Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today’s video, we’re going to discuss Succubi, demons who appear desirably, usually as beautiful women, and prey on men in the night.

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Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today’s video, we’re going to discuss Cronus’s escape from Tartarus, this followed by him becoming the king of the Isles of the Blessed, Greek Mythology’s version of heaven.

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Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today's video, we're going to discuss Astaroth, variously described as a duke, lord, and prince of hell. He purports to have played no part in the fall of the angels and to have been unjustly condemned. He appears as an angel, but even in endeavoring to appear as such, his fiendish nature can't be completely concealed. The angelic appearance he maintains gives him a look both foul and unsettling, and the stench of his breath is so repulsive as to be perilous. As well, the fact that he holds a poisonous serpent and rides around on a monstrous dragon hardly helps to legitimize his pretense.

We're going to begin with the work of Johann Weyer, which will piece together Astaroth's demonic profile: what he looked like, what his power was, and what danger he posed to the conjurer. After that, we'll explore his origins, getting into the Bible and Near East polytheism. And finally, we're going to go through many of the demonic hierarchies in which he features.

Alright, let's get into it.

Johann Weyer was a Dutch physician, occultist, and demonologist, known for his seminal work on demonology, "False Monarchy of Demons". This text was an appendix to his larger work, "On the Tricks of Demons", published in the mid-16th century. Unlike other works that elucidate the eldritch and evil mysteries of witchcraft, Weyer's own writing w as countervailing in that it condemned the rabid and virulent ideas that underpinned and encouraged witch hunting. He believed that those who claimed to, or were accused of, practicing witchcraft suffered from mental illness. He didn't believe they conspired, cavorted, and cackled in the dead of night with a coven of wicked spell-slinging women, pledging their souls to the dark power of Satan, a rather enlightened perspective given the era in which he lived. In particular, his work served to counter the "Malleus Maleficarum", the "Hammer of Witches", a guide that explained how to identify and exterminate witches.

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Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today's video, we're going to discuss the three judges of the underworld in Greek mythology: Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Aeacus. These three judges, all of them sons of Zeus, were the arbiters of the afterlife, giving verdicts to the villainous and virtuous alike. The souls of the wicked were sent to Tartarus, and the souls of the righteous were sent to the Isles of the Blessed.

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The idea of there being a judge of the underworld harkens back to the earliest works of Ancient Greek literature. In the Odyssey, Odysseus ventures down into the depths of the underworld to consult a prophetess. He describes what he sees along the way. Among the spirits he describes are some of the great sinners, rulers, and heroes of old. The great sinners include Sisyphus and Tantalus, both of them condemned to punishment without end. The rulers and heroes include Agamemnon, the high chief of the Greek forces that waged war on Troy, and Achilles, the mightiest hero to wield spear and sword in the Trojan War, his conquering spirit and battle prowess eclipsing those of any other, foe or friend. Another king described by Odysseus along his chthonic quest is Minos, who, depending on the version, either serves as the judge of the dead or as one of the judges of the dead. Here's the passage:

"I saw Minos the son of Zeus holding a golden scepter and delivering judgments among the dead. There he sat, and around him the others sat or stood in the ample-gated house of Hades, seeking from this master of justice the firm sentences of the law."

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Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today's video, we're going to discuss Enyo, the Greek goddess of slaughter and bloodshed. She, along with better known gods like Ares and Athena, was a war deity, one said to revel in the destruction of armies and the devastation of cities. Because of her perverse proclivities and morbid M.O., she was much more in line with Ares than Athena: Ares was associated with bloodlust, brutality, and wanton violence, while Athena's own association with warfare is more accurately described by words like defense, strategy, restraint, and necessity. She was someone you would have invoked while devising a battleplan or organizing the defense of a settlement or city. With Ares, the point of it all was suffering and slaughter; with Athena, wisdom and warfare were interwoven; for her, war was a last resort - a tool of pragmatism, not an indulgence of pleasure.

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Virtually the only times Enyo features in the stories that culminate into the mythical mosaic of ancient Greece is during battle. As the goddess of slaughter and bloodshed, writers almost exclusively included her in their works when people were killed and blood was spilt. In this way, she numbered among other gods and daimons who frequented the battlefield. ( Daimon is the Ancient Greek word for spirits that were halfway between gods and humans, often functioning as minor deities, and is the antecedent for the English word 'demon'.) The gods and daimons who frequented the battlefield include: Ares, the god of war, Phobos and Deimos, respectively "Fear" and "Dread", Eris, the goddess of strife, and the Keres, the trio of goddess or daimons of violent death, described as horrid, nightmarish creatures who feasted on the fallen, devouring flesh and drinking blood. When battles are described by the poets of Ancient Greece, and by later poets who wrote stories situated within the framework of the Greek mythos, usually some combination of these carnage-fueled characters is described on the battlefield. They foment conflict, fill forces with frenzy and fury, take part in the killing, and glory in the thick of the clash, champions pressing forward and corpses littering the ground.

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Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today's video, we're going to discuss Sisyphus, a man whose story embodies the adage 'too clever for his own good', a man synonymous with the consequences of inciting the wrath of the gods, and a man whose fate has become an enduring symbol of futility, eternal struggle, and meaningless tasks.

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In Greek mythology, leaving gods aside for the moment, there is a small group of people who became immortalized as superlatives. Orpheus was the greatest musician, able to charm animals, even able to coax rocks and trees into movement. Hercules was the strongest man, bearing the crushing weight of the heavens on his shoulders for a time. Daedalus was the greatest inventor, creating the labyrinth in which the minotaur dwelt, and fashioning wings for himself and his son Icarus so that they could escape from the labyrinth after they were imprisoned inside. Sisyphus was the cleverest man - too clever for his own good, as events would bear out in the fullness of time. He cheated death twice, first ambushing and chaining Thanatos, death incarnate, who was sent to end his life, then once in the underworld, convincing Hades to let him leave. In the end, what awaited most people in the underworld was deemed too-low security for Sisyphus, so he was sent down to Tartarus and given an unending task, making any future wily antics an impossibility. Though he would win himself more days in the sun, his ultimate fate was perpetual punishment, not a great trade off.

First, we're going to quickly go over a pastoral feud involving multiple instances of cattle theft, the outcome of this showcasing Sisyphus's cleverness. Second, we're going to go over the meat and potatoes, so to speak, of Sisyphus's mythology, which entails the betraying, tricking, ambushing, and chaining of gods, evading and escaping death, and perpetual punishment in the form of forever rolling a boulder uphill.

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Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today's video, we're going to discuss Salmoneus, a man cursed and condemned by the gods and a man of impressive lineage.

His sin was hubris and his crime was scorning the gods. He honored himself in their stead and tried to deify himself by impersonating Zeus, going so far as to toss torches and drag around pots to simulate lightning and thunder. His fate was that of the buzzing pest that annoys someone to the point of being swatted, Zeus striking him down with a thunderbolt and sending him down to Tartarus.

He was only a few generations removed from the first man and the first woman, and the grandson of Hellen - not Helen of Troy but the son of Deucalion - from whom the tribes of ancient Greece claimed ancestry. Exploring this later on will take us from the first Titan-born humans and the time of the great flood to the tragic death of the hero Jason.

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In Greek mythology there are three crimes considered especially egregious, swift and severe justice meted out to those who perpetrate them. These three crimes are: (1) violating the sanctity of hospitality, pertaining to which the murder of a guest, or guests, is the most flagrant and least forgivable, (2) the murder of one's own kin - the closer the relation, the harsher the condemnation - and (3) hubris against the gods. This last was Salmoneus' offense. He thought himself a god. He dedicated the sacrifices and libations that should have gone to the gods to himself, and he even went so far as to impersonate Zeus, tossing torches and dragging around clanging metal to emulate the fire and flash of lightning and the booming rumble of thunder. As you no doubt have already guessed, this didn't sit well with Zeus and didn't end well for Salmoneus, who was struck down with a thunderbolt and cast down to the abyss of Tartarus, a place beneath the earth not unlike a mirrored reflection of the sky, the great chasm below instead of the great vault above, a place reserved for those who defied the gods, be they immortal, such as the titans, or the worst of the mortal sinners, to whose infamous ranks Salmoneus' was imminently destined.

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