From songs that will take you to another place entirely, to songs that remind us of a time back in our past. We asked around, and here are our top ten picks for songs that remind us of all things mythical, and a bit about what makes them so special.
‘River’ by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard
“It’s a long psychedelic piece that is about drifting down a river.”
‘All I want’ by Kodaline
Think: “Windy road trip and soul filling.”
‘Rhiannon’ by Fleetwood Mac
“Not only is it a classic, but it’s a perfect song for mythical/fantasy themes. Basically Stevie Nicks was inspired by the fantasy novel Triad: A Novel of the Supernatural by Mary Leader, which tells the story of a woman being possessed by a spirit called Rhiannon. It has a lot of links to the Welsh goddess, Rhiannon, who Nicks was also interested in. It’s a hauntingly beautiful song.”
‘琴師’ by 音頻怪物 (Qínshī by yīnpín guàiwù)
“I like the story behind the song, and how the music perfectly captures the emotions behind the story. It’s mostly about how time passes by no matter what your circumstances are, and about how we are never truly free.”
‘Cinnamon’ by JOME
“Eyes shut, clothes drapes over you, and suddenly you are where your heart most desires.”
‘Immigrant Song’ by Led Zeppelin
“It’s a song about Norse mythology, but most importantly it’s arguably one of the greatest rock songs of all time. Such a classic.”
‘Song of the Goddess: The Eternal Path’ by Erutan
“Shows how music can create emotion in people even without the need for language. The song was created for a high fantasy game called ‘Dragon Nest’, so it invokes a sense of wonder and adventure. Even without the visuals, the song sounds like a hero’s journey. It starts off gentle, just like the call to adventure – picks up after the verses, just like the trials of a hero – ending with strong vocals, just like the final battle between the hero and villain.”
‘Where’s My Love’ (Acoustic) by SYML
“Invokes a feeling [love] that you, yourself have never felt, but after listening to this song, you know exactly what it [love] feels like.”
‘In the Court of the Crimson King’ by King Crimson
“[It’s] lovecraftian, very mysterious, feels like you’re stuck in something you can’t even comprehend.”
‘Purity Ring’ by Sea Castle
“Because imagining myself within the lyrics and bassline makes me feel like God.”
Comments Off on Mythbusting History; how did the science of the Nuclear bomb keep the Cold War cold?
The effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki left a devastating impact on the world, whilst cementing the US as a major strategic power. The lessons learnt from the power and force of nuclear weaponry significantly influencedthe introduction of the nuclear strategy of deterrence. The taboo associated with using these weapons of mass destruction was discussed by many historical figures of the time. The anti-nuclear war notion held by these figures led to other avenues to relieve the Cold War tension between the West and the Soviet Union. The science behind the development of the atomic bomb, however, led to other uses for nuclear energy within Western military strategy, including the use of submarines in naval espionage that aided to keep the Cold War cold.
The use of the atomic bomb in late WW2 left Japan devastated from its effects, whilst elevating the US to a much stronger position as a world power, with an emerging influence stretching from Europe to Asia. As illustrated through a number of nuclear weapons created by the US between 1945 and 1962; over 3,000 missiles with nuclear capabilities, whilst the USSR only procured approximately 1,500 missiles with nuclear power. This disparity between the two world powers of the time suggests rising tensions and the West’s domestic concerns over Soviet military actions. The United States’ policy of deterrence in military strategy demonstrates the levels of precaution taken with these weapons in the 1950s by Western nations. The Truman administration’s attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki left an impact on the political mindset regarding the application of nuclear weapons. This is exemplified in Truman’s press conference in 1950 where he described the bomb as a weapon “of mass destruction” with significant impacts on non-combatants in the war – “innocent men, women, and children who have nothing to do with the military aggression”. This illustrates the anxiety surrounding weapons of mass destruction and highlights the growing taboo of the use, rather than the development of, nuclear weapons by the US and other Western nations. Historians have argued that the rationality of States in this period was a major factor for the non-use of nuclear arms.This rationality, the taboo against using these weapons, the fear of mutual destruction held by both West and East, also led to the removal of thepotential for ‘total’ war seen in the earlier part of the 20th century with WW1 and WW2. The gap between US and Soviet expansion of nuclear weapons was another issue raised by historians to counter aggressive American growth of weapons of mass destruction. As a result, Western and Soviet military strategy turned to espionage and early technological warfare and redirected nuclear technology use to other military means, including powering the engines of submarines.
