“I fell down a bit of a ruins research rabbit-hole”

readable version https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/933753595174031361

Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) has a lot of fun with irreverence toward hermits, especially one on a 60-ft pillar:

> His stand was a pillar sixty feet high, with a broad platform on the top of it. He was now doing what he had been doing every day for twenty years up there—bowing his body ceaselessly and rapidly almost to his feet. It was his way of praying. I timed him with a stop watch, and he made 1,244 revolutions in 24 minutes and 46 seconds. It seemed a pity to have all this power going to waste. It was one of the most useful motions in mechanics, the pedal movement; so I made a note in my memorandum book, purposing some day to apply a system of elastic cords to him and run a sewing machine with it. I afterward carried out that scheme, and got five years’ good service out of him; in which time he turned out upward of eighteen thousand first-rate tow-linen shirts, which was ten a day. I worked him Sundays and all; he was going, Sundays, the same as week days, and it was no use to waste the power. These shirts cost me nothing but just the mere trifle for the materials—I furnished those myself, it would not have been right to make him do that—and they sold like smoke to pilgrims at a dollar and a half apiece, which was the price of fifty cows or a blooded race horse in Arthurdom.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/86/86-h/86-h.htm#c22

Tom Cahill, in his book "Mysteries of the Middle Ages" [1] explains explains how in ancient times, people had very different attitudes towards hermits, stylites, and anchorites:

"Though often represented as a period of repression... the Middle Ages offered - at least in religious roles - more options than now allowed. ...in the Middle Ages such social oddities were welcomed and assigned a place of honor. While the rest of us went about our worried lives, they prayed for us continually, speaking to God on our behalf."

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=_vikHFhqIwIC&source=gbs_na...

I'm impressed by the way he used Twitter as a table of contents to his own writing. https://twitter.com/PaulMMCooper/status/915959278028148736

A question for any passer-by historians: how did they deal with urination and defecation? Was there a secondary bucket system for that? Or do you just know to not approach the north side of the pillar?

For those looking to see more on this kind of thing....

Simon of the Desert is a famous 1965 foreign film by a famous director (Luis Bunuel) that is loosely based on the life of one of these Stylite ascetics.

It is a product of both the 1960s and Mexican magical realism (like Juan Rulfo) so expect it to be weird and you won't be disappointed.

It's surprising that any part of the temple survived at all, given the early Christians' destruction of "pagan" temples.

So how do these people got on the top of these pillars? What did they do there all day?

This shows the joy of our profession; find a loose thread and pull it.

Monty Python would have had a field day with this.

Fascinating story and a reminder o how poor a fit Twitter is for long form writing. I would love to read the atlasobscura version of that thread.

Interesting stuff, but is there a more obnoxious way to tell a story than in a twitter thread? I was hoping that Medium was starting to solve this problem, but clearly not everyone has adopted it.

Writer notices that a 1800s picture of the temple of Jupiter at Olympus had an addition above the pillars that isn't there in other images nor in the temple reproductions. Turns out it was a dwelling for Christian ascetics, the dwelling being censored from some images and removed to return the ruins to their "original".

Think that's about it, from a scan through.