The Latin Asclepius

Among the many religious and other cultural syncretisms which resulted from the conquest of Egypt, first by the Greeks in the 4th century BC and then the Romans in the 1st century AD, is the figure of Hermes Trismegistus, the thrice blessed Hermes, clearly based on the Egyptian god Thoth. However, while Thoth has an ibis head upon a human body, Hermes Trismegistus is often portrayed with a more typical human appearance.

 

The Corpus Hermeticum, a collection of 16 dialogues in Greek, purported to have been written by Hermes Trismegistus in great antiquity -- some said that Trismegistus had personally advised Moses -- was translated by Marsilio Ficino from Greek to Latin in the 15th century, and has been translated into many other languages since, and occasioned great interest without interruption to the present day, although the scholarly consensus now is that they were written some time in the 2nd or 3rd century AD. 

Another Hermetic dialogue, known as the Latin Asclepius, somewhat longer than those in the Corpus Hermeticum, appears to come from the same time and place, although it is preserved in Latin, in manuscripts also containing philosophical writing by Apuleius, the 2nd-century AD North African Latin poet best known for his epic poem The Golden Ass, sometimes called the Metamorphoses of Apuleius. 

The surviving manuscripts which contain the Latin Asclepius alongside Apuleius' philosophical are as old as the 12th and 13th centuries. Early editions of Apuleius routinely included the Latin Asclepius, under the assumption that Apuleius has translated it from Greek, but comparisons with the striking style of Apuleius' works has for the most part laid that thesis to rest. That the the dialogue was originally Greek seems well-established. Greek versions of passages are cited by Augustus and Lactantius.

The Asclepius who gives this dialogue its title is described within it as a demigod and grandson of the Greek god of medicine of the same name, and not that god himself as is sometimes asserted. The same demigod Asclepius appears in several of the Greek dialogues of the Corpus Hermeticum. In the Latin Asclepius, Hermes Trismegistus, Asclepius and the god Tat discuss the relationships between the physical and the metaphysical, between the human and the divine, between the mortal and the eternal and other categories of opposites, with Trismegistus however emphasizing the unity of all things, a principle sometimes referred to in Hermetic philosophy simply as the One. 

As far as I know, there has not been much progress made on the question of who wrote the Corpus Hermeticum, the Latin Asclepius and the other related texts in Greek, Latin, Coptic and Armenian. Many of these Coptic texts are among the artifacts in the famous Nag Hammadi library found in the 1940's. For example, I have not found so much as a guess about whether the author of the Latin Asclepius also authored any of the texts preserved in other languages. However, the Latin Asclepius, whether in Latin or translated, tends these days to published along with other Hermetic texts, and no longer with the works of Apuleius.

I'm a Bear, and Not Just Because I'm Big and Cuddly

I see huge overvaluation everywhere -- yes, even now, after the markets have fallen somewhat. Here are just a few examples: 

I believe that EV stocks, even after the crash so far, are greatly overvalued. The only way that TSLA was worth a trillion dollars is if you bought the dream that Tesla was going to dominate the worldwide automotive industry. At half a trillion or even 200 billion, it would still be ridiculously overvalued. 

 OEM's are transitioning to EV's, they always planned to do so, which means that the narrative about Tesla being unique and disruptive has always been fiction. 

I love EV's. I think the OEM's will make great EV's. 

Turning from EV stocks to cryptocurrency, we're going from overvalued assets, to assets which are very nearly literally worthless. Blockchain technology has a lot of applications. REAL applications. Encryption, managing smart grids, etc. It should be valued based on reality. 

EV's, cryptocurrency, wristwatches, automobiles in general, real estate -- there's an awful lot of things which are still hugely overvalued. I don't know where the rational bottom of this market is, but we're still far above it. 

Having said all of that: of course, the value of securities never needs to be rational. It could be that I'm being grossly irrational by emphasizing rational valuations. All I know for sure is nobody knows where the market will go, and nobody ever knows. Some of us sometimes guess well. That's the most anybody can hope for.

Method to Musk's Madness?

Many observers assume that Elon Musk has been unraveling a bit lately, because that's what it looks like.

But we've got to remember that Musk has occasionally been pretty good at putting over a public perception. Remember, for example, when people thought he was a nice guy who invented all sorts of stuff and didn't care about money and just wanted to save the planet? That was because Musk wanted people to believe that.

Maybe Musk's recent announcement that he has switched from Democrat to Republican, claiming that the Democratic Party has become "the party of division and hate," is just more calculated shaping of his public image.

 

Maybe it's part of his exit strategy from Tesla. It would fit in with a time-honoured tradition of people moving from Left to Right politically, and then proclaiming that their younger selves meant well, but were hopelessly naive. In Musk's case, the stereotypical headshaking over his younger librul self could go something like: "Once I, too, believed that mankind could survive without oil. And I tried my best to make that hopelessly naive dream a reality [...]" And then he becomes a US Senator from Montana, taking some of Montana's wealthy Democrats with him into the GOP. 

Either that, or he really is going completely crazy. Because, Republican and the owner/Dear Leader of one of the world's largest EV manufacturers at the same time -- that's not a good fit.

It didn't occur to me until just this moment that perhaps Musk has announced that he's a Republican precisely because it's a bad fit with leading Tesla. And because he senses that he may have pumped about as much money out of Tesla as he can -- if he can sell his Tesla shares before they become relatively worthless.

Growth of EV Sales

Worldwide, about 6.75 EV's were sold in 2021, which was more than twice the 2020 total of 3.3 million, which itself was a 60% increase over 2019's total of 2 million. In the first quarter of 2022, 2 million units were sold, almost twice the 1.1 million sold in Q1 2021. 

 

No one knows how quickly EV sales will increase in the future, and no one I've seen is predicting that sales will continue to double every year -- but just for fun, just for the moment, let's pretend they will. Double 2022's global total of 6.75 million would be 13.5 million in 2023, 27 million in 2024, 54 million in 2025, 108 million in 2026 and hold it, hold it, because as far as I know, there have never been as many as 108 million motor vehicles sold in any calendar year. If I've got it right, the worldwide record so far was under 80 million, in 2017, and few if any people are predicting as many as 108 by 2026.

I'm sure that a lot of you, including many hardcore EV advocates, are yelling at your screens about now, saying that I'm an idiot and that 100% growth of EV sales every year is impossible. 

Yes, I'm an idiot, you've got no argument from me there. Where we disagree is in the use of this term "impossible." I've long believed that it's an overused term, and that many more things are possible than most of us tend to think most of the time.

The growth of the EV sector over the past couple of years has happened in spite of COVID, in spite of supply chain issues -- and in spite of very, very few EV's having been sold outside of China, Europe and North America. Lots of vehicles were sold in Central and South America, Africa, India. Very, very few EV's. 

About 90% of recent EV sales have been in China and Europe. Why? It's very simple: because laws in China and Europe said that higher percentages of vehicles had to be EV's. Because people decided that EV sales were going to grow.

What's the biggest obstacle to the growth of solar and wind power to run all these EV's, real present-day one plus the imaginary future ones? It's the legal situation again, with the fossil fuel industry and so-called "utilities" hindering the growth of solar and wind, and thus the death of fossil fuels. 

From one perspective it all seems very complicated, and it's true that there are a lot of moving parts here, and that EV sales are just a part of it: exposing the ties between fossil fuels and government, building up solar and wind, smartening up the grid, improving public transportation, encouraging people to walk more and eat less meat, afforestation, re-forestation, rebuilding wetlands, etc etc. Yes, you could say that it's complicated.

From another perspective, though, it's as simple as anything could ever be: do we want to save our own lives? How much do we want it? Do we want it bad enough, or not?

I'm not going to save the world all by myself, one isolated autistic weirdo with a silly blog. How many people are working on these things, how many will join them? People with the brains to make better batteries and smarter grids? People with power, people in positions to pass laws that get more EV's and less ICE vehicles built, laws that speed the growth of solar and wind and kill off fossil fuels, laws which improve education so that everyone is better equipped to improve all of these things? People with the patience and eloquence and intelligence to explain, better than I can, why all of these things are necessary and how important they are?

Dream Log: Office Drama

I dreamed I was working in an office. I have no idea what sort of work we did, or were supposed to do.  Nothing appeared in the entire dream which resembled work which people do for a living. 

 

Regular readers of this blog know that my age varies greatly from one dream to another. In this dream, my age varied greatly from one moment to the next, as did the age of one other employee in the office. 

In the dream, I was very depressed. I'm not depressed now, in waking life, but in the dream my depression had become so severe and so obvious that everyone in the office was concerned, and was trying to cheer me up. There were 8 or 10 of us altogether. Our boss was a woman, possibly in her 40's (I'm no good at guessing people's ages). I was significantly younger, mid-20's perhaps, and so were most of the others. There was also one man who was in his 60's or perhaps older.

The other person in the dream whose age was going to changed looked like Keanu Reeves. In real life, Keanu Reeves is 57, but he looks a bit younger because he's in very good physical condition. At the start of the dream, this guy looked the way Keanu Reeves looks now. He had long hair and a full beard, both streaked with grey.

In real life I'm 60 years old.

The others in the office kept reciting platitudes to me, of the sort that seem to thrive in corporate culture. The things they said just made me feel worse because they were so trite, so stupid. But I didn't want to say that. These people were being nice, trying to help me as best they could. I didn't want to verbally slap them in the face for their trouble.

