i will bring evil from the north, and great destruction

I am not a safe person to follow because I at any moment will mention that old-timey scholars thought the selkie myth was from Greenlandic Inuit women drifting all the way to the Orkneys in sealskin kayaks and being “rescued” and marrying into the local population. That was a thing people actually thought. You can find articles about it on JSTOR. 

broke: the term “Finn” as an umbrella term for sorcerers and magical animals in the folklore of the insular North Atlantic (Iceland, Faroes, Shetland, Orkneys, other Scottish islands)  is clearly a carryover from the older saga tradition, where Finno-Ugric religious traditions are otherized by being parsed as “magical”

woke:

me, listing off my list of previously tried meds to the intake person: ...and that's all of them I think

him:

him: I think I am going to call the head of department out of his lunch break

WE HAVE ACHIEVED MOOD STABILIZERS

You Won’t Be Alone (2022) dir. Goran Stolevski

If you eat a couple bulbs of raw fennel or stick them up there your period will probably be affected but you could also just get an IUD or take your birth control and if you take your birth control it'll be, you know, properly dosed

I love cultivating plants and herbs but I don’t want to spend all my fucking time GARDENING when I could have 12 years of set it and forget it contraception, and access to an abortion to ctrl alt delete any unwelcome guests in my uterus.

well silphium doesn't grow in the continental US. it only grows in a few microclimates of the eastern Mediterranean, looks like just in türkiye for now. so the person cultivating and harvesting it would be, on balance of probability, an impoverished and exploited farm worker in a country without a lot of labor protections and with a large and frequently abused refugee population (trafficking refugees and migrants without documentation for agricultural labor happens everywhere, at alarming frequency).

so like what have we accomplished here. new type of fennel grown in potentially unethical conditions that you can maybe self administer somehow to perhaps do a diy abortion? maybe? according to a handful of people writing two thousand years ago?

even if it is effective, you have a rare and very expensive new food crop that can only be grown in a few places in coastal türkiye that doesn't catch on in America because it causes severe cramping and miscarriages, because if it's really that effective as abortion medicine it would also affect the unsuspecting person who just wanted a salad and has now consumed enough silphium to make their uterus yell at them for a week.

or it doesn't catch on in America because it's banned in half the country as an abortiofacient.

Don't think we solved anything here

If you eat a couple bulbs of raw fennel or stick them up there your period will probably be affected but you could also just get an IUD or take your birth control and if you take your birth control it'll be, you know, properly dosed

One of my core memories from sophomore Latin class was this girl telling the professor that at her high school the girlies would eat fennel and parsley before prom so their periods would come early and him going that's probably how they used silphium ha

This was a course about Roman women taught by a guy specializing in Roman women, specifically the grave inscriptions for female Roman prostitutes, and we were struggling through a medical text, so it's not that insane of an exchange. Crucially he didn't advise the ladies of the class to find some silphium if they were in a jam

Oh holy shit they found Silphium alive and growing in the wild.

Like now that I am awake I need to reiterate how huge this is. It was presumed harvested to extinction by the Romans. It was a favorite flavoring and according to historians one of the best contraceptives ever known. True or not it would be fantastic to study that but it being extinct made that impossible.

This is such a huge deal! I hope they get it figured how to grow it.

Please.

It’s been so bad lately.

There was an earthquake DURING the hurricane today.

Only the return of long-lost Slut Mint could bring 2023 back from the brink.

Oh, and if we find out it’s savory we’re either calling it Whoregano or “This-Fetus-Will-Not-Be-Carried-To-Turmeric”

Thank you, no further questions.

Guys I am begging you not to automatically take at face value two or three ancient descriptions of a particular herb's abortifacient qualities. Ancient medical authorities by and large did not know what the fuck they were talking about.

I cannot find any peer reviewed sources linking the "discovered" plant to the ancient one, nor can I find any scientific sources testing the supposed abortiofacient qualities of the discovered plant.

I did find this blog by a classics MA debunking the myth of silphium the magical abortifacient.

And this article points out that the presumed abortiofacient qualities of silphium would not be relevant for an overharvesting extinction because Roman law at the time (and fifty years before!) privileged having many children.

Silphium might have been part of the fennel family, which does have some minor abortiofacient qualities. If it was a type of fennel then yes, sure, might have been good for that, but the ancient sources also say it was a treatment for epilepsy, dog bites, and respiratory illnesses. It was not specifically held up by the ancient sources as solely or even primarily a medicine for ending pregnancies. The article I linked there even admits that one of the passages they use to highlight the ancient appreciation for silphium could just be referencing the fact it was associated with the region of Cyrene.

It was not overharvested because it was an effective abortiofacient. It was overharvested because it was delicious. The ancient sources speak to this.

The reason we think it's an abortifacient above everything else is because of a historian named John Riddle, who made some rather expansive claims about it. That escaped into listicle land.

We HAVE safe, effective abortifacients. The problem isn't that we don't have enough. The problem is that we don't have access to them. Pliny isn't a fucking pharmacologist.

Hands down my fave thing about hurricane season is when zoos put their birds in the bathroom to protect them from the wind and we get images like this

Photo from St Augustine Alligator Farm

tundras are soooo pretty aand beautiful to look at smears of best ever colors on flat and muted greens and yellows.... hard agree with los campesinos like yes take a body to tundra for real......

nature but it looks like a sad hug its so real