Another superlative article from our Czech colleagues:
China’s Superstition Boom in a Godless State In post-pandemic China, superstition has surged into a booming industry, as youth turn to crystals, fortune-telling, and AI oracles in search of hope and meaning. By Ansel Li, Sinopsis (5/13/25)
Introduction
It is one of history’s more striking ironies: the People’s Republic of China, an officially atheist, Marxist-Leninist regime that has long sought to suppress all forms of organized religion, now finds itself caught in a tidal wave of superstition. Post-pandemic, what began as a trickle has become a torrent—an uncontrolled spread of fortune-telling, lucky crystals, and spiritual nonsense, growing in the vacuum left by institutional faith and spread further by a hyper-connected internet society.
This phenomenon is not merely a return to old habits or rural mysticism. It has become a nationwide consumer frenzy, driven by the very demographic the Communist Party hoped would be its most rational constituency: the young and educated. In chasing these modern symbols of hope, they are losing more than just money.
This morning, as is my wont, I stepped out on my stoop to test the weather. Across the street, I saw children running around picking up eggs that had been hidden in the grass here and there and delightedly putting them in the baskets they held with one hand. These eggs were colored, all right, but made of plastic, not the kind of natural eggs we used to spend a lot of time on boiling and dyeing and, if we were fancy and clever, making designs and even using multiple colors through a combination of melted wax and various tools and techniques. I fondly recall the olfactory and tactile sensations of vinegar, melted wax used during the process, and smooth egg shells.
Really elaborately decorated Easter eggs are called pysanky (plural form of pysanka from the Ukrainian word pysaty meaning "to write" (source), cf. Russian письменность ("writing"). You don't have to be a pro and make pysanky like the ones shown here, but you can derive a lot of fun and satisfaction making your own colored Easter eggs that are dyed and decorated in a fashion that is commensurate with your time and talents.
Stumbled upon an earliest surviving partial bible translation into Japanese made by Manuel Barreto in 1591 (known as バレト写本 or Reg. lat. 459), here's the first paragraph.
In the first part of this inquiry, I stressed the connection between Mesopotamian and Indus Valley (IV) civilizations. My aim was to provide support for a scriptal and lingual link between the undeciphered IV writing system and the well-known languages and writing systems of Mesopotamia (MP), which tellingly is translated as liǎng hé liúyù 兩河流域 ("valley / drainage basin of two rivers") in contemporary Sinitic. The point is to detach IV from IE, which is a red herring and a detraction from productive efforts to decipher the IV script. If we concentrate on the civilization, languages, and writing systems of MP, it should be easier to crack the IV code.
"Cultural Nuances in Subtitling the Religious Discourse Marker Wallah in Jordanian Drama into English." Al Salem, Mohd Nour et al. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 12, no. 1 (March 6, 2025). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-04515-6.
The Indus Valley civilization, also called the Harappan civilization, is seen by experts as on a par with the better-known ones of Egypt, Mesopotamia and China.
One of the earliest, it flourished on the banks of the Indus and Saraswati Rivers during the Bronze Age. It had planned townships, water management and drainage systems, huge fortified walls and exquisite pottery and terra cotta artistry.
It's interesting precisely where they positioned the curse tablet:
A skeleton found during excavations beneath a historic hospital in Orléans, France,
has a curse tablet between its legs. (Image credit: Service Archéologie Orléans (SAVO))
When I got to the Latin, I was puzzled by whether I should leave "sit" in there or get rid of it. I knew it must be some form of the verb "to be", but I wasn't sure exactly what form and what function it played..
So I put "sit" in Google Translate Latin and pushed the translate button, but forgot that I had the "into" language set on Chinese. I was surprised / delighted / tickled when the Latin came out as Chinese "suí tā qù 隨它去" (lit., "let it go"). On the one hand, I was amazed by how colloquial it sounded, but, on the other hand, I thought it was a brilliant attempt on the part of GT to capture the grammatical sense of Latin "sit".
Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-fifty-eighth issue, “The Dance of Qian and Kun”, by Denis Mair:
ABSTRACT: This collection of papers and interpretive essays reflects my interest in structuralism as practiced by ancient Chinese thinkers who devoted their study to the symbolism of a fertility dance. I point to evidence that the authors/compilers of the oracle used a dance of contraries as a matrix to provide context for archetypal life situations. Some of the papers present empirical evidence of architectonic, dance-like features in the overall formal matrix: oscillations, rhythms, symmetries, and gradients of integration. In other essays I present plausible readings of individual symbols. My aim in doing so is to demonstrate that the symbols contain dense patterning and conceptual seeds that encourage symbolic elaboration. For instance, I show that centrality, ebb-and-flow, rapprochement of contraries, fertility worship, and many other ideas are implicit in the text. Such implicit ideas give the text a wide range of applicability.
The interpretive essays touch upon the question of how human sacrifice, used as a display of competency by late Shang-era elites, eventually tapered off in the early to mid-Zhou era. In that period the Zhou swerved off in a new direction toward civil religion and a concern with intrinsic values of human self-understanding, which pointed the way to the teachings of a humanistic educator like Confucius. Although the internecine wars of the Zhou were violent, the act of killing was no longer put on display as an apex ritual, as it earlier had been, used, for example, to commemorate the building of construction projects in the late Shang. My analyses of specific symbols give evidence of a distinct turn toward humanistic thinking in the early to mid-Zhou.
Dr. Hu Shih (1891-1962) was arguably the greatest Chinese scholar of the 20th century, for whom I have the utmost respect. He and I thought alike on a number of important subjects: language, literature, and script reform, philosophy (we both were attracted to the utilitarian-pragmatist-logician and defensive strategist Mo Zi [c. 470 -c.391 BC]), recognition of the great influence of Indian civilization upon Chinese culture, dedication to public service and education, devotion to democracy, and so forth. Overall, the only other 20th-century thinker and writer who could compete / compare with Hu Shih was Lu Xun (1881-1936), but the latter came from the left, whereas Hu Shih came from the right. I admired them both.
Even when I was a child, I was never a theist, and I stopped going to church when I went to college and my mother wasn't around to urge me to do so. Likewise, I suspected that Hu Shih, being a Confucian minded Chinese intellectual, was not a theist either. So it was quite a surprise when the following notice from the Hu Shih Memorial Hall in Taipei came to my attention:
Having just come back from two weeks in London and Belfast, this article is particularly germane for me:
"The Irish and Scots Aren’t Fooled by Your Fake Accent: Some cultures are better than others at spotting impostors. The skill could allow them to pick out outsiders trying to infiltrate their groups." By Eric Niiler, WSJ (12'16/24)
I love to hear Scots and Irish speak, although often I cannot understand all that they are saying. Twenty and more years ago, the head circulation librarian at my university had such a mellifluous lilt that I would sometimes check out books when she was on duty just to hear her sweet tongue, but I had no idea which particular variety of Scottish (I think) she was speaking.
