck belongs to the baker of the loaf, regardless of who finds it when eating the loaf. Also, the food item is not specifically dessert.

And yet, it's impossible to ignore the striking similarities. The "baking a key into a loaf of bread" seems to go back several centuries, although perhaps not much further. I think there must be an earlier form that this ritual took, where it was a sweet baked good and not just a typical loaf of bread, and where the good luck only belonged to the individual lucky enough to get that portion of the dessert that contained the charm -- not the preparer of the food.

But somewhere along the way, this ritual was lost, and a diluted form remained in the newer shlissel challah tradition. Needless to say, Jews from the Saharo-Arabian sphere, such as Moroccan Jews, do not practice this tradition -- it's a distinctly Indo-Euro thing. And the fact that Ashkenazi shlissel challah is 90% identical to Irish Christmas pudding and Iranian samanu for Nowruz, is a powerful testament to the Indo-European-ness, rather than Saharo-Arabian-ness, of their culture.

Moving on now to Hanukkah, two of the major features of contemporary Ashkenazi Hanukkah -- gelt and the dreidel -- are fairly recent, going back maybe a few centuries in Europe, so it's hard to infer anything about Ashkenazi roots from them. Maybe they just picked it up from their European hosts, like they did with the dreidel (teetotum). Maybe they invented it themselves, but long after Ashkenazi ethnogenesis had taken mature form (like the gelt).

However, the most prominent symbol and practice -- lighting the menorah -- is more revealing, since it goes back further.

Here is a good review of the earliest Hanukkah menorahs, whether surviving examples of them, visual depictions of them in old sources, or written accounts.

The earliest accounts of them date to circa 1000 AD in Europe, followed centuries later by illustrated depictions and surviving examples. They do not trace back to Classical times, or Bronze Age times, or anything related to Second Temple Judaism and its account of the past. They're absent for most of the Dark Ages, for that matter.

That is just after the collapse of the Khazar Khaganate, though, when the Jewish converts who controlled the trade routes would have had to migrate further westward into Europe to earn a new living. 14th-century Jewish cemeteries, like the one in Erfurt, Germany, show that they had developed a culture of their own, having their own section of a cemetery, although their genepool was still bi-modal at that point.

But sometime between the fall of the Khazar Khaganate and these 14th-C. cemeteries in Germany, Ashkenazi ethnogenesis had taken off.

The lack of menorahs during most of the Dark Ages shows that, yet again, there is no evidence showing a cultural continuity from Second Temple-period Judaeans and the Ashkenazi Jews. Most notably, the Ashkenazis have never been documented as speaking a Semitic language (until some of them began LARP-ing as neo-Judaeans, moving to Palestine and reviving Hebrew), or any other member from the Saharo-Arabian family broadly. Only Indo-European ones, like Yiddish.

Moreover, the menorahs from the earliest depictions do not resemble the Temple menorah from the Classical period, which had 7 branches, with 1 in the center, and 3 pairs of symmetrical branches leading out from the center. This verbal description and visual depiction is widely attested in Classical times themselves, e.g. in the Arch of Titus from roughly 80 AD that shows the Roman removal of the Temple menorah after destroying the Temple 10 years earlier.

Re-shaping the Hanukkah menorah to take this form, but with 4 pairs of branches plus a central branch, is pretty recent, perhaps from the 19th C or so, and maybe connected to or pre-figuring the Romantic nationalist movement of Zionism.

At any rate, the early Hanukkah menorahs don't resemble the Temple menorah whatsoever. They don't have a single branch and pairs of symmetrical branches. And the structure is not a pedestal or base, with the light-bearing elements being held aloft by the branching section. Rather, the light-bearing elements were all resting flat on a single horizontal surface, like a shelf or fireplace mantle, with no branching or supporting elements underneath the shelf.

More tellingly, the earliest depictions show candles as the light-bearing element -- a practice that continues to this day, even after the change in the shape of the main supporting structure, from a shelf to a Temple-esque design.

The original Temple menorah did not use candles at all -- the end of each branch held a cup for oil, in which a wick was dipped. Even further back, in the narrative that motivates the holiday of Hanukkah, there is a miracle of oil -- which continued to burn for 8 days and nights, when supposedly there was only enough oil to burn for one. It's not a miracle of a candle that continued to burn longer than it should have -- there's no mention of candles, only oil lamps.

