Tag: mythology

In Tolkien the Elves were not human, and you see this reflected more in the early years of RPGs with Tolkien inspired elves in them. But in the 30+ years since they’ve been increasingly humanized (much like Vampires). Now they are just people with pointy ears (and Vampires are people who sparkle) and they’re written and played more or less like any other human character.

A lot of Elf characters in current media could lose the pointy ear prosthetics and just be a person. There’s really very little that makes them feel that different.

The otherworldly inhuman nature of Elves and other magical creatures is something you see throughout folklore. Here’s an old Irish Fairy Tale about a mermaid (not the half-fish kind, this is basically an Elf that lives in the water):

One spring morning, fisherman Patrick Gannon stood upon the seashore as the sun rose. “Lovely morning,” he sighed to himself. He puffed on his pipe, for nothing could bother Patrick this day.

Except one thing. He wished he could share his pleasure with a wife.

“Ah, a wife would be fine on such a morning,” he sighed again. Just then, he spied a rock upon the shore, upon which sat a beautiful young woman, combing her sea-green hair.

Patrick looked down at the sand. He knew this was a mermaid, a sea fairy. Beside the maiden sat a red cap with a feather—a magic cap, that is, the sort the mermaids wear to find their way home beneath the sea.

Patrick ambled down the shore toward the rock. “Hello,” he said, startling the mermaid. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I came only to say how pretty you look this morning.”

When she blushed and looked away for a moment, Patrick grabbed her cap.

“What do you want?” the mermaid asked.

“Mermaid,” Patrick said, “I want to marry you.” The mermaid accepted.

So Patrick put her cap into his pocket, for a mermaid will lose her memory without her feathered cap.

Now Patrick and the maiden returned to Patrick’s cottage. They had three children, and no one was happier than Patrick Gannon. However, one day he forgot to hang up his fishing nets.

Mrs. Gannon was cleaning that morning, and she spied the fishing nets that Patrick had not put away. When she lifted them, she found a hole in the wall, and in that hole she found her red cap.

The moment she found it, she put it on, and she remembered her father and mother and longed to see them. She walked out the door, turning once to blow a kiss to her sleeping children. She walked to the shore and dove into the sea.

So Patrick lost his beloved mermaid. Every day he walked to the shore, hoping that his wife would return, but she never did. Still, he never forgot her, for he knew that she had truly loved him.

The Elf in this story is not human and acts in an inhuman way—just like Tolkien’s elves. Real people don’t lose their memory when you take their magic hat, or walk away from their own children when they get their magic hat back. Humans have more compassion than that. They don’t lose the will to live when faced with tragedy either. What makes humans human is that they’re stronger than that.

Perhaps part of the problem is we’ve gotten so used to characters who are alien on the outside but human on the inside that we’ve forgotten about ones who are the other way around? Or who have an alien exterior as a visual symbol that they are not human and think and act in not human ways. When we take story elements and ideas from older media (like Tolkien) this is where we run into problems with confusion about how humans are depicted and how non-humans are intended to contrast with that.

Maybe we’ve had too many pointy eared humans in our media and not enough Elves?

— Elves, Half-Elves and Humanity – Strange Magic

Author’s emphases.

Thank the gods for the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, else I could not have linked to the source blogpost.

Many fairy tales revolve around castles and courts. These places are filled with wonder and awe, horror and debauchery. They are both simultaneously filled with dark and light. Capricious nobles, strange and incomprehensible to us born outside their world, are ready to take advantage of us, to be overtaken by us, to destroy us and to be destroyed, to give us blessings and curses, to reward treasure, take treasure, and have treasure taken. There are secret places in here to explore, to hide in. Ways in, ways out. People in there of all kinds, different factions with different interests, all revolving around the mystery and mysticism of the castle.

These are dungeons, but less dirty, grim, and abandoned, more poetic, mystical, strange. In a dungeon, cobwebs fill hallways and the dead shamble around. This can happen in castles as well, but in fey castles or gothics, you have animated suits of armor, strange servants, weird guests.

Let’s look at two examples: Bluebeard’s Castle (fairy tale) and Dracula’s Castle (gothic).

Bluebeard’s Castle is a place of horror and mysticism. It is beautiful, and the castle’s owner, Bluebeard, is charismatic, attractive, groping. He invites you in, barrs one secret room, and gives you keys to the other. You stumble from fairy tale room into fairy tale room, dancing with strange servants, surviving strange riddles and puzzles. But there is that secret room, that dark room, that strange room with the potential treasure and horrible curse. In all ways, this is a dungeon for fey.

Dracula’s Castle is much the same. Surrounded by direwolves and spectres and will-o’-wisps, filled with vampiric brides and hiding peasants trying to escape their damnation. Locked doors that hide darker secrets that must be explored so that you know you can leave. A haunting, stalking, loping master of the castle, a threat coming through the walls or into your room.

And yes, keep in mind, there are rooms to rest in within the castles. Places to regain your faculties. Or, places in which even weirder encounters can happen. Dracula’s brides invade and you must fend them off through wit until their husband returns to calm them. Bluebeard returns and you must hide from him, keep it secret that you’ve been in that Dark Room, survive his hunting of you when he finds out.

Yes, castles are dungeons, but with more active threats. Intelligent dangers that know you are there and want to interact with you.

Strahd’s Castle is a dungeon, but an Archfey, an Elven Prince, the Winter Court can all have a similar one.

Whenever I see fey adventures, I always see forests that, glades this. No one ever really makes adventures around the castles. But it is here that the fairy tale is the most powerful, and where the gothic can be wedded to it.

It is this wedding that I think has a lot of creative potential for dungeons and modules in the future. A castle that takes both fey and gothic elements to make something. Like the 5E Raven Queen, who is at once a god, an archfey, and a gothic horror, who resides in a Castle of Memories. This is the perfect dungeon place. Invade and plunder the memories of countless tragedies to learn secrets to defeating enemies, or finding rare treasure. Hide from the Raven Queen and her elven servants, and avoid the gloom-beasts that manifest here too. Every room can have a new puzzle or encounter or secret with ease. Other factions can be in here, perhaps adventurers or elves or those seeking audience with the Raven Queen

And let’s talk audiences. For a game about adventure, these are often glanced over. But an audience with a powerful gothic-fey (or a normal fey or a gothic creature) can be a great puzzle. You must at once dodge around their ego, have wit-duels with other members of courts, gain allies to help you, present treasures or plan how to escape, potentially have a crazy battle, potentially hoodwink or trick whoever you are having an audience with—there’s lots of potential here.

Now with this all positioned, I guess the next step is to actually make a castle-dungeon adventure. I’ll have to sew on that though.

— Castles are the Dungeons for the Fey and the Gothic – Hmmm Marquis

Author’s emphases.

Alas, that blog is gone, and the Internet Archive does not have a copy of this blogpost. I have copied the entire blogpost text here for posterity.

Neither angels nor devils, jinn can move in both directions, as is clear from the romance of Sayf al-Kulut and Badiat: they can surpass the devil’s works in wickedness and also act vigorously on behalf of the supreme God and goodness. In the sura called ‘The Jinn’ in the Koran, the jinn tell us, ‘That among us there are the righteous, and there are the less so—of diverse persuasions are we’….

In a plot, the supreme being can act as a narrative force embodied in providence, but there are limits to the spectrum of his behaviour. Even the furious God of the Old Testament does not possess the degree of idiosyncrasy and vitality that less strictly perfect beings, intrinsically various and unruly, can add to a story. It is not simply a question of the devil having the best tunes, but a reflection of the inherent demand that this kind of fairytale storytelling makes: for surprise, for wonder, for astonishment. The Greek myths could imagine gods and goddesses behaving badly and the stories correspondingly fizz with inventive plots: with the fairytale and the tales from [A Thousand And One] Nights this variety and spice, so necessary to a good story, moves out of the ranks of the divine into the intermediate world of spirits.

