Here's the inspiration:
Knocknagael, Boar Stone | Canmore
Just came across this artisan online who does Celtic and Norse artwork...
Just to be clear: no affiliation or connection to him. Just cool artwork... And it's a pig!
https://www.celtichammerclub.com/store/p153/Slate_Coasters.html#/
Do we know if there are similarities between this voyage to the Moon and Lucian's True Story?
Trivia: There is some evidence that I'm related to Mayflower passengers, but not members of the Saints but the Strangers. In fact, I'm trying to substantiate my link to the ones who Bradford called "“one of the most profane families” on the ship.
As far as ritual or religioius practices, Epicurus leaves money in his will for "the funeral offerings to my father, mother, and brothers." The word translated "funeral offerings" in τὰ ἐναγίσματα (ta enagismata) < enagisma. See:
1.4. Destruction sacrifices
12Destruction sacrifices at which no dining took place, covered by the terms holokautos in the inscriptions and enagizein, enagisma and enagismos in the literary texts, are rare and cannot be considered as the regular kind of ritual in hero-cults. All the terms seem to cover the same kind of ritual, the destruction of the offerings, but they have different bearings on the character of the recipient. Holokautos was more neutral, being used for both heroes and gods, while enagizein, enagisma and enagismos are particular to hero-cults and the cult of the dead. Apart from referring to a destruction sacrifice, enagizein, enagisma and enagismos also mark the recipient as being dead and therefore impure in some sense, and distinguish him, or a side of him, from the gods, who are immortal and pure. In most cases, the destruction sacrifices to heroes were performed as separate rituals and not in connection with a thysia.
13The enagizein sacrifices seem to have been aimed at highlighting the dead and impure character of the hero. The destruction of the offerings formed part of the cult of the dead, but it is doubtful to what extent they were performed with animal victims, since the sacrifice of animals had practically disappeared from the cult of the ordinary dead already in the Archaic period, partly as a result of the funerary legislation.
14Partial and total destructions of the victims are also found in the cult of the gods and can sometimes be viewed as a result of the character of the recipient, but perhaps more clearly as a reaction to or as a reminiscence of a particularly pressing and difficult situation. Similarly, in hero-cults the destruction sacrifices are not only a reflection of the recipient’s character, but may also be a response to the problems and stress of a particular situation or may be performed in order to avoid difficulties in the future. Seen from this angle, these rituals were used in the same manner as in the cult of the gods.
15The evidence for the terms enagizein, enagisma and enagismos, considered to be standard terms for the sacrifices to heroes, is slight for sacrifices to heroes in the Archaic and Classical periods (no use at all is made of the terms in inscriptions before the late 2nd century BC, for example). More remarkable is the frequent use of the terms in the 1st to the 3rd centuries AD, particularly in the 2nd century AD and especially by Pausanias and Plutarch. The popularity of the terms during this period, evident also from the hapax enagisterion (attested in an inscription dating from c. AD 170), can be linked to the antiquarian tendencies of the Second Sophistic. Enagizein sacrifices seem to have been regarded as an old and venerable ritual, and the terms enagizein, enagisma, enagismos and enagisterion are predominantly used for heroes considered as being ancient, a tendency which may have originated in a desire to separate the old, traditional heroes of the epic and glorious past history from the more recently heroized, ordinary mortals of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. This link between heroes and enagizein may, in its turn, have been the reason for the almost mechanical use of enagizein in the scholia to explain and elucidate sacrifices to heroes in the Classical sources, whether or not these rituals contained any actions of the kind usually covered by enagizein. It is also interesting to note that, in the 2nd century AD and later, enagizein began to be used for sacrifices to gods, though often to divinities connected with the sphere of death and the underworld, and for sacrifices differing from regular thysiai. In this late period, the term seems gradually to have taken on the meaning “to burn completely”, no matter who was the recipient.
Don It would not be the first time, nor the last. Certainly, the posturing of Descartes in the first few pages of "Meditations on First Philosophy" clearly suggest he was seeking to avoid the fate of Galileo, only a few years prior.
Oh, I don't doubt a sense of personal safety was a *part* of his decision. After all, that's one reason he taught on his own private property and not in the gymnasia or stoas. But I firmly believe Epicurus also got a great deal of pleasure, enjoyment, and satisfaction from participating the religious rites of his city. For ease of access, here are my thoughts from my perusal of On Piety:
(raises hands in the air) Testify, Brother Cassius! Testify! Hallelujah! 
But on a more serious note, I also find Epicurean theology, piety, and practice an interesting topic. The point I always make is that Epicurus himself and the classical Epicureans made a correct understanding of the gods a primary point in multiple texts: The Letter to Menoikeus, Principal Doctrines, Philodemus's On Piety, the first line of the Tetrapharmakos, and so on. I, too, completely agree that the "Epicurus feigned piety to protect his skin" is an easy, lazy response to the question. The research can be a bit of a rabbit hole (as numerous threads on this forum attest!) and can be frustrating due to lack of textual sources and archeological evidence, but there's enough there to make for interesting discussions.
Dewitt's book is available to read on Internet Archive.
Probably the whole thing could wind up pointing to a place where we discuss a table of parallel Shakespeare/Epicurean references.
One has to be careful here. From what I've seen on this thread and elsewhere on the forum and in published texts and papers, Shakespeare definitely had allusions to Epicurean philosophy in his work, evidently primarily via Montaigne via Lucretius. However, my contention would be that one has to be careful in saying Shakespeare was genuinely citing Epicurean sources as opposed to seeing lines that "sound" Epicurean or lines that evoke Epicurean ideas that are more widespread culturally. It's merely an extension of my frustration with Dewitt's "Christianity around every Epicurean corner" issue. That sids, I genuinely find this Shakespeare angle fascinating and was completely unaware of its depth previously... So thank you all for this!
I'll just add for now that our pattern recognition can be overactive:
This can also extend to seeing agency in purely physical phenomena, such as assigning divine agency to storms or earthquakes... And the "creation" of the universe.
This is my dilemma and something I'm still working through. When you say:
It is the image that comes to mind when you think of something
Which comes first? Did the "image" arise in the mind after you "think" of something, or did you think of something and then the image arises in the mind? Or is it simultaneous? It seems there had to be a sequence, even if almost unimaginably rapid.
I fully agree that we are not born with innate images of dogs, pencils, towers, cows, etc. But it seems to me we are born with some natural ability to make sense of the world by detecting patterns in the world, at first rudimentary patterns, especially faces. Even an innate sense of what constitutes fairness or awe. The youngest of infants seem to be able to have their fascination captured by some phenomena. They'll stare at novel stimuli longer than ones they're accustomed to. Repeated exposure refines and expands those rudimentary inborn and evolutionarily developed abilities and "prolepseis." One's native language begins to label those patterns, but the patterns exist independently of language.
This is where I find the thesis of the mind as a prediction engine so fascinating. According to research, we couldn't survive if we only reacted to stimuli after receiving sense data. The snake would have already bitten us if we waited for it to strike before jumping away. We would already have fallen off the cliff if we waited until our foot felt nothing under it. Our minds - our brains inside our skulls - are constantly constructing the external world from previous sensory data and predicting the next most likely scenario. It fine tunes as data flows in, correcting the prediction, keeping us alive. The more accurate the prediction, the more accurate our prolepseis if you will, the better flow we have through the world.
This is just one of the ways I find the intersection of Epicurus's philosophy and modern science so intriguing and fascinating. The fact that I can even compare modern research with two-millennia-old theories of mind blows my mind.
Bryan 's comments are spot on.
Even more complexity comes in when one considers that Epicurus said that we have a prolepsis of justice and a prolepsis of the gods. I reconcile this with the idea that humans appear to have an innate faculty or propensity for fairness and an innate sense of awe or wonder. Both these come from research done with very young infants and toddlers, and, in the case of fairness, non-human species. Those may not have been what Epicurus necessarily had in mind, but for me it reconciles Epicurus's intuition and modern scientific research.
That, along with the idea of an innate faculty of pattern recognition to create those "mental images" that Bryan mentions, is how I reconcile Cicero's "insitae vel potius inatae cogitiones." To me the Lewis & Short definition of "implanted by nature, inborn, innate, natural" can be reconciled with an inborn faculty or propensity, but I would agree that the mental images are reinforced and strengthened by subsequent exposure to them. In some ways, it's like a child calling every animal a "dog" until they realize "dog" refers to a specific kind of animal after repeated experiences of "dog" in their environment.
The concept of the prolepsis is still very much a work-in-progress for me.
Does that sound right? If so, I really like and respect that use of the word: a deep form of recognition that implies intimate knowledge of a thing.
I suppose that could work. I've never heard it put quite that way, but that's the general idea. Thoughts from others on this point are encouraged!
If that is not how the word is used here in EpicureanFriends then I'm happy to hear an alternative definition.
Ah! Thanks for that clarification. That helps to show where you're coming from on using that. So, yes, there is an English word "prolepsis" as defined by Merriam-Webster as
: ANTICIPATION: such as
a: the representation or assumption of a future act or development as if presently existing or accomplished
b: the application of an adjective to a noun in anticipation of the result of the action of the verb (as in "while yon slow oxen turn the furrowed plain")
And the English word's etymology is from Greek prolēpsis, "from prolambanein to take beforehand, from pro- before + lambanein to take.
However, Prolēpsis within Epicurean philosophy is used to refer to a specific faculty of the mind/body. Epicurus chose it to refer to this epistemological faculty from the words available to him and gave it a specific connotation within his philosophy. It's been variously translated into English as anticipation, preconception, and some other terms. Using it with its modern English definition within English vocabulary is going to cause a little confusion in an Epicurean philosophy forum, hence my going off on the prolepsis tangent in that prior post. It appears there may have been confusion on both our parts on the use of that word. Mea culpa.
This is, of course, unfair at a number of levels.
BrainToBeing : First, I sincerely didn't mean any offense. My only purpose for that simile was to compare what you seemed to be doing in taking one word ("capital-T Truth") and equating it with something at a much more basic level. Likewise, I see some scientists who want to thread the needle, so to speak, wanting to be able to use the word God while referring to a more basic level of knowledge and/or practice.
On the other points, your using "objective truth" and "opinion versus objective accuracy" and "objective data" and so on is entirely consistent with an Epicurean approach. It is possible for there to be all of those things without there being some kind of transcendent, capital-T, universal Truth...unless you want to assign, semantically, the capital-T Truth word to "the way things are" in an effort to find out what is "objectively" true in a given situation. Epicurus, and even more so Lucretius and Philodemus, advocate for acquiring observation and evidence and not taking things at face value or assigning some supernatural cause to them. This seems to align with your wanting to diagnose your patients true needs against their profession of 10/10 pain in an effort to acquire opiates.
And, let me state explicitly, that the opioid epidemic was and continues to be a tragedy, especially in some rural communities from which I came and where I grew up. But a search for some universal Truth isn't going to make that better. The tragedy has to be addressed on a myriad of levels: personal, familial, societal, and governmental. As such, that topic probably falls outside the purview of this forum; however, as others have said, Epicurus's philosophy is a philosophy of personal responsibility, deep friendship, the support of a social contract that should have participants doing no harm and not being harmed, and the rejection of supernatural causes and the inefficacy of prayer for divine intercession (although Epicurus did say that "it is better to follow the stories of the gods" than to be fraught with the anxiety of hard determinism). You can apply those aspects of Epicurean philosophy as seems appropriate to that real-world situation.
Anticipating your possible question (prolepsis)
Actually, that's not how the word prolepsis or, in Engish, "anticipation" is used in the Epicurean philosophical sense unless you were using it in a humorous way. Prolepsis is somewhat of an enigmatic word and the texts are woefully few in explaining how Epicurus and the early Epicureans used the term. Speaking for myself, the canonic faculty of the prolepseis (plural of prolepsis), seems to be a faculty of pattern recognition that sorts through all the sensory data flooding into us and is able to pick out meaningful patterns. That faculty can then apply those patterns to sense data in the future, and, over time, then builds up a "library" of patterns against which to make sense of the world. That's one reason I find the work of Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett and others in seeing the brain as a prediction machine intriguing, as it seems to align (imperfectly but pretty well) with this idea of the Epicurean prolepseis.
As far as the gods, Epicurus famously asserted "Gods exist," but what he actually meant by that statement continues to be argued among those of us on the forum 
and in academic circles. What is without question is that Epicurus did not think the gods - in whatever way he meant that word - took no notice of us and did not grant favors or inflict punishment. That said, the Epicureans - especially Lucretius - had no problem whatsoever in imagining other life forms, mortal like us, inhabiting other worlds. Lucian of Samosata, who was at the very least sympathetic to Epicureanism, wrote arguably the first sci-fi story, A True Story, where there is space travel, life on other planets, etc. The use of the word "true" in light of the other topics on this thread is interesting in that Lucian says his is the only "true" story because he tells everyone at the outset that he's making it up, unlike the old myths that attempt to say what they're writing actually happened.
Great first post, Eggplant Wizard !! Welcome aboard!
