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next Punderworld episode is up on #webtooncanvas and tapas

new episode is up

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I like to pretend that Rhea/Cybele is a female identifying intersex being mainly because of the Agdistis myth. Queer gods are often overlooked unless they're dudes imo

That's a nice interpretation! Definitely nicer than the myth that says that the gods feared Agdistis and cut off the male organ, thus making Agdistis female (as they saw it).

I also think there are considerably fewer goddesses that can be interpreted as queer compared to male gods (at least if we're talking about the Greco-Roman mythology), since there was relatively little interest in female love-life when not angled towards men.

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13: Sherlock Holmes and John Watson

"It was worth a wound—it was worth many wounds—to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask. The clear, hard eyes were dimmed for a moment, and the firm lips were shaking. For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain. All my years of humble but single-minded service culminated in that moment of revelation."

"The Adventure of the Three Garridebs" by Arthur Conan Doyle, 1924

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This week I've sat down with the script for Queen of the Dead. I've tried to write down all the remaining scenes to figure out in which order things should happen, if something needs to be added, and so on. I have some problems to piece together the Sisyphus arc with the Demeter arc. As it is now, Sisyphus tricking his way out of the Underworld happens about the same time as Demeter starts to deprive the earth of all fertility.

What would work best for the narrative is if both arcs also are concluded at about the same time (that is, Sisyphus is caught as Zeus realizes that he has to placate Demeter). The problem is that several months need to pass before the situation with Demeter gets really serious (the humans still have the grain from their latest harvest to live on), and it doesn't make sense that the Underworld gods would just forget about Sisyphus for several months. Maybe they would if they got distracted by something else (Hades and Persephone are sort of in their honeymoon phase, so I suppose they could be less observant).

I have considered to take the Sisyphus arc out. That way the story would be finished much sooner. But it does serve its purposes for the plot, and if I take it out, I'll have to rewrite the story. I don't know if I want that.

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Time to get cosy in the dark season. Candles, vegetarian stew seasoned with fennel and saffron, and a nice cup of tea in the sofa with the plush rats. ^^

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The Egyptians didn't think their gods had animal heads? But they're usually portrayed that way?

Yes, but if I have understood things correctly, it was symbolic. They believed a god could adopt the skills and strength of a particular animal, and the animal headed form is just to show the duality of the god.

Here is a post where an egyptologist explains this much better than I can.

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Whoah I didn't know that you drew the Egyptian gods! Do you have more art of them like Nephthys or Tawaret?

I don't know as much about Egyptian mythology as I do about Greek and Norse mythology, so sadly I haven't drawn that much on that subject. I drew Nephthys and some other gods back in 2011, but I don't want to draw attention to old, crappy art (that was also before I had learned that the Egyptians actually didn't think of their gods as humans with animal heads).

Isis, Osiris, and Bastet are the only Egyptian gods I have drawn lately (and the Bastet drawing was more of a warm-up thing). Maybe I'll draw some more next Inktober. ^^

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12: Isis and Osiris, part 3

This great one is fallen on his side, he who is in Nedyt is cast down. Your arm is taken by Ra, your head is lifted up by the two enneads. Behold he has come as Orion, behold, Osiris has come as Orion, Lord of wine at the wag-festival. 'Perfect one,' said his mother; 'Heir,' said his father. Conceived by heaven, born of the underworld: Heaven conceived you together with Orion; The underworld bore you together with Orion. Whoever lives, lives by the gods' commands: you shall live! You shall set forth with Orion in the eastern part of heaven; You shall descend with Orion in the western part of heaven. Making three of you is Sirius, pure of thrones: She is your guide on the goodly parts of heaven, In the Field of Reeds.

From the Pyramid Texts of Pepi I translated by Toby Wilkinson.

The Pyramid Texts are a diverse group of hymns, incantations and spells, composed to assist the deceased king in his resurrection, ascension to the sky and admission into the company of gods. In the Sixth Dynasty the cult of Osiris was on the rise, thus Osiris began to play a key role in this transition from death to rebirth, and the texts make explicit references to the Osiris myth. Nedyt is the mythical location where Osiris was slain by his brother Seth. The Field of Reeds is a concept associated with the Osirian model of the afterlife: an agricultural idyll where the deceased could live an eternal life of fertility and abundance.