Throughout the Medieval period in the Saharo-Arabian sphere, including our Western contempo depiction of it, oil lamps were the defining way of portable artificial lighting.

In fact, to this day, Moroccan Jews -- who *do* come from the Saharo-Arabian sphere, and *are* documented as speaking a Semitic language historically -- use an oil lamp form of a menorah for Hanukkah, unlike the candle-based form that the Ashkenazis use.

Did anyone in the Middle East adopt candles as much as the Europeans did? Yes -- the Persians! And the Indian groups further to their east. Candles are not so ancient, but they're ancient enough -- going back to the Romans. And yet, their spread seems to have been confined to the Indo-European sphere, with Greeks and Persians and Indians adopting them, but not so much the Arabians or North Africans.

See the article on candles from the Encyclopedia Iranica for the full history of candles in Iranian culture, but the fact that it has its own entry testifies to how central they are to Iranian culture.

And -- wait, what's this? -- Iranians light candles to place on the main table during Nowruz, along with the Half-Seen items. And like the early Ashkenazi menorahs, they are not held on a branching symmetrical candelabra, just on top of the table top. Nowruz and Christmas overlap a lot due to them being "end of the year" holidays, although over the centuries, Iranian New Year's has stayed in the arrival of springtime (when the Proto-Indo-European New Year's holiday was likely held), while the Indo-Euros who adopted Christianity moved it back toward the new central holiday of Christmas, nearly at the end of their calendar year.

Candles have been central to European Christmas traditions for centuries, including placing them on the Christmas tree in the Modern era, until there were electric lights. Or the Lutheran practice of Advent candles, which are similar to the Hanukkah menorah in keeping track of the time during the late December holiday. Candlemas, in early February, is the end of Christmas / Epiphany season, transitioning into the New Year.

Candles on a Hanukkah menorah places the Ashkenazi holiday within the Indo-Euro, rather than Saharo-Arabian, traditions. But maybe it's just the Ashkenazi adopting or assimilating to practices of their Euro hosts? How do we know it goes back further and may originate outside of Europe?

Back to those Nowruz candles! Some practitioners of Nowruz include one candle for every child in the household, making the number of candles variable -- a multiple of the number of children in the home.

Wouldn't you know it? -- the Ashkenazis also tend to increase the number of candles, as a multiple of the number of children in the home! They give everyone their own individual menorah, each of which has 9 candles.

So it's not exactly the same as Nowruz, where each child only gets one candle. But the Ashkenazi child getting 9 candles is due to the invariable nature of 9 in the Hanukkah holiday -- it celebrates the 8 nights of the miracle of the oil, plus the 1 candle to help light the others. Each child must get 9 candles, not just 1, otherwise it wouldn't commemorate the 8 nights.

However, the number of candles does increase as a multiple of the number of children in the home, for both Nowruz and Ashkenazi Hanukkah. I don't know of a similar "certain number of candles per child at home" tradition in other Indo-Euro cultures during Christmas or New Year's. If it exists, it must be fairly marginal, whereas the practice is widespread enough to this day for Nowruz that it's mentioned in reviews of the holiday rituals.

And the good ol' Moroccan Jews seal up the other side of the argument -- they don't have one menorah per child, or anything that varies with the number of children at home. They only use one menorah for the entire household, no matter how many people live there.

So, Ashkenazi Hanukkah rituals more closely resemble Iranian Nowruz than Moroccan Jewish Hanukkah, aside from the indisposable elements like commemorating the number 8, artificial light-bearing things, etc.

Those Late Medieval depictions of menorahs in Europe only show them lighting 8 candles in a place that is probably a synagogue. And in that context, there's no family living there -- so they can't, in principle, vary the number of menorahs with the number of residents. Perhaps as Hanukkah became a popular holiday within the domestic setting, it met an older ritual that involved "increasing the number of lights according to the number of children". And that older ritual came from the Iranian sphere.

This is yet another sign that the source populations for that coalition that would eventually become the Ashkenazi Jews definitely included one in or around Iran.

But more than that -- I think most of their religious and sacred traditions were carried over from that Iranian source, and not from the East Slavic source that also held sway in their coalition.

I've mentioned the divide between Germanic-surnamed Ashkenazis, who seem to have a higher proportion of genetic and/or cultural background in the Iranian source, vs. the Slavic-surnamed Ashkenazis, who have less of it and more of the Slavic source.

