Z is for ZOOMORPHIC ANGELS II

Well, here we are at the end of April 2012's A-Z blogging challenge.  Last year's final post, Z is for Zoomorphic Angels, is my second most popular post of all time, so, I'm revisiting the subject this year.  If you missed it, I recommend going back and reading that one first (linked above) and then coming back for this year's.

Unlike the anthropomorphic ("human-shaped") angels that dominate the occasions of hierophanies or angelic visitations to humans in the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, there are two species or classes of angels that are definitely zoomorphic.  These monstrous angels are the cherubim and seraphim (note the plural forms in Hebrew end in -im).  While we do not have Hebrew images of these creatures, we know do have the Phoenician images that were made for Egyptian and Assyrian markets, and the images made with a visual imagination dominated by Egyptian and Assyrian conceptions seem to have been the same images that were sold in Israel by Phoenicians. 

The cherubim get a lot more references than the seraphim, which I believe are only clearly and explicitly referenced in Isaiah.  The image at the bottom of the page, found in nearby Syria, has the requisite six wings and holds a serpent in each hand (check biblical references below).  In addition to the images in the archaeological record and the rather idiosyncratic descriptions in Ezekiel,  we can tell that the cherub is like a winged bull, sphinx, or griffin because YHWH is pictured as using one as a mount in the book of Psalms.  Celestial creatures of this type were popular in Mesopotamia and called karibu/kuribu, "intercessor."  King Hiram of Byblos had cherubim flanking his throne and incense altars have been found in Taanach and Meggido flanked by them.  It is not surprising them that they are said to have flanked God's throne and the Ark of the Covenant.  The parallelism of Psalm 18 may suggest that they were associated with the winds.  It is clear that both cherubim and seraphim were "angels of the presence," but they do not seem to have the messenger function of anthropomorphic angels.  I can't help but feel that the Bible does not make full use of the potential of these monstrous angels.  Why don't we ever seem them tearing into the enemies of God's people?  Maybe the God of Israel really does not have as bloody tastes as others of us do.  Certainly, in mythopoesis that was inspired by scripture, that's how I see myself using zoomorphic angels.  Maybe their occurrences in liturgical and mystical contexts instead of smiting contexts should be telling us something that I have yet to pick up on.



Scripture References

Genesis 3:24
Exodus 25:18-20; 37:6-9
Numbers 7:89
I Samuel 4:4
II Samuel 22:11
I Kings 6:23-28; 8:6-7
Psalms 18:10; 80:1
Isaiah 6:2-6; 30:6 (cf. Num. 21:6-8; Deut. 8:15)
Ezekiel 1:4-28; 10:3-22; 28:14,16

Syrian Figure from Tell Halaf

Taijitu, Yinyang, and D&D Alignment

It's always fun when your readers are interested in something you are interested in, and perhaps even more fun when it's a reader that you know.  Perspicacious comments are pleasing!  So I was happy to see Paris' comments on Y is for YINYANG, yesterday.  Initially, he notes that the principles of motion and interactive arising would make it "challenging to equate Yang to Law and Yin to Chaos without describing a cosmology in which the one eventually changes to form the other."  He then goes on to reflect on an aspect of Pathfinder's Golarion setting to do just that.  There are a few responses I'd like to make vis-a-vis Paris' comments that I hope might develop what I have in mind and perhaps shed further light on my understanding of Yin-and-Yang and the Great Dao.

First, Yin and Yang are not opposing forces (I note, Paris, you said "supposedly").  They are complementary opposites, and so can only be in opposition of a very special kind.  This fits with a Neutral view of a threefold alignment universe.  The proponents of Law and of Chaos each take their side to be the the rightful whole, and the other side its destruction, which itself needs to be destroyed (in ways keeping with its alignment).  Neutrality would view all things as arising from the interaction between Law and Chaos, with both being necessary.  Balance would not be a stasis between them, but needful disintegration of order and ordering of chaos.  While forces and individuals who side with one against the other would resist every instance of this, those who understood its necessity would work for the best outcomes and overall balance.  So a cosmology in which Law and Chaos were constantly in motion, rising and falling, would be a feature of what I was envisioning.  I take it that Law and Chaos do give rise to one another, and that like any of the pairs of complementary opposites in my example chart below, if one were to dominate   it would be detrimental.  Like the perspectives of Confucianism and Daoism themselves, one might argue that Chinese civilization flourished when the two were in harmony.