Espionage and the emerging use of strategic intelligence from the 1940s to 1960s was another military policy that was used by Western nations. Human, signals, and technological espionage was widely used by both the USSR and the US. The US harnessed technological espionage for mobile collection operations that had the ability to collect intelligence across Soviet borders. Between 1947 and 1960 as many as 13 US intelligence flights were shot down over Soviet territory. These flights, however, heavily impacted Soviet intelligence groups, such as the NKVD, and subsequent retaliation of Soviet intelligence forces created an ‘intelligence war’. This retaliation resulted in a pursuit for more innovative and less invasive intelligence systems to be developed after 1960. Despite the ‘intelligence war’s’ need for a high level of secrecy, some aspects became surprisingly public. For example, the 1945 defection of the code clerk Igor Gouzenko, from the Soviet embassy in Ottawa publicly revealed the scale of Soviet espionage on, then supposed, allies in Northern America. This led to regular public trials of these ‘atomic spies’ in both the West and the USSR and spurned an East-West ‘war of words’. The intelligence war of the ‘First Cold War’ was the main impetus for modern intelligence agencies, with many of the organisations founded in the 1940-1950s still operating today. The use of these technological and signals-based intelligence operations therefore became a key component of the arguments for non-use or use of atomic weapons throughout the Cold War.
Submarines were one of the main espionage instruments in use during the Cold War, both before and after the 1970’s. US nuclear submarines were developed in 1951, and the British joined them in 1960. These submarines allowed Western maritime strategy to expand, with nuclear reactors needing no fuel, and they had the ability to remain below periscope level for longer periods of time. This contrasted with previous submarine technologies that were primarily diesel electric, which would routinely have to come to periscope level to take on air every 36 hours. The emergence of the new engineering techniques of nuclear submarines suggests that nuclear development – and weaponry – had a major impact on the strategies of the US, British, and even the Soviet Union. Submarines could not only be a tool for gaining maritime communication intelligence but also provided a mode of transport for weapons (both nuclear and otherwise) during the ‘First Cold War’. Although Western nations – particularly the British and the US – were preoccupied with the perceived threat of nuclear warfare through the air-powered atomic bomb, the development of submarines allowed blue water navies to engage a more balanced fleet of surface and underwater warfare. The enhancement of intelligence technology particularly submarines clearly derived from the fear of nuclear war, with the growth of espionage a major outcome of the development of nuclear technology on the conduct of the Cold War.
The policy of deterrence of nuclear weapons in the US suggested that States had an underlying rationality and credibility which would prevent them turning to nuclear war. Intelligence and espionage were major military strategies during the Cold War, as the ‘intelligence war’ provided an opportunity for Western nations to enhance military equipment and weaponry, most notably submarines of the US and the Royal Navy.
When, in 2016, Donald J. Trump was elected President of the United States, none claimed to be certain of the consequences except the vast majority of his supporters. They were absolutely sure that Trump would drain the swamp, lock up Hillary Clinton, “just keep winning.” However, in the first nine months following Trump’s inauguration Clinton was not locked up, the swamp appeared as full as ever; the joys of winning seemed hard to spot. In the face of apparent chaos in the White House, some Trump supporters became disillusioned. But, many more avid supporters stayed in support of Trump, on a variety of platforms such as Reddit, Twitter, and 4chan. It was on 4chan in particular that one of the most complicated conspiracy theories of the century cropped up, that of the elaborate pro-Trump conspiracy QAnon.