— Stranger Magic, p. 48

Perseus’s subsequent trials and triumphs, like those of his great-grandson Herakles, are too epic in scope, covering most of the known world, Hell included, and too teeming with exploits to go into in any detail here. Most significant, however, was the way in which the deeds of both heroes were reflections of their father’s battles against Gaia—which is to say, of the Greeks’ ongoing struggle to subsume the Pelasgians’ old, earthbound, chthonic cults into the brave new world of patriarchal Olympian dominance. Thus, Perseus’s most renowned exploit would be his beheading of that superbly demonized version of the Great Mother, Medusa, the terrible, snake-haired Gorgon who dwelled with her equally hideous sisters in a seaside cave near the opening to the Underworld.

— Zeus, p. 123

Demeter’s hair was yellow as the ripe corn of which she was mistress, for she was the Harvest Spirit, goddess of farmed fields and growing grain. The threshing floor was her sacred space. Women, the world’s first farmers (while men still ran off to the bloody howling of hunt and battle), were her natural worshipers, praying: “May it be our part to separate wheat from chaff in a rush of wind, digging the great winnowing fan through Demeter’s heaped-up mounds of corn while she stands among us, smiling, her brown arms heavy with sheaves, her ample breasts adorned in flowers of the field.”

Demeter had but one daughter, and she needed no other, for Persephone was the Spirit of Spring. The Lord of Shadows and Death, Hades himself, the Unseen One, carried her off in his jet-black chariot, driven by coal-black steeds, through a crevice in the surface of Earth, down to the realms of the dead. For nine days, Demeter wandered sorrowing over land, sea, and sky in search of her daughter, but no one dared tell her what had happened till she reached the Sun, who had seen it all. With Zeus’s help, the mother retrieved her daughter, but Persephone had already eaten a pomegranate seed, food of the dead, at Hades’s insistence, which meant she must come back to him. In the end, a sort of truce was arranged. Persephone could return to her sorrowing mother but must spend a third of each year with her dark Lord. Thus, by the four-month death each year of the goddess of springtime in her descent to the underworld, did winter enter the world. And when she returns from the dark realms she always strikes earthly beings with awe and smells somewhat of the grave.

— Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea, p. 3

To modern sensibility the fact of a story’s being allegorical makes it less likely to be an accurate depiction of real events. Modern writers try to drain their texts of meaning, to flatten them out in order to make them more naturalistic.

To the ancients, who believed that every single thing that happens on earth is guided by the motions of the stars and planets, the more a narrative brought out these ‘poetic’ patterns, the truer and more realistic the text.

So, it may be tempting to view the journeys into the Underworld made by Hercules, Theseus, and Orpheus as mere metaphor. It is true that on one level their adventures represent the beginning of humanity’s coming to terms with the reality of death. But, as we try to imagine the adventures underground of Hercules, Theseus, and the others, we must not conceive of them as to be purely internal or mental journeys, such as we might contemplate today. When they battled with monsters and demons, they were confronting forces that infested their own beings, the corrupted human flesh, the dark labyrinth of the human brain. But they were also fighting real monsters of flesh and blood.

— The Secret History of the World, Chapter 7

Thetis:

What a dangerous precedent! What if one day there were other heroes like him?

Hera:

What if courage and imagination were to become everyday mortal qualities? What would become of us?

Zeus:

We would no longer be needed. But for the moment there is sufficient cowardice, sloth, and mendacity down there on Earth to last forever.

— “Clash of the Titans” (1981)

…Before Tolkien and Disney, dwarves were crafty, foul, evil, thieving, deceitful little bastards. And that was their good side….

— Archetypology 101: Kings under the mountain – RPGnet

[In The Hobbit, Bilbo] has two other qualities besides [the Ring]. One is luck. The dwarves notice this more than once, with Thorin for instance saying, as he sends Bilbo down the tunnel to the dragon, that Bilbo is ‘full of courage and resource far beyond his size, and if I may say so possessed of good luck far exceeding the usual allowance’ (chapter 12). Earlier on, after Bilbo had rescued them from the spiders, ‘[the dwarves] saw that he had some wits, as well as luck and a magic ring – and all three were useful possessions’ (chapter 8). This belief that luck is a possession, which one can own, and perhaps even give away or pass on, may seem to be characteristically dwarvish, i.e. old-fashioned, pre-modern: it is a commonplace of Norse saga, for instance, where there are many lucky and unlucky cloaks, weapons, and people.

— J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, p. 27

Author’s emphasis.

Let’s begin by looking at the most widespread and celebrated of all mythic monsters—the dragon. This creature, in one guise or another, appears in almost every mythology and has been the subject of many books and countless articles. Perhaps the most intriguing of these examinations is An Instinct for Dragons by anthropologist David E. Jones. Jones argues that the image of the dragon is composed of the salient body parts of three predator species that hunted and killed our tree-dwelling African primate ancestors for about sixty million years. The three predators are the leopard, the python, and the eagle.

— Deadly Powers, pp. 162-63

Regardless of their different sizes, features, and forms, monsters have one trait in common—they eat humans. Whatever else they may do for us psychologically, monsters express—and ex-press—our dread of being torn apart, eviscerated, chewed, swallowed, and then shit out. This shameful fate of those who are eaten is confronted in an African myth in which a giant predatory bird swallows the hero whole day after day and then excretes him. Myth after myth confronts the stark facts of being consumed by a larger creature, obsessively depicting in graphic detail what both monsters and animal predators naturally do—turn humans into excrement. The stories express “the most basic anxiety of every living being”: “being swallowed and eaten.” One sees this anxiety throughout world myth.

— Deadly Powers, p. 158

Author’s emphasis.

The unconscious sends all sorts of vapors, odd beings, terrors, and deluding images up into the mind—whether in dream, broad daylight, or insanity; for the human kingdom, beneath the floor of the comparatively neat little dwelling that we call our consciousness, goes down into unsuspected Aladdin caves. There not only jewels but also dangerous jinn abide: the inconvenient or resisted psychological powers that we have not thought or dared to integrate into our lives. And they may remain unsuspected, or, on the other hand, some chance word, the smell of a landscape, the taste of a cup of tea, or the glance of an eye may touch a magic spring, and then dangerous messengers begin to appear in the brain. These are dangerous because they threaten the fabric of the security into which we have built ourselves and our family. But they are fiendishly fascinating too, for they carry keys that open the whole realm of the desired and feared adventure of the discovery of the self. Destruction of the world that we have built and in which we live, and of ourselves within it; but then a wonderful reconstruction, of the bolder, cleaner, more spacious, and fully human life—that is the lure, the promise and terror, of these disturbing night visitants from the mythological realm that we carry within.

— The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 8

In myth, the gods are more vulnerable. They are subject to passions and emotions, they quarrel, fight, and even die. This vulnerability was largely taboo in Egyptian art. The power of words and images was greatly increased when they were carved in stone to last for eternity. A terrible event, such as the murder of the good god Osiris, was too dangerous to show. Portraying even a temporary triumph for the forces of evil or chaos might empower them to act in the world.

— Magic in Ancient Egypt, p. 18

Wherever it may lead, the perilous journey is always, of course, perilous. The hero, traditionally a young man, must defend himself against beast and foe. In Celtic folktales and faery tales he often risks physical danger, bodily harm, even death, as he quests for a marvelous object that he believes will bring luck, health, or a richer life: a magical sword, a cauldron of wisdom, a cup of knowledge, or a faery lover. On the shaman’s initiation journey the danger is psychic—the disintegration and reintegration of personality. The object of the quest is a “new soul,” a shamanic soul with its disorienting and upsetting vision of reality. On subsequent journeys, the shaman’s quest may still be for nothing less than the human soul of a patient who is sick, of someone severely depressed, or of a person recently deceased. As psychologists and symbologists note, the archetypal journey is always one of initiation and self-discovery. The physical objects sought on the quest are symbols of psychic wholeness, health, and the integrated soul, or in Jungian terms, the Self.

