Potlucks, this passage seems to suggest, once served a social purpose, which later iterations in suburbia denuded entirely.

The stakes of the ancient world appear desirable to the modern man.

When a corpus is deemed too significant to be tampered with, that is to say when it is ritualistic, it produces a conservative legacy. Literature is not similarly precious, and therefore produces an opposite legacy. These map on to the brains divisions, but it is unclear which before the other.

A notion of curses is lost on contemporary society, yet we demonstrate a yearning for the treatment of curses.

Soma is mentioned here, quaffed by Vedic chieftains. Were psychedelics in use by the state when the British arrived?

Panjabi and Doab in the west looked down on those in the east, the Bihar and Bengal, as I sufficiently aryan. This later switched.

We listened to the fall of civilization podcast about the largest Hindu empire. The book hasn't caught up to that empire and the conflict with Muslim Indian empires. The Mahabharata is a swan song to the Hindu cosmological order. The Ramayana proposes new ideas and is still the ideal of the Hindu state. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fall-of-civilizations-podcast/id1449884495?i=1000551515692

Indian rice production reminds me of the theory that Asian populations are better at math because it's cultivation required more developed practices, like the tiering of water retaining terraces described here.

Traditional, and perhaps ritualistic, tributes and structures became the basic elements of political and economic formation. Janapada, the ancestral territory of a clan, gets pinned down, reducing the nomadic way of life, as was previously exemplified by the Arya.

Proto-capitalism comes into being, although, interestingly, it is mostly concentrated in cities. A different system of economy, one based more on trust, may have continued in rural areas. A proto-system of castes also comes into formation, with rajas at the top and dada, a native population of the Vedas, near the bottom. This is a result of aryanisation.

It is described here how outsiders could slot into the caste system. It's rigidity makes me think that the idea it would be supplanted entirely by an outside force would be unthinkable. The first study made of this civilization Al structure by the British must have been mind boggling.

Ionian is also a mode. They were one of the four major tribes of Greece.

Limited reworking of the Bible was done in order to argue for heredity. Or, perhaps this simply took place in time out of mind.

This image of holy men roving about feels essentially tighter, or tighter than whatever is going on in society today.