#mythursday

[dabbingstoner420710]

Getting lit in the hot tub.

[malandingbinibini]

At dahil mag bibirthday yung favorite ko 😂 Haha sa mismong birthday mo na lang ako mag long speech 😂🎈🐷 P.S ang taba ko dito mygawd 😭 . . . . #thursday #mythursday #highlights #vsco #vscocam #vscom #vscolife #vscohub #vscopic #vscofilter #vscoedit #vscoonly #savoryph #JohnRoa #BirthdayBoy 💓 (at Savory SM Manila)

[benito-cereno]

A Tale of Knockmany Hill

Hey, y’all, I hope you are having a good weekend. How about a little belated St Patrick’s Day cheer?

I meant to post this last night, but I had some really frustrating computer trouble that is now resolved, but turned me off of finishing this thing last night once it was fixed. I hope you will forgive me.

Irish mythology is not exactly my area of expertise, but I have some familiarity with Irish folk and fairy tales, so I thought I would share some of that with you in celebration of the Emerald Isle this weekend.

Fionn mac Cumhaill is a legit Irish mythological hero, the central figure of an entire cycle of myth called the Fenian cycle, which centers on Fionn and his followers, the Fianna. He’s a powerful hunter and warrior, with a magical spear and all that kind of business. Here he is fighting a giant fire-breathing boy named Aillen:

In many ways, he’s almost like an Irish Heracles, not the least of which being that he is not only a legitimate hero of myth, but he also makes his way into folklore as well, which incorporates elements of myth, but sprinkles in many details that are quite different.

(Actually, let’s do this first: how do you pronounce “Fionn mac Cumhaill”? Well, cool people know that in Irish the digraph “mh” is [often] pronounced “w” [which is why, as every smart person who reads this blog knows, “Samhain” is pronounced more or less like “sah-win” and not “sam hane”], and so “Fionn mac Cumhaill” is pronounced more or less like Finn MacCool, and is very often spelled that way for English-speaking audiences, though it is also sometimes spelled MacCoul or even M’Coul. So, yes, the greatest hero of Irish folklore has a name that sounds like one a douchebag frat bro might pick for a fake ID.)

All right, that said: how is folklore Fionn different from mythic Fionn? Well, for one thing he was a giant rather than just a mighty warrior (the saying is that after the advent of Christianity Irish gods got small and became fairies; Irish heroes got big and became giants). Mythic Fionn’s most famous wife was named Sadhbh; folkloric Fionn has a wife named Oonagh.

Here is a thing they have in common: each version has a magic thumb. Young Fionn burned his thumb while cooking the magical Salmon of Knowledge and immediately stuck his burnt thumb in his mouth. He found that this imbued him with the salmon’s wisdom, and for the rest of his life, when he needed to consult on important matters or even see the future, he would suck his thumb and he could know what he needed to know.

The giant Fionn is credited with creating various geographical features, including, most famously, the Giant’s Causeway, which he is said to have built as a bridge from Ireland to Scotland.

The most famous story of the giant Fionn concerns the Causeway, and here it is:

While Fionn is out building the Causeway, he gets word that another giant is looking to kick his ass. This giant, whose name is usually given as Benandonner (though Jacobs gives it as Cucullin, and another book I have gives it as McConigle), is so powerful that he once pounded a thunderbolt into a pancake and carries it around in his pocket. Fionn actually freaks out a little.

He runs home to his wife Oonagh and tells her that he’s worried that he might actually get his ass kicked by this other giant. She tells him that she’ll take care of it.

This post is already long af, so I’ll try to keep this brief: Oonagh cooks up a mess of griddle cakes, but hides cast-iron skillets inside each one. She also makes some curds and whey and dresses Fionn up like a baby and puts him in a cradle.

Oonagh then whistles to summon Benandonner who hears it and hurries up to Fionn and Oonagh’s house up at the top of Knockmany Hill. He says he’s been looking all over Ireland to kick Fionn’s ass and Oonagh is like, “Huh, that’s weird, because Fionn definitely left here earlier looking to kick your ass. Oh well, while you’re here, you might as well be my guest.”

The first thing Oonagh does is have Benandonner turn the house around so it doesn’t face the wind, a thing she implies Fionn does all the time. She also asks him to dig for water under a rock in her yard. When he does so, he leaves a four hundred-foot deep canyon in his wake. During this time, Oonagh learns that Benandonner’s magical strength is kept in the middle finger of his right hand, much as Fionn’s wisdom is contained in his thumb.

Chores done, Oonagh sits Benandonner down to eat some griddle cakes (those with the iron skillets inside). He takes a bite and busts out two teeth. He’s like, “What the fuck” and Oonagh shrugs and is like “Fionn eats these all the time,” so he tries another one and loses two more teeth and is like “Goddammit what the fuck”

Meanwhile, Oonagh has given a griddle cake to Fionn (disguised as a baby) without a skillet in it, and he munches away happily. Benandonner is like “Who is this magical baby” and Fake Baby Fionn is like “What’s up, I’m a baby who is nothing compared to how fucking dope my father, Fionn--who is definitely not me--is.”

Benandonner gives the baby the stink eye, so Fake Baby Fionn is like, “Hey, here’s a normal thing: let’s have a rock-squeezing contest. Whoever can squeeze water from a rock wins.” He hands Benandonner a rock while he himself grabs a handful of curds and whey. You know how this ends.

Anyway, Benandonner is pretty scared of this terrifying baby but is like, “I gotta feel the teeth of the baby who can eat those cakes” because sticking your fingers in a strange baby’s mouth is a pretty usual response to superhuman feats of baby strength. Anyway, as you can imagine, he reaches in to feel Fionn’s teeth and obviously Fionn bites his magic finger off and Benandonner loses his powers and somehow Fionn is the hero of this story even though his much smarter wife did all the goddamn work.

Two last things (for now) about Fionn:

1) He is the Irish version of the King in the Mountain trope, equivalent to such figures as King Arthur, Theseus, St Wenceslas, and many others. The idea is that he is not dead, but merely sleeping in a cave, surrounded by his army. When Ireland is in its hour of greatest need, he will arise and lead his army to victory. This is the secret meaning of the title of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: not merely a reference to the classic song in which a dead man is revived by the power of whiskey, but a statement that Ireland is rising: Finn, again, is awake.

2) And let’s wrap this up by tying this boy a little closer to Saint Patrick himself. Mythological Fionn had a son with Sadhbh named Oisin (pr. “ush-EEN”), who is the narrator and purported writer of the Fenian cycle, which is somewhat akin to saying that Homer was Odysseus’s son. 

Anyway, according to tradition, Oisin survived until the age of Saint Patrick himself (5th century CE; this story is too long to recount right now, but involves a woman with a pig’s head) and the two engaged in a legendary series of debates, which represented the conflict between traditional and Christian beliefs in Ireland. You can read more here.

All right, jiminy. That was pretty long. Thanks if you’re still with me. If you enjoyed reading this and would like more Irish folk tales, please share it. If this gets, oh, let’s say 100 notes, I’ll do another one, maybe the tale of the Shee an Gannon and the Gruagach Gaire.

And finally, if you are Irish and I messed this all up: whoops

[benito-cereno]

I saw you tweeting about it, I always thought Apollo and Artemis were gods of the Sun/Moon not just music and the hunt. Is that not the case?

Classically speaking, for the most part, no. While Hellenists (Greek and Greek-ish peoples of the post-Alexander era ca 3rd century CE) often conflated Apollo and Artemis with the sun and moon, this didn’t become the standard belief until about the third century CE.

Homer and Hesiod and Ovid and Vergil would not identify Apollo as the sun, for example.

Classically speaking, the sun and moon were the Titans Helios and Selene, whose names mean, well, sun and moon.

Apollo was the god of plenty of other things: music, prophecy, healing, poetry, light, the arts, truth, etc. Basically the things that were super important to the Greek cultural identity, which is why I often refer to Apollo as the god of being Greek. It’s for this reason that his name is just Apollo in Latin: he didn’t have a pre-existing Latin god that he could be pasted onto, so he was just borrowed whole hog.

