Samizdat

What is Samizdat?

Samizdat is three sites in one. The most immediate features the Cicada Files, hosting interviews and articles analyzing the cypherpunk order known as the “web’s greatest mystery.”

Then my own articles are posted, most of them also hosted on Academia. Finally, the oldest entries on Samizdat serialize excerpts from the world’s great books, indexing literatures across cultures and epochs.

The secret of Samizdat is at the bottom of every page: the tags and the categories. Clicking on them brings up lushly hyperlinked pages sorted by topic, and you sometimes encounter surprising correspondences.

The word Samizdat is Russian, it refers to dissidence across the former Eastern Bloc where resisters defied Communist authorities to reproduce censored underground publications by hand, passing them from reader to reader. Evading official Soviet censorship was hazardous.

Vladimir Bukovsky: “Samizdat: I write it myself, edit it myself, censor it myself, publish it myself, distribute it myself, and spend time in prison for it.”

This summarizes my activities on this site: I am a lone, rogue historian, pilloried on social media for publishing primary source materials that others attempt to suppress or spin.

Tracing ideas across vast vistas of time, mining connections between scholarly works, I seek synchronicities among national literatures. With the Cicada Files, I apply the tools of political science to analyze the organization, functions and goals of Cicada 3301, a cypherpunk order that perplexed millions.

The tagline, “Publishing the Forbidden,” is unrepentant. While all materials reproduced on these pages are freely available on the internet, with links provided, in some cases paywalls and other barriers are circumvented and hostage information is liberated. Ideas need to be free, and Samizdat exists to facilitate the unconstrained distribution of data.

I charge nothing for Samizdat. I do gratefully accept patronage via Patreon and I appreciate it when you buy me a cup of coffee with PayPal. You can untraceably send me ฿itcoin or ZCash via KeyBase.

All copyrights remain with their original holders. To any extent that selecting, sorting, categorizing, tagging, highlighting and illustrating academic materials written by others can be considered copyrightable, I surrender all claims, in exchange for a polite credit. When copyrighted information is published, I attempt to credit the copyright holder. When copyright holders cannot be determined, I assume a free, fair use privilege.

Conversely, all original synthesis and commentary by me is copyrighted ©Samizdat, all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated. Much of my writing I release into the wild with my blessing. May a million flowers bloom.

Corrections

If data posted on Samizdat is incorrectly credited, or if you can assist with citations or captions that can be refined, corrections will be gratefully accepted. Just hit the comments link at the bottom of every page. All comments must be curated, so if you wish to comment anonymously, or communicate with me privately, just say so, and I will keep your comment unpublished.

For Instance

One purpose of Samizdat is to excavate myth and legend. For example, the Deluge: it is more than mere Biblical myth.

While the Flood was an historical fact for the ancient Sumerians, modern scholarship analyzing the Kings List of ancient Sumeria was long stumped by the impossibly long reigns of antediluvian rulers. Antediluvian monarchs were consequently considered mythic. Then a professor named R. K. Harrison solved the puzzle.

Postdiluvian kings are historical. We have their records. While we still have few records antedating the Deluge, we now have lists of rulers and other data that is increasingly looking factual rather than mythic.

Which brings to mind Plato’s Timaeus (360 BCE), where the Egyptian priesthood of Neith in Sais lectured Solon:

“There have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes. …

As for those genealogies of yours which you just now recounted to us, Solon, they are no better than the tales of children. In the first place you remember a single deluge only, but there were many previous ones …”

It also brings to mind, for me, anyway, the Pillars of the Sun and the Pillars of Hercules, which when searched, bring up Jachin and Boaz, and the Pillars of Emerald and Gold in the Temple of Melkarth in Herodotus, and the Pillars of Seth. Now you begin to see what can happen when you start doing searches on this site.

I often serialize on Samizdat whatever I am reading, and I publish links to Facebook and Twitter.

Feel free to read over my shoulder.

Estéban Trujillo de Gutiérrez

Bangkok

Ed. Note:

My personal blog is at Magic Kingdom Dispatch, with accompanying accounts on Facebook and Twitter. I typically comment on the news of the day on Facebook, fight the net wars on my Twitter feed, and break out essays from time to time on my blog. You can securely correspond with me using KeyBase.

Headers

The header graphic changes with my research interests. It formerly depicted a Nisroch apkallū, formerly considered a “Griffin-demon,” which long mystified Assyriologists.

Stephen Thompson – Asshur, Assyrian God, Marble Relief, British Museum, 1872 The Catalogue of a Series of Photographs from the Collections of The British Museum (Photographed by S. Thompson), Part III, W.A. Mansell & Co, London, 1872, p. 30. In the Nimrud Gallery of the Museum, Eastern side, #355. B.C. 884. Marble slab. Eagle-headed winged deity Asshur (the chief of all the Gods), holding cone and basket, (supposed to represent the receptacle in which the divine gifts are stored,) and standard inscriptions. https://www.flickr.com/photos/photohistorytimeline/10171487505/

Curious? Do a search on apkallū. Keep in mind that apkallu and apkallē are variant spellings. You will be amazed by the data returned.

Site Organization

If you prefer a standard table of contents, the only one available at this time concerns our long digression on the apkallū. I will get this site sorted eventually. You can also hit the Archives link, and get overwhelmed with a plethora of data.

How to Use This Site

Incidentally, there are two ways to view this site. If you just hit the root page at therealsamizdat.com, or click on the top graphic, you will see dated entries without tags and categories at the bottom.

To see tags and categories, and likewise the search field, click on the title of any entry. That will take you to an entry view, with all indexing features available at the bottom of the page. I will figure out how to position a search window at the top of every page eventually.

I am working on the features of this site, so please bear with me. At this time, I think that the site works best as a ridiculous reading engine, returning whatever I have read and indexed on a subject.

I will be bringing a full sitemap and a sorted archive view online, and I will write some introductory essays for some of the broad themes covered by Samizdat.

Previous Headers

One of the earlier header graphics was the Behistun Inscription. Here is a beautiful pencil drawing of it.

A penciled illustration of the Behistun Inscription.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Behistun_Inscription_Eger.png

Here is the actual graphic.

The actual Behistun Inscription.

Here is another view in situ of the actual monument.

“Bisotun Iran Relief Achamenid Period” by Hara1603 – Own work. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bisotun_Iran_Relief_Achamenid_Period.JPG#mediaviewer/File:Bisotun_Iran_Relief_Achamenid_Period.JPG

Here is an even earlier header graphic.

Which was cropped from the image below. At that time, I was serializing works from Kabbalah. Please keep in mind that the search system is a program, and it has not been taught to conflate Kabbalah, Kabbala, and Qabala, or other variant spellings. Searching on these terms will bring up different results. I tag and categorize as I read, using the spelling present in each excerpt. Sometimes I include variant spellings. Other times, not. I am human.

This was the first header graphic, back when I began making this site. At that time I was reading deeply on the ancient Egyptians, mostly via E. Wallis Budge.

It was cropped from this image of the Metternich stele.

Detail, Metternich stele. (Clippus of Horus, Metternichestele, ed. Golenischeff, plate 1.)
Reproduced from E.A. Wallis Budge, Egyptian Magic, p. 149.

Enjoy.