#matt and jackie I know you guys have the pulp tumblr and follow the pulp tag are you reading all of this?

[man-down-in-hatchet-town]

Pulp Musicals and... Thoth??

I would say apologies to all of my followers having to deal with my incredibly wordy Pulp Musicals melt-down this morning, but mostly I just want to say "please please listen to these I promise you want regret it."

Now back my regularly scheduled wordy meltdown. Spoiler alert: I think I figured out what the green statuette on top of MAIA is!

So this morning I posted my analysis of the default MAIA drawing (here) and talked a bit about the green statuette, and how I couldn't figure out exactly what it was but suspected that it somehow linked to Samuel. I also mentioned that it looked vaguely Egyptian. @its-short-for-jackalope then put in the notes that Samuel is after all a writer and reporter, so the statuette could perhaps be an Egyptian scribe. I googled Egyptian scribe statues and none of them really looked right, so I then looked up the Egyptian patron God of Scribes.

His name is Thoth. He's often depicted as just a guy with a bird's head, but there are several depictions both from ancient times and from more recent eras (which doesn't bother me, as Pulp itself takes place way after Ancient Egypt... so far) where he wears a certain type of headdress and looks like this:

And here is once again the blown-up image of the statuette from the MAIA drawing:

I mean... I might be crazy but there's a definite resemblance there. It's a front angle, so our view is pretty odd, but could the blue smear I previously called a beard instead be a long, hooked beak? It's a definite possibility, and I did say there was something inhuman about the face (though at the time I went with "dog" oops).

So I'm pretty much convinced that the statuette is Thoth.

And here's the kicker: in addition to being the patron god of scribes, Thoth is the God of sacred texts, mathematics, science, and magic, as well as the master of knowledge and the messenger and recorder of the Gods. And, maybe most importantly of all, he is the God of the Moon.

So, yeah. Good enough for me.

So what does this mean if each item represents an episode or member of our quartet?

Well, one interpretation is that Ancient Egypt, and perhaps her Gods, will come into play as a central element of a future episode. This would mean that Samuel is instead represented by the globe (unlikely as the Earth is much more within John's line of symbolism), the rocket (unlikely for young man from 1835), or the crack in the wall (also not likely but by process of elimination nonetheless the least unlikely...which is terrifying), or else I'm completely wrong about each of the four protagonists having their own symbol (which makes Rose and Margaret having their own objects when the boys don't very, ah, weird and interesting).

But personally I think the Thoth statuette could still represent Samuel. Thoth is the god of scribes, after all, and that's what Samuel is. And just as Thoth is the messenger and recorder for the Gods, Samuel accidentally woke something inside of Margaret, essentially sending a message from the moon to her latent "divinity" (let's be real, by Ancient Egyptian standards Margaret and the Traveler would be Gods), and is now in a position to record for posterity what he sees and learns of these godlike beings. I'm also working on a theory that Samuel is literally the key to Margaret's gate, and I think that would fit with him being represented by Thoth, especially if the gate ends up being in/on the moon. But more about that after we've finally gotten to see Episode 3...

Unless that Episode completely discredits that theory before I even have time to post it. We'll just have to see.

But that statue is almost definitely Thoth, yeah?