The spirit of Epicureanism is of course inclusive. Cicero would want education only for the 'good families'. I want basic education for everyone (although basic doesn't include things like algebra and grammar for me) and I want advanced education for talented people regardless of social background. I don't want a distinction between schools for working class families and schools for rich people. In fact I would prefer to abolish private schools altogether. So I think I have more in common with you in the way I view education than with Cicero.
Now we're getting somewhere. Thank you for that clarification. That helps me understand your position a little better.
My follow up question is "What would you include in your 'basic education'?" Epicurus certainly wrote against παιδεία (paideia), the standard form of "education" or (better translated, in my opinion) "enculturation" of his time. I have even translated it "indoctrination" at times, trying to convey his rejection of it. So there may be echoes of that in what you're proposing if I'm understanding your position.
People today have the inclusive right to universal education (or rather obligation since many kids would rather not be in school if they could choose) but you don't have the inclusive right of protection from something as dire as homelessness. I think the second kind of inclusion is more important and more pertinent to people's well-being and pleasure. So we should keep in mind that symbolic inclusion and real inclusion are not the same thing and I am sure most people here understand that well.
Getting into "rights", inclusive or otherwise, is a tricky area. George Carlin's take on "rights" always struck me as near the mark: We don't have "Rights." We have "privileges," because if they can be taken away, they aren't rights. Epicurus's definition of justice - to neither intentionally harm others nor to intentionally be harmed by others - as part of the social contract seems a solid foundation with far -reaching ramifications.
First, impressive amount of work and a decent start.
Taking a quick look, it seems the transliterations from Greek to Latin script are a little idiosyncratic. The use of "oo" for ω while technically correct for the length can lead people to try and pronounce it like "boot." Same for ee for η, saying "beet" instead of just a lengthened ε. Also the use of both y and u for υ (upsilon):
δυναμένοις (du-na-me-nois) δυ-να-μέ-νοις: present middle/passive part. from the
verb δύναμαι (dynamai) → "to be able"
There underlining for the accents in the transliterations don't necessarily convey why their important. Plus all the accents are underlined the same way.
That said, this is a great start to an interlinear text for study purposes.
PS. The Greek to Latin letter issue is one of the reasons I decided against transliterations in my Menoikeus commentary.
In my view, Truth (with a capital T) is that which exists independent of our perspective of it. We are not the authors of truth, only at best its revealers and/or messengers. For example, the laws of physics existed long before we attempted to discover them. They existed independent of our perspectives.
You're simply describing "the way things are," as Lucretius' takes the title of his work. If that's what you're calling "Truth with a Capital T" that's like a physicist saying the sum total of all laws of physics can be called "God." Epicureans accept that the material universe exists "independent of our perspective on it." In fact, the universe existed before we were born and will exist after we cease to exist. That aspect of what you're calling "Truth" doesn't seem to be that big of a deal from my perspective.
So, I do think there is Truth, though we certainly may not know what it is.
Okay, but that doesn't address my question. If you're going to assert that there's some kind of ultimate "Truth," you need to at least say how you arrive at that conclusion. Is there a god that provides the source of the ultimate Truth? Is there some supernatural revelation that provides knowledge of this ultimate "Truth"? Conversely, if you're merely asserting that we find "Truth" - i.e., the way things are - by investigating nature via science and other means of measurement and observation and then apply those in technology (i.e., "the machine I'm now using"), that seems to me to be rather a banal "truth."
I mean no disrespect by saying this, but, I beg you..Please... Please stop using the phrase "great sages of the past." We're not concerned on this forum with the "great sages of the past." If this was a general philosophy forum, then that would be fine. This particular forum, however, is dedicated to exploring the philosophy of Epicurus, the interaction between the Epicureans and their rivals, the works of the early Epicureans, and the continuing influence of Epicurean philosophy up to our time. Again, this is sincerely not meant to be any disrespect to you or your individual interests and pursuits. But we need stay focused. If you have reactions to the individual Epicurean doctrines or Epicurean ideas, I believe we would all be interested to hear them.
And while "brilliant voices derived different fundamental conclusions at these philosophical levels," I would say not all conclusions are created equal. If, for example, one's "personal philosophy" relies on supernatural revelation, not verifiable or observable, I would see that as a red flag.
"Truth" (with a capital "T", a universal truth)
What do you mean by capital-T Truth? What would a "Universal Truth" be? And what would your authority for asserting the particular Universal Truth be?
PS. Godfrey was spot on in his description of the Epicurean position in "universal Truth."
