Mythology Explained

Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today's video, we're going to take a look at the Aesir-Vanir War, the war that took place in the mythic past between the two tribes of gods in Norse mythology, and following that, at how, ultimately, the Mead of Poetry, the mead that inspired gods and the greatest of skalds, bestowing mastery over verse and song, was created.

Let's get into it.

In Norse mythology, one of the major events that transpired in the mythic past was the Aesir-Vanir war. Though the two tribes eventually reconciled, for a time, relations between the two were beyond strained, defined by violence and rancour. Fierce fighting broke out as each tribe tried to destroy the other. They fought to a draw, as neither side could gain a winning advantage, allowing cooler heads to prevail before greater death and destruction could be dealt. Eventually, tempers subsided, wounds were tended, and a peace was brokered through prisoner exchange.

Before we really dive into this, though, let's take a quick pause and do an overview of each tribe and highlight some of their differences.

The Aesir were the more prominent and popular tribe. They dwelt in Asgard, one of the nine realms, and their number included gods like Odin, Thor, and Loki. By comparison, the Vanir were obscure. They made their home on Vanaheim, another of the nine realms. And beyond a handful of gods like Njord, Frejya and Freyr, not much is known about them. More so than the Aesir, the Vanir were associated with the bounty and fertility of the earth. Also, incest, which was forbidden amongst the Aesir, was common practice for the Vanir.

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Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today's video, we're going to discuss Uriel: regent of the sun, archangel, presider over Tartarus, flame of God, and angel of September.

We're going to start off with some rapid fire information; following that we're going to explore Uriel's role in scripture, meaning the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Bible, and the Quran; and finally, we're going to look at Uriel's role in two apocryphal works: 2 Esdras and the Book of Enoch.

Let's get into it.

Uriel, whose name means 'fire of God', is one of the most important angels in non-scripture biblical lore. Depending on the source, he's been classified as either a Seraphim or Cherubim, the two angelic choirs closest to God's Throne, and as one of the seven archangels. Other aspects of his power and purview include: presider over Tartarus, archangel of salvation, flame of God, angel of the presence, and angel of the month of September. In Milton's Paradise Lost, he's described as the 'regent of the sun' and as 'the sharpest sighted spirit in all of Heaven'. According to Abbot Anscar Vonier, born near the end of the 19th century CE, Uriel is the angel who stands guard with a flaming sword at the entrance of Eden after Adam and Eve are expelled and its paradise becomes lost to humanity.

Canonically speaking, Uriel is absent from scripture. In the Hebrew bible, known as the Old Testament to Christians, no angels are addressed by name. In the New Testament, which accounts for roughly the last quarter of the Christian Bible, only two angles, Michael and Gabriel, are addressed by name, and of those two, only Michael is actually referred to as an archangel, as can be seen in Jude 1:9: "Yet Michael the archangel, when contending with the devil he disputed about the body of Moses, durst not bring against him a railing accusation ..." In Islam, Israfil is the archangel who will blow the trumpet from the holy rock in Jerusalem; though there is no clear Judeo-Christian counterpart, Uriel and Raphael are sometimes associated with him.

Though Uriel doesn't feature in scripture by name, there are events that feature anonymous angels with whom he is sometimes identified. Lacking specificity, these events, by nature of their substance not being ascribed by name, are left open to theorizing and are, therefore, attributed to any one of a bevy of prominent and powerful angels, depending on the version. Examples include the unnamed angel who wrestles Jacob in Genesis 22:25, "Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the break of dawn ...", and with the angel who annihilates the Assyrian army in II Kings 19:35, "That night an angel of the Lord went out and struck down one hundred and eighty-five thousand in the Assyrian camp, and the following morning they were all dead corpses."

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Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today's video, we're going to discuss Cthulhu: a behemoth monster from far-flung space, a creature that has lived on earth for millions of years, a sight so overwhelming and incomprehensible to the human mind that one looks shatters sanity and binds the shards with madness.

We're going to start off by taking a look at Cthulhu's family tree, something that Lovecraft delineated in one of his letters. Following that, we're going to look at some supplemental info given by Cthulhu's entry in The Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia, and finally we're going to spend most of the video going through what can be gleaned from 'The Call of Cthulhu', the story written by Lovecraft in which Cthulhu, the eponymous monster, most prominently features.