YIN	YANG
Low Wet Female Soft Cold Dark Unseen Negative	High Dry Male Hard Hot Light Seen Positive

I have some passages from the Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) in mind as I write this.  Sadly, my two translations were destroyed last year and this semester I taught out of the class anthology without replacing them, therefore this post does not have the quotations I would have liked to use.  Let me finally note that, for such a system to work from my point-of-view, Good and Evil in their moral or ultimate senses could not be sorted as Yang-Yin.  I believe that philosophical Daoism agrees with me here, as well.  Maybe I will revisit this topic at some future date and include some quotations.  I also noted that at least one other A-Z blogger this year shared my interest.  Yay!

Those lucky South Koreans and their awesome flag...

Y is for YINYANG

Posting unexpectedly from out-of-town. It helps one discover how much one hates the iPhone blogger app.

Yinyang, or yin and yang as we tend to say it in English, is the theoretical complementarity of opposites in Chinese tradition such as Daosim and Confucianism. It is famously recognized (though hardly ever correctly named) in the taijitu (great power diagram) symbol.

The symbol has been used in mythopoesis by author Robert Jordan. The symbol could be used by gamers who play with a three alignment system, especially one where they do not equate Law and Chaos with Good and Evil. Law as Yang and Chaos as Yin would make the taijitu the perfect symbol for Neutral alignment. I've been playing around a little for how I might use this in my Ygg setting. More to come on that, soon.

X is for XENOPUS LAEVIS

Xenopus laevis.  A biologist immediately knows the importance of that name, but perhaps many mythopoets do not, as I did not.  However, our fellow rambler and Holmes expert is happy to help you, as he did me, here.

W is for WONDER

Tarantulla Nebula from the Hubble Spacescope, Courtesy of NASA.

One of the basic human responses is wonder.  It's an inner state, a mood or attitude, that seems to have an accompanying emotion that can be very intense.  There are also certain thoughts that go along with it.  The external universe elicits these thoughts with its size, beauty, complexity, and simplicity.  But just as we know from our own internal experience that the seen has unseen behind it, so we suspect that the external universe hides even as it expresses mystery.  I'm not sure if WOW! is a thought or not, but the inner state produces questions, so we often use it as a verb and say, "I wonder what/if/etc."

Why is there something rather than nothing?  Why are these the somethings that are and not some others?  Wonder is a crucial part of religion, philosophy, art -- and especially fantastical fiction.  We express our sense of wonder in science, in worship, and in the sub-creation of worlds that have the inner consistency of reality.  What other animal wonders?

Here's wishing you all the wonder you want, and then a bit more to surprise you at just the right moments.

J is for PSEUDODRAGON

Just checking to see if everybody is awake!  The W  entry will be coming later, but I wanted to share that I am enjoying finally getting around to read what Steven Brust is famous for, instead of what I appreciated him for.  In any event, after giving in to all the recommendations of this series and having finished the first two, I've come to like it more than I thought I would.  But I think there are more little hints that this started as a D&D game than just that a supporting character is a Jhereg.  Which is, by the way, a better name for a little dragon than pseudodragon, which has always bugged me as an adult.  Any other Brust recommendations out there?  I hear a rumor that he's going to be getting some attention in exalted realms soon...more to come when I can talk about it.