(I should probably note, since some people may not know this: the Greek/Roman god situation was not one where the Romans were like, “Oh, we like these Greek gods, let’s borrow them and then change their names for some reason.” A major element of Greco-Roman religion and culture [which helped them in their pursuit of empire] was syncretism, which is basically the ability to say, “Hey, you thing is like my thing, they’re probably the same thing.” [This is also part of the reason why Judaism and Christianity did not jibe well with the generally religiously permissive Roman culture: it’s very easy to go to Egypt and say, “Oh, Zeus and Ammon are the same,” or else, “Oh, you have another god we don’t have? Add him to the pokedex.” With monotheism, it’s a littler harder to reconcile.] Anyway: as the Romans conquered Greece, they said, “Oh, the Greeks are way better than we are at everything except fighting, let’s try to be classy like them.” This included looking at their body of myth and looking at a way to make it their own, by pasting it on top of their already existing pantheon. “You’ve got a sky father? We’ve got a sky father. So Zeus and Jupiter must be the same dude.” Some fits weren’t that easy: Mars was originally an agricultural god, for example. But he was the closest fit to Ares. Also: the bellicose Romans felt WAY different about Mars than the Greeks did about Ares.)

Artemis was goddess of the hunt, wild animals and wilderness, young women, virginity, and, ironically, childbirth.

It’s not hard to see why Apollo and Artemis ultimately get conflated with Helios and Selene, though: they’re twins, Apollo is god of light, Artemis is goddess of childbirth (which was greatly associated with the moon), Apollo is gold, Artemis is silver.

The conflation seems inevitable in retrospect, but it would have been completely foreign to, say, Pericles.

[benito-cereno]

hi! would you mind elaborating on your comment about the romans and their early view of mars (vs. the greek view of ares)? your post about differences between greek and roman gods is obv legit, but that particular issue isn't one i'm familiar with. the early association of mars with agriculture is well est., but i'm not sure what you're pointing to RE: issues around the different views of each god on the two sides. i'd like to read about that, if you're thinking of any particular books/articles.

Basically what I mean is that, generally speaking, at least in the literature we have, the Greeks thought Ares was a dick, while the Romans held him in higher esteem.

Ares was the god of the undignified parts of war: gore, bloodlust, decaying bodies, and so on. In the Iliad, Zeus cannot even pretend to hide his disgust at his own son. From book 5:

Then looking at him darkly Zeus who gathers the clouds spoke to him:“Do not sit beside me and whine, you double-faced liar.To me you are the most hateful of all gods who hold Olympus.Forever quarrelling is dear to your heart, wars and battles.

…

And yet I will not long endure to see you in pain, sinceyou are my child, and it was to me that your mother bore you.But were you born of some other god and proved so ruinouslong since you would have been dropped beneath the gods of the bright sky.”

(Naturally, he was better esteemed in warlike Sparta, and I’ve even seen it claimed multiple times that the idea that Ares is bad is Athenian propaganda, meant to belittle their rival city. This doesn’t scan, however, as evidenced by that quote from the Iliad. Homer didn’t give a shit about Athens; it was a little rinky-dink nothing town at the time of the writing of the Iliad, barely scoring a mention in the catalog of ships.)

(Meanwhile, Athena represents the “good” parts of war: strategy, winning, honorable combat, and so on. She, contrary to Ares, is Zeus’s golden child. You could possibly sway me that this idea came from the Athenians, but, again, blind Homer disagrees.)

On the flip side, the Romans were only good at two things: fighting and farming. Consequently, it makes sense that they would be pretty into their hybrid war/agriculture god. While the Greeks viewed Ares as a destructive force, for the Romans, Mars was about achieving peace through force.

He was, literally, the father of their people, as he was the father of Romulus and Remus, and several important elements of Roman culture–the Campus Martius where elections and many other cultural events were held, plus the month of March–are named for him.

[2muchlove2carry]

tomorrow is thursday which means i have my marbling lesson and the new the pitt episode comes out

never kill urself

[jeremykwan1969]

#positiveliving in #Malaysia wishes yall #myThursday happy hours as we made simple curry beehoon noodles for lunch topped with acrabled eggs in fried toufu and fried onions. There is no where else serving so much ingredients as home made curry beehoon in this World, don't yall think so? Thank you for yall contonuous support in #myhomecooking journey during this #myCMCO period as we wish yall #stayhome #staysafe #stayhealthy #kitajagakita #kitajagakuarga #kitajagakomuniti hugs #mylovelies #loverevolution2020 thanks God for the journey so far and for God's provision... https://www.instagram.com/p/CGorMUKpbKdNyYt7Fa0nAzTv2Tpy6jEaMtPcaM0/?igshid=1wv8ius16vgol

[manuelinfantewriter]

New games for my parrots and the new bird bath tub. #myparrots #goodlunch #mythursday #may2020 https://www.instagram.com/p/CAchTtPASBQ/?igshid=1q03hxt9aqqzm