Let's get into it.

As we can see from the photo, the genealogy begins with Azathoth, and after him is the Nameless Mist, Darkness, Yog-sothoth, and Shub-Niggurath. These five entities are all Outer Gods, and though we're going to gloss over them right now, if people are interested in more Cthulhu Mythos content in the future, we'll definitely make more videos covering them. Little is known of Nug and Yeb, the spawn of Yog-sothoth and Shub-Niggurath, but they seem to be far less powerful than their forebears, a fact made plain by them not being counted among the outer gods. Similarly, Cthulhu, born to Nug, is also not classified as an Outer God; as we'll see, he's one of the Great Old Ones, an incredibly powerful category of being in Lovecraftian Lore, but still certainly outclassed by Outer God entities, which are monstrous cosmic forces that transcend time and space.

Here's a passage from 'The Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia' that explains how Cthulhu travelled to earth and on what his time there was like before the emergence of Humanity:

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Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today's video, we're going to discuss Prometheus: a Titan who betrayed his own kind and joined the gods, the champion of humanity, the wily trickster who stole fire from Zeus, and the victim of one of the most truly diabolical punishments in all of Greek mythology: to have his ever-regenerating liver ripped out of his belly each day and devoured by an eagle for thousands of years.

First we're going to explore the role Prometheus played in the creation of humanity, going through various versions from multiple works; following that, we're going to go through the escalating back and forth between Prometheus and Zeus, an exchange that results in a livid Zeus condemning his plucky, intrepid adversary to one of the worse punishments in all of Greek mythology; and finally, we're going to wrap up the video by looking at the story of Deucalion, Prometheus' son - specifically, at how he builds a boat to survive a world-consuming flood unleashed by Zeus to eradicate humanity.

Let's get into it.

Prometheus was the son of Iapetos, one of the 12 first-generation titans, and of Clymene, one of the Oceanid nymphs. Born to them were four sons: Atlas, strong and unyielding, condemned to an eternity of bearing the heavens on his shoulders, Menoitios, an obscure figure, smote by Zeus' lightning and thereby sent smoking down to Tartarus, Prometheus, wise and cunning, an ardent champion of humanity, and Epimetheus, dull and naive, whose susceptibility to temptation helped bring unspeakable suffering into the world. (An alternative genealogy claims that Iapetus' consort, the mother of these four second-generation titans, was Asia, another of the Oceanid nymphs descended from first-generation Titans Oceanus and Tethys.)

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Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today's video, we're going to discuss the Nephilim: primordial giants of incredible size and strength, hybrid sons of fallen angels and mortal women, abominations despised by God, colossal corpses obliterated in the great flood that consumed the earth.

We're going to start off by looking at two of the passages in which the Nephilim are mentioned in scripture. Following that, we're going to explore the Nephilim insofar as they are discussed in apocryphal works, specifically, The Book of Enoch and The Book of Jubilees.

Let's get into it

One understanding of the word Nephilim is to mean "the fallen ones", derived from the Hebrew Naphal, meaning "to fall". Frequently, though it is directly translated as "giants", a word used instead of Nephilim in Greek, Latin, and English versions of the Old Testament.

One of the oldest translations of the Hebrew bible is the Septuagint, a Greek translation. The name Septuagint was given to this Greek translation on account of a story surrounding its creation. The word for 70 in Latin is septuaginta, so the name Septuagint was supposedly derived from there being 72 translators, six representing each of the 12 tribes of Israel. It is thought that the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew bible), was translated around the middle of the third century BCE, and that the subsequent two divisions of the Hebrew bible (the Nevi'im and the Ketuvim) were translated sometime in the second century BCE. In this translation, the word Nephilim was rendered to gigantes, the Greek word for giant, a change that was similarly embraced by some Latin translations (such as the Vulgate, which became the definitive Latin version used by the Catholic Church) that followed in the centuries to come. Continuing this trend were many of the English translations, these also favouring the word giant. However, as said, the adoption of the word giant as a substitute for Nephilim wasn't universal, as can be seen in the English Standard Version of the bible, which uses Nephilim, not giant. Furthermore, English translations of the Tanakh (the Hebrew bible) still use the word Nephilim, as well.

