Tag Archives: Mythology

Top Tens – Heroes & Villains: Top 10 Heroes of Mythology (Special Mention) (19) Dog God & Goat Boy

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Collage of modern rendition inspired by New Kingdom tomb paintings by Jeff Dahl, Wikipedia “Anubis” under licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en and cover art for John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy

 

 

(19) DOG GOD & GOAT BOY

 

And now we get to my wildest special mentions, where the heroes of mythology crossover into my personal mythology.

Dog gods – “deities depicted as dogs or whose myths and iconography are associated with dogs” – occur in different mythologies, but crossover into my personal mythology due to my reverence for them. Dog gods always get bonus points from me!

“Various cultures and mythologies feature dog gods, protectors, and mythical hounds, most notably Anubis, the ancient Egyptian jackal-headed deity of the underworld.”

As for goat boy, it’s just Pan, isn’t it? Not quite – it’s for all the capering and capricious caprine deities out there, all the satyrs, fauns, and goat boys out there. As a Capricorn goat boy myself, I borrow the term for my personal mythology from Bill Hicks comedy routine, in which he styles himself as Randy Pan the Goat Boy, available for children’s parties (where he cavorts with their mommy).

Of course, there’s also Giles Goat Boy by John Barth – very much the mythic hero.

 

RATING:

X-TIER (WILD TIER)

Top Tens – Heroes & Villains: Top 10 Villains of Mythology (Special Mention) (18) Wendigo

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Antlered skull image for the Wendigo from the trailer for the 2022 film – reflecting the contemporary trend towards depicting the Wendigo with a deer skull for a head

 

 

(18) WENDIGO

 

“The Wendigo, the Wendigo
I saw it just a friend ago
Last night it lurked in Canada
Tonight on your veranada!”

 

A malevolent supernatural being “in the mythologies of several Algonquian and Athabaskan peoples”, with its definitive characteristic as its monstrously voracious hunger, for eating you – or perhaps even worse, possessing you. While its definitive characteristic is its hunger for human flesh, whether literally as predation or metaphorically as possession, its more disturbing feature is its human origin – that the Wendigo is a human transformed into a cannibal monster.

The nature of that transformation varies – “you can become one just by coming across a Wendigo, being possessed by the spirit of a Wendigo or even dreaming of a Wendigo”. Of course, that suggests that somewhere down the chain, there must be an original Wendigo, which is where other causes of transformation might kick in, such as cannibalism or whatever.

The appearance of the Wendigo also varies – “its most common description is a dreadfully skinny giant of ice devoid of lips and toes”, although recently that’s been overtaken by having antlers or even a deer’s skull with antlers for a head due to recent media adaptations or depictions.

What also varies is the way it can be killed, if indeed it can be. “The more it devours, the larger and more powerful it grows, and thus it can never find enough food to satisfy its hunger”.

Although it varies, the Wendigo is consistently a “malevolent, cannibalistic, supernatural being” – “they were strongly associated with the north, winter, cold, famine, starvation”. As such, it has been widely adapted throughout popular culture, particularly in the horror genre.

 

RATING:

X-TIER (WILD TIER)

Top Tens – Heroes & Villains: Top 10 Heroes of Mythology (Special Mention) (18) Jack

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Cover art by Brian Bolland for issue 15 in November 2007 of the Jack of Fables comics series published by DC Vertigo, encapsulating this entry as a recurring character in folklore

 

 

 

(18) JACK

 

“Jacks are nimble. Jacks are quick. Jacks do not get caught in traps. Jacks kill Giants…Jack is a figure, like Robin Hood, who almost certainly embodies echoes of pre-Christian myths. He is a wise Fool, a Trickster. This halo of the chthonic, which is exceedingly difficult to pin down, may well explain the allure of the various Jack figures in innumerable rhymes and fairytales: the Jack who climbs the Beanstalk and rifles the treasure of the Giant; the Jack whose bargains, each of them magical, gains him the king’s daughter; Jack the Giant-Killer, whose four Magic possessions turn him into a Shapeshifter”.

And there are many more Jack figures in mythic folklore and modern fantasy. Of course, not all of them are heroic – although Jacks tend to be ambiguous heroes at the best of times as befitting for tricksters. Some are more neutral or even verging on dangerous – Jack Sprat, Jack Horner, Jack in the Green, Jack O’Lantern. Others are outright villainous – Spring-Heeled Jack, Jack the Ripper, Jack Ketch.

“Jack is an English hero and archetypal stock character appearing in multiple legends, fairy tales, and nursery rhymes. Folktales about Jack date back to 15th century England but have since spread to other countries through English migration and colonialism. Appalachia in particular has a tradition of Jack tales, often told through folk songs…Unlike moralizing fairy heroes, Jack is often thievish, lazy or foolish, but emerges triumphant through wit and trickery, resembling the trickster or rebel archetypes”.

My favorite adaptation of Jack is as Jack of Fables, the title character of the series of comics of that name by Bill Willingham, spun off from Willingham’s Fables series (and Jack’s role as supporting character in that series). Aptly enough for this special mention, he is (almost) every Jack that has appeared in folklore – Jack and the Beanstalk, Jack the Giant-Killer, Jack and Jill, Jack Horner, Jack Be Nimble, Jack Frost, Jack O’Lantern…

 

RATING:

X-TIER (WILD TIER)

Top Tens – Heroes & Villains: Top 10 Villains of Mythology (Special Mention) (18) Xipe Totec & Baron Samedi

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Baron Samedi as depicted in his standard design in the Smite video game from the fan wiki

 

 

(17) XIPE TOTEC & BARON SAMEDI

 

“It’s going to be a beautiful day, heh heh heh, yes sir, a b-e-a-u-tiful day” – Baron Samedi in the James Bond film “Live and Let Die”.

 

Just as I felt that these pantheons needed some representation in the special mentions for my top mythological heroes, so too I felt they needed representation among the special mentions for my top mythological villains.

Ironically, that was as strange as nominating heroes from the pantheons. Sure, the whole Aztec and voodoo pantheons might seem villainous to those not familiar with them, although it might be more accurate to describe them as anti-heroic or alien in their morality.

Still, these two deities seemed to me the best nominations as mythological villains for their respective pantheons.

I mean, who else among the Aztec pantheon than Xipe Totec, whose name means Our Lord the Flayed One?

Sure, he earned this special mention on the back (or is that skin?) of his adaptation in Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles – one whose modus operandi seemed to be wearing the skin of his victim’s faces on his own – but there’s his portfolio as a deity.

“In Aztec mythology, Xipe Totec…was a life-death-rebirth deity, god of agriculture, vegetation, the east, spring, goldsmiths, silversmiths, liberation, deadly warfare, the seasons, and the earth”.

All but the deadly warfare seems benevolent – except that he connected agricultural renewal with warfare and indeed was believed to be the god that invented war. He also had a strong association with disease – so potentially he had the means to be all Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse wrapped up as one.

Baron Samedi – which translates in English as Baron Saturday – is probably the most famous voodoo loa or deity. It’s a little unfair to rank him as villain rather than the antihero or trickster that he more accurately is.

Apart from his fame and his role as a god of death, what earns him villainous special mention is more by way of adaptation – the first is as the model for the cult of personality by Haitian dictator Papa Doc, and the second is his role as villainous henchman for James Bond in the film Live and Let Die, strikingly played by Geoffrey Holder and perhaps the only genuinely supernatural antagonist for Bond, if his post-credits appearance is anything to go by.

 

RATING:

X-TIER (WILD TIER)

Top Tens – Heroes & Villains: Top 10 Heroes of Mythology (Special Mention) (17) Green Man

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Green Man sculpture by Tawny Gray at the Custard Factory, Birmingham, England, photographed by Valiantis, Wikipedia “Green Man (Folklore)” licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

 

 

(17) GREEN MAN

 

It’s not easy being green – the Green Man, Jack in the Green, Green Knight…

“The Green Man, also known as a foliate head, is a motif in architecture and art, of a face made of, or completely surrounded by, foliage, which normally spreads out from the centre of the face. Apart from a purely decorative function, the Green Man is primarily interpreted as a symbol of rebirth, representing the cycle of new growth that occurs every spring.”

It has been argued as “related to natural vegetation deities” or even to represent “a pagan mythological figure” surviving in medieval art and architecture, but sadly the latter is a recent argument not supported by evidence.

However, “the Green Man is a term with a variety of connotations in folklore” – “During the early modern period in England and sometimes elsewhere, the figure of a man dressed in a foliage costume, and usually carrying a club, was a variant of the broader European motif of the Wild Man (also known as wild man of the woods, or woodwose). By at least the 16th century, the term “green man” was used in England for a man who was covered in leaves, foliage including moss as part of a pageant, parade or ritual”.

Hence the argument of the survival of a pagan mythological figure – by Lady Raglan in 1939 – which proposed a kind of Green Man Grand Unification Theory of the Green Man (including its frequent use as a name for pubs), the Jack in the Green folk costume and May Day celebrations.

And that’s just getting started – “The Green Man has been asserted by some authors to be a recurring theme in literature…the figures of Robin Hood and Peter Pan are associated with a Green Man, as is that of the Green Knight”.

 

RATING:

X-TIER (WILD TIER)

Top Tens – Heroes & Villains: Top 10 Villains of Mythology (Special Mention) (16) Balor & Crom Cruach

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Balor (left) and “the bloody maggot” Crom Cruach (right) as depicted by Simon “The Biz” Bisley in Pat Mills’ Slaine: The Horned God – which won them this special mention (fair use)

 

 

(16) BALOR & CROM CRUACH

 

Balor…of the evil eye!

Balor represents the Fomorians in my special mentions – “a group of malevolent supernatural beings”, essentially the equivalent of demons in Irish mythology. Balor was their leader and “considered the most formidable” of them – “a giant with a large eye that wreaks destruction when opened”.

He’s killed in battle by the god (or demi-god or divine hero) Lugh of the Tuatha De Danaan – and “has been interpreted as a personification of the scorching sun”.

Interestingly, Dungeons and Dragons adapted his name for their in-game demon version of the Balrog to avoid copyright.

Crom Cruach “was a pagan god of pre-Christian legend” – “he was propitiated with human sacrifice and his worship was ended by Saint Patrick”.

Apart from the adaption of Crom’s name as that of Conan’s deity, they earn special mention for their adaptation as eldritch abominations by Pat Mills as the antagonists of the titular hero in his Slaine comic.

 

RATING:

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)

Top Tens – Heroes & Villains: Top 10 Heroes of Mythology (Special Mention) (16) Horned God & Sacred King

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Cernunnos or at least a similar figure on the Bronze Age Gundestrup Cauldron (public domain)

 

 

(16) HORNED GOD & SACRED KING

 

“He is the laughter in the woods.”

Pan and Cernunnos may be the most famous or iconic (the former more so) but there are more horned deities, particularly if you include deities that are represented or symbolized by horned animals.

“Deities depicted with horns or antlers are found in numerous religions across the world. Horned animals, such as bulls, goats, and rams, may be worshiped as deities or serve as inspiration for a deity’s appearance in religions that venerate animal gods”.

Like the Triple Goddess, modern witchcraft and neopaganism have adapted the horned deities of paganism to the Horned God, representing the male aspects of divinity and second only to the Triple Goddess, typically as her consort among other roles.

“The Theme, briefly, is the antique story, which falls into thirteen chapters and an epilogue, of the birth, life, death and resurrection of the God of the Waxing Year; the central chapters concern the God’s losing battle with the God of the Waning Year for love of the capricious and all-powerful Threefold Goddess, their mother, bride and layer-out. The poet identifies himself with the God of the Waxing Year and his Muse with the Goddess; the rival is his blood-brother, his other self, his weird.”

Of course, supernatural horned beings are depicted much more negatively in Christianity, with the devil and other demons typically as horned (or is that horny)? Interestingly, there are the occasional exceptions, with no less than Moses famously said to be or depicted as “horned” upon being radiant or glorified by God. That is usually attributed to mistranslation but has recurred throughout artistic depictions of him, including by Michelangelo.

“The Horned God has been explored within several psychological theories and has become a recurrent theme in fantasy literature” – with my favorite example of the latter being the titular Horned God in “Slaine: The Horned God” by Pat Mills.

And then there’s the mythic figure of the sacred king, overlapping with that of the horned god, at least in modern paganism and a recurring theme in fantasy.

“In many historical societies, the position of kingship carried a sacral meaning and was identical with that of a high priest and judge…The monarch may be divine, become divine, or represent divinity to a greater or lesser extent.”

The figure of the sacred king was famously propounded by Sir James George Frazer in The Golden Bough – behold the monomyth of the sacrificial sacred king!

“A sacred king, according to the systematic interpretation of mythology developed by Frazer in The Golden Bough…was a king who represented a solar deity in a periodically re-enacted fertility rite. Frazer seized upon the notion of a substitute king and made him the keystone of his theory of a universal, pan-European, and indeed worldwide fertility myth, in which a consort for the Goddess was annually replaced. According to Frazer, the sacred king represented the spirit of vegetation…came into being in the spring, reigned during the summer, and ritually died at harvest time, only to be reborn at the winter solstice to wax and rule again. The spirit of vegetation was therefore a ‘dying and reviving god’. Osiris, Dionysus, Attis and many other familiar figures from Greek mythology and classical antiquity were reinterpreted in this mold…The sacred king, the human embodiment of the dying and reviving vegetation god, was supposed to have originally been an individual chosen to rule for a time, but whose fate was to suffer as a sacrifice, to be offered back to the earth so that a new king could rule for a time in his stead.”

 

RATING:

X-TIER (WILD TIER)

Top Tens – Heroes & Villains: Top 10 Villains of Mythology (Special Mention) (15) Questing Beast & Wild Hunt

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Arthur and the Questing Beast by Henry Justice Ford (1904) and Wodan’s Wild Hunt by Friedrich Wilhelm Heine (1885)

 

 

(15) QUESTING BEAST & WILD HUNT

 

I just can’t resist their evocative names, despite it being arguable whether they were actually villains. The Wild Hunt in particular seems more of a chaotic force.

Sadly, the questing beast is not so named because it was the subject of a quest but for the French word glatisant – hence its alternative name of the Beast Glatisant – related to or signifying barking or yelping, the noise the Beast made.

The Beast itself was a hybrid beast like a chimera – that is a single beast seemingly composed of different animal parts – albeit one often interpreted as a giraffe, from their medieval description as half camel and half leopard.

The Beast doesn’t feature in the main part of Arthurian legendary canon but pops up as cameo as it were, with the hunt for it as the subject of quests “futilely undertaken by King Pellinore and his family and finally achieved by Sir Palamedes and his companions”.

Of course, I also can’t resist matching the innuendo of questing beast with the adventurous bed. On that note, questing beast overlaps nicely with the innuendo of wild hunt.

“The Wild Hunt is a folklore motif occurring across various northern, western and eastern European societies, appearing in the religions of the Germans, Celts, and Slaves” – typically involving “a chase led by a mythological figure escorted by a ghostly or supernatural group of hunters engaged in pursuit. The leader of the hunt is often a named figure associated with Odin in Germanic legends but may variously be a historical or legendary figure like Theodoric the Great, the Danish king Valdemar Atterdag, the dragon slayer Sigurd, the psychopomp of Welsh mythology Gwyn ap Nudd, Biblical figures such as Herod, Cain, Gabriel, or the Devil, or an unidentified lost soul. The hunters are generally the souls of the dead or ghostly dogs, sometimes fairies, Valkyries or elves”.

That list of Wild Hunt leaders is not exhaustive either – indeed, it could be the subject of its own top ten.

“Seeing the Wild Hunt was thought to forebode some catastrophe such as war or plague, or at best the death of the one who witnessed it. People encountering the Hunt might also be abducted to the underworld or the fairy kingdom…According to scholar Susan Greenwood, the Wild Hunt “primarily concerns an initiation into the wild, untamed forces of nature in its dark and chthonic aspects.””

 

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Top Tens – Heroes & Villains: Top 10 Heroes of Mythology (Special Mention) (15) Quetzalcoatl & Papa Legba

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Quetzalcoatl – or Kukulkan – as depicted in the Smite video game. There’s not many depictions of Papa Legba.

 

 

 

(15) QUETZALCOATL & PAPA LEGBA

 

I felt that these pantheons needed some representation in the special mentions for my top mythological heroes – and these two deities seemed to me to be the most heroic of their respective pantheons, Aztec and voodoo, albeit there’s not many heroic choices in pantheons that often seem villainous or at least alien.

Also, how can you not have a soft spot for the name of Quetzalcoatl? It sounds cool – so much so that I like quipping my middle initial stands for it – and what’s more, it IS cool, meaning “feathered serpent”. Also, it absolutely rules at Scrabble.

“A major deity in Aztec and other Mesoamerican cultures, revered as the god of wind, wisdom, learning, the priesthood, and creation, often depicted as a serpent with feathers, symbolizing the connection between earth and sky, and representing life, death, and rebirth. He was associated with the planet Venus (as the morning/evening star), invented the calendar and books, and was a benevolent force, though his myths also involve exile and prophesied return, influencing early interactions with Spanish conquistadors.”

He can apparently be traced back to earlier Meso-American origins – among the Mayans under the less evocative (and Scrabble-winning) name of Kukulkan, or more controversially, even to a legendary Toltec ruler by the name of Ce Acatl Topiltzin. Even more controversially are those Spanish sources identifying Quetzalcoatl with St Thomas the apostle – or that the Aztecs identified Cortes with prophecies of the deity’s return.

I particularly like him because he is the least sacrificial of the Aztec gods, although sources vary as to whether he was opposed to human sacrifice or just had less of it.

Papa Legba is a loa or lwa in voodoo, “acting as the gatekeeper and intermediary between the human and spirit worlds, invoked first in ceremonies to open communication with other spirits. He is depicted as an old man with a cane, associated with crossroads, communication, and passage, symbolizing wisdom and the ability to remove obstacles, though sometimes appearing as a trickster.”

He scores bonus points for being commonly associated with dogs.

 

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Top Tens – Heroes & Villains: Top 10 Villains of Mythology (14) Ahriman & Asmodeus

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There’s a shortage of visual representations of Ahriman so I went with the next best thing – Chaos Space Marine Ahriman from 40K, depicted as character feature image in the fan wiki (left). And on the right, Asmodeus as depicted as the supreme devil in Dungeons and Dragons 1st edition Monster Manual. Looking suave…

 

 

(14) AHRIMAN & ASMODEUS

 

Yes – it’s another alliterative pairing of mythological villains.

Ahriman is drawn from the Persian mythology and religion of Zoroastrianism – “also known as Angra Mainyu…the deity of evil, darkness, and destruction in Zoroastrianism, acting as the primary adversary of the creator god, Ahura Mazda”, although ironically the latter seems more phonetically the origin of the name Ahriman.

Ahriman is essentially the devil of Zoroastrianism, although an entity that was more evenly matched with God in that dualistic religion. His resemblance to the devil is not coincidental – “representing chaos and falsehood, Ahriman is believed to have inspired later concepts of the devil and plays a central role in cosmic dualism”.

Asmodeus on the other hand is a demon originating in Biblical mythology, indeed in the Bible itself – albeit the apocryphal Book of Tobit. He rises to prominence above his apocryphal origin due to embodying the sin of lust in folklore and I’m always here for anyone embodying the sin of lust. That gave him a prominence and name recognition in popular culture, not least in Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder – indeed as the supreme ruler of Hell (or the Nine Hells) or effectively the Devil of Dungeons and Dragons in game lore.

 

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)