[If you found my blog because you’re curious about Greek people mixing up prehistoric bears and demigods, this post is for you. I studied archaeology with a focus on other things, and the research on this topic goes back decades, but imo the best book on how dinosaur bones influenced mythology is Adrienne Mayor’s The First Fossil Hunters. I strongly suggest you support this amazing historian and buy her stuff – she’s a great writer and she specializes in folklore and geomythology, it doesn’t get much cooler than that – but if you can’t and you’re interested in the subject – well, I believe scientific knowledge should be shared and accessible to everyone, so here are a few highlights. Part one of six.]
Griffins: a very mysterious mystery
“A race of four-footed birds, almost as large as wolves and with legs and claws like lions.”
The one thing you need to know about griffins is that they don’t really fit in anywhere. They have no powers, they don’t help heroes, they’re not defeating gods or anything like that. Technically speaking, they’re not even monsters – people thought griffins were legit – real animals who lived in Central Asia and sat on golden eggs and mostly killed anyone who went near them. And okay, someone might say, ‘Frog, what’s fishy about that? People used to be dumb as rocks and there’s plenty of bizarro animals out there, anyway’ and yeah, that’s a very good point – except for one thing. See, what’s creepy about griffins is that we’ve got drawings and descriptions of them spanning ten centuries and thousands of miles, and yet they always. look. the. freaking. same.
Like, here’s how people imagined elephants.
This is insanely funny and probably why God sent the Black Death to kill everyone, but also pretty common tbh, because a) people want to feel involved, b) people are liars who lie and c) it’s hard to imagine stuff you’ve never seen. So the more a story is passed around, the more it’s going to gain and lose details here and there, until you get from dog-footed hairy monkey of doom to plunger-nosed horror on stilts. But griffins – art or books, they’re consistently described as wolves-sized mammals with a beaked face. So that’s what made Adrienne Mayor go, Uh.
And what she did next is she started digging around in Central Asia, because that’s the other thing everyone agreed on: that griffins definitely lived there and definitely came from there. And this is where things get really interesting, because as it turns out, on one side of the Urals you’ve got Greeks going, ‘Mate, the Scythians, you know – they’ve got these huge-ass lion birds, I’m not even shitting you rn’ while on the other side of the Urals – wow and amaze – you’ve got Siberian tribes singing songs about the ‘bird-monsters’ and how their ancestors slaughtered them all because they were Valiant and Good.
(This according to a guy studying Siberian traditions in the early 1800s, anyway, because you know who writes stuff down? Not nomads, bless them: dragging around a shitload of books on fucking horseback is not a kind of life anyone deserve to live.)
And anyway, do you know what else those Mighty Ancestors did? They mined gold sand, and they kept tripping over dinosaur bones because that entire area is full of both things and some places are lucky like that. And in fact, the more excavations were carried out in ancient Scythian settlements, the more we started to realize that those guys were even more obsessed with griffins than the Greek were. Hell, some warriors even had griffins tattooed on their bodies?
And it’s probably all they ever talked about, because that’s when griffins suddenly appear in the Mediterreanean landscape: when Greek people start trading (and talking) with the Scythians.
(Another important note here, not that I’m not bitter or anything: something else those excavations are showing is that Herodotus was fucking right about fucking everything, SO THERE. Father of lies my ass, he was the only sensible guy in that whole bean-avoiding, monster-fucking, psychopathic and self-important Greek ‘intelligentsia’ and they can all fuck off and die and we don’t care about temples Pausy you dumb bitch we want to hear about the tree people and the Amazons and the fucking griffins goddammit. Uuugh. /rant)
So anyway, Scythian nomads had been hunting for gold in places with exciting names like ‘the field of the white bones’ and basically dying of exposure because mountains, so Herodotus (and others) got this right as well: that successful campaigns could take a long-ass time, and very often people just disappeared, never to be heard from again. What everybody got less right: the nomads and adventurers and gold miners weren’t killed by griffins, because by the time they started traveling into those mountains, ‘griffins’ had been dead for hundreds of thousands of years. What they did see, and what was sure to spook the fuck out of them, were fossils – and, more precisely, protoceratops skulls, which can be found on all the major caravan routes from China all the way to Uzbekistan and are so ubiquitous paleontologists call them ‘a damn nuisance’.