— Fire in the Head, p. 161

The gods as icons are not ends in themselves. Their entertaining myths transport the mind and spirit, not up to, but past them, into the yonder void; from which perspective the more heavily freighted theological dogmas then appear to have been only pedagogical lures: their function, to cart the unadroit intellect away from its concrete clutter of facts and events to a comparatively rarefied zone, where, as a final boon, all existence—whether heavenly, earthly, or infernal—may at last be seen transmuted into the semblance of a lightly passing, recurrent, mere childhood dream of bliss and fright. “From one point of view all those divinities exist,” a Tibetan lama recently replied to the question of an understanding Occidental visitor, “from another they are not real.” This is the orthodox teaching of the ancient Tantras: “All of these visualized deities are but symbols representing the various things that occur on the Path“; as well as a doctrine of the contemporary psychoanalytical schools. And the same metatheological insight seems to be what is suggested in Dante’s final verses, where the illuminated voyager at last is able to lift his courageous eyes beyond the beatific vision of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, to the one Eternal Light.

— The Hero with a Thousand Faces, pp. 180-81

Emphasis mine.

In folklore and saga, gifts from fairies or higher powers to a mortal prince are usually magical. A magic spear would return to its master when hurled; magic horses would convey him safely out of battle; and magic armor would make the hero invulnerable. Typically, Homer has suppressed all such outlandish protection; no hero fighting at Troy has any charm or power to escape death. Nonetheless, as will shortly be revealed, remnants of the original attributes of each of Peleus’ divine gifts are discernible in the Iliad, although transformed and turned by Homer to tragic effect….

Of the many deaths the Iliad records, no other resembles that of Patroklos. Nowhere is the pitiful vulnerability of a mortal so exploited as it is by the savage malevolence of Apollo’s blow and the hounding of the wounded man as he tries to shun death among his companions. The horror of this extraordinary scene is reinforced by the resonance of two disparate, submerged traditions. One of these concerns that magic armor, worn by the folktale predecessors of Achilles, whose fairy-tale function had undoubtedly been to render its wearer invulnerable. As has been said, Homer severely repressed any hint that the armor given by the gods to Peleus had supernatural properties, yet he allows one aspect of this ancient motif to surface here, turning it to electrifying effect—Patroklos must be stripped of the armor before he can be killed. Thus Apollo’s savage blow strikes off his helmet and breaks the corselet upon him. Patroklos is killed—slaughtered—naked.

— The War That Killed Achilles, Chapter 7

Emphases mine.

The few demigods, such as Aineias, who receive miraculous rescue [in the Iliad] are saved only by the direct intervention of a patron divinity, not by any special ingredient of their own semidivine nature. The flesh of the demigods is wholly vulnerable, the blood is the blood of mortals, the pain of injury that of ordinary mortal men, as is the inevitability of death. Nothing the men have inherited from their divine parents is itself protective; what saves them is the physical removal from the danger of the battlefield. The vividly evoked vulnerability of demigods such as Aineias will also have bearing upon the nature, and limitations, of the epic’s most outstanding demigod—Achilles.

— The War That Killed Achilles, Chapter 4

The Olympians of the Iliad know everything about the mortals they look down upon; Zeus himself is eurúopa, “far-seeing,” a direct legacy of his origins as the all-seeing God of the Bright Sky, to whose celestial vantage the events on earth are laid bare. Rarely indolent, usually zestful and opinionated, the extended family of Zeus aggressively engages with the mortal world. In disguise, the Olympians move, speak, and act freely among men, partaking of the human experience. There is nothing about the men and women at Troy that the gods do not know, even to foreknowledge of their individual fates.

By contrast, despite the busy flow of divine activity that drums through their lives, the Homeric heroes and heroines know very little about their gods. Few could claim to know what a god looks like, as most encounters take place with the deity in disguise. There are exceptions: Helen famously recognizes Aphrodite, despite her masquerade as an old servant woman, by the “round, sweet throat of the goddess / and her desirable breasts and her eyes that were full of shining.” Likewise, Poseidon’s disguise as the seer Kalchas is betrayed by his footprints: “‘this is not Kalchas, the bird interpreter of the gods,'” Aias the son of Oïleus says to Telamonian Aias, “‘for I knew / easily as he went away the form of his feet, the legs’ form / from behind him. Gods, though gods, are conspicuous.'”

