Showing posts with label mythology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mythology. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

The Wastes of Hellas


Once, long ago, the world was good. The Hellenes lived under the protection of the Olympian gods, and made sacrifices in their honour. Life was not always easy, but it was right. Then came the opening of Tartarus, and the terrible Titans walked the earth once more. From that day forth, a dark cloud spread over humanity that has never yet lifted.


Today, most of Hellas is a burning wasteland. The survivors of the human race dwell in a few isolated villages and walled city-states. The Olympian gods are all dead or missing, while the Titans roam the land committing random acts of destruction or extracting terrible tribute from the Hellenes. The wilderness is overrun with monsters - chimerae, cyclopes, sirens and hecatonchires. Only a few heroes, possessing the diluted bloodlines of the Olympians, can stand between these horrors and the last bastions of civilisation.


Beyond the borders of Hellas are the lands of the barbarians, similarly devastated. There dwell a few uncivilised tribes, including the ferocious Amazons and the bestial Centaurs. Across the oceans lie the lost islands of Odysseus, the ruins of Troy, and the silent sands of Egypt.


The Olympians are gone, but they left behind their ancient relics, the mysterious creations of Hephaestus and his craftsmen. Some adventurers seek to gain power and riches by excavating the works of the Olympians, while others aspire to discover Mount Olympus itself, which is rumoured to hold the secret of the Gods' destruction.


Other locations of note:

- Thebes, a city formerly ruled by the wise Oedipus. After he exiled himself, the city was struck with a plague and today is inhabited only by the shambling undead.

- Crete, a dystopian island state where slaves from the mainland are routinely sacrificed in the depths of the Cretan Labyrinth. It is rumoured that a Titan dwells in this Labyrinth, and the constant sacrifices are the only thing keeping Crete from being destroyed.

- Sparta, a fascist military city-state whose people are renowned for their discipline and bloodlust. The Spartans have survived the inhospitable conditions of the new world by making themselves into inhuman killing machines.


Friday, September 21, 2012

Latin American Adventures

He explored every inch of the region, even the riverbed, dragging the two iron ingots along and reciting Melquíades' incantation aloud. The only thing he succeeded in doing was to unearth a suit of fifteenth-century armor which had all of its pieces soldered together with rust and inside of which there was the hollow resonance of an enormous stone-filled gourd. When José Arcadio Buendía and the four men of his expedition managed to take the armor apart, they found inside it a calcified skeleton with a copper locket containing a woman's hair around its neck.
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude



My devil makes me dream like no other mortal dreams
With a blank eyed corner
The only way to see him in the tunnel where he slept
By the longest tusk of corridors, numb below the neck
In my heart
Where he keeps them in a vault of devil daughters

- The Mars Volta, 'With Twilight As My Guide'



Like all men of the Library, I have traveled in my youth; I have wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I am preparing to die just a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Once I am dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the railing; my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite.
- Jorge  Luis Borges, The Library of Babel





The people of Cozumel had long experience of accommodating outsiders who came in peace, as the island was sacred to the Maya goddess Ix Chel, and her shrine was a place of pilgrimage for the mainland Maya. A peculiarly treacherous current running in the narrow sea between mainland and island was a further barrier to violent invasion. Certainly Naum Pat and his people enjoyed immunity from the endemic Indian warfare which constituted normal relations between the mainland provinces, and saw themselves as outside the Maya political arena.
- Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan  1517-1570



The one called Ah Chable they crucified and they nailed him to a great cross made for the purpose, and they put him on the cross alive and nailed his hands with two nails and tied his feet... And after he was crucified they raised the cross on high and the said boy was crying out, and so they held it on high, and then they lowered it, ... [and] they took out his heart. And the ah-kines gave a sermon telling them that it was good what they must do, and that through adoring those gods they would be saved, and that they should not believe that which the friars used to say to them.
- Testimony of Pedro Huhul of Kanchunup, 17 August 1562


Terrified, exhausted by her fate, Visitación recognised in those eyes the symptoms of the sickness whose threat had obliged her and her brother to exile themselves forever from an age-old kingdom where they had been prince and princess. It was the insomnia plague.
- One Hundred Years of Solitude







La Tunda is a myth of the Colombian Pacific region, and particularly in the afro-American community, about a vampire-like monster woman that lures people into the forests and keeps them there. Sometimes it appears in the form of a loved one, as the likeness of a child's mother, who would lure him into the forest and feed its victim with shrimps she has farted upon (camarones peídos) to keep her victims docile in some kind of trance. 



Tezcatlipoca, Smoking Mirror, We are his Slaves, He by whom we live, Enemy of Both Sides, Lord of the Near and the Nigh, Night, Wind, Two Reed, Possessor of the Sky and Earth
The light was so weak at noon that when Pelayo was coming back to the house after throwing away the crabs, it was hard for him to see what it was that was moving and groaning in the rear of the courtyard. He had to go very close to see that it was an old man, a very old man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn't get up, impeded by his enormous wings.
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings