Remember when some conservative twitter posted this?
This is the Age of Sin. Reject the order of creation. Revel in the annihilation of Man as the image of God. DESTROY. Plot designs of death. Disfigure the face of Man and Woman.
I feel like they were catholic, but they didn’t have the medieval decency to post it in Latin. I tried, and would like a second opinion:
Haec est aetas peccati. Reicitote ordinem creationis. Gaudent annihilatio Hominum qui imago Dei. DESTRUITOTE. Insidiàte consilia mortis. Disfaciatote faciem Virum et Mulierum.
I invented a second person plural imperative in “disfaciatote.” Whaddyagonnado, ehh? Undecided on Virum vs Hominum, or if a royal singular like Man in the original could be kosher in Latin.
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I would try translating the third clause as something like Gaudete in interitu hominis sicut imago Dei, but I wouldn’t be too worried, we are all cum mortuis in lingua mortua.
Latin pedant here:
Why invent a 2nd person plural imperative when Latin already has one?
reicite!
destruite!
Gaudete!
Not sure what case ‘annihilatio” should be in. Can’t find “disfaciare” anywhere.
And “faciem Virum” should be “faciem Virorum” (gen. plural) or perhaps “faciem hominum”.
Not sure how to translate “man as the image of god” — ‘hominem [ut] imaginem Dei’? The English is ambiguous — is it destruction of man (who happens to be in the image of God)? or of the notion that man is in the image of God?
It sounds better in English — sort of like pseudo-Satanic death-metal lyrics.
Maybe try it in Swedish? Detta är Syndens tidsålder. Förkasta skapelseordningen. Njut av förintelsen av människan som Guds avbild. FÖRSTÖRA. Plottdesigner av döden. Vanställe mans och kvinnas ansikte.
Icelandic? Þetta er öld syndarinnar. Hafna röð sköpunar. Gleðstu yfir tortímingu mannsins sem ímynd Guðs. EYÐJA. Söguþráður dauðans. Afskræma andlit karls og konu.
(via Goggle Translate)
You knew I’d show up, right?
I am, in fact, sat here covering a Spanish class while marking Latin homework. So I might as well take a break to mark more!
First off, the future imperative ending in -ote is very rare and looks highly unusual in both Classical and Mediaeval Latin. Far more usual, and with basically the same meaning, is the regular present imperative. So I’ve fixed that for you.
“virum” versus “hominum” – “vir” is man as in male, homo is man as in human. I think the latter is meant in the first line, the former in the second.
“reicio” is more “throw back” than “reject”. “respuo”, meaning “spit back” or “vomit back” has the forceful sense you’re after.
“gaudent” is the regular present tense third person plural – “they rejoice”. You want the imperative “gaudete” (see post #1, above)
Capitalisation is interesting in Latin. I tend to prefer the Classical habit of not capitalising anything but proper nouns, but other languages’ capitalisation rules have crept into usage in Latin at times, and the Middle Ages was quite a hodgepodge. No self-respecting Medieval theologian would capitalise “homo”, though, unless referring to Jesus specifically. They would, however, always capitalise “Deus”.
I’ve changed “qui est imago” to “secundum imaginem” as the latter is closer to Medieval Christian usage “according to the image”.
“destruo” is the root of our “destroy”, but more literally means “spread about” or “unmake”. “deleo” is more usual.
“insidiare” is an acceptable Medieval version of the deponent “insidior”, but its meaning is more “enact an ambush, spring a trap”, rather than “plot an ambush, set a trap”. I like the sense of trap or ambush rather than the more prosaic “consilia” (plans, intentions, designs), so I’ve changed it to “insidias facite” – “plan an ambush”.
“disfacere” is, again, the root of “deface”, but again means more “unmake” or “tear down” rather than “ruin the appearance of”. “deturpare” (lit. “make foul”) would work, but I have gone with “maculare” (“stain”) for the sense.
The question of whether Man and Woman have one face between them or one face each is relevant here. I have assumed one face between them on the idea that it is humanity’s common face we’re getting at here, though a transphobe would probably assert that a man’s face and a woman’s face are entirely different things, and avoid implying they are the same. Which is another good reason to pick singular over plural.
“virum” and “mulierum” are genitive plurals. If we’re going with “man” and “woman” as generic categories then we would want a categorical singular.
So we have:
haec est aetas peccatorum. respuite ordinem creationis. Gaudete in annihilatio hominis secundum imaginem Dei. DELETE! insidias mortis facite. maculate faciem viri feminaeque.
Oh yes, and Latin tends to prefer concrete nouns to abstract ones. So I’ve changed “age of sin” to “age of sinners”.
am i so obvious cartomancer? yes i am.
what i didn’t expect was the other replies. now i’m interested – does anybody disagree with cartomancer, and if so, what’s your reasoning?