And guess what they look like.
Just fucking guess.
[Left: a golden griffin, Saka-Scyhtian culture; right: psittacosaurus skull, commonly found in Uzbekistan and the western Gobi.]
Also, fun detail if you’re into gory and painful ways of dying: many of the dino skeletons are found standing up, because the animals would be caught in sand storms and drop dead. So basically you’d be riding your horse and minding your own gold-related business when all of a sudden you see the empty sockets of a beaked something staring at you and yeah – as a reminder, the idea of evolution was not a thing until Darwin, so any Scythian or Siberian tribesman seeing something like that would assume there was a fairly good fucking chance of a live whatever-the-hell-this-is waiting for him behind the next hill. And that’s what he’d say to Greek traders over a bowl of fermented mare’s milk: to stay the fuck away from those mountains, because griffins, man, they’re fucking real and there’s hundreds of them and anyway, maybe write that down if writing’s something you’re into, never saw the point myself but eh, to each his own, right, and cheers, good health, peace and joy to the ancestors.
Man, don’t you just love mythology?
(How fossils influenced mythology: part two, Cyclops, will be up soon.)
I didn’t really appreciate Aang until this picture.
When I was young, Aang got on my nerves. “Make the tough calls, take responsibility, grow up! I’ve had to!”
I gave him no mercy for his age because, at the time, I was younger than him. He annoyed me when he slacked on his training, when he didn’t listen to Jeong Jeong, when he refused to kill the Firelord. Him and every other character who would give up the greater good to keep the moral high ground. Your principles don’t matter, results do!
It wasn’t until I got older that I saw Aang differently. He was a child, trying to do what was right, who never wanted to do any harm. And he was exactly what the world needed. Aang was a peaceful soul in war time, gentle when others were cruel, merciful when others were unforgiving, and he reminded everyone how to laugh in a world that had long forgotten how to have fun.
Even after years of hardship, losing absolutely everything and waking up to fight a war, Aang still loved life. He loved marble tricks, penguin sledding, and most of all, he loved people. Aang annoyed me because he was naive, but now inspires me because even after he saw the world at it’s worst, he didn’t forget how to be a kid at heart. In this picture, middle aged and with the weight of the world on his shoulders, Aang not only lets some weird guy by the docks take his picture, but does so with absolute glee.
Aang shouldn’t be more like me, I should be more like Aang.
All Systems Red by Martha Wells is narrated by a battle cyborg who, throughout the entire tense dramatic plot playing out around it, mostly just wants to be left alone to watch sitcoms. murderbot: agender icon
I like to picture Sora as crafty. Like he took woodshop, he would make things with/for his mom.
Made his own fishing nets, spears, maybe even his own boat for going to the island!
Those masks and lil robot, and especially the mini ship with the dolls.
And as he traversed worlds, he would continue to make little things. Any down time they had, grab a hunk of wood and carve something in the world around him that inspired him.
He was never much of a buyer, so he would make gifts.
Before leaving for the next world, if he made a friend, he’d give what he made to them.
It could anywhere between a miniature of them, or related to their journey. Their connection.
As he continues, he gets better and more intricate.
If he visits the same world again, he’d gift them something he had been working on because he was thinking of them.
Donald and Goofy would encourage it, though Donald would certainly make sure he only used materials familiar in that world for his gifts. You know. “Order”.
So even though he has connections through friendship, a tiny piece of him is everywhere he has ever been, even if there wasnt anyone to gift it to, he gave it to the world itself.
i will never forget the Harley Quinn cosplayer that sat behind me during an O.W.Ls exam at a con and singlehandedly wiped the floor of everyone else with her HP trivia knowledge giving Slytherin house a ton of points. at the very end of the panel she leaned forward to me and silently whispered “i work as a guide at Harry Potter World at Universal” with the most evil grin on her face. what a Slytherin thing to do. well played, Harley Quinn of my dreams. well played.
the most iconic moment in musical history is during a very potter musical when Voldemort jumps out of the cauldron and takes the first step and you hear that he’s wearing tap shoes and you just Know what’s coming
DarkestElemental616 