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Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today's video, we're going to discuss Lilith, the queen of hell, mother of demons, angel of prosti.tution, killer of pregnant women and infants, Adam's first wife, and seducer of men. We're going to start off by looking at a couple of allusions to her in the Old Testament. Following that, we're going to look at early influences that originated in Mesopotamia, and finally, we're going to look at the tide of information presented in various works published throughout the Middle Ages.

Let's get into it.

Lilith barely features in scripture: she's absent from the Quran and doesn't appear in the New Testament; it's only in the Old Testament that she's included, and even then, her inclusion depends either on the translation or on the interpretation.

In the Book of Genesis, which is the first book of the Old Testament that describes the Cosmogony (the creation of the universe) and the anthropogony (the origination of humanity), the creation of women is described twice, each with different wording, which has led to some interesting theories and stories that endeavor to reconcile the two.

The first instance reads as follows:

"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them."

One interpretation of this passage is that God created the first man and the first woman simultaneously, which, by this reckoning, places it at odds with the second instance in which the creation of the first woman is described.

Here's the passage that describes the second instance:

"And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; and the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, Made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of man."

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Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today's video, we're going to discuss an interesting question: just how many angels, exactly, betrayed God, were cast out of heaven, and became demons. We're going to begin by looking at an earlier iteration of the Devil, one that portrays him as an instrument of God used to test humanity, not as the ruler of hell and king of demon kind; this will take us into the Book of Job, which demonstrates how the Devil was used in that capacity and wasn't always viewed as a fallen figure. Then, we're going to look at the Book of Revelation, which describes the fall of the angels, and finally, we're going to dive into the various theories that quantify the angel population and detail the proportion of them that fall from heaven and become demons; one hypothesis postulates there to be 133,306,668.

Let's get into it.

Satan, also known as Beelzebub, the Devil, Iblis, Mephistopheles, Lucifer, and numerous other infamous names and titles, wasn't always viewed through the same lens we use in contemporary times - which is to say perceiving him as the great defiler, the nemesis of God, the bane of man, the corruptor of hearts, the fallen one, the leader of Hell's hordes, the lord of infernal fire, and so on and so forth.

In fact, the notion of fallen angels is entirely absent from the Old testament, which means accounts pertaining to the number of angels who forsook Heaven, replacing its light with the darkness of Hell, didn't exist until the advent of yet later works, like the New Testament and the Book of Enoch. But before we move our focus to that, Let's spend a little time looking at what could be called Satan's antecedent, which is the earlier conceptualization of him that's included in the Old Testament.

In Hebrew, satan means adversary, and Satan, as an epithet for the Devil, is actually a truncated version of ha-satan, meaning the adversary, which, as originally conceived, referred to a post held or duty performed by an angel that served God, one unfallen. This angel, as directed by God, would oppose mankind, bringing strife and suffering to test resolve, to see if, even in the face of unbearable circumstances, people would keep their faith and remain true to God.

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Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today's video, we're going to discuss Adonis: one of the most - if not the most - handsome man in Greek mythology, a man who was born from a sappy womb encased in the trunk of a tree, a man with whom Aphrodite was infatuated, a man doomed to fall well before grey flecked his hair or the lines left by long years etched his skin.

Let's get into it.

Adonis' name has become synonymous with male beauty, but despite this and despite the fact that he had goddesses fighting over him, his life was one more so characterised by tragedy than by favour and fortune. His story can basically be boiled-down to three parts: his conception, his birth and his death. In short, his mother, after being impregnated by her father, is transformed into a tree; Adonis then emerges from her bark-crusted body, only to live a short while before a hunting mishap costs him his life. This, of course, is terribly truncated, but it does provide the bare bones and should function as a sort of guiding star for the longer version to come.