The story started during a photo-op before a military dinner on October 5, 2017, where Trump claimed that the dinner may just be “the calm before the storm”. Regarded as an alarming comment by some, it was instantly latched onto by the subreddit /r/conspiracy, as well as 4chan’s board /pol/ as the defining feature of the Trump era. The Storm, they argued, would be a sweeping series of arrests and restructurings, all led by Trump, to oust the “Deep State” and reclaim America from its “oppressors”. Three weeks later, a poster on 4chan’s /pol/ board made a bizarre series of claims. Hillary Clinton was to be arrested on October 30th, and /pol/’s readers were warned that “mass riots would occur”, and to “be ready”. This poster identified themselves simply as “Q”, supposedly an allusion to Q-level security clearance, a high-ranking security classification in the Department of Energy pertaining to knowledge of nuclear weapons. Hours later Q posted a series of oblique statements, left behind nominally for /pol/ to decode the hidden meaning behind.
There is a common appeal to many conspiracy theories, from flat-earthers and moon landing deniers to QAnon and Pizzagate. It is the feeling of knowing a hidden truth about the world. It makes the theorist feel smart, powerful, one of a select few people who know things about the world that everyone else does not. To QAnon’s followers, all die-hard Trump supporters, that hidden truth was panacea: Trump was in control. The apparent chaos in the White House was staged. The oppressive reign of the ‘evil liberals’ was at an end. The winning they had been promised was just around the corner. And the man they were willing to put their absolute faith in was just about to bring it about. The secret truth was not merely something that they wanted to believe to feel smart, it was something that they had no choice but to believe since, to the Trump supporter, it made so much sense. How else could it be but that the brilliant billionaire businessman would be able to drain the swamp in such a huge way? Everything was going to be okay.
October 30th came and went, and Clinton was not, despite Q’s predictions, arrested. The majority of QAnon’s followers were undeterred. On November 1st, Q later claimed that DNC campaign chair John Podesta was to be arrested. Further, to prevent the spreading of fake news around the issue, Trump would use the Emergency Broadcast System to “provide a direct message… to all citizens”. The Emergency Broadcast System has been defunct since 1997, when it was replaced with the Emergency Alert System, although to QAnon this was but a tiny detail. One might imagine that QAnon may have been more deterred when Mr. Podesta was not arrested as Q claimed. But from here on the conspiracy theory had gained a sizeable amount of momentum, and with its growth it became far vaguer. Broad, seemingly meaningless claims by Q such as “Epicenter. Full House. They are all here. 24/7/365. Enjoy the show.” became far more common, and the vagueness of the theory allowed supporters to map their own theories and ideals onto Q’s claims. Branches of the theory have incorporated everything between the pizzagate conspiracy, false flag shootings, the power of the illuminati, and Jewish bankers being secretly in control of the world. Many insisted that Q’s seemingly vast knowledge of both these conspiracies and the inside workings of the Trump administration were indicative of Trump’s secret moves to end all of these evils and more. They were moves which would leave him with eventual full control of the government and the ability to usher in a new golden age.
To be clear, the truth behind Q’s messages is non-existent. Kim Jong-un is not a secret CIA plant, the Democratic leadership have not all been impeached yet, and Hillary Clinton did not get arrested on October 30th. The hydra of a theory, however bizarrely totalitarian and seemingly anti-democratic it appears, is utter bunkum. The real question behind the theory is why, despite its complete untruth, it has so much support. It still draws a wide base of supporters, and one that seems to be spilling over into the real world. At some of Trump’s most recent rallies, supporters have appeared wearing “We are Q” shirts, or carrying similarly branded placards. Despite “their man” having won the election, QAnon’s followers are still holding out for more. The reason that QAnon still draws so much appeal ties directly to that belief of ‘more on the way’. It has tapped into something common among Trump supporters: blind faith. QAnon’s basis in truth is as fragile as that of the flat earth theory, but this does not worry its followers for an instant. Merely believing in QAnon is enough to be reassured that the man into which they put so much faith in 2016 will pull through. To this group of fanatics, no matter how dire the investigations into the Trump campaign seem, no matter how much chaos seems to pervade the White House, their “winning” is only just over the horizon.
