Daily Archives: March 26, 2024

Top Tens – Miscellany: Top 10 Youtube (10) Supercuts Delight

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Youtube channel banner as at 26 March 2024

 

(10) SUPERCUT DELIGHTS (USA 2019)

 

 

“I primarily make video essays and the occasional meme video on popular shows and movies. I used to make supercuts / minute-straight videos until transitioning into what the channel is today.”

 

As per the bio and channel name, this Youtuber started off with ‘supercuts’ or short ‘clip’ videos – splicing together clips from television or film, usually to a running gag or theme, with the most common being “devoid of logic” as demonstrated from recurring video titles e.g. “Season 8 of Game of Thrones Being Devoid of Logic”.

 

And as that sample video title indicates, the original focus of the channel was Game of Thrones – and while that (and House of the Dragon) remains a substantial focus, the channel has long since branched off into other TV series or film.

 

While my favorite type of popular culture criticism remains that of sarcasm and snark – what TV Tropes dubs the Caustic Critic, something we’ll see much more of in this top ten – Supercuts Delights is perhaps the most measured reviewer in my top ten as well as the one with least of an ax to grind, often alternating positive appreciation with negative criticism, even on the same subject or in matching videos. For example, he did a video on the Top 10 Characters Ruined by the Last Seasons of Game of Thrones – as well as a video on the top ten characters that weren’t. Similarly, for an example that does not use Game of Thrones, he did a video of the top ten best changes made by the recent Netflix live-action series of Avatar: The Last Airbender – and a video of the worst.

 

There’s not much more to say – I’m always a fan of top ten or similar lists, but contrary to the impression you might have from the video titles I noted above, he does more straightforward reviews as well. He also tends to be admirably compact, keeping his video content relatively short and without any bloat in duration.

 

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

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Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Mancy (9) Theriomancy

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Photo Canadian geese flying in V-formation (“Bird” – Wikipedia) by John Benson on Flickr -Creative Commons Attribution Generic 2.0 Licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

 

(9) THERIOMANCY – ORNITHOMANCY

 

The way of animal powers

Similarly to my previous entry for somatomancy, theriomancy, or divination by animals, is likely one of the first methods of divination in human history – or prehistory.

After all, prehistoric humans depended on closely observing animal behavior, including in effect to divine patterns from that behavior, so it was not much of a conceptual leap to divine patterns beyond animal behaviour altogether to other things or forces in the natural or supernatural worlds.

And of course there is the contemporary ritual theriomancy of Groundhog Day.

Again similarly to my previous entry for somatomancy, theriomancy tends to be more specialized to particular animals or types of animal.

My top pick has to go to ornithomancy & alectryomancy – the former is divination by birds (or the flight of birds), with the most famous being the Roman practice of augury (from Latin for looking at birds) and the latter is literally divination using a rooster or roosters, but also more broadly chickens or other fowl.

This is because of its historical documentation or prevalence, particularly in classical Greek or Roman history, in turn perhaps reflecting how birds have always seemed to earthbound humans as liminal beings between heaven and earth.

One form of alectryomancy involved divination using a bird or number of birds, ideally a rooster or cockerel, pecking at grains which are scattered on letters and interpreting meaning from the letters or words spelt out. Something of that may survive in the apocryphal story of the western Roman emperor Honorius and his favorite chicken.

Close runner-up is apantomancy, or divination by chance or random encounters with animals.

As for the balance of another top ten within my top ten – a top ten for theriomancy – I’m going to stick to alphabetical order as their individual details are somewhat scant

3 Ailuromancy – cats
4 Arachnomancy & entomomancy (myrmomancy) – the former is divination by spiders and the latter is divination by insects (with myrmomancy being divination by ants). The former is something I’d imagine as being used by the arachnophile Drow in Dungeons & Dragons – and as an arachnophobe, I see it as the most evil method of divination, even more so than my top ten entry famed for being evil
5 Batrachomancy – frogs
6 Canomancy & ololygamancy – divination by dogs, with the latter as divination by the howls or howlng of dogs
7 Hippomancy – horses
8 Ichthyomancy – fish
9 Myomancy – rodents, particularly mice or rats. Much like modern science and its lab testing, amirite?
10 Ophidiomancy – divination by snakes

What adders came to shed their coats?
What coiled obscene
Small serpents with soft stretching throats
Caressed Faustine?

Although I’d like to imagine it extends to delirious visions from snakebite, a la snake-handling.

Shout-out to dracomancy – included in Wikipedia’s list of methods of divination as divination (or magic) by dragons, obviously limited outside of fantasy or mythology (arguably an example of the latter is Sigurd or Sigfried gaining divinatory powers from the heart of the dragon Fafnir).

Also honorable mention to conchomancy or divination by shells.

As a method of divination, theriomancy seems to be of much wider versality than somatomancy and the same seems to go for it as a school of magic, which would seem to combine the Dungeons and Dragons class of wizard with that of druid (or perhaps medieval witches with their animal familiars).

And with a little fantasy or imagination, it has even wider potential – even if we confine ourselves to theriomancy as being a literal way of animal powers, as being able to replicate the abilities (or form) of any animal, particularly if we extend that throughout the animal kingdom including extinct animals or even microscopic fauna. There’s a reason the Dungeons and Dragons spells of polymorph or shape change are considered broken by being ridiculously overpowered. Of course, one could restrict this by proposing different schools of magic for different taxonomic divisions (or for different habitats or biomes).

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
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Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Mythologies (9) Afro-American – Voodoo

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Free ‘divine gallery’ sample art – OldWorldGods

 

 

(9) AFRO-AMERICAN – VOODOO

 

One of the newest entries in my top ten, as well as a mythology that is part of an active religion – or more broadly the family of Afro-American or African diaspora religions.

While I find it fascinating, it is a mythology or mythologies of which I only have superficial knowledge – and perhaps like popular culture, I am most familiar with the Louisiana variant actually titled voodoo and the Haitian variant that is titled vodou.

For Louisiana voodoo, it is primarily the ritual or magical practices that are associated with voodoo in popular culture or ‘Hollywood voodoo’ – charms or amulets such as voodoo dolls, ‘gris gris’ bags and of course mojo. O yes – and voodoo queens, such as Marie Laveau. I also find it intriguing how early followers of voodoo as slaves disguised their traditional gods as Catholic saints in a form of subversive syncretism.

For Haitian vodou, it is the divine entities, the loa or ‘divine horsemen’ that possess their followers – particularly the distinctive trinity of Papa Legba, Erzulie, and of course Baron Samedi, not least from his cinematic incarnation in the James Bond film, Live and Let Die. Again, I find it intriguing that the loa go by many names, which represent different personalities or traits – with the two most significant being the more positive ‘Rada’ form and the darker ‘Petro’ form, the latter representing the angry dark side of the loa, usually linked to the dark side of slavery in the Afro-American historical experience.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
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Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Books (9) Ronald Hutton – Triumph of the Moon

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Oxford University Press

 

 

(9) RONALD HUTTON –
TRIUMPH OF THE MOON (1999)

 

The history of what Hutton portrays to be the only religion England has ever given the world, modern pagan witchcraft or Wicca.

Ronald Hutton is an English historian who specializes, among other specialties, in the history of the various strands of contemporary paganism – particularly in this book, which might be regarded as his magnum opus.

It may be somewhat deflating or disillusioning for those who like to imagine modern paganism or neopaganism as descending from an unbroken lineage or tradition back to historical paganism, but Hutton presents Wicca definitively as a twentieth century reconstruction, often artistic or literary in nature.

However, Hutton clearly writes from a respect for the new paganism, consistent with his paean to it as the only religion England has given the world (and I understand that he was actually raised as a pagan in his youth).

And for that matter, what does it matter that it is a reconstruction of historical traditions, rather than a genuine continuation of, as neopaganism likes to present itself, longstanding hidden pagan traditions? Scratch beneath the surface and much the same can be said of other religious traditions. After all, if a historian can characterize even Christianity, from a historical perspective, as a Greek hero cult devoted to a Jewish messiah, then what of reconstruction? And that’s setting aside how much of either side of that characterization – Greek and Jewish – might be further characterized as reconstruction, or at least synthesis of other traditions.

Among his other books prior to Triumph of the Moon, Hutton deflated much the same claims of the ritual year in English paganism or at least tradition in Stations of the Sun – demonstrating the various celebrations to be of much more recent vintage than is often claimed for them.

And after Triumph of the Moon, Hutton has gone on to look at other strands within modern paganism in a similar vein (as more reflecting modern reconstruction than genuine historical tradition) – shamanism, druids, and most recently, various ‘pagan’ goddess figures of folklore in his Queens of the Wild.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
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