Daily Archives: April 8, 2024

Top Tens – Miscellany: Top 10 Youtube (3) Reaper

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Youtube channel banner – 8 April 2024

 

(3) REAPER (UNITED KINGDOM 2022)

 

 

“Christ – who wrote this?!”

 

And now we come – perhaps aptly enough given the featured tagline for this entry – to my holy trinity of Youtube popular culture criticism, all hailing from the British Isles interestingly enough, one from each of its holy trinity of England, Scotland and Ireland.

 

(Sorry, Wales – you miss out. You’ll just have to make do with Mauler, the only Welsh Youtuber I know – and whom I like well enough, except I tend to skip out on the notorious length of his content).

 

All three are classic caustic critics but Reaper is perhaps the most entertainingly embittered of them, often in the most, ah, incorrect ways. He does profess to like a few things, or at least occasionally comment on positive aspects or potential, but mostly he is tearing whatever film or TV series he is reviewing a new one – and hard!

 

He’s the English member of my holy trinity of caustic critics by the way.

 

If nothing else, he put me on to The Inbetweeners, the British TV comedy series with its delinquent high school cast of characters – and particularly the toweringly sarcastic teacher Mr. Gilbert (played by Greg Davies, funnily enough an ex-teacher turned actor and comedian).

 

That’s a quote from Mr Gilbert in the featured tagline – from a brief clip that Reaper plays as a recurring gag for, you guessed it, flaws that he perceives in the writing for film or TV scripts.

 

Unfortunately, the mere quote does not convey the sheer tone of annoyed exasperation in its line delivery, prompting me to quote it regularly in my office – rivalled only by the quote by Matt Berry from “What We Do in the Shadows” (I think) which Reaper often uses as conclusion for his video reviews, “it’s a piece of sh*t!”.

 

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Mancy (3) Hieromancy

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Free ‘divine gallery’ art sample – OldWorldGods

 

(3) HIEROMANCY

 

“Who are these coming to the sacrifice?”

No doubt some are wondering what could exceed the cosmic power of the previous entry, astromancy? Or the elemental power of the preceding methods of divination or schools of magic?

And yes – astromancy might top the scale for sheer raw power, even absurdly so, but it lacks the conceptual force that underlies hieromancy, which is that divination or magic COSTS. When it comes to either, there is no such thing as a free lunch – particularly when it comes to breaking the normal rules of reality as they do. No snatching the secrets from the stars just by looking at them as in astrology – that’s just cheating or cutting corners.

There’s a price to be paid, in full – and very often in blood. And we all have to make sacrifices. The world is indeed a vampire, at least when it comes to divination or magic.

That can be the case even combined with other methods of divination or schools of magic. For example, one can still channel or harness power from some cosmic, elemental or other source but it needs a hieromantic payment or sacrifice, as a trigger or ignition point, as a focus or means, or as a key to unlock it.

This concept that divination or magic requires some payment or sacrifice has a logic and therefore potency to it, to avoid being reality-breaking or story-breaking if magic is too easy. For example, it is striking just how low magic The Lord of the Rings is compared to the high magic of your average Dungeons and Dragons setting. If The Lord of the Rings was a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, it could be over in a few turns by casting some sort of divination spell on the ring and magically teleporting to Mount Doom.

Strictly speaking, hieromancy is divination by sacred or holy means or objects (from the Greek root hiero- for sacred or holy), although typically that is by sacrifice. I mean, have you read all the sacrifices at the Temple prescribed by the Bible in Leviticus and those books? The place sounds like an abattoir.

The archetypal hieromancy is divination by entrails from animal sacrifices, or as it was known from Latin, haruspicy (performed by a haruspex). One might say that hieromancy is like hydromancy, except that it involves scrying blood and guts rather than water. The liver was of particular interest – hence hepatoscopy or hepatomancy.

Of course, when the chips were down, the ultimate form of hieromancy was anthropomancy – or divination from human sacrifice, again particularly by entrails of the dead or dying sacrificial victims. Perhaps it worked best if you ate the liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti? I’d also like to imagine that when Aztec priests dressed up and danced around in the flayed skin of their sacrificial victims, that anything they said would be taken as oracular utterances.

As a method of divination, it doesn’t seem particularly instructive, other than telling that whatever was sacrificed is dead.

As a school or even more so system of magic, it has a conceptual force to it. Much like the rest of life, you get what you pay for – by exchange, payment, or sacrifice. That would also extend to contracts or Faustian pacts with divine or infernal powers.

Perhaps the archetypal hieromantic magic is the trope of blood magic (which I suppose technically might be haematomancy or hemotomancy).

“Spilling of blood is a potent force in the working of magic. It may be a token sacrifice, but it may also be the loss of life that fuels the spell. Expect mages who practice blood magic to be portrayed as evil, or at least charcoal grey, with possible exceptions made for druid like nature cults that may be considered amoral…Some blood may be indicated to be more powerful than others. Common types are human blood, monster blood, the blood of royalty, the blood of a special line, the blood of an innocent, a child’s blood, the caster’s own blood, or virgin’s blood. Sometimes only a single person’s blood has power, and any other blood is powerless. Sometimes it also makes a difference whether the blood being used was offered willingly or taken unwillingly”.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****
S-TIER (GOD TIER – although ironically the gods and similar beings usually get their magic for free as part of their being or nature)

Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Mythologies (3) Norse

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Chris Hemsworth as Thor in the 2013 Marvel film “Thor: The Dark World” – not the most accurate cinematic adaptation of Norse mythology but perhaps the most popular (via the characters in Marvel comics)

 

 

(3) NORSE

 

“We come from the land of the ice and snow
From the midnight sun where the hot springs flow
The hammer of the gods
Will drive our ships to new lands
To fight the horde, sing and cry
Valhalla, I am coming”

And now we come to a mythology that is one of the best known, even outside its European continent of origin, thanks to Thor in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the days of the week still named in English for the Norse gods. It is also arguably one of the most hardcore mythologies, with imagery worthy of a metal album cover.

