Deities featuring in the Hymns

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I will point out that while we have an article on Melinoe, we are missing articles on Mise and Hipta. – Michael Aurel (talk) 03:42, 28 August 2023 (UTC)Reply

A couple of quick comments in advance of the GA review

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First, good job with the article. When I saw the nomination, I clicked on the link with some misgivings. Because this is Wikipedia, I more than half expected to find a farrago of obsolete 19th-century sources mixed with 21st-century New Age mysticism. Instead I found a solid summary of recent scholarship, a wide-ranging bibliography, and even a section on the manuscript tradition. Nicely done. I've made a couple of trivial corrections to the list of references, and I have two other suggestions that you might want to consider before the GA review:

  • The treatment of publication dates in the list of references is very inconsistent: some citations have the year of publication in parentheses after the author's name, some have it without parentheses at the end of the citation, some have it in both places, and a few have no date at all (e.g., Hopman-Govers, Vian, Blumenthal's review of Quandt). I don't spend much time on Wikipedia, but my impression is that good article reviewers tend to want a consistent citation format, so you may want to go back through these and impose some kind of order.
  • The final sentence of the first paragraph in the "Religious significance" section currently reads Within the collection itself, Morand sees a number of different members of the group's religious hierarchy as being mentioned: the μύσται, the regular members of the cult (and the group mentioned most frequently); the νεομύστης, the "new initiates"; the μυστιπόλος, who were likely members involved in initiations and ritual activity; and the ὀργιοφάντης, who seem to have been members involved in initiation rites (similarly to the μυστιπόλος), and who may also have been responsible for displaying holy objects. There's a problem here with singulars and plurals in the Greek vs. English terms. μύσται is plural, so glossing it with "the regular members of the cult" is fine; but all of the following Greek words (νεομύστης, μυστιπόλος, ὀργιοφάντης) are singular, even though the English text treats them as plurals. In other words, νεομύστης means not "new initiates" but "a new initiate"; the μυστιπόλος was not "members involved in initiations and ritual activities" but "a member who was involved in initiations and ritual activities"; and so on. The problem is easily fixed, either by rephrasing the English or to changing the Greek terms to the corresponding plural forms (νεομύσται, μυστιπόλοι, ὀργιοφάνται), whichever you prefer.

— Cheers, Choliamb (talk) 20:00, 25 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the kind words! And thanks for these suggestions, which I've hopefully addressed satisfactorily.
  • I'm not quite sure what was going on with the dates. The idea was to provide the date at the front of the bibliographic entry in cases where the author had multiple works listed, so as to match the citation style (eg. "Veyne, pp. 12–3" vs "Morand 2001, p. 209"), but all of the works listed should have had dates at the end, and there of course shouldn't have been dates missing entirely. I've added in the missing dates, and hopefully things are now consistent.
  • I've opted for the plural forms of the Greek, for now at least, as the words are in the plural in the collection (as quoted by Morand). Morand herself does use the singular forms though, treating these terms more as religious "titles" if my memory serves me correctly, so perhaps the GA reviewer could opine as to whether the English sentence ought to be reworked instead. Ideally, I would be able to get my hands on a copy of Fayant's 2014 study, and see what she thinks of Morand's view that these terms reflect ritual reality, which we're currently presenting without opposition.
Best, Michael Aurel (talk) 02:31, 26 November 2024 (UTC)Reply