Then they had gathered in the office of the man who was in his 60's or older, and they called me to join them. Grinning foolishly, they gestured at the other man's desk, and pointed out what a contrast it made to mine. My desk was huge and heavy, made of hardwood. It was old and darkly lacquered. This guy's desk, by contrast, was pretty much just a tray table. My colleagues all made statements about how "efficient" it was that this guy used such a tiny desk.

I was completely unimpressed by this, and I was afraid that I might not be concealing how I felt.

Then, suddenly, I was no longer in my mid-20's, but my real age, 60. I was talking to the guy who looked like Keanu. He still had long hair and a full beard, but suddenly he was much younger. Not a grey hair in sight, no wrinkles. That gaunt look which older athletes have about the eyes and throat was gone.

He was looking at an entry in the index of a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein. "This has got to be a misprint, don't you think?" he asked, and showed me the entry: "Wittgenstein, Jeanemmanuel." 

"Shouldn't Jeanemmanuel be hyphenated -- Jean-Emmanual -- or two separate words?"

"I don't know," I replied. "The only person I can ever remember hearing about who was named Wittgenstein was Ludwig. As far as whether that name is 'correct' as it's printed on that page... Hmm. Well. you see, there's some controversy over the topic of 'correct' language. Some people, most definitely including me, don't believe that there is such a thing as 'correct' language use. There are conventions of use, and when these conventions are broken -- well, in the opinion of those like me, it's not the end of the world. 

"That leaves the question of how Jeanemmanuel himself spells, or spelled, his name. If he spells it as given there on the page, then I'd say the index entry is correct, period.

"Except that it's also not even that simple. Because, some people spell their own names differently on different occasions. and even then, I'm not inclined to insist that a mistake has been made. 

"Do you know the most famous instance of a person writing their own name differently on different occasions? Shakespeare. These idiots who insist that Shakespeare didn't exist, sometimes their Exhibit A is the different spellings in different Shakespeare-autographs. But these idiots don't know that a lot of people spelled their own names differently from one occasion to the next 400 years ago. It wasn't uncommon at all [...]"

And I went on and on, feeling better, talking about something at last which I found so much more interesting than anything usually to be found in the usual corporate culture of that particular office, wondering whether the now-young Keanu lookalike was also sincerely fascinated, or had only been trying all along to cheer me up...

Dream Log: Small-Town Politics and Autism

I dreamed I was in a small town on the west coast, in Oregon, Washington or British Columbia. The town's population couldn't have been as much as 50,000. It had many restaurants, bars, hotels and clubs which did a flourishing out-of -town business. Two men were among those struggling for control of the town's money and politics, one who looked and acted like Elon Musk and one who looked and acted like Mark Zuckerberg. 

 

But they weren't world-famous billionaires. Their business was concentrated in this small town. It was speculated that they both might be autistic.

Like the real Elon Musk, the local businessman who looked like him lied all the time, about absolutely everything, so that being autistic appeared to be just one more thing he was lying about. Like the real Mark Zuckerberg, the businessman who looked and acted like him really did seem to be autistic, and like Zuckerberg, and unlike, say, Daryl Hannah, he definitely could not be said to be glamorizing  the condition, except perhaps for hardcore Brent Spiner fans,

I was little-known in this town and wanted to stay that way, but video and audio of me looking and sounding strangely -- for example, I sing. Sometimes I sing intentionally badly, to amuse myself -- began showing up in the local media and on the Internet. This led to my becoming enmeshed in the business struggle between the liar who looked like Musk and the creepy dweeb who looked like Zuckerberg. I wasn't sure I trusted Not-Zuck, but he was definitely better than Not-Musk, so by default I ended up on Team Not-Zuck. (In the dream these two were called by their names, but I don't remember their names.)

Then the whole dream shifted to something resembling the TV series "Alias." Not-Musk now did the majority of his business  from local clubs, sending his minions out to physically fight with Not-Zuck's minions. 

At one point I and two other members of Team Not-Zuck were racing through town in an Audi e-tron at dusk, heading toward the beach. There was a Chase bank on the beach. One of the exterior walls of this small bank building was completely covered with video screens and neon stock tickers, and buried somewhere within all of that was the clue to our next move.

We slammed to a screeching stop in the parking lot, poured out of the car, and soon one of the other guys was howling with glee. "Chase is going to give me $225 to open an account," he yelled. 

This guy had ADD. We got his head back in the game, and eventually we found the time and place where Not-Musk and Not-Zuck could secretly meet, out of the eye of the extraordinarily-vigilant local business journalists.

At this point I made up my mind to face Not-Zuck, and tell him that I had had enough, that I was out.