By and large, however, the men at Troy fight in a kind of fog of existential ignorance, never knowing where or who the gods are or what divine activities and plans already under way may affect their own actions. Nor do they know what they must do for their supplications and prayers to be received. A very few incidents appear to suggest that Zeus, at least, punishes the wicked, which, if true, would furnish some minimal guidance for gaining his favor and avoiding his wrath. Menelaos, for example, rants at the Trojans for taking Helen away: “‘wretched dogs, and your hearts knew no fear / at all of the hard anger of Zeus loud-thundering, / the guest’s god, who some day will utterly sack your steep city.'” On closer look, however, in this and other such cases, it is clear that punishment is to be meted out by Zeus only in his capacity as patron of a specific institution: he is Zeus Orkios, “Zeus who upholds oaths,” or Zeus Xenia, the god of guest friendship. Zeus’ loyalty, then, is in fact to himself in his particular cultic aspects, not to a principle of overarching justice.

— The War That Killed Achilles, Chapter 6

Emphasis mine.

Coming from who knows where, a lucky find is potentially unsettling to whatever world it enters. The moralists will be likely to complain, the gamblers will be pleased, while everyone else will wait to see if it really is amusing, this new thing. Whatever the case, before we can have a full sense of the disruptions and delights that come in the wake of a lucky find, we need fuller examples to work with. In 1965 [C.E.] George Foster, an anthropologist who had worked in Mexico and Italy, published an essay that is partly about how peasants respond when their neighbors’ fortunes suddenly change. In “Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good,” Foster argues that many othervise perplexing details of peasant behavior can be understood by assuming that peasants believe there is a fixed quantity of wealth in the community and therefore that if someone in the group suddenly becomes richer it must be because someone else, or the group as a whole, has become poorer. The idea holds if we imagine, as Foster does, a closed community, or—to put it the other way—the idea finds its exceptions in cases in which wealth clearly comes from outside the nominal bounds of the group. Peasants do not feel ripped off if one of their number becomes richer as “a result of selling labor as a migrant worker, for it is clear that wages so earned come from across the border. More telling for my purposes are the other ways to get wealth without being subjected to group opprobrium. In peasant communities in southern Italy, for example, the neighbors won’t harass someone whose sudden success comes as a “gift of Fortune,” as, for example, when “a rich gentleman gave a poor boy a violin,” or when “a rich gentlewoman adopted an abandoned child,” when a man “hit upon a hidden treasure” buried in the woods, and when “another was lucky enough to win in the lottery.”

— Trickster Makes This World, pp. 131-32

Emphasis mine.

…In short, trickster is a boundary-crosser. Every group has its edge, its sense of in and out, and trickster is always there, at the gates of the city and the gates of life, making sure there is commerce. He also attends the internal boundaries by which groups articulate their social life. We constantly distinguish—right and wrong, sacred and profane, clean and dirty, male and female, young and old, living and dead—and in every case trickster will cross the line and confuse the distinction. Trickster is the creative idiot, therefore, the wise fool, the gray-haired baby, the cross-dresser, the speaker of sacred profanities. Where someone’s sense of honorable behavior has left him unable to act, trickster will appear to suggest an amoral action, something right/wrong that will get life going again. Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox.

That trickster is a boundary-crosser is the standard line, but…there are also cases in which trickster creates a boundary, or brings to the surface a distinction previously hidden from sight. In several mythologies, for example, the gods lived on earth until something trickster did caused them to rise into heaven. Trickster is thus the author of the great distance between heaven and earth; when he becomes the messenger of the gods it’s as if he has been enlisted to solve a problem he himself created. In a case like that, boundary creation and boundary crossing are related to one another, and the best way to describe trickster is to say simply that the boundary is where he will be found—sometimes drawing the line, sometimes crossing it, sometimes erasing or moving it, but always there, the god of the threshold in all its forms.

— Trickster Makes This World, pp. 7-8

Emphasis mine.