(urth) Laundress and Star (AEG spoilers)

[brunians at brunians.org]

Cadmus was from Phoenicia. As are Greek letters, the polis and a lot of
other things that people think of as typically Greek.

Yes, Perseus was the ueber-Greek. Wasn't Danae Cadmus daughter? No, I was
mixed up. Argos, not Thebes. They are related somewhere in there, though.

Anyway, there was a lot of Phoenician influence on Greece just coming out
of the post-Mycenaean dark ages.

You are very welcome, for the word and for everything else, such as it is!
It's not often that I get to go on about this stuff, which I do enjoy
immensely.



.




> Excellent reply.  Thanks.  I did in fact get the bit about Ba'al--in
> fact, I'd known that and forgotten it from long ago.  Once you know
> that "Beelzebub" means "Lord of the Flies" or "Prince of Flies" it's
> actually quite intuitive that "Ba'al" is just "lord" or "prince"--a
> title, rather than a name.
>
> I'm also fairly surprised that I missed that Wolfe, by connecting
> Cthulhu to Phoenician deities, was only following Lovecraft--it's not
> as though I haven't read The Shadow over Innsmouth, and, heck, even
> Buffy the Vampire Slayer made the connection.
>
> Perseus was Greek in all the senses that count, right?  His mother was
> almost the mother of Greece, as the Greeks are the Danaans.  I suppose
> people thought he was from Serifos.
>
> I'll look into The Highest Altar, it sounds fascinating.  And thank
> you for the word "aniconic."
>
> On 10/20/08, brunians at brunians.org <brunians at brunians.org> wrote:
>> > Of course--I'm not using Chesterton as gold-star history here.  The
>> > question is whether we can infer that Wolfe had the sacrifices to
>> > Phoenician false gods in mind when he threw that "Cassiopeia weeps for
>> > her children" bit in.  It's certainly an interesting thought.  The
>> > Squid God is already Cthulhu layered with Cetus and sort of the pulp
>> > notion of a human sacrifice to quiet an angry volcano or storm.
>>
>> I read a *way* interesting book about this, which does happen, in this
>> instance among the Mapuche of Chile. What actually is done (or was done
>> in
>> this case) is that there is a disaster, volcano, storm, tsunami or
>> whatever and after the fact the sacrifice is done. The book is called
>> 'The
>> Highest Altar': I have a copy around here somewhere.
>>
>> The Mapuche are *very* traditional and their religious practice
>> completely
>> non-Christian (altough there are Catholic and Protestant Mapuche (the
>> Incas never conquered the Mapuche, the Spanish never conquered the
>> Mapuche, the Chileans worked out an agreement with them)). Further
>> north,
>> in the region around Lake Titicaca, the author investigates similar
>> practices which have become more or less syncretic and (here it becomes
>> very interesting) which the practitioners very consciously correlate
>> with
>> European derived occult practices and Satanism.
>>
>> >                                                              Are
>> > we meant to also take him as the deity honored by human sacrifice
>> > around the southern and eastern side of the Mediterranean?
>>
>> That's his nephew Dagon.
>>
>> >                                                               I don't
>> > know if this points toward any other interpretive clues, although it
>> > is interesting that what we typically consider a Greek myth is set in
>> > what is now Israel.
>>
>> Who was Cadmus? Where did he come from? And Danae?
>>
>> Where did people *think* that Perseus was from?
>>
>> >                     That's rich turf--I doubt Wolfe would leave it
>> > fallow.
>>
>> Wolfe is one of, like, three people I've met who really understands this
>> stuff.
>>
>> > Or maybe it's just Wolfe's guess at the origin of the Cetus myth.
>> > Ultimately the myth is about a queen trying to sacrifice her daughter
>> > to a monster, and the heroic foreigner who stops the sacrifice.
>>
>> On one level. I don't think I would say 'ultimately'.
>>
>> >                                                        Maybe
>> > Wolfe takes the myth as in part chiding by the Greeks of the
>> > child-sacrificing practice of their neighbors?
>>
>> I doubt it, but maybe.
>>
>> Maybe I was unclear about the Ba'al bit: all of these Kana'anim, Bni
>> Israel, Phoenicians, the lot of them, had lots of gods and one in
>> particular who was in charge of where you lived, addressed as Creator
>> and
>> Master (or Creatress and Mistress) of the World, worshipped
>> aniconically,
>> etc. Who it was varied on what city you were in. The Bni Israel, in the
>> time of David and Solomon, addressed YHWH as ba'al. Later on, the
>> language
>> changed, the title confused with a proper name and applied only to the
>> other gods of other western Semitic cities.
>>
>>
>>
>> .
>>
>>
>>
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