Adonis was the son of the princess Smyrna, the beautiful daughter of king Theias, who ruled Assyria. Many suitors lined up in hopes of winning Smyrna's heart, but for one reason or another, none of them could. Rejection after rejection ensued, and they mounded up like love letters crumbled and discarded by some pining soul severed from its other half. They accumulated and then culminated - not in the finding of a husband - but in provoking Aphrodite's Wrath. You see, as the goddess of love, each rejection was an affront to her very being, and eventually, after so many suitors had been turned away, the goddess could not help but lash out, feeling so deeply scorned as she was. She cast a spell of love on Smyrna's mind, and in an especially cruel turn, it was none other than king Theias who was made the object of his own daughter's lustful love. Smyrna surreptitiously slipped into her father's chambers during the night, using the cover of darkness to hide her identity.

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Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today's video, we're going to discuss Metatron, perhaps the greatest of all the angels when considered in context of the constellation of non-scripture writings that pertain to the Abrahamic religions. Formerly a man, he was chosen by God to become an angel. As an angel, his form was larger than the whole of the earth. He had 72 wings, each one larger than the earth, and he had hundreds of thousands of eyes, each one brimming with God's glory.

Let's get into it.

In the aggregate, when considering all of the auxiliary non-canonical works, here meaning works that pertain to the Abrahamic religions but aren't scripture, many believe Metatron is presented as the greatest of all the celestial servants, greater even than archangel Michael and second only to God in power.

The etymology of his name is a matter of some debate; Eleazar of Worms, a Jewish Rabbi of the late 12th and early 13th centuries CE, claimed it was based on the Latin word metator, which meant guide or measurer, and Hugo Odeberg, a Swedish professor and theologian, claimed the name was purely of Jewish origin, and that it was a metonym for the epithet 'little Yahweh, meaning something like "one who occupies the throne next to the divine throne. This supports the notion of Metatron residing in the 7th heaven, the uppermost tier in which God resides.

In Traditions of the Jews II, written by Johann Andreas Eisenmenger, a 17th century scholar who studied rabbinical literature, Metatron is described as the Angel of Death. Daily instructions are given to him by God as to which souls were to be reaped. And just as he was God's delegate in this matter, so did Metatron operate through his deputies, Sammael and Gabriel. Another story that presents eminent angels as subordinate to Metatron is told in the Chronicles of Jerahmeel, a voluminous series of chronicles compiled by Eleasar ben Asher, who is thought to have lived during the 14th century. Jannes and Jambres, two Egyptian sorcerers who managed to ascend to heaven through use of their black arts, were so formidable that archangels Michael and Gabriel were unable to expel them. As the story goes, it wasn't until Metraton intervened and exerted his own power that these two sorcerers were cast out of the divine domain.

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Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today's video, we're going to discuss the all-out war between the gods and the titans, a war so devastating that it remade the face of the earth, a war so important that it decided who would sit highest and rule the cosmos.

Let's get into it.

Just as important as the war itself were the events that lead up to it, so we're going to spend a little time setting the stage by exploring the preamble. First there were the primordial deities, who were succeeded by the Titans, who were, in turn, superseded by the gods.

Cronus, the youngest and boldest of the titans, learnt of a prophecy that foretold his downfall at the hands of one of his children, and he must have been especially paranoid of such an eventuality; for it was he who overthrew his own father, Uranus, the personification of the sky, by castrating him. The strategy Cronus employed was to swallow his children whole as soon as they were born, but his consort, the titan goddess rhea, grew more distraught with each child she lost, until she reached her tipping point and resolved to save her youngest child. She swaddled a stone in baby's wrappings and proffered it to Cronus in Zeus' stead, and Cronus, not suspecting even an inkling of trickery, promptly swallowed the stone.

Unbeknownst to Cronus, though, Zeus was whisked away and raised in secret, where he grew into a paragon of power, strong of body and keen of mind. Once the bloom of manhood was upon him, he made a triumphant return with the goal of casting his father down from his lofty seat, but to accomplish this, he would need allies, so Zeus' first move was to free his siblings.

Now, there are multiple accounts that detail exactly how Zeus was able to force Cronus to disgorge the five gods - Zeus' five siblings - he had swallowed. Per Apollodorus' account, Zeus enlisted the aid of Metis, who contrived for Cronus to imbibe an emetic, which purged the titan's stomach and brought up all who were imprisoned within. First came the stone, which was swallowed in Zeus' stead, then the gods in this order: Poseidon, Hades, Hera, Demeter, and finally, Hestia.

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