Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2016 February 9

= February 9 =

Just William
I just read an article (not on Wikipedia) about the Just William books by Richmal Crompton. William remains 11 years old throughout the decades that the books were published, and apparently he has two birthdays during that time - but continues to be 11. One of these was obviously the story called William's Birthday. But I can't recall another. The article hinted that it may have been a story featuring a flower show and/ or a prize marrow. So can anyone remember the title of, or any details about, William stories featuring
 * William having a birthday, or
 * a flower show, or
 * a prize marrow

Thanks! Amisom (talk) 07:57, 9 February 2016 (UTC)
 * William gets involved in a flower show (with predictable consequences) in "Boys Will Be Boys" (William Does His Bit, 1940), but there's no reference to his birthday as far as I know. Tevildo (talk) 08:51, 9 February 2016 (UTC)
 * According to our article, William_the_Conqueror_(short_story_collection) has a story called A Birthday Treat, where 'The Hubert Lanites ruin William's birthday party'. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 09:33, 9 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Hmm, that's odd because it's the wrong synopsis, the eponymous birthday treat is for Ginger's aunt's birthday in that story... Hmm. Amisom (talk) 10:45, 9 February 2016 (UTC)

Paradise for females (3, I suppose)
The above questions have prompted me to ask: what do religions other than Islam offer to women after death? And, relatedly, how do or did women (ordinary women for their time and place, not Joan of Arc anomalies) envisage paradise? I was working on the biography of Louisa Capper, who ran a household so smoothly that hypochondriac Jane Carlyle describes it as a sort of Eden:
 * a perfect Paradise of a place, peopled as every Paradise ought to be with Angels. There I drank warm milk, and eat new eggs, and bathed in pure air, and rejoiced in cheerful countenances, and was as happy as the day was long, which I should have been a monster not to have been, when every body about me seemed to have no other object in life but to study my pleasure.

Is there a book about this? Descriptions of what the laity thought the afterlife would be like? Not reincarnation but the Heaven and Hell aspects, especially the Heaven. I'm equally interested in Victorian Englishwomen and current Korean Christians and everyone in between. Carbon Caryatid (talk) 14:43, 9 February 2016 (UTC)
 * I'm going to digress a bit from the actual question here to observe that compelling descriptions of Heaven, for either sex, are pretty hard to find. Rarely do the preachers make it sound like a place you'd actually want to go.  I think the human imagination is a lot better at conceiving extreme horror than extreme joy.
 * I can think of two exceptions: First, C. S. Lewis in Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  I guess they didn't actually get to Heaven in that book but they got close enough to give you a taste and make you know you'd like more.
 * The other is from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, when Buffy is back from the dead, and all her friends assume she's been in Hell. (Such good friends.)  Near the end of the episode, she confesses her actual experiences, but only to Spike.  Her Heaven sounded, not very stimulating, but certainly restful. --Trovatore (talk) 19:47, 9 February 2016 (UTC)


 * Not sure if your final question is asking just about women's descriptions of paradise, or descriptions by the laity in general. For a famous and extensive treatment of this subject from a Christian layman, see the third part of La commedia.  I'll agree with Trovatore on the "hard to find"; I've typically heard the subject addressed in terms such as "any human activity will eventually become wearisome, but for the sinless human, service to God in his presence will be eternally joyful, far beyond our imagination".  Nyttend (talk) 19:51, 10 February 2016 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure about Victorian Englishwomen but many Christians' imagery of the afterlife is not only taken from scripture but also from hymns. I once did a language analysis of a set of gospel songs years ago (I believe it was on the theme of forgiveness) and it was a very interesting project to do. This might be especially valuable for the most commonly song hymns, the ones that the laity didn't need a hymnbook to sing, that they had memorized. Vivid and imaginative song lyrics can leave a lasting impression on ones memory that filters into ones belief system of what heaven or hell might be like. Additionally, at least in the United States, many hymn writers were laity and quite a few were women so it wouldn't necessarily be a clerical or preacher's view of the afterlife.  Liz  Read! Talk! 21:50, 10 February 2016 (UTC)
 * That's a great point. The Cyber Hymnal has tons of Protestant hymns, including 400+ by Fanny Crosby.  Go to her biography there and scroll down to find a lot of links; presumably there will be a good number of heaven-related ones.  My background doesn't use hymns, so I'm not as familiar with good examples as most Protestant editors would be, and I doubt I can make any other suggestions, but you could always ask for help at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Christianity/Noticeboard if you need more assistance.  Nyttend (talk) 01:36, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Thank you, all. The point that we humans are better at imagining terrors and torture than the specifics of bliss rang home. A linguistic analysis of hymns is a direction I would not have thought of, but yes, music is likely to penetrate and populate the subconscious. Carbon Caryatid (talk) 22:28, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Not sure if this helps, but in Judaism only the body has a gender, souls do not. So there is no difference for heaven for Men vs Women. Heaven is describing as feeling like the pleasure of sex, the warmth of the sun, and the relaxation of the Sabbath. Ariel. (talk) 09:47, 12 February 2016 (UTC)

