Daily Archives: April 29, 2024

Top Tens – Miscellany: Top 10 Youtube (Special Mention) (11) Gigguk

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Youtube channel banner as at 29 April 2024

 

(11) GIGGUK (UK 2005)

 

“Just a guy who likes to talk about Anime and has been doing it for way too long.”

Indeed he’s been doing it for almost two decades from his Youtube channel banner – and moved to Japan at some point to do it as well if I recall correctly from his videos.

I would describe myself as dabbling in anime, usually those films or series that stream on Netflix, although I dabbled in it more in a phase coinciding with my discovery of Evangelion.

So I don’t often go down into that underworld these days but when I do I use Gigguk as my guide. Indeed I often just watch his videos rather than the anime series themselves, except for those that particularly engage my interest from his videos (usually the more fantasy or SF titles).

He combines a meticulously informed fandom of anime with a healthy sense of humor about the medium – not least a self-effacing sense of humor about how silly anime or its fandom can be.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

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Top Tens – Mythology: Mancy (Special Mention) (11) Abacomancy

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A dust storm blankets Texas houses, 1935 in a photograph by George Everett Marsh Jr – public domain image used in Wikipedia article “Dust”

 

(11) ABACOMANCY

 

“I will show you fear in a handful of dust”

“Ah what a dusty answer gets the soul
When hot for certainties in this our life”

I could do these dusty quotes all day, although apparently dusty answer has become a term used for unsatisfactory reply, which does not bode well for abacomancy or divination by dust. However, I just couldn’t resist special mention for it and not just because it was literally the first entry in alphabetical order in Wikipedia’s list of methods of divination.

Disappointingly, it didn’t involve oracles in temples full of dust and cobwebs, but apparently something akin to geomancy – divining patterns in dust, dirt, sand, silt or ashes after being thrown or dropped on a flat surface. Also, Jackson Pollack was into it, doing a series of paintings for it.

Of course, I prefer to cite abacomancy as my go-to excuse for not cleaning my home.

As a method of divination or school of magic, abacomancy seems a little, well, dusty. Although I’d like to imagine abacomancy as a school of magic in a post-apocalyptic fantasy setting – magic powered by dust and detritus, flotsam and jetsam, rust and ruins. Essentially, necromancy but for objects instead of living things (although the two could overlap), a Magic of Broken Things along the lines of the God of the Lost in Stephen King’s The Girl of Who Loved Tom Gordon (although again those could overlap).

Come to think of it, a Magic of the Wasteland – both in terms of the form and style of T.S. Eliot’s poem of that name, the source of my handful of dust quote.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
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Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Mythologies (Special Mention) (11) Dragons

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Aww – adorable! Illustration of a winged, fire-breathing dragon by Friedrich Justin Bertuch from 1806 – public domain image used in the Wikipedia article “Dragon”

 

(11) DRAGONS

 

Here be dragons!

Dragons, drakes, worms or wyrms. Serpents – feathered, horned, winged. Amphipteres, lindworms and wyverns. Basilisk, cockatrice, hydra or ouroboros – and of course the tarrasque.

Dragons or draconic creatures are nearly universal in myth and folklore

“Nearly every culture has myths about something called a ‘dragon’, despite the fact none of them can agree on exactly what dragons are. How big are they? What do they look like? How many heads do they have? Do they breathe fire? Or ice?” (Or something else altogether?)”

“Do they fly (and if so, with or without wings)? How many legs do they have? Are they dumb as planks, or superintelligent? Are they low scaly pests, or ultra-rare Uber-serpents ancient and powerful as the Earth itself? Are they benevolent? Malevolent or even outright demonic? Are they divine entities or spirits, or just really cool animals?”

As such, dragons in myth or folklore could well be the subject of their own top ten list, including their various elements, tropes and types – not to mention the elements, tropes and types of that most important human interaction with them, dragon-slaying and dragon-slayers.

Very broadly speaking, there are two predominant traditions of dragons (in Eurasia) – ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ dragons, with the former tending towards malevolence or demonic entities, and the latter towards benevolence or divine entities. It is of course more complex than that – with many other distinctions between them (and variations within them).

Even their theories for their origin and ubiquitous presence in myth and folklore are fascinating and diverse.

The most obvious source is of analogous reptilian creatures, whether extant or extinct – crocodiles and Komodo dragons being examples of the former, dinosaurs of the latter. Of course, the dinosaurs themselves can’t have influenced human myths or folklore of dragons, but their fossils could have – apparently some attribute Chinese dragon worship to the prevalence of dinosaur fossils in China. There could even be a combination of extant or extinct reptiles, with some scholars believing “huge extinct or migrating crocodiles bear the closest resemblance, especially when encountered in forested or swampy areas, and are most likely the template of modern Oriental dragon imagery”.

Of course, it’s not just reptilian features – dragons “are often a hybridization of feline, avian and reptilian features”, as noted by anthropologist David E. Jones in his book “An Instinct for Dragons” where he suggested humans, like monkeys, have inherited instinctive reactions to large cats, snakes and birds of prey.

A less obvious source is of the symbolism of natural or elemental forces, as in Robert Blust’s The Origin of Dragons – with particular attention paid to the phenomenon of the rainbow.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
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Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Books (Special Mention) (11) Huston Smith – The World’s Religions

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Harper Collins, 50th anniversary edition

 

(11) HUSTON SMITH – THE WORLD’S RELIGIONS

 

The classic work on the subject of its title, by leading scholar of religious studies Huston Smith – himself almost the literal embodiment of that title, raised in China as a child of a Christian missionary family and student of philosophy in the United States.

By necessity, it uses a broad-brush approach to the eight world religions it examines in their respective chapters – Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity and what it calls primal or tribal religions. It prompts to mind German philosopher Karl Jasper’s characterization of an Axial Age as the crucible of modern world religions, Jasper ended his Axial Age prior to Christianity or Islam – but it is striking that no major world religion has yet emerged since either.

As per its subtitle “Our Wisdom Traditions”, it seeks to put each religion’s best foot forward and look past caricatures or stereotypes – perhaps most memorably expressed by Smith when it comes to Islam as a common perception of a religion of sword and harem.

My personal favorite chapter, and unfortunately also its shortest, was that on the primal or tribal religions, which despite its brevity, impressed upon me the most the merits of the primal or tribal worldview – including the lost strengths and versatility of an oral culture as opposed to a literate one, despite the obvious advantages of literacy to our society.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
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