OK nobody willing to do this competitively, I’ll just throw out a couple of questions:
I think I can see why you used secundum, but looking at all the possible meanings they say on wiktionary, and less importantly what google translate does with it, it feels like it changes the meaning too much – like it’s always “man because of / according to the image of god,” where I have to imagine there’s a different preposition (or whatever the term) that could get closer.
goog transl consistently thinks the insidias are singular, not sure why. i trust you more, of course, but just raises a question mark for me.
re: maculate, it seems mild. i wonder if there’s a latin source of a myth where a nymph was turned into a monster by a god, like lamia or medusa, that sort of thing, and what word they used in that situation.
xanthe’s sicut seems more accurate by my dubious online sources.
allison – i used this page https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/disfacio to get at my own construction for that. amusingly there are links that should go to latin variants that instead jump to romanian, so wiktionary showing its weaknesses.
“according to the image”… hard for me to see that as being the same meaning as “as the image.” I do think the english is pretty clear. capital Man with regards to quality of being the image of god, basic bibble shit. another way of constructing the idea in english might be “celebrate/enjoy/savor/exult in/delight in/etc the erasure/removal/obliteration of the godlike aspect of man’s image” … idk.
Okay,
“secundum” was pretty straightforwardly “according to” in Classical Latin (though rarely used – ut or sicut were more usual). In Medieval Latin, particularly theological texts, it became much more common, and was used more in the sense of “in the capacity of”, which I think nails the sense here – we’re considering Man in the specific sense that he is made in the image of God, rather than in one of His other capacities. ut or sicut are fine though (but remember that the verb must remain in the indicative or it turns it into a purpose clause).
insidias (nominative insidiae) is one of those odd Latin words that only ever occurs in the plural (like castra – military camp), and since you can’t further pluralise a plural, that plural form can denote either one trap/ambush/plot or several depending on context.
The strength of “maculare” depends on context. It is the word you would use for getting gravy on your trousers, but in a theological context it can have very grand implications, tied to sin and pollution (consider, for example, the “immaculate conception” – not an insignificant concept in Christian thought). These implications go back to the standard Aristotelian view that some non-material things are without internal contradictions and thus do not suffer natural corruption. Thus, admitting any stain or flaw is proof positive that a thing has regressed from a pristine, eternal, spiritual state to a flawed, temporary, material one. Which I think is very much the sense our esteemed bigot intended.
I’m not a Latin scholar by any measure; I tried working Latin into my science baccalaureate as an additional subject in first year and soon found almost anything from the arts faculties was sadly unworkable with my timetable. I just sing Latin occasionally (most recently a performance on the 200th anniversary of the première of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis). So for example, I knew gaudent (“they rejoice”) was clearly a mistranslation of the imperative to the reader to “rejoice”, hence gaudete. Generally cartomancer’s translation is completely solid. I preferred sicut to secundum because the standard translation (almost a cliché) of the latter is “according to”, while the former seems closer to the sense (?) of the tweet, and the translation of the third clause was most obviously defective to me.
One of the deep, underlying-cause cognitive errors in said bigot being that there ever was a “pristine, eternal, spiritual state” to regress from. It’s the “temporarily embarrassed angels” problem all over again. A refusal to acknowledge that we’re animals, mortal and made of meat and possessed of drives and instincts and part of rather than above nature, and that there is nothing wrong with that.
There’s something scary to some people, maybe even to most people, in that, but I don’t think it’s the usual off-the-cuff philosopher’s answer of mere “fear of death”. Death, after all, is in the materialist view just “you lose consciousness, much as you do every night, but this time you don’t wake up again”. It’s cause to lament unfinished business and unexperienced things you were curious about, but no more occasion for existential terror than sleep I should think. If anything, death should scare religious believers more, because there will always be that nagging doubt of “did I do well enough to not end up in hell?” for them. Personally, I fear dying itself much less than I do the prospect of a period of inescapable pain preceding it, or losing someone else.
In the end I think it has something to do with a loss of control or even a “mere” loss of status. Even the poorest and most downtrodden human is a king among the flies and worms and dogs and plants … as long as they believe themselves to be above nature. The “lost” control was of course an illusion. Thinking of yourself as a temporarily embarrassed angel won’t deter a tornado from smacking you around with a two-by-four that used to be part of your house, or make a great white back down when it sees your tasty legs wiggling in the water, or anything like that. And not doing so won’t make you any less capable of availing yourself of Doppler radar or other ways of evading natural hazards, even those that can’t be tamed.
(The natural hazard that scares me? Famine, followed by earthquake.
Famine is a civilization-killer and climate change could yet prove to be its herald; and earthquakes are the one disaster type for which we have still no meaningful warning capability, striking as a bolt out of the blue.)–strikethru edit by GAS. ya edging up to my doomerism policy again, bud.
thanks for the comments ye all. xanthe, i used to see you around more at some point in the past, but don’t remember where. were you on a+? nice to see you again.
Likewise! Yes, I was on A+, while it lasted, eventually being a moderator of the forum for some of the dying days. I’d been a fan of Pharyngula back in the scienceblogs.com era, and have drifted away from movement atheism and back and away and back many times, on some inconstant orbit while the oceanic mass sundering the Deep Rifts churns away slowly. It is dispiriting or at least sobering to see where some of the people, who espoused humanistic principles along with their atheistic world views, have ended up over the years. Quite a few more of the good folks I remember are happily out and having transitioned, more than were out back in the day though, so that’s nice. 🙂
excellent. wait. i resemble that remark lol.
Awesome, isn’t it? 🙂
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