On the 200th anniversary of Emily Brontë’s birth, a man plays a violin in a field of lavender. The stalks are high enough to brush his severely trimmed beard, and he tilts the instrument upwards to evade the sky-seeking flowers. His face, low beetling brows and prolific sideburns, stares directly at its neck. The body is sycamore, from an age-old tree felled close to the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth. He thinks it might even have been there during her lifetime. In an artistic sense, he says, the wood he spent three months labouring over has now come back to the moors. While Steve Burnett has made violins for a number of historical figures, Brontë seems uniquely suited to this treatment. Burnett sees music as an extension of the literary world – and indeed, her literary world is almost all we know for sure of Emily Brontë. Independent and mysterious, our conception of her life has been shaped by the assertions and aspersions of biographers and laypeople alike and has given rise to a number of strongly-held beliefs which remain, despite little to no proof, foremost in many people’s minds.If one thing about Emily Brontë is certain, it is that she never had it easy. Educated and impoverished, she was motherless and her parson father absent. Her dream, to start a school with her sister Charlotte, never eventuated. Brontë died of tuberculosis at 30, a year after her only book was published, on the same estate where she’d lived since the age of. As improbable as it seemed, that book would become one of the foremost in the English literary canon, and after Brönte’s death a million and one myths would spring up around her life. What better occasion than the 200th anniversary of her birth to re-examine them? Brontë was a weird homebody and a lonerA recent book by academic Claire O’Callaghan argues that while it is clear that Brontë was shy and reserved, this doesn’t make her weird. Charlotte claimed in her preface that Emily rarely spoke to people in her village. However there is evidence that Emily was in fact quite well-known, and records remain of many people visiting her house. While Emily was boarding at Roe Head, Charlotte says she “felt in her heart that [Emily would] die if she did not go home,” but later historians suggest this was hypochondria brought on by the deaths of two members of the family from tuberculosis. And while Charlotte described the position Emily took at Law Hill as “slavery” in letters home, it is clear that Emily had no great love of teaching and this is just as likely to have been the cause of her resignation. Reports from her teachers at Heger’s School remember her as a “darling child” who was both intelligent and loved, and only left upon the death of her aunt. So while Charlotte might have constructed Emily as a weird homebody, this seems to be a way to excuse the unorthodox nature of her writing rather than the truth. Her approach to writing was not intelligent or disciplinedIn Charlotte’s preface to Wuthering Heights, she portrays it as “wrought with a rude chisel” and suggests that Emily was unable to control her artistic gift. In her biographical notice – a prelude to Wuthering Heights written after Emily’s death – she outright describes her sister as having “no worldly wisdom.” However these statements are widely seen as an attempt to protect Emily’s reputation, which was at risk due to her highly unconventional novel. Additionally, Charlotte regularly left Emily in charge of the whole family’s financial affairs, and her teachers remembered her as very learned, making it very unlikely that any of her sister’s statements were true. She willed her own death Charlotte’s biographical notice stated that her sister “did not linger” over her own death and grew mentally stronger even as her flesh perished. This hypothesis was supported by Charlotte’s declaration that the poem No Coward Soul Is Mine – a sort of elegy to one who may never be destroyed as they live on in God – was Emily’s last. However this poem was written much earlier on – before Emily wrote Wuthering Heights, in fact. Additionally, the tuberculosis which has been well-recorded to have claimed Brontë’s life had previously claimed those of several members of her family, and it was well-known that doctors were powerless to stop it. Perhaps Emily simply wished to live out her last few months in peace. She had a secret lover Several of Brontë’s biographers have been convinced that she couldn’t possibly have imagined Heathcliff and Catherine’s love story without having had one of her own. However, despite the sordid love stories of several of her siblings being immortalised in letters and lawsuits, none of Charlotte’s letters or the interviews conducted with Brontë’s acquaintances after her death have managed to turn up any evidence of a lover. The assumption that her poems show evidence of a lover are similarly flawed. Most of them have been well-established to relate to fictional characters, rather than Brontë herself. It has been noted that assuming Bronte couldn’t have written these stories without a lover is even somewhat belittling of her creative talent. Emily Brontë’s life is immortalised in artefacts: a violin, gloves, letters, and perhaps most importantly the book she is most known for. While it is irresistible to delve into the personal life of our most celebrated authors as well as the literary, it is more than valuable to critically consider the myths that spring up. And while Brontë may be long dead, her courageous soul lives on.
Frequently throughout myths and folklore we can see the presence of nature spirits. Their names are varied and numerous: nymphs, faeries, sprites, elementals. Through different locales, cultures, and times, these capricious and mercurial embodiments of the natural world remain a constant. Some of the most well-known among these spirits are creatures of water. In almost every mythology there are malicious water spirits who will drown the unwary, or benevolent presences delivering fish, fresh water, and prosperity. The stories which surround them tell us a lot about the relationship between humans and the water so ever-present on our planet.
Most notorious among these water spirits are the seductive sirens who lure men to their deaths. In reality the sirens of the Odyssey were not the beautiful, mermaid-like temptresses we might imagine. The sirens Homer described were half woman, half bird. But the idea of a spirit luring the unwary to a watery grave was not unique to the Greeks. In the British Isles there is the Morgen, a female spirit who bewitched men with her beauty and illusions of underwater gardens, and the kelpie, a shapeshifter that would take many forms to coax people into the water where it could devour them. Slavic folklore tells of the Rusalka, the beautiful, restless spirits of drowned women who appeared in streams to lure passersby to their death. Though these images of seductive and beautiful femmes fatales may seem familiar, deadly male water spirits abound also. In Slavic myth we find the Vodyanoy; in Finnish myth the Nakki; in Japanese lore, the Kappa, and in the Solomon Islands the Adaro. The portrayal of these spirits and their interactions with humans reveals the relationship of those humans with water itself. Stumbling across one of these beings was seen as an ever-present danger when one ventured near rivers, lakes, or the ocean. And being drowned by one was often a result of not taking necessary precautions, being reckless, or guided by impulse rather than rationality. This is also true of interactions humans have with water. Particularly in ancient times, death by drowning was a constant risk, but one that was essential to life.
While water elementals in myth echo the ever-present danger and mercurial nature of water, they also remind us how important it is to our survival. Sirens may be the better remembered ‘mermaids’ of Ancient Greece, but far more commonplace in Greek and later Roman society were water nymphs: naiads, nereids, oceanids, and many others. While these nymphs retained the unpredictability of more malevolent elementals, it manifested in them as carefree, youthful energy. They were known for singing and dancing and were often associated with and bound to specific bodies of water. Nymphs were well-respected in Greek mythology. Seen as minor deities, they were often placed in the retinue of gods and goddesses. Other such benevolent or neutral spirits occur in widespread mythological traditions around the world. In Chile, there is La Pincoya, a female mermaid-like figure who summoned fish, and rescued those who were shipwrecked. In various traditions in Africa, the figures known as Mami Wata were capricious but ultimately benevolent spirits who brought bring water to the people who worshipped them. Selkies are Scottish folkloric beings who transformed from seals into humans, and featured in tales where they married or were forced to marry humans. Irish Merrows are the closest to the modern conception of a mermaid; beautiful half-fish, half-humans, they played lovely music from underwater. They were mostly considered peaceful and benevolent, and could interact with, or even fall in love with, humans, despite also being capable of luring humans into the water in a trance. These more ‘friendly’ portrayals of water spirits, that often coexist in the same traditions as the decidedly more dangerous entities mentioned before, add a level of complexity to the story about humans’ relationship with water. While the danger of drowning is ever-present, the life-giving nature of water, and the fish that dwell within it, has never been forgotten. The presence of often humanlike nymphs and mermaids in myth and folklore is interesting because it can show the fascination, wonder, and joy humans have always found in the unpredictability and freedom in nature, particularly in water.
Water spirits endure to modern times, but their representations now reflect a more confident and secure relationship with nature. Drowning is no longer a constant concern, and Australia in particular is known as a nation of swimmers. Our portrayals of mermaids reflect that view of water and the ocean: indeed, any fear of the depths below now manifests in the decidedly non-mermaid -like figures of sharks and sea serpents. Mermaids inhabit an escapist fantasy space, with children’s media like H2O: Just add water, Ponyo, The Little Mermaid, Aquamarine and the Ingo series of novels. We can wish we were mermaids, romanticise the beauty of breathing underwater and swimming effortlessly through the sea. Other ideas become caught up in the mermaid myth. Dolphins become an approximation of horses for an undersea civilisation. The legend of the sunken city of Atlantis pops up as a fantastical underwater metropolis of merpeople. Our portrayal of entities that live beneath the surface of our blue planet no longer reflects a respect, fear, and awe for a water which is both life-giving and lethal. Instead it conveys the curiosity and wonder evoked by the oceans as the last undiscovered places in our world.
In Ireland, mythology is embedded in the history of the country. It’s said that you can see Tír na nÓg (The Land of Youth) on the horizon if you look out to sea on a clear day. There are no native snakes, supposedly because St Patrick expelled all snakes from the island. The Brú na Bóinne site, built 5,000 years ago (older than the pyramids of Egypt) holds a chamber which is lit by the sun only on the solstice every year. I used to live near Lough Derravaragh, a lake where four children were supposedly turned into swans by their evil stepmother and cursed to wait 900 years for the spell to be broken. These myths and landmarks have survived thousands of years, as have the names from such stories, such as Oisín (uh-sheen), Aoife (ee-fah), Niamh (neev), Fionn (f-yun) and Meabh (may-ve), which are still very popular in Ireland today. More recent history is given the same mythic treatment. Gráinne Mhaol (graw-nyah wale) was a pirate queen and Gaelic aristocrat. In 1593 she was charged with her crimes and threatened with hanging. So, she personally went to the court of the English Queen Elizabeth I, who at that time claimed sovereignty over Ireland She pleaded that she had lived the life of a pirate out of desperation, and that if released she would change her ways. Legend has it that they spoke in Latin as Gráinne refused to speak English, and Queen Elizabeth did not know Gaelic. Elizabeth pardoned the majority of Gráinne’s crimes, but Gráinne continued to make her living “by land and sea” until her death in 1603. Many years after her death, the legend of Gráinne Mhaol became a symbol of Irish rebellion against English rule. I was taught a song about her in primary school, Óró Sé do Bheatha ‘Bhaile, which welcomes Gráinne and a thousand warriors to come and free Ireland. Even the Irish rebellion in 1916, the Easter Rising, has become almost mythical. If you’ve ever been to Dublin, you will have walked along O’Connell St and seen the General Post Office building, where some of its pillars are still pitted with bullet holes. Kilmainham Gaol, where the leaders of the rebellion were held and then executed, is now a museum and landmark. The song that the rebels sang, Amhrán na bhfiann (ow-rawn nah veen), is now the national anthem of Ireland. On the other side of Ireland, in a village called Dingle, there is a memorial to the sons of Dingle that fought in that rebellion. The story is so widely remembered and commemorated that you could almost believe that the rebels won independence for Ireland on that very day. Instead, it was in 1949 when the southern part of the Island became a republic and officially cut ties with the British Commonwealth. The Irish are known globally as musicians and storytellers. Their history, which has been marred by tragedy and hardship and struggle, is enriched with tales told and songs sung for hundreds of years. People across the world who claim Irish heritage are often drawn back to this tiny island, with a hunger to understand where they came from. The country has changed a lot, and is still changing today, but one thing remains constant. They will find a country which has fought for its identity by holding on to its myths.