Tantalizing Lip Butter?

Tantalizing Lip Butter.  The jar itself is a strange thing.  I assume that it is some very thick chap stick type stuff that makes your lips super sexy (the Yes! gives me that strange idea).  I, being male, have never tried lip butter much less tantalizing lip butter.  I do remember Suzy Chapstick commercials when I was younger...  Ah Suzy, where are you now?

Anyway, on with the post.  As tantalizing as Suzy Chapstick may be, she is not mythology and we must continue on with our quest.  Back to the tantalizing lip butter.  For that matter, we don't really even care about the lips or the butter (although butter might have something to do with our tale).  "Tantalize" comes from a poor chap in Greek myth mentioned in our last post (which was so long ago - sorry, been busy).

Tantalus hated the gods.  Why?  Who knows?  There are a few ideas floating about such as he was invited to eat with the gods and just couldn't get enough of a good thing.  Some say he resented not being able to be a god (with his father being Zeus he figured he ought to be able to hang out with the deities).  The actual reason doesn't matter.  What does is that he HATES the gods.

Now Tantalus must have been loved by them and he must have kept his hatred a secret.  Just like Montressor he feels that revenge is best when the victim does not know it is coming.  He invited the gods to eat dinner with him (mayhaps to return the favor) and instead of cooking up a nice pork dinner or even a delectable beef stew, he cooked his own son (I;m sure he used butter and he did cook the lips - just to tie it in with the previous paragraphs).  The gods, of course, realized this trickery and would not eat.  Well, most of the gods.  Demeter evidently is a pig since she ate her portion before waiting for anyone else to start.  They take the pieces of meat and reconstruct every part but the part that Demeter ate.  Now, if you are thinking dirty at this part of the story, you are in the wrong culture - that would be Egyptian.  The part they no longer have is the shoulder.  Demeter, a little ashamed I imagine at her dinner table etiquette, builds an ivory shoulder and they bring the son back to life.

To punish Tantalus for his evil deeds, Tantalus is trapped in a pool of water in Hades.  Some say that there is a huge rock hanging over his head to keep him in terror of dying, but I don't really like that version.  The more common idea is that he is constantly thirsty, but whenever he bends his head down to get a drink, the water drains down so he can't get any.  He is also hungry.  There are fruit trees which have fruit dangling from branches just within reach, but whenever he reaches for them, a wind blows the fruit just out of reach.  

Thus the word tantalize means to keep just out of reach.  Which brings us back to the poorly named lip butter, as it is obvious from the yes yes yes! part that these lips are not meant to be kept out of touch.  Oh well, I guess our friends at The Body Shop just don't get mythology...

Lord of the Cu Sith?

Darth Vader is by far my favorite anti-hero.  Everything about him always seemed so mysterious.  Now that the first three movies have been made, we know all about him, but when I was growing up, there was always that wonder of what happened to this guy to make him so evil?  Even now I'll watch Revenge of the Sith and sort of hope that he won't actually kill those little kids, even though I know he must in order to turn so evil.  And that title:  Lord of the Sith!  When I was a kid, no one knew what a Sith was, but man, wouldn't it be cool to be one?  I even remember a Marvel comic that had a Sith as an alien being and Darth Vader, as evil as he was, had done something super nice and saved their whole world, which is why they worshipped him.

Now, Sith just means jedi of the dark side, and while it is nice to have some clarity, the magic just seems to be gone.

But since I am bored today, I'll push it a little farther.  Sith, in Gaelic, evidently means fairy.  Now, while I usually think all mythology allusions to be super cool, Darth Vader - the guy named Skywalker after the Norse trickster Loki, the guy whose name is a twist on Dark Father (a little foreshadowing back then), is now the Lord of the Faeries???  Just doesn't seem right.  I wondered if it was an accident or intentional on Lucas's part.  We have talked about faeries here, some, but not enough for me to know this.  I couldn't find out, although I did find a large history of the Sith (Star Wars-style, not Gaelic) at How Stuff Works, of all places (and they do mention the faerie thing.

Pushing on along, I found a website called Cu Sith.  It seems to be a start to a collection of mythological articles.  I was not very impressed by it yet, as there are more links to buying things, progressive newsletters, and other stuff than actual myths, but it might be interesting to check back there every once and a while to check it out to see how/if it evolves.

The interesting thing about Cu Sith is the name.  A cu sith is a faerie dog.  It is huge, so huge that its paw is as big as your hand and bigger than a bull.  It foretells death, like so many other of the black dog ilk, but in this case, what separated the cu sith from those other dime-a-dozen dogs is that he's green.  Yep.  

You really got to feel sorry for the cu sith.  While he is environmentally friendly and all, from what I've learned from Kermit growing up, it's not easy being green.

Gwyllgi

The gwyllgi is an interesting character.  It is a huge black dog that resembles a Mastiff and haunts roads at night to scare travellers.    Almost every source I find has that much information and maybe a little something else.  From looking at various sources I have found that it is also called The Dog of Darkness, Mauthe Doog, and Barghest.  There are a lot of black dog creatures in Europe and North Europe.  The Gwyllgi is the one found in Wales.    I found a whole web site devoted to the black dog phenomena, but I won't go through it now.  I'm only interested in the gwylli today.

As I continued to search, I found most sources say that when people went back in the day time to see evidence of what they saw, nothing was there.  One source that stated when someone saw the black dog their death was imminent.  That started me thinking about Harry Potter - remember book three with The Grim?

To drive things home and make it truly interesting to me, I found a "see also" reference to another type of giant dog similar to the gwyllgi - Padfoot, the nickname of the black dog "haunting" Harry at the time.  So I know that nothing in those books are accidental, but it is still fun to find where the lesser known allusions come from.

To link this to Greek mythology, you have a similar idea, not with a dog, but with Pan.  The god was known to hide in the woods near roads and make noises to scare travellers, which is where we get the word, "panic."