V is for VERISIMILITUDE

 is for VERISIMILITUDE



I have said before that I believe Tolkien's  "On Fairy-Stories" (1947) is one of the most (fine, I really think the most) important pieces of theory for the practicing mythopoet.  He gives us the concepts of sub-creation and secondary belief to describe the enchantment of mythic literature (or fairy-stories).  The sub-creation enchants its readers by eliciting their secondary belief (in contrast to willing suspension of disbelief).  The secondary belief of readers in a sub-creation depends on its verisimilitude.  Verisimilitude is what elicits secondary belief and thus enchants.  Without it, fantasy falls flat.  Understanding Tolkien's point about verisimilitude, and then pondering deeply what it might mean for you and your audience, in particular how to sustain and not strain or break it, is worth your time if you haven't done it.  If you don't have a copy of it in something that you already own, get yourself a paper or electronic copy right away.  Read, ponder, repeat.

U is for URBAN SETTING II

Due to losing some family storage, I've recently had to go through a lot of old things (see my Nostalgia post).  I came across the remnants of what was once a mighty collection of illustrated children's books of the better kind.  The collection was shared between my daughter (the child in question) and myself (for use in the classroom in my previous incarnation -- okay I shared the books with my students as well, but they were taught to be careful with books from Dr. Obscure's Special Collection).  Sorting through them, I kept a few for myself, a few for my daughter, and the rest went to the shelves of Half Price Books.  Among those that I kept were two really cool books -- A Seaport through History: from the 10th Century BC to the 20th Century and A Central American City through the Ages: San Rafael.  These books by Hernandez, Ballonga, et al. are out of print and appear to have been published under somewhat different names by different publishers.  They trace a fictional Mayan city and  a Low Countries seaport through their histories, showing maps and cross-sections, with relevant information about them that would be enviable in a game setting book.  The fact that they are historical and yet fictional would make them perfect for just such a purpose, so I intend to eventually use them for just that.  It looks like there is at least one more book they did together, so I'm going to try to remember to keep an eye out for the one on the Islamic city.

Note that I just snuck in a Tomeful Tuesday, which we haven't had in a while!  Finding good material for an urban setting in unlikely or perhaps just new places, especially for cheap or free, is quiet satisfying.  I've used old National Geographics in the past, but I really like that the unique characteristics of these two books, and that they have the feel without the danger of being recognized as real places.  What resources have you found for creating urban settings?

U is for URBAN SETTING

"Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."

"A great city is, to be sure, the school for studying life."

— Samuel Johnson

The city.  Urbs.  Civitas.  Polis.  There is something powerful about the packing of places and teeming of characters that make it rich for the imagination to inhabit.  Thus it is one of the settings that I love, even for fantasy adventure.  It's not because I eschew variety: the hamlet, the wilderness, and -- especially the Underworld -- all have their charms.  But a well-drawn city matches the well-done Underworld in my book.  Dickens' London (to choose one London), lives for me and it is one of the Londons that I love; Rutherford's is another.    McCullough's late Republican/early Imperial Rome likewise seems a real place with its own distinctive character.  I'd like to find fiction set in Venice and Florence that do the same for those cities in the Renaissance.  It's been a long time since I read much Ann Rice, but I think I'd probably say her New Orleans, and perhaps to a lesser extent her Paris, read well.  The Thieves World novels made Sanctuary breathe and roar and spit.  In game settings, the Free City of Greyhawk, Waterdeep, and Golarion's Absalom (for sale here) are intriguing cities that promise strong sense of place. 

What cities do you love?  What materials from fiction or gaming deliver a city in its stones and in its soul to your imagination?  What are the touches that make the city seem a unique, living place?  Are there equivalences of the double decker bus, the little black cab, the red phone box, and the red royal post box?  How do you go about city building in your secondary creations?  I would love to hear your thoughts, examples, and recommendations!

T is for TAROT

Regular ramblers know that, in spite of being an old fogy who never got into any of these new-fangled card games, I am still fascinated by card decks.  I created a way for generating classic fantasy role-playing characters using a standard card deck.  (The world wasn't as impressed as I was, but what-ya-gonna-do?)  I've emoted about my love for Paizo's Harrow Deck and the old Deck of Many Things.  So I was always looking for a good deal on a Ravenloft Tarokka deck or a tarot deck.  Well, I finally got the tarot deck the day before T!  (The artist is David Palladini.)  I got a great deal at Lucky Dog Books.  (I'm still working on forgiving them for closing their old Paperbacks Plus store in Lakewood.  So many great memories in that place over the years.)