The Iranian source seems to have been more cultured, elite, prestigious, sophisticated, with a long history of being administrators, bureaucrats, scientists, artists... and perhaps also priests. Not merely "religious officials," but priests as an elevated specialist elite stratum in society, propped up by the material surplus of a large sedentary agrarian economy.

East Slavs in the Dark Ages simply did not have that kind of economy, nor did the West Slavs for that matter. Only the South Slavs did -- namely, the Bulgarian Empire, who sponsored and spread the Cyrllic Alphabet among the previously illiterate Slavs, adopted and codified Christianity for the Slavs (including the use of Old Bulgarian, AKA "Old Church Slavonic," as the liturgical language, even for other Orthodox Slavs to this day), founded the Orthodox Slav style of churches through their proximity to the Byzantine Empire, and so on and so forth.

East Slavs were semi-nomadic, mainly peasants, no large or powerful central state ever in their history, illiterate, with a folk culture but not much of a high culture, etc. They represented the brusque, pushy, materialistic trader type. That type also exists in a civilized culture like Iran, but there's also the spiritual specialist type, who fill a permanent role of "priest".

So when it came time to come up with rituals for the new converts to Judaism, the Ashkenazis all looked at each other and decided, "Well, you Iranian types seem to know what you're doing with the whole priestly role -- why don't you handle that part of our culture-to-be? As long as we East Slavs don't find anything too fishy about it, we'll just take your civilized word for it."

This ties into the genetic data on Ashkenazi Jews, where there are certain genetic markers for the so-called "priestly bloodline" AKA the kohanim (such as those with the surname Cohen). They are supposedly descended from the temple priests of the Second Temple era, who, after the temple was destroyed in 70 AD, continued to play some kind of new priestly-ish role in society, just not the same was as tending to the now-destroyed temple. And they supposedly kept that role within their bloodline, only marrying into other priestly families.

Well, the "keeping our bloodlines priestly" I can buy -- but not them tracing back to the Second Temple Judaeans. We know from all the other evidence that they have no genetic or cultural connection to them, not even religiously -- the Ashkenazis are only documented as practicing Judaism from the Talmudic era, not Second Temple Judaism.

However, if the kohanim within the Ashkenazis were more likely to come from the Iranian rather than the Slavic sub-population of their founders, then they'll at least pass as "Middle Eastern", which is always a weasel-word in genetic studies. Middle Eastern meaning an Indo-European-speaking "fire worshiper"? -- or a Semitic-speaking monotheist? Very different cultures!

And who knows? Maybe there was one actual Judaean priest who wandered into Persia in order to help train the new converts, and he left some of his kohanim bloodline there, where it got preserved through priestly caste endogamy. I highly doubt that, but even if true, it only says there was that one ancestor who was Judaean, vs. 99% of Ashkenazi "Middle Eastern" ancestors being Iranian / Armenian / East Anatolian.

That suggests that, like Iranian bureaucrats, Iranian priests are mainly based on their role in society, not on the specific institution it serves. They were priests under Zoroastrianism, then mullahs under Islam, and some of them as kohanim within the Iranian-derived portion of the Ashkenazi Jews.

That makes me wonder about when Christianity used to be a big deal in Persia and further east ("Nestorians"). That was during the Dark Ages, when Zoroastrianism, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism were all vying with each other for influence. There were certainly Iranian Christian priests in those days.

Maybe there's a common priestly genetic sub-population that they all came from, no matter which religion they performed the priestly role within. At that narrower level, I'm sure there are genetic differences -- Zoroastrian priests wouldn't have married into Christian priest families (knowingly), or with Muslim clerics (knowingly), and so on.

Maybe take the Parsis in India as a convenient example of Zoroastrian priests, although DNA from actual Late Classical / Medieval Zoroastrian priests would be ideal. Muslim clerics in Iran are still around, with some families or bloodlines being well known already, I'm sure. And then use Ashkenazi kohanim as the other comparison.

I'll bet, at a certain level, they all came from the same priestly genepool in Iran! Just like Iranian bureaucrats who were famously adept at serving one empire, or another, or another still. It's the specialized role, not the master, that they preserved. Iran is not an anarchic, tribal, nomadic culture of honor like it used to be way back in the Bronze Age, or like many of its neighbors have been (Turkic, Mongol, Arabian). It's one of the most thoroughly and thorough-going civilized cultures on Earth, for better or worse.

Where else would new converts to Judaism recruit their priests from, if Iranians were an option? For the Ashkenazis, it was -- and they did.