I mean, what else can you say of a mythology that features a ship made entirely of fingernails and toenails (of the dead)? Or its creation myth, in which the world was created from the corpse of a giant. No fluffy let there be light here. Or that the gods are essentially locked into a perpetual cold war (heh) against the giants – complicated by the trickster Loki in their presence, who alternates between getting them into compromising or difficult situations before getting them out of those situations (until he goes one trick too far). And like the historical cold war, the gods are planning for mutually assured destruction – famously gathering slain warriors in Valhalla – when the war turns hot at the end of the world. Or rather, when it turns ice cold at Ragnarok – or Gotterdamerung, the twilight of the gods (in the Fimbulwinter or endless winter).

Of course, Norse is something of a misnomer, as it was a Germanic mythology that extended throughout much of northern Europe, although it is most identified with Scandinavia and Iceland (and Vikings!), also the source of its surviving texts, so hence the epithet Norse.

“The source texts mention numerous gods, such as the hammer-wielding, humanity-protecting thunder-god Thor, who relentlessly fights his foes; the one-eyed, raven-flanked god Odin, who craftily pursues knowledge throughout the worlds and bestowed among humanity the runic alphabet; the beautiful, seer-working, feathered cloak-clad goddess Freyja who rides to battle to choose among the slain; the vengeful, skiing goddess Skadi, who prefers the wolf howls of the winter mountains to the seashore; the powerful god Njord, who may calm both sea and fire and grant wealth and land; the god Freyr, whose weather and farming associations bring peace and pleasure to humanity; the goddess Idunn who keeps apples that grant eternal youthfulness; the mysterious god Heimdall, who is born of nine mothers, can hear grass grow, has gold teeth, and possesses a resounding horn” and of course “Loki, who brings tragedy to the gods by engineering the death of the goddess Frigg’s beautiful son Baldur”

Norse mythology is distinctive in that its gods are not only fallible (even the wily Odin), but also all mortal. They can and do die. And die aplenty on its version of the apocalypse. No foreordained triumph of the gods here – on this day, all gods die, taking their enemies down with them. Well, not all of them, as there are some key survivors to renew the world, but that phrase just has a good ring to it.

That doesn’t stop the Norse gods from being hardcore – from plucking one’s eye out as Odin did for wisdom, or losing one’s hand as security deposit as Tyr did, putting his hand in the mouth of the Fenris Wolf. Which of course brings me to their fearsome adversaries, not just frost and fire giants, led by Loki, but also his three terrible children – the goddess Hel leading the dishonorable dead, the Fenris Wolf leading other monstrous wolves, and the World-Serpent.

Hardcore.

 

RATING: 5 STARS******
S-TIER (GOD TIER)

Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Books (3) Barbara Walker – Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths & Secrets

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(3) BARBARA WALKER – WOMEN’S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MYTHS & SECRETS (1983)

 

She is the goddess and this is her body!

Also behold the monomyth! Not of Joseph Campbell’s universal hero, but of the universal goddess (although all heroes are her heroes). Or rather – the Goddess, since she is ultimately all goddesses. Virgin, mother, crone – god the mother and mother of god.

Now we get into my top trinity of my top ten books of mythology – the three B’s as I like to call them, although admittedly I have to force that a little for this entry from the first letter of the author’s first name. Interestingly, Barbara Walker has also written a number of classic references to knitting. Obviously our interest here consists of her books in neo-pagan feminism, of which this entry was first and foremost – as an encyclopedia reference to mythology and religion through the lens, or rather the dance, of the Goddess. Essentially, throughout all entries there is Walker’s monomyth of the archetypal Goddess throughout mythology and history – or rather prehistory (or perhaps herstory), as the Goddess was displaced, firstly into many goddesses, and secondly by male gods or God.

However, like neo-paganism or the goddess movement in general, Walker’s monomyth is not so much a matter of historical accuracy (as many of her historical sources and interpretations don’t hold up under scrutiny) as it is historical reconstruction – the goddess as sacred poetry rather than sacred history. Or as sacred dance – the ghost dance of the Goddess as it were.

Walker herself is an atheist, so she doesn’t believe in the Goddess as a supernatural entity but as a symbol – and one she proposes as healthier for our society.

As she quotes Eugene O’Neill in one of her entries:

“We should have imagined life as created in the birth-pain of God the Mother. Then we would understand why we, Her children, have inherited pain, for we would know that life’s rhythm beats from Her great heart, torn with the agony of love and birth, and we would feel that death meant reunion with Her, a passing back into Her substance, blood of Her blood again, peace of Her peace.” – Eugene O’Neill, “Strange Interlude”

Of course, Walker’s not just talking your New Age Goddess here, all sweetness and light or maiden and mother – baptized between her breasts. She’s also talking your Old Testament bitch-goddess, apocalyptic wh*re or classic White Goddess of Graves – crucified between her thighs.

But meh – that’s no different from my life anyway:

“Sometimes I am the sister who befriends you, sometimes I am the mother who holds you, and sometimes I am the lover who sticks one in your back.”

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****
S-TIER (GOD TIER)