Ghee in 10th century Japan
Daigo (dairy product) is a slightly weird article. It says that daigo (ghee) was made in Japan in the 10th century. The reference cited is a Japanese dairy association website about cheese. The only primary source referred to for this assertion, is an Indian-Chinese religious sutra, which talks about the various dairy products, in a figurative sense as an analogy for spiritual advancement. The sutra is not itself evidence that ghee was ever made in China, let alone Japan. The article also makes a weird claim that Emperor Daigo is named after the dairy product (also referenced to the dairy association website), whereas the orthodox view is that he is named after his burial place, which itself references the religious / metaphoric meaning of ghee. The article then concludes that daigo is no longer made in either Japan or China.

So, was daigo or ghee ever made in China or Japan, or is this just a fanciful story made up by the dairy association to make themselves (and cheese) seem ancient? --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 18:05, 9 February 2016 (UTC)
 * It seems like there's a lot of muddle in our article. First, if there's a reference in the Nirvana Sutra, our article on that says it's most likely that that work originated in South India. The sentence quoted has a logic - from cows to milk etc. And then from butter, where can you go but to ghee? And ghee would be familiar to a South Indian readership. The Nirvana Sutra seems to have been a very important Buddhist text in East Asia. So the text had to be translated. They had to find a wording to express the "beyond butter", and used "daigo". I don't know if it relates to "dai" meaning "great". I saw on the Internet an explanation of "creme de la creme" which is an interesting parallel. The idea is one of successive stages of refining. The way that "quintessence" is used figuratively in English is another parallel. As a solution in Wikipedia, I would think merge with ghee, since it's supposed to be the same thing. I doubt whether much can be kept after the merge. There is nothing so far to indicate that ghee was made in Japan. 22:14, 9 February 2016 (UTC)


 * "To establish Buddhism and its cuisine in Japan, Korean artists and architects built temples and monasteries to house monks from Korea and China. Nineteen expeditions made the dangerous crossing to China in unstable, flat-bottomed boats between 600 and 850, returning laden with monks and scholars skilled in cuisine, literature, politics, and theology, with seeds and cuttings, including tea and sugar, ferments, rotary grindstones, pottery, lacquer, chopsticks, spoons, silk, art, musical instruments, and Jia Sixie’s Essential Skills for the Daily Life of the People (quickly translated into Japanese)...The Japanese court adopted the typical Buddhist trio of butter, sugar, and rice. The government bureau of milk production was producing cream, butter, and an unknown product known as daigo, which logic suggests may have been ghee, by the beginning of the seventh century, a practice that continued for at least three hundred years."Rachel Laudan. (2013). 'Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. (p. 128).&mdash;eric 03:59, 10 February 2016 (UTC)


 * Thanks, based on that at least there was something called daigo in Japan, although whether it is ghee is uncertain.
 * The Chinese Wikipedia article on daigo/ghee has a quote from the Compendium of Materia Medica: "Zongshi [Song dynasty author] said: when making lao [at least in modern usage, a junket-like dessert], the top congealed layer is su, and the oil-like substance on top of the su is tihu [Japanese pronunciation: daigo], which is extruded when cooked, and there is not a large amount, it is sweet and delicious, but there are few [medicinal] uses for it." Chinese Wikipedia describes tihu as similar to yak butter. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 10:25, 10 February 2016 (UTC)