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It was time for the yearly Alternativfesten this weekend, so I dressed up in red and black. It's a small alternative festival in my town with art, music and dance performances. The bands were more on the punky side this year, which isn't my favorite kind of music, but the main attraction was the synth band Priest so there certainly was something for me as well. The dance performances included both familiar things, such as the Ukrainian dancer Mila Balero, and new stuff like acrobatics and a male pole dancer. I bought this cute sticker of an angry cat. It illustrates very well how I feel every time my phone (or doorbell) rings unexpectedly.

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new punderworld is up on webtoon and tapas!

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I had my colposcopy today. Someone had cancelled their appointment, so I could come in much earlier than expected (when I sat in the waiting room I learned about the result of the US election. Piss!). The colposcopy was a bit painful (my vagina has always had some problems with penetration and it was a long time since I had something bigger in there). From what they could see, there were no obvious cellular changes, but the tests will show if there is something that needs to be followed up and treated.

On another note, I downloaded Tinder some time ago to give dating a try. I think it's quite difficult, though. I need to get to know people during a longer time before I can feel attraction for them, and it's hard to click with people when they rarely have any other interests than working out. I've been on one date so far. The guy was very nice and polite, but concluded afterwards that we were too different to be compatible. I was surprised he knew that already, but all right. I appreciated the honesty.

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9: Most Beloved Sister

A short story by Astrid Lindgren that really moved me as a kid. The seven-year-old Barbro feels like her parents don't really care about her, but she has a secret twin sister called Ylva-Li who likes her more than anything else. Ylva-Li is the queen of the golden hall which can be reached by crawling down a hole under the rose bush, Salikon. One day Ylva-Li tells Barbro that she will die when the roses of Salikon have withered. Barbro refuses to believe her. When she returns to her parents it turns out that they have been very worried about her and that they have bought a puppy for her, something she has been wanting for a long time. The next day, the roses on the rose bush are all dead, and there is no longer a hole in the ground.

As a child I hated that ending and thought it was so sad. I didn't understand that Ylva-Li most likely was an imaginary friend that Barbro didn't need anymore or had grown too old for.

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I'm confused. Is your Ariadne a mortal or a goddess, and is she connected to the Labyrinth/Minotaur myth and Theseus?

She is a Minoan goddess that existed before Zeus and the Olympians. I haven’t been able to piece together her whole story yet, but Asterion, the Minotaur, was probably her brother-consort that she betrayed in some way. She hibernated for a long time on the island of Naxos, before Dionysos came there and woke her up. By then she had been forgotten and only distorted fragments of her story lived on as fairytales.

I'm aware that there are some problems with this. In my comic Nekyia (Nekyia was my first Greek myth comic and when I made it I wasn't sure if I would do more of them. Thus I didn't think certain things through so very well) I connected Minos, Zeus’ son and one of the judges in the Underworld, with the legendary king Minos, but he obviously can’t be Ariadne’s father in my version if Ariadne is older than the Olympians. Maybe I’ll have to go with Plutarch who says that according to the people on Naxos, there were two Minoses and two Ariadnes.

Yeah, it's a mess.

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It was a fun Inktober. My goal was ten drawings and I managed to do thirteen, so I'm pleased. It was nice to draw without it being part of a big project and to relax with some coloring (but ngl, I'm starting to miss working on the comic now).

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17: Rats

Cute rats feasting on a pumpkin concludes this year's Inktober. Happy Halloween! ^^

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13: Hel and the dead

"This romance - whether frustrated or fulfilled - between Hel and Baldr is not attested in the surviving mythological sources. Yet the authors who develop this plotline are right to understand Hel as a desiring woman, as we saw in chapter 5. She is a goddess who wants to gather men to her as her lovers; for her, coming to possess Baldr is the ultimate prize."

"That death should be so consistently imagined as female makes sense in a warrior culture where men have to accept the idea that they could die violently at any moment. Just as a man's mother gives him life, nurtures him and cares for him in his early days, the warrior's last hours or minutes are imagined as a willing surrender to the loving embrace of a woman who may do what she will with his body as she carries him off to the next world: death and sex are powerfully intertwined."

The Norse Myths That Shape the Way We Think by Carolyne Larrington.

(This drawing is not meant to be an accurate representation of Old Norse religion and mythology. I just thought it would be fun to draw Hel with the dead as her lovers, including Baldr and Nanna.)

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12: Vlad Stein from Blood Stain

Blood Stain by @sigeel is a slice-of-life, workplace comedy. Chemistry major Elly Torres is desperate for a job and accepts an offer from the eccentric scientist Vlad Stein. It's fun, charming, and beautifully drawn (and I just love eccentric, slightly dysfunctional characters. I guess I see a part of myself in them ^^).