Extra Credits
Published on 14 Jan 2019Join the Patreon community! http://bit.ly/EMPatreon
Inis Fáil is the Isle of Destiny, in Ireland. It was here that the Children of the Danu were sent on a quest to find their destiny, but they would have to encounter the Fir Bolg first…
January 15, 2019
Celtic Myth – The Isle of Destiny – Extra Mythology – #1
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December 19, 2018
Krampus – Christmas Demon – Extra Mythology
Extra Credits
Published on 17 Dec 2018Join the Patreon community! http://bit.ly/EMPatreon
Krampus’s name is growing popular in the United States, but most of us don’t really know what he does OR that he is partners with St. Nicholas himself. He is in fact just one of many Christmas demons…
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December 6, 2018
Izanami and Izanagi – Underworld Blues – Extra Mythology
Extra Credits
Published on 3 Dec 2018Join the Patreon community! http://bit.ly/EMPatreon
When Izanami died giving birth to Kagu-Tsuchi, the incarnation of fire, Izanagi visited the underworld to try to get her back, not realizing the dreadful terrors he would face. But from that bitter journey, sprung the life of new Japanese gods…
Watch the Overly Sarcastic Productions crossover episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clJ0F…
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November 22, 2018
Perseus – Medusa – Extra Mythology – #2
Extra Credits
Published on 19 Nov 2018Join the Patreon community! http://bit.ly/EMPatreon
Perseus is not intimidated by the grey women and their eyeball, or by Hermes’s complicated directions, or by Medusa, or by a winged horse sprouting out of Medusa’s blood, or by Andromeda’s boyfriend, or by his own dad.
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November 19, 2018
Corvus Corax featuring Arndis Halla: Hugin & Munin
Corvus Corax
Published on 25 May 2018The new album “SKÁL” – OUT NOW ► http://hyperurl.co/corvuscorax
With “the voice of the icelandic wind” Arndis Halla!
http://arndishalla.isMusic by Corvus Corax
Lyrics: traditionalVideo Credits:
Produced by Swieding Medien
Executive Producer: Corvus Corax & Doro Peters
Second Camera: Sarah Wieding, Serge Foly & Halldór Sveinsson
Color Correction: Sarah Wieding
Filmed, Edited & Directed by Ronald Matthes
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November 8, 2018
Perseus – Plans of Bismarckian Proportion – Extra Mythology – #1
Extra Credits
Published on 5 Nov 2018Join the Patreon community! http://bit.ly/EMPatreon
Perseus was the undesirable grandchild of the king Acrisius, who wanted him dead — but accidentally just left him alive to float to a new beach. THEN he became the undesirable ADOPTED grandchild of the island’s despot, Polydectes, who sent him on a quest to obtain the head of a gorgon…
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October 25, 2018
Prometheus – The Making of Man – Extra Mythology – #2
Extra Credits
Published on 22 Oct 2018Join the Patreon community! http://bit.ly/EMPatreon
As the age of heroes faded and monsters were cast from the world, Zeus brought a task to the wisest of titans, Prometheus and his brother Epimetheus. They were to create the animals and form man to populate the upcoming age — which also lead to the creation of Pandora (and her box of sorrows).
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October 11, 2018
Prometheus – Origins – Extra Mythology – #1
Extra Credits
Published on 8 Oct 2018Let’s start at the primordial beginning. The first “peoples” on the earth were Cyclops and Titans. Prometheus was one of these titans, and in fact just one of two remaining after an unfortunate conflict with, you guessed it, Zeus…
Join the Patreon community! http://bit.ly/EMPatreon
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September 25, 2018
Amazons – fierce fighting tribe or just ancient Greek porn?
Lindybeige
Published on 21 Jun 2011You can believe in them if you want, but if you do, you should out of fairness to other mythological characters believe in giants, cyclopes, griffins, and gorgons.
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April 23, 2018
Yggdrasil – Nine Worlds of the Norse – Extra Mythology
Extra Credits
Published on 20 Apr 2018Sponsored by God of War! http://bit.ly/2FBqVPH
Everything, from the giants’ home of Jotunheim, to the primeval Vanaheim, to the mortal realm of Midgard, is connected by the tree named Yggdrasil, life to all nine worlds of Norse peoples.
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April 22, 2018
The Lament for the Rohirrim – Lord of the Rings – Clamavi De Profundis
Clamavi De Profundis
Published on 31 Mar 2018Here is our version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s poem, “The Lament for the Rohirrim!” We hope you enjoy it:)
A note on our interpretation:
We approached this piece more “organically”. The melody was composed by singing the lyrics, seeking to be true to the notion of vocal folk tradition. Therefore, the feel of this song is more rhythmically free and more focused on simply dwelling on the questions and answers of the text. There are two sections of the piece: the melody is sung first in a “contemplative” setting, and then repeated in a more “epic” setting, to explore varying sentiments drawn from this beautiful text.
We hope you enjoy this as much as we did creating it! Thanks very much for listening and for your support!
We are unable to get permission to sell this song so we are posting it here free for your enjoyment. If you want a copy of the mp3, we are offering it to those who support us on Patreon!
My brother composed and arranged the piece. My family sang it.
Please no bad language in the comments. We want this to be family friendly:)
Lyrics:
Where now the horse and the rider?
Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk,
And the bright hair flowing?
Where is the hand on the harpstring,
And the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest
And the tall corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain,
Like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.
Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning,
Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?
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April 11, 2018
The Aesir-Vanir War – Extra Mythology
Extra Credits
Published on 9 Apr 2018Sponsored by God of War! http://bit.ly/2FBqVPH
One day, a mysterious visitor appeared among the Aesir, one of two races of Nordic gods. An epic and long war began, and yet despite the bloodshed, their war eventually gave poetry to the world.
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March 26, 2018
Rick McGinnis on Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos
Peterson’s book and lecture series has been much in the news lately, so Rick McGinnis shares his thoughts, particularly about the message and intended audience for 12 Rules for Life:
It was probably inevitable that this sudden notoriety would create a demand for a book-length statement of principles from Peterson, and he obliged earlier this year with 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Deceptively packaged as a self-help tome, the book expands on a series of postings Peterson made on Quora, a crowdsourcing website that, instead of asking for money, invites its readers to contribute answers to questions posed by other readers.
The book’s structure is straightforward; after sketching in the origin of the dozen precepts, he states them at the outset of each chapter, explains them in varying degrees of complexity with examples from his practice as a clinical psychologist, anecdotes from his own life or – and this is proving to be most tantalizing – ruminations on quotes from history, philosophy, mythology or (most often of all) the Bible.
On the surface, Peterson’s edicts for a good life are self-evident: Stand straight; Obey the Golden Rule; Choose your friends wisely; Set yourself reasonable expectations; Raise your children well; Don’t be a hypocrite; Cherish meaning; Don’t lie; Listen before you speak; Choose your words carefully; Let children fail so they learn to succeed; Be kind to animals.
But lest you think that short paragraph should save anyone the price of the book, it has to be understood that we are at least a generation, perhaps several, from the point where these commonsensical statements were known, understood or accepted by any sane adult. We are, at the end of a century of phenomenal technological advances and cataclysmic history, sorely in need of a book-length exposition on phrases that you’d once expect to find on needlework samplers.
Early on and quite often, Peterson comes across with butt-clenching dread as the smartest-man-in-the-room, laying out the stories behind the facts, culled from his years of reading and research, with the force and volume of a firehose. He relies heavily on evolutionary biology to explain our hardwired need to create and find our place in hierarchies, with examples that distill our endlessly troubling social responses to bluff, authority, and even violence down to chemical and neurological mechanisms set in place way back in time with far less complex creatures (a scenario that’s easily satirized as “we are all lobsters”).
It’s been observed – and confirmed by Peterson – that the ideal audience for his book is young people in general and young men in particular. As a former young man, I can attest that being told by a wise older man, clearly on your side but unwilling to sugar coat the facts, that the bully and the big-man-on-campus are better armed than you are to jockey for status and fulfillment – the alpha lobsters, waving their claws around to appreciable effect – is very much less than comforting. Peterson’s ideal audience will have to endure the climb up a very steep hill of biological determinism to reach the far more hospitable plateau beyond.
I’m not saying Peterson is wrong. From the perspective of an older man, I’ve seen this lobster battle played out too many times to deny its plausibility. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t suggest that the ideologies that he decries, imagining that there is no biological determinism – not even the binary division of gender – or even a landscape governed by measurable standards or objective truth, is far more appealing to young people raised to believe in an ever-expanding entitlement of “rights” and a pursuit of “justice” that needs to triumph above history or biology.
It’s when Peterson tries to explain the philosophical and even theological roots of our cultural systems that things might be rewarding, for both young and older readers. He has a core group of texts that he relies upon, with particular emphasis on Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn on the modern side, and while he will evoke ancient mythology – the gods of Egypt make several appearances, though even he can’t overcome the essential strangeness of their myths – he reaps more rewardingly from the Bible, especially in one passage where he analyzes the difference between the Old and New Testament God.
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March 4, 2018
QotD: Rousseau’s “Noble Savage” myth
The concept of a primeval matriarchy may be regarded, on one level, as a modern incarnation of the Golden Age myth, a belief found in primitive societies throughout the world that during the infancy of the human race mankind lived in perfect peace and harmony in a world of abundance. The Garden of Eden is the biblical take on the legend. In the Bible story however, as in all traditional accounts, there was a “Fall” from grace, after which strife and hardship entered the world. The Fall, or Original Sin, represented an implicit acceptance of human imperfection and in a way accounted for the violence and discord of life by pointing the finger of blame at humanity as a whole and the individual in particular. The essential imperfection of human nature was recognized by all ancient societies, and is a theme which we encounter in the works of the Chinese philosophers as well as those of India and Greece. With Rousseau and the Enlightenment, however, there came a change. Reacting against the rationalism and industrialization of the eighteenth century, Rousseau and his fellow proto-romantics adopted a sentimentalized view of ancient and primitive man, arguing that human nature, in its pristine form, was not “fallen” at all, and that human beings had in modern times been corrupted by an exploitative and degenerate economic system.
Rousseau’s Noble Savage has caused untold harm over the past two centuries as totalitarians of various hues sought to foster and free the inherent nobility of humanity by destroying the corrupt and exploitative economic systems which had supposedly turned people into butchers and criminals. Both fascism and communism trace a direct line of descent to Rousseau, as do anarchism and the various extremist ecology movements of our time.
Feminism, too, is a branch of Rousseau’s tree, though it has other wellsprings. Marx and Freud, of course, with their negative attitudes to Christianity and Christian civilization in general, contributed much to feminism. Marx in particular emphasized how “bourgeois” Christian society had oppressed women, and called for the abolition of the family and complete sexual liberation. Freud contributed by his claim that neuroses and mental illness in general were the result of sexual repression. But the myth of a primeval matriarchy also owed much to students of mythology such as James Frazer and (more especially) Robert Graves. Archaeology too played its part, as scholars began to uncover ancient images of goddesses and female deities from various parts of the globe. The Palaeolithic epoch, the earliest age of homo sapiens, revealed small statuettes of clay, ivory and bone, depicting some form of Mother Goddess. Perhaps the most influential archaeological discoveries, however, came from Crete, where between 1900 and 1905 Sir Arthur Evans uncovered a splendid pre-Greek civilization where women and female deities apparently enjoyed a privileged position.
Emmet Scott, “The Myth of the Primeval Matriarchy”, The Gates of Vienna, 2016-07-13.
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November 2, 2017
“… the United States made a collective choice to let the South have a mythology in place of independence”
Colby Cosh is cheering on the carnage of the US-Civil-War-revisionism war that appears to have broken out to our south:
As someone who is relishing the United States’s outburst of Civil War revisionism, I am a little confused by the controversy over a remark by the White House chief of staff, John Kelly. Kelly is being assailed for saying in a Fox News interview that “the lack of an ability to compromise led to the (American) Civil War, and men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.”
This was part of a familiar-sounding encomium to Gen. Robert E. Lee, the Confederacy’s warlord. It is the kind of thing, until recently an accepted part of the American civil religion, that is being instantly challenged in our tempestuous moral climate. And I think this is, on the whole, terrific. About time, and then some.
But I would have thought that the objectionable part of Kelly’s comment was the stuff about “men and women of good faith” — as if Southern whites had not made war for the purpose of preserving a caste’s economic advantage and its political dominance within the federation. Did “good faith” always characterize the Confederacy’s collective behaviour before and during the war? One thinks of Andersonville, or Fort Pillow, or Bleeding Kansas, or — to throw in a Canadian angle — the Confederacy’s use of British North America as a base for conspiracies and violence. We may even recall Preston Brooks beating Charles Sumner nearly to death in the United States Senate in 1856, and being lionized throughout the South for it.
“Good faith,” eh? This reflects the toxic part of the schoolhouse account of history given to Americans: faced with the problem of being bound together in a Union as a victorious nation and a vanquished one, the United States made a collective choice to let the South have a mythology in place of independence. An account of the war as a fateful collision between “ways of life” was allowed to stand — perhaps in the absence of acceptable alternatives — and the South was permitted to commemorate and celebrate war heroes without inviting odium or reprisal. Those heroes ultimately remained part of the ruling class in the South.
It is easy to recognize talk of “good faith” (or “ways of life”) as the thinking of somebody still under the cultural spell of Gone With the Wind. The puzzle is that it does not seem to be the “good faith” part of Kelly’s comment that is inviting the strongest objections. He is being vilified by the “lack of an ability to compromise” part.
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