I wish I had some cool new idea to share, but I don't.  I started playing around with a use for the tarot during gaming, but it is still in the early stages of development.  Therefore, I'll share the picture of my deck in action and promote my old post (linked as "card deck" above), Paizo's Harrow, and Charles Williams' The Greater Trumps.  Don't hate me for one day of show-and-tell and sell.  ;-)

S if for SAGE

The images of Zeno of Citium and Confucius provide two strongly contrasting images of the sage from two classical societies that valued the wisdom of the wise, while disagreeing internally over the nature of wisdom and the man who wielded it.  The sage is important in the real, external world as the rare possessor of valuable knowledge.  They have a correspondingly high place in our internal and secondary worlds.  For Jungian investigations, you will want to look under the term senex.  Both as teachers and as figures, their value extends beyond their lifetimes.

Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world?


1 Cor 1:20

Correspondingly, the sage has had an important role in fantasy role-playing, as well -- both in the primary world of the player or gamer, and in the secondary world of the game or characters.  There is the sage who knows the way of gaming, and so dispenses wisdom to the gamers.  The late Jean Wells was one of the original sages, dispensing wisdom in our Dragon Magazine feature, Sage Advice.  There are also sages as NPCs in the game itself.  They serve as an expensive resource for characters who need help solving a problem with knowledge to which they have no other access.  They can also serve as a nice plot device for GMs who want to present players with an option for play.

Sages to the Seventh Power
If one sage is good, then seven sages must be awesome.  Many cultures have thought so.  Sumeria had theirs.  Ancient India had the saptarishi.  Pre-Socratic Greece had their seven sages.  Three Kingdoms China had their Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove.  Finally, there is the fascinating case of the fictional Seven Sages of Rome, a cycle of early European romances that appear to have Sanskrit, Persian, and Hebrew origins.  This makes me want to create my own council of the wise!

R is for ROBINSON CRUSOE

Defoe's 1719 novel, an early example of the English novel, entered my imagination at a young age thanks to my mother's provision of nicely illustrated children versions of classic novels.  It also made an impression on G. K. Chesterton, whose importance for mythopoets I have treated before.  But unlike the elements of the story that my youthful imagination was taken with like cannibals, pirates, friendship, and black-powder, Chesterton was taken with, of all things, Crusoe's accounting of items salvaged in chapter IV.  In other words, with little more than a list of goods.  For Chesterton, it is a poem reflecting the truth of our world.

In chapter IV of Orthodoxy, "The Ethics of Elfland," he writes,

I really felt...as if all the order and number of things were remnants from Crusoe's ship.  That there are two sexes and one sun, was like the fact that there were two guns and one axe.  It was poignantly urgent that none should be lost; but, somehow, it was rather fun that none could be added.  The trees and the plants seemed like things saved from the wreck: and when I saw the Matterhorn, I was glad that it had not been overlooked in the confusion.  I felt economical about the stars as if they were sapphires (they are called so in Milton's Eden): I hoarded the hills (116).

...there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression that in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin (118).

I never appreciated the salvaging of goods when I read Robinson Crusoe, though it did make more of an impact on me when I saw the Swiss Family Robinson movie.  But after reading Chesterton, I find it unforgettable.  Even while I take more of a mythic approach to the story of the Fall than Chesterton did, I believe it resonates with me just as much.  It also suggests part of the truth behind humanity as homo mythopoeicus.  Our sense of wonder at the things that are and the things that are not find one mode of expression through the sub-creation of secondary worlds.  In On Fairy-Stories, Tolkien traces this to the doctrine of the imago Dei: God created beings in his image, that is, image-making creatures.

Thanks and Welcome!

There have been a number of comments and additions to the roster of Ramblers lately that I have not been as quick to acknowledge as usual.  Thank you to everyone for the support!  I appreciate your follows and comments (even if it takes me a while to get around to them).  Please accept my welcome to Mythopoeic Rambling.  I hope you'll explore the Page Tabs, Blog Archive, and Labels to get a lay of the land and find new resources for your own imaginings.

