#mongoose-under-the-house

[puppydoggraham]

(source for poem: two-bees-poetry)

[t3acupz]

This is so specific but I’m thinking about how otters and mongooses are in the Mustelinae family. How they’re ruthless hunters that are able to take down prey much larger than themselves. How otters live off mostly fish but are known to commit the most heinous crimes in nature. How otter is also a term for a slightly hairy, lean but muscular gay men.

[adeptune01]

how to talk like hannibal part two !!

How to Speak like Hannibal: PART 2

Picture a relationship that you have- could be a friend, enemy, family, etc.

Ex: You and your sibling

2. Think of a metaphor that could be used to describe this relationship- the weirder the better

Ex: Comparing your sibling to the fuse of a cannon.

3. Put it all together.

Ex: You're the fuse that I light when our parents are enraged beyond consolation.

[sarcastic-clapping]

you just rb'd a hannibal post and tagged it with "lines that owe me money" and i was disappointed to find out that was not a commonly-used tag of yours. anyway, what are some other lines that owe you money?

sorry i didn’t see this yesterday i truly did just reblog that one hannibal post and immediately log off because it was a one-hit KO to my daily limit for psychic damage caused by this website.

i might have to make that a recurring tag because i could list examples of lines that owe me money for like….five straight days. and like two of those days would just be for hannibal quotes alone. and i think that would only really scratch the surface.

[animorphstruther2002]

my main problem with objectification isn't that it's degrading and dehumanizing but that not enough people get weird and intense with it

[effervescent-fool]

"How do you see me?"

"The mongoose I want under my house when the snakes slither by."

digital painting // tracked time: 3h 45m

ko-fi

[ournextdoorneighbor]

the mongoose i want under the house when the snakes slither by

[dukeofriven]

So often alt-Earth worldbuilding falls apart under the slightest bit of pressure: what if every human on earth from birth had a sentient, speech-capable, physical manifestation of their soul that could shape shift and eventually settled on a form that revealed some inner truth about your person would that not radically alter the course of human history? To which the answer, apparently, was 'not in any meaningful way, no.'

Live theater in the His Dark Materials universe must be wild. Surely an actor's daemon also has lines to recite, so their daemon's form probably also factors into casting decisions. Maybe some plays have vague character descriptions for daemons, but I bet other plays have really specific or central daemon characters. And sure, big-budget theaters can afford to hire a separate actor with a particular daemon to stand backstage while their daemon plays its part onstage, but community theaters don't have those kinds of resources.

Like if you're casting for Julius Caesar, surely the real historical Caesar had a pretty iconic daemon, right? Are you going to cast an actor with a pigeon daemon as Caesar and just have everyone suspend their disbelief that it's Caesar's lioness, ἁμαρτία?

[hannibalstink]

if i open one more hannibal fanfiction and hes talking abt "my love" no what happened to the mongoose i want under the house when the snakes slither by

[myfriendfaust]

The mongoose under the house.

(In other words - guess who’s back and obsessed with Hannibal again!)

[yamayuandadu]

Sorry If i am bothering you but i want to know what role did the wilderness and its animals play in Mesopotamian mythology?

I like answering questions about Mesopotamia which indicate genuine interest, so no need to worry.

The most straightforward answer would be that the wilderness was generally perceived negatively (see ex. Wiggermann’s Scenes From the Shadow Side). The steppe in particular was usually portrayed as a place where one can get robbed at best and as the dwelling of ghosts, demons and the like - or just straight up the underworld -  at worst. The mountains were frequently viewed as a site of confrontations between gods and their opponents but more neutral or even positive portrayals pop up in literature too. It’s also important to note that the marshlands were viewed pretty firmly positively. As for wild animals: by far the best overview of Mesopotamian zoology is offered by Jeremiah Peterson in his dissertation A Study of Sumerian Faunal Conception with a Focus on the Terms Pertaining to the Order Testudines. Niek Veldhuis’ Religion, Literature, and Scholarship: the Sumerian Composition Nanše and the Birds, with a Catalogue of Sumerian Bird Names is really good too. There’s also quite recent Entomological Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia by Vazrick Nazari but you should bear in mind the author is an entomologist, not an assyriologist, so some sections are… less than reliable and sources as old as from the 19th century, and as questionable as Paropola’s phantasmagoric visions,  are employed once the focus shifts away from identification of insects.

More under the cut.

Animals were generally seen as an essential part of the world outside human dwellings. Positive comparisons to certain taxa - wild and domestic cattle and lions - are very common in myths, royal hymns, and other genres. The bovine analogies are so popular in Mesopotamian texts that even scorpions could be metaphorically described as a sort of bull.

Demonic traits could be attributed to some animals viewed as dangerous: snakes, scorpions and dogs in particular. Additionally, omen texts indicate that ants were seen as messengers of Ereshkigal, presumably because their burrowing lifestyle made the Mesopotamians assume they could move all the way down to the underground land of the dead. Finding ants while digging foundations for a new building was therefore an ill omen; seeing flying red ants above a house, meanwhile, was a sign the owner is at the risk of being killed. Due to such risks, behavior of ants was sometimes observed by religious specialists, and some of the namburbi protective rituals specifically deal with them. Locusts were a bad omen too, but that’s a given. On the other hand, moths were viewed as bringers of good omens.

Some deities were associated with the wilderness, and broadly with animals dwelling there. Most notable examples are Ninkilim (addressed as “lord of the creatures”; his name was at times confused with ninka, “mongoose”, leading to the development of the idea that he was a deified mongoose himself), Sumugan (though he was associated with domestic animals too) and to a smaller degree Numushda, arguably. Ennugi, a minor courtier of Enlil, could be addressed as the creator of grubs, though a similar role is also attested for the mythical king Alulim; attestations are limited to incantations against field pests, though. For more context see here.

A special case is Nanshe. Two of the major literary texts focused on her focus on interactions between her and animals - Nanshe and the Birds and Home of the Fish. These belong to the subgenre called “enumeration literature”: while there is an actual plot, and deities are involved, the goal is mostly to fit as many terms from a single category into a single composition. As a result, Nanshe sounds… unusually passionate (fixated, even) on the core topics. I think it makes for really unique characterization but alas, as a major Mesopotamian deity who fits neither into questionable Bible takes nor into the madonna-whore complex she’s not getting anywhere in popculture. Something that’s generally missing from the Mesopotamian repertoire are myths involving anyone turning into an animal. There are two notable exceptions, Enlil and Namzitarra, which involves Enlil turning into a raven to test a devotee, and Dumuzi’s Dream, in which Dumuzi asks Utu to turn him into a gazelle to escape underworld gendarmes pursuing him.

Major gods were not theriomