Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Books (Special Mention: Revised Entry) (10) Encyclopedia of Gods

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(10) MICHAEL JORDAN –

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GODS (1992)

 

Another entry that is exactly what it says on the tin – an encyclopedia of entries for gods and goddesses in alphabetical order.

No – the author is not the basketballer. At least, I don’t think it is.

And yes – there’s an entry for God.

“Deities have been identified with the human psyche for at least 60,000 years. Encyclopedia of Gods offers concise information on more than 2,500 of these deities, from the most ancient gods of polytheistic societies – Hittite, Sumerian, Mesopotamian – to the most contemporary gods of the major monotheistic religions – Allah, God, Yahweh. Among the cultures included are African peoples, Albanian, Pre-Islamic Arabian, Aztec, Babylonian, Buddhist, Canaanite, Celtic, Egyptian, Native American, Etruscan, Germanic, Greek, Roman, Hindu, Persian, Polynesian, and Shinto.”

“Each entry provides details on what culture worshiped the god, the role of the god, and the characteristics and symbols used in identification. In the case of the more important personalities, references in art and literature and known dates of worship are also provided. Indexes by civilization and role of the god enable the researcher to compare gods across cultures or to find information on specific topics of interest”

 

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Top Tens – Tropes & Other: Top 10 Stone Ages / Stone Age Iceberg (Special Mention 16-20)

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Kebaran culture (Levant and Sinai) microliths 22,000 – 18,000 years ago (public domain image)

 

 

(16) STONED AGE

 

And now, as usual towards the end of special mentions, we come to my weirder and wilder entries – well, weirder and wilder than the Matriarchal Stone Age and the longhouse.

I just couldn’t resist the obvious gag of the Stoned Age, but it’s more than just a gag – it’s a reference to the Stoned Ape theory of Terrence McKenna, which indeed involved human prehistory in the Stone Age. Hence – the Stoned Age.

 

(17) PALEO DIET

 

“Meat’s back on the menu, boys!”

Another obvious entry suggested by the contemporary paleo diet, which purports to be a diet based on the model of our Paleolithic ancestors as the ideal diet for health – so no Neolithic grains or milk but sadly seems to opt out of the cannibalism theorized to occur during the Paleolithic. Not to mention all the other crap that we turn up our noses at or throw out today…

 

(18) STONEPUNK

 

Yabba dabba doo!

Yes, it’s the Flintstones – meet the Flintstones, they’re your modern Stone Age family…

But seriously, the Flintstones is classic stonepunk – one of the many ‘punk’ variants of fantasy or SF named after cyberpunk, albeit the version most likely to be played for laughs. Not to mention comedic anachronism, not least humans living alongside dinosaurs. Which I suppose would make some versions of Young Earth Creationism….stonepunk?

Stonepunk focuses on pre-technological developments in prehistoric times, its juxtapositions of the modern world with the primitive, and the effects of an early form of “advanced” technology on society

More broadly, I would extend this entry to more serious (or seriously researched) works set in prehistory, such as the Clan of the Cave Bear books (and film).

 

(19) STONE AGE HERBALIST

 

Well, I can’t have Stone Age special mentions without a shout-out to the Stone Age Herbalist account on X – bringing the Stone Age to our own age.

 

(20) EROTIC STONE AGE

 

Bow-chicka-wow-wow – my usual preference is to reserve my final or twentieth special mention for a kinkier or kinkiest entry. Well, there wasn’t much else to do at night in the Stone Age…you and me, baby, ain’t nothing but mammals.

 

But seriously, the Stone Age s€x is pretty much the focus of study for evolutionary psychology.

Top Tens – Film: Top 10 Animated Films (7) Wreck-It Ralph

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(7) WRECK-IT RALPH

(2012-2018: WRECK-IT RALPH 1-2)

 

Disney film Wreck-It Ralph took us inside video games with its protagonist as the eponymous villain in a 1980’s 8-bit video game (reminiscent of Donkey Kong, with Ralph as Kong), who rebels against his role and dreams of being a hero ‘off-screen’. He sees his opportunity in another game of Hero’s Duty (a more modern first-person shooter game in the style of Halo and Call of Duty among others) – unfortunately, his efforts lead to one of its self-replicating alien bug antagonists escaping to yet another game, Sugar Rush (a kart racing game in the style of Super Mario). And things get worse from there…

The plot is fun but the true delight of Wreck-It Ralph is the exuberant abundance of video game references – in visual gags and characters. These are introduced from the outset – Ralph’s support group of video game antagonists (Bad-Anon) includes Bowser from the Mario franchise and Doctor Eggman from Sonic the Hedgehog, as well as M. Bison and Zangief from the Street Fighter. That’s just for starters – there’s Tapper (from the Tapper game, who runs an off-screen bar in the same style as his game for video game characters), Sonic the Hedgehog, other characters from Street Fighter, Pac-Man and ghosts (Blinky, Pinky and Inky), Dig Dug, Frogger, Q-bert and more. Even that most basic original video game, Pong. There are video game references in the most amazing (and fleeting) details, such as sound effects and graffiti – “Aerith lives”, “Shen Long was here” and “All your base are belong to us” among others.

Ralph returned for a sequel breaking (surely that should have been wrecking?) the internet – while fun, it did not quite live up to the original.

 

FANTASY OR SF

 

I’m saying fantasy – but technofantasy, given the premise is based on computer game characters, not unlike the programs in Tron.

 

COMEDY

 

Definitely a comedy – including many gaming in-jokes.

 

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

A-TIER (TOP-TIER)

Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Books (Special Mention: Revised) (14) Erich Von Daniken – Chariots of the Gods?

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(14) ERICH VON DANIKEN –

CHARIOTS OF THE GODS? (1968)

(RONALD STORY – THE SPACE GODS REVEALED 1976)

 

I’m not saying that it was aliens but it was aliens – ancient astronauts!

A modern mythology par excellence – and Erich von Daniken is its prophet!

The mythos of aliens as ancient astronauts was not original to Daniken and his Chariots of the Gods, which remains the Bible of the mythos, despite Daniken’s increasingly wild sequels. Indeed, he appears to have ripped off his theories from previous writers, perhaps not surprisingly for someone convicted and imprisoned for embezzlement and fraud (and he wrote one of his sequels in prison). However, Daniken was the foremost popularizer of the mythos, such that the craze (or cult) for it was coined Danikenitis.

While absurd, one can’t deny that the mythos Daniken popularized was – and remains – a hoot.

It’s the mythos in which “ancient locations, legends, gods, and creatures from ancient myth are connected to alien visitors from a radically more advanced civilization”, including “that these aliens influenced our history in some way, mostly through technological advances”.

“Proponents of this theory also espouse that ancient construction projects like the pyramids and Stonehenge are clearly too advanced and a little too fantastic for ancient man to have constructed without help…since there are pyramids in the Americas, Egypt, and China… you guessed it, they all got their idea from aliens. Other popular sites include the Moai of Easter Island and the Nazca Lines…this theory is often crossed over with Atlantis”.

Oh yes – and the Biblical God is an alien, the Bible is littered with references to aliens or alien technology (The Ark of Covenant was electrically charged! Sodom and Gomorrah were literally nuked! Ezekiel’s vision of flying wheel within a wheel was a helicopter!), and the titular chariots of the gods are of course UFOs.

I can’t have special mention for Daniken without including one of many books refuting him – Ronald Story’s The Space Gods Revealed and its point by point refutation of Chariot of the Gods.

 

RATING:

X-TIER (WILD TIER)

Top Tens – Tropes & Other: Top 10 Stone Ages / Stone Age Iceberg (Special Mention: 11-15)

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Kebaran culture (Levant and Sinai) microliths 22,000 – 18,000 years ago (public domain image)

 

 

(11) MEGAFAUNA EXTINCTION STONE AGE

 

The mammoth is dead – and we killed it!

Well, the jury’s still out on the cause of mass megafauna extinction – also termed the late Pleistocene extinctions – between human impact and climate change, although the consensus seems to support “at least a contributory role of humans in the extinctions”.

I mean, they do tend to coincide with the patterns of early human migration, particularly in the Americas and Australasia, but it was like that when we got here, honest!

 

(12) ROCK & CAVE ART STONE AGE

 

Yes, I’m an Altamira and Lascaux cave art fanboy – as I am of the Sorcerer in the Cave of the Trois-Freres, particularly as drawn by Henri Breuil. All hail the Horned God!

Cave and rock art comprise perhaps the most vivid visual icons of the Stone Age – and our best glimpses into the minds of our Stone Age forebears.

Speaking of the Sorcerer…

 

 

(13) SHAMANIC STONE AGE

 

There are different viewpoints of Stone Age religion or religious beliefs, but one of the two predominant viewpoints is that the Stone Age was fundamentally shamanic. That viewpoint underlies Weston La Barre’s The Ghost Dance, as well as Peter Watson’s The Great Divide: Nature and Human Nature in the Old World and the New. The latter essentially proposes that the native Americans remained locked into the shamanic beliefs and mindset they brought with them from Siberia – reinforced by the rigors of American geography and the larger number of psychedelic plants.

As for the other predominant viewpoint of Stone Age religion…

 

 

(14) MATRIARCHAL STONE AGE

 

Stone Age Venus! She is the goddess and this is her body!

You don’t get much more of a visual icon of prehistoric matriarchy and mother goddess worship than the famed Venus of Willendorf. Paleolithic – more like Paleolithicc, amirite?

Ironically, despite the prolific nature of Paleolithic Venus figurines, it is the Neolithic that tends to be associated with mother goddess worship or goddess-centric religions, typically overlapping with agricultural fertility, at least in popular culture – albeit an association highly contested within archaeology and anthropology.

Which brings me to…

 

(15) LONGHOUSE STONE AGE

 

The idea of the communal dwelling or longhouse, originating in the Neolithic albeit with a long history after that – and coopted in contemporary online discourse to signify oppressive matriarchal or gynocentric social conformity.

Top Tens – Film: Top 10 Comics Films (8) Kingsman

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Shot (heh) from the best scene of the Kingsman film series (from the first film – you know the one)

 

 

 

(8) KINGSMAN

(2014-2017: KINGSMAN 1-2. Yeah, I don’t count the 2021 prequel, let alone 2024 spinoff Argyle. I do count that short film crossover with Archer)

 

Kingsman: The Secret Service is a playful and subversive parody of spy films in general and James Bond in particular – adapted from a comic by Mark Millar (similarly to another Millar work, Kickass, a playful and subversive parody of superhero film).

The film apparently originated when Millar and director Matthew Vaughn were at a bar discussing how the spy film genre was too serious and they wanted to do a fun one. And oh boy did they deliver on that premise – as Guardian writer Jordan Hoffman quipped, “no one in the production can believe that they’re getting away with such a batsh*t Bond”. It takes all the elements of a Bond film and ramps them up with its tongue firmly in its cheek – Bond on crack.

Of course, there is the eponymous spy agency – stylish (“manners maketh man”) and quintessentially British (named for Arthurian characters), with Colin Firth’s Galahad in a superb action role. However, it is Samuel L. Jackson who steals the spotlight, hamming it up with his lisping, megalomaniac supervillain Valentine – such that he makes Bond villains look positively tame by comparison (although his blade-legged henchwoman Gazelle comes a close second). Valentine’s supervillain scheme is to fix global warming (yay!) by killing most of the world’s population (um – not so yay?) – the mechanism for this is revealed in an awesome frenzied continuous action scene.

Per Rolling Stone magazine – “This slam-bang action movie about British secret agents is deliriously shaken, not stirred … Even when it stops making sense, Kingsman is unstoppable fun”.

The 2017 sequel Kingsman: The Golden Circle enjoyably repeated many of the same beats, extending them also to the Kingsman agency’s cousins in the United States, the Statesman, but didn’t quite match the fun of the first film.

 

FANTASY OR SF

 

Leans to the SF side of the genre, as usual for comics films.

 

COMEDY

 

Also leans to the more comedic side for comics films, including spy film parody.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

B-TIER (HIGH-TIER)

Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Books (Special Mention: Revised) (13) Dictionary of Imaginary Places

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(13) ALBERTO MANGUEL & GIANNI GUADALUPI –

THE DICTIONARY OF IMAGINARY PLACES (1980)

 

Again, exactly what it says on the tin – a literal dictionary in alphabetical order of entries for imaginary places.

However, there’s a fine line between the imaginary places of mythology and those of literature or fantasy, with many entries in the latter. For example, I would argue that Atlantis transcended its (minor) literary origins in the works of Plato to become mythic. Even when Plato wrote it, he attributed it to Egyptian records of it. And so on, with imaginary or legendary places such as Hyperborea or Eldorado – although the imaginary places of mythology lose out somewhat with places off the planet Earth (albeit more exclusive of SF locales) as well as “heavens and hells”.

Again, the publisher’s blurb sums it up:

“This Baedeker of make-believe takes readers on a tour of more than 1,200 realms invented by storytellers from Homer’s day to our own. Here you will find Shangri-La and El Dorado, Utopia and Middle Earth, Wonderland and Freedonia.”

 

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Top Tens – Tropes & Other: Top 10 Stone Ages / Stone Age Iceberg (Special Mention 6-10)

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Kebaran culture (Levant and Sinai) microliths 22,000 – 18,000 years ago (public domain image)

 

 

(6) BOW STONE AGE

 

Like the spear but even more so as a Stone Age game-changing ranged projectile weapon. Apparently the first evidence of bows or arrows goes back to 60-70,000 years ago or so – and their use had spread everywhere but Australia and most of Oceania by the end of the Paleolithic.

 

(7) CLOTHED STONE AGE

 

I’d like to see a demarcation between the Naked Stone Age and the Clothed Stone Age.

Interestingly, such a demarcation is not too different from that between the Paleolithic and Neolithic, although the Naked Stone Age doesn’t quite go so long as the full Paleolithic, wrapping up (heh) towards the end of the Middle Paleolithic.

It always strikes me how recently humans developed and used clothing, with the weight of opinion seeming to be approximately 100,000 years ago, and before that the Stone Age was gloriously naked, albeit hairier.

This was the intuitive truth behind the Biblical Garden of Eden. How far we have fallen from our nude Eden!

 

(8) DOG STONE AGE

 

I like dogs so why not have a Dog Stone Age?

But seriously, the domestication of dogs is something of a key transition in the Stone Age, particularly towards the domestication of animals for agriculture. The dog was the first animal and only large carnivore to be domesticated, occurring at some time towards the end of the Paleolithic (usually opined at an upper limit of 20-40,000 years ago), reflecting its usefulness for human hunter-gatherers prior to agriculture.

 

(9) CERAMIC STONE AGE

 

The development and use of pottery was another key transition in the Stone Age, usually associated with the Neolithic but occurring as early as the Upper Paleolithic. Pottery is also iconic of archaeology – I tend to quip archaeology is mostly dusting off broken pieces of pottery as opposed to Indiana Jones.

Of course, from our modern perspective, we tend to see pottery as decorative or a novelty, because we have since moved on to other materials for storage and cookware (even where the importance of it persists in the surname Potter).

 

(10) WHEELED STONE AGE

 

The iconic invention of prehistoric humanity, so much so that the phrase reinventing the wheel has become proverbial – albeit the Wheeled Stone Age is pretty much a few seconds before midnight of the Stone Age and perhaps more accurately as part of the transition to the Bronze Age, if not indeed in the Bronze Age itself.

We tend to think of the wheel for wheeled vehicles, but it also overlaps with the previous entry in the development and use of the potter’s wheel.

Top Tens – Film: Top 10 Animated Films (8) Inside Out

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(8) INSIDE OUT

(2015-2024: INSIDE OUT 1-2)

 

The depiction of a mental landscape may not have been an entirely original concept, but it was executed superbly in Pixar’s Inside Out.

The first film was set in the mind of a young girl Riley, dominated by a console or control panel run by five personified emotions – Joy, Sorrow, Fear, Anger and Disgust (color-coded for your convenience!)

The control room overlooks an imaginative mental landscape, primarily consisting of islands of memory or personality about the memory dump – which is a literal memory abyss or hole (or a metaphorical Lethe of forgetfulness). The plot revolves around a typical odd couple pairing of Joy and Sadness, as the two are accidentally sucked into Riley’s long-term memories and try to return to the control room, as the mental landscape deteriorates into outright collapse around them in something akin to emotional breakdown (due to Riley’s family moving from Minnesota to San Francisco). Of course, while Joy is paired with Sorrow (and helped by Riley’s imaginary friend), it leaves only Fear, Anger and Disgust to run her psyche (or as Honest Trailers quipped, leaving her psyche to be run by “your average YouTube comments section”. Or any internet comment section for that matter, as well as the X formerly known as Twitter).

Although now that I think about it, it would be interesting to see the (adult) Freudian version of the film, particularly with the superego, ego and id. (But then again, I am my own id. I’m all id, baby!). Or perhaps, the Jungian version, with all those mythic archetypes…

There was the sequel film in 2024 which added a few more adolescent emotions headed by Anxiety to Riley’s mental landscape.

 

FANTASY OR SF

 

Given it’s the emotional or psychological landscape, it probably evades easy genre distinctions but I’m going with fantasy.

 

COMEDY

 

Comedic – but not surprisingly it has many emotional (heh) moments.

 

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP-TIER)

Top Tens – Mythology: Top 10 Books (Special Mention: Revised) (12) Richard Barber & Anne Riches – A Dictionary of Fabulous Beasts

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(12) RICHARD BARBER & ANNE RICHES –

A DICTIONARY OF FABULOUS BEASTS (1971)

 

Exactly what it says on the tin – a literal dictionary in alphabetical order of entries for fabulous beasts.

The publisher’s blurb sums it up best

“Mythical creatures drawn largely from medieval travellers’ tales, but encompassing civilisations from the Sumerians to the Wild West…an astonishing ark filled with beasts from a fabulous zoo far more varied and entertaining than anything from ordinary natural history. From Abaia and Abath to Ziz and Zu, from the microscopic Gigelorum that nests in a mite’s ear to the giant serpent Jormungandor who encircles the whole globe, there are beasts from every corner of man’s imagination: the light-hearted Fearsome Critters of lumberjack tales find a place alongside the Sirrush of Babylon and the Winged Bulls of Assyria. Some of the fabulous beasts turn out to be real creatures in disguise – a Cameleopard is a kind of glamourised giraffe -while others are almost, but not quite, human. Among the six hundred entries are some which are full-scale essays in their own right, as on Phoenix or Giants; and just in case it seems as though the authors dreamt up the entire book, there is a detailed list of books for the would-be hunter in this mythical jungle.”

 

 

RATING:

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)