Q is for QUEEN MOTHER OF THE WEST

Hsi Wang-mu or Xi Wangmu is a Chinese goddess of death, immortality, and the Western Paradise.  She is described in the HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion as having a leopard tail, tiger teeth, a spool-like headdress, sitting on K'un-lun mountain by a sacred tree preparing the elixir of immortality and being accompanied  by the jade hare, the three-legged bird, the toad, the nine-tailed fox, and in some accounts, an armed guard.  She hosts feasts at which seekers are served the peaches of immortality. 

I'm having trouble finding images that fit that description, but check out the following for some other ideas.  Check out this site for not only other illustrations, but the most information I found about her online.  I do not have enough expertise in Chinese religion to judge that online article by Max Dashu, but it is fascinating and packed with details and suggested interpretations of the evidence regarding this goddess.  Yumiyu's illustration is here.  Izabeth's is here.  A more modern looking illustration that looks like it may go with a video game is here.

A number of goddesses have caught my attention during this year's challenge. This one seems to combine a number of elements of Chinese religion, including the alchemical and perhaps the shamanic.

The association between the West and Paradise persists in forms of Pure Land, whose Western Paradise is overseen by Amitabha, or the Buddha of Infinite Light (known in Japan as Amida Butsu).

P is for PALADIN, Part 2

This post is my second meditation on the paladin.  For last year's, see here.


"Don't deny your rowdy nature, paladin.  And don't take advice from old people."

from season 1 episode 25, "His Hero."

Pendleton Ward had included plenty of hints in previous episodes of Adventure Time.  Finn had previously referred to his alignment and his inability to act against it.  In episode 23, he refuses to kill a Neutral creature, as he will only kill evil ones.  In episode 24, he tells Bubblegum he can't beat up the Ice King for no reason.  "It's against my alignment!"  The kind of character that worries this much about not transgressing against his alignment is, of course, a paladin, so RP gamers watching had known that Finn was a paladin before the old lady calls him one in episode 25, and before Ward explicitly acknowledged the fact in an interview on Wizards' Dungeons and Dragons website.

The name derives from a Roman term for a palace official, and thence came to be applied to Charlemagne's Twelve Peers, and later to all chivalrous heroes.  Gary Gygax (Supplement I: Greyhawk 1976 -- spelled out further two years later in the PHB) took the term for such a paragon of knighthood and added to it the sanctity of the ideal crusader -- a crucial development that goes beyond even the importance of the Christian identity of the Twelve Peers contrasted against the background of their Saracean foes.  This development gave games from D&D and its descendents, including WoW, the name for their holy warrior classes, when the obvious term in the West would have most likely been crusader.  Perhaps the denigration of that name mitigated against its effectiveness as a choice.  It is interesting that the original uses of the name would have better suited it as the name of a member of a royal order of knights bound to a king -- such as Finn and Jake play in season 2, episode 3, "Loyalty to the King" of Arthur's Knights of the Round Table.  But perhaps the later, especially those devoted to the Quest of the Holy Grail, will help us to bind the two concepts together, with paladins being Lawful in so far as they are bound to a king or other divinely ordained ruler of law and Good in so far at they are devoted to their deity.*  This could provide a fun source of tension as well for the character, when there is the potential for loyalty and holiness to come into conflict.

As Adventure Time so bluntly points out, the paladin uses violence for ends that are both lawful and good: in particular, the protection of the weak.  For more on the chivalric code, see here and here.  Crafting a bipartite code for a paladin that spells out in one part his duties to his leige lord (or lady) and in another, his duties to his heavenly Lord (or Lady), would go a long way towards world and character building, whether for fiction or gaming.

In addition to Mallory's Morte d' Arthur, I'd rewatch  Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven, although I did not like the director's cut which seemed to step away from the fine line of showing the good and bad on both sides and towards being obviously anti-Christian.  Therein are examples of the holy warrior struggling to be bound to both God on one hand and to his King and kingdom on the other.

* Let's not pass up the opportunity to link this Lawful Good entry.