This is Sparta!

I confess. I find silly image macros absolutely hilarious.

Dante's Inferno

Dante's Inferno has been kicking around the cultural playground for over 700 years. But it has never before been interpreted with exquisitely hand-drawn paper puppets, brought to life using purely hand-made special effects. Until now. Rediscover this literary classic, retold in a kind of apocalyptic graphic novel meets Victorian-era toy theater. Dante’s Hell is brought to lurid 3-dimensional, high-definition life in a darkly comedic travelogue of the underworld — set against an all-too-familiar urban backdrop of used car lots, gated communities, strip malls, and the U.S. Capitol. And populated with a contemporary cast of reprobates, including famous — and infamous — politicians, presidents, popes, pimps. And the Prince of Darkness himself.

Grrr. The movie seems interesting, but I can't get the web site to load. Anyway, IMDb has a trailer and some information, and if you're in San Francisco you can buy tickets at sf indiefest.

Hellboy and Hecate

Indeed, Hecate shows up in the new animated Hellboy: Blood and Iron movie. Pop over to Hellboy Animated to see a picture and find out what Hellboy's weapon of choice is.

Hellboy: Blood and Iron airs on Cartoon Network, March 10.

Eros in a Speedo

The costume designer outfitted the winged god Eros in a Speedo and made sure the other costumes didn't become see-through when the actors emerged from the water. She also gave one actor a pair of aqua socks to keep him from slipping on the wooden deck. (They were eventually abandoned because they made distracting slurpy noises.)

Mary Zimmerman's Metamorphoses is playing in Des Moines.

Penelopiad adapted for the stage

Margaret Atwood is adapting her book, The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus, for the stage in a format that the producers are calling a "cabaret." The Penelopiad will premiere in July 2007 at Stratford-upon-Avon's Swan Theatre, then open the 2007-2008 season in English theatre at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa next September.

Full story at CBC.CA


Penelope

The goat must burn

So what do you do when the damn Christmas goat in Gävle refuses to burn? You do what the keeper of the Honey House did, and arrange your own sacrifice.


Goat in flames

Uncle Al

Yes, I'm aware that I might have to rename this blog Myth, Magic, and Aleister Crowley in Popular Culture soon, but how could I possibly resist posting this mural from Bergen, Norway?


Uncle Al

The Golden Compass

Somehow I missed this. The official web site for The Golden Compass, the first movie based on Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, is now online - and you can play with the alethiometer!

Food of the Gods

Slashfood reports that Greek Gods are introducing some new yogurt flavors. The containers look spiffy, but the choice of flavors is rather ordinary. Whatever happened to nectar and ambrosia?

(Thanks to Donna for finding this!)


Poseidon

Jesus in a fried tortilla

In 1977, a woman making burritos in Lake Arthur, N.M., saw the face of Jesus in the pattern of skillet burns on a tortilla. She built a shrine to house the Jesus tortilla, which was blessed by a priest, and thousands of people from across the country came to gaze and pray for its divine assistance in healing their ailments.

Los Angeles Times article about pareidolia, the perception of patterns where none are intended.

If this sort of thing entertains you, be sure to pay a visit to the Paredolia Project (and please leave a comment if you figure out why Allah is listed among the vegetables.)

Diana - princess or goddess?

"In the case of Diana, Princess of Wales this was an obvious culmination. As her brother pointed out at her funeral, Diana — or Artemis, if we are going to stick to the Greeks — was the goddess of hunting, herself hunted to death.

Or you could say that, pursued by the Furies for much of her public life, those foul harpies finally got their girl. She could be Prometheus, stealing fire (or fame) from the gods (or the royal firm), and giving it to mortals for their own use; or Cassandra, predicting her own fate in a series of tapes and telephone calls; a female Narcissus, gazing doomed and entranced upon her own reflection in magazines."

India Knight makes some observations about the use of mythic imagery in discussing Princess Diana, insults Catholics, uses the strange construct half-Muslim, and gets the readers quite irate.


Diana

The Ascent of Dionysos

Athena has consistently shown herself to be one of the most powerful Olympians, but was overthrown by Hades in the closest struggle for Mount Olympus to date. Defeated and ashamed, Athena steps down from Mount Olympus to make room for Dionysus.

Forget about getting the house cleaned in time for Christmas. I'm playing Mythos!

The Chemical Wedding

Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden is involved in the production of a movie inspired by Aleister Crowley.

The movie is reportedly about a professor in an English university, whom, after a failed experiment, becomes obsessed with Crowleys soul. Crowley himself was very much into redhaired women, and obviously the professor becomes enchanted by a very beautiful, red-haired student.

Read more at Maiden Norway.

Yes, obviously...


Aleister Crowley

Apocalyptic violence

"The message? The end is near and the savior has come. Gibson's efforts at authenticity of location and language might, for some viewers, mask his blatantly colonial message that the Maya needed saving because they were rotten at the core. Using the decline of Classic urbanism as his backdrop, Gibson communicates that there was absolutely nothing redeemable about Maya culture, especially elite culture which is depicted as a disgusting feast of blood and excess."

Read Tracy Ardren's review at archaelogy.org.

So if Mel Gibson's new genre really is religious slasher flicks, what can we expect next? Something based on the writings of Adam von Bremen, maybe? I suspect that "the enlightened Christian describing the barbaric heathens" would be very much Gibson's thing.


Midvinterblot

Roasting the Christmas goat

STOCKHOLM, Sweden. For 40 years it has been torched, vandalized, had its legs cut off and even been run over by a car. But officials in the Swedish city of Gävle are guaranteeing that this year's giant straw Christmas goat - the victim of Sweden's most violent yule tradition - will survive unscathed.

Officials think they have finally outsmarted the resourceful vandals by dousing the battered ram with flame-resistant chemicals normally used on airplanes.

Bah. Cheating. Why, oh why, do they have to ruin one of the funnest favorite Christmas traditions we have? Yes, there are those who get all worked up it and talk about vandalism, but most of us find the whole thing rather hilarious. I mean, last year the police were looking for Santa Claus and a gingerbread man, who were suspected of shooting burning arrows at the goat until it caught fire. In 2001 it was burned down by and American tourist who upon being arrested he had heard about the tradition at a party. Tell me that's not funny.

While the origins of the Christmas goat are unclear, the symbol is believed to date back to Norse mythology and the two goats that drew the carriage of Thor, the god of thunder.

Source: boston.com

I doubt that the connection to Norse mythology exists, but I suppose it might make the story more interesting. Personally I'd much rather draw inspiration from The Wicker Man and stick a crappy actor in the goat.

Artemis and Santa

"There are several humorous cameos in this film, including an uncredited actress who plays the Greek Goddess Artemis working undercover on Earth as a gym teacher. This actress is gut-bustingly funny in a role that is far too brief when compared to the time spent on Heat-miser and Snowmiser. In fact, her role is part of the underlying, richer story about the role that myth and story plays in cultures, even modern ones."

Belinda Acosta reviews The Year Without Santa Claus

Sepulchre

Despite finding Labyrinth terriby dull (like Dan Brown on tranquilizers, sort of) I might consider reading Kate Mosse's next novel, after all.

Having cracked the time-slip device with Labyrinth, Mosse's new work, Sepulchre - a time-slip adventure novel set in fin-de-siecle France and the present day - may well be even better. "It's about a woman writing a biography of Debussy, who was very interested in the occult, which was very popular in France at that time. Labyrinth was a Grail story. This one is the real Tarot."

Read the interview at The Sydney Morning Herald

Socrates: Lost in Olympia

"SOCRATES: LOST IN OLYMPIA", the feature-length 3d animated English-language film, planned as a European & Chinese co-production, is in the initial phases of preproduction. Twelve fresh and exciting characters have been added to Socrates' group of friends and this time the mission is next to impossible: to save the planet and the Olympic Games. "SOCRATES" is scheduled for a 2007 theatrical release.

Read more at Dimitri Vorris' web site.

There should be some religious or mythological content in there, right?

Necropants!

Yes, it's exactly as morbid as it sounds (though when I saw the headline I initially thought it was referring to those people who don't wash their jeans).

"Necropants are part of a complicated sorcery for gaining money,” Atlason explains. “The owner of necropants had to make a deal with a male friend while still alive about digging up his body after a natural cause of death, skinning it below the waste and wearing the skin as necropants."

Read about the Museum of Sorcery & Witchcraft in the Iceland Review.

Building the Trojan Horse

Radio 4 airs Alick Rowe's The Horse, "an account of what might have happened during the construction of the Trojan Horse and what follows when it’s finally loaded up with twelve valiant Greeks". Listen to it on the BBC web site.

Also, don't miss this Neatorama post about a modern version of the horse.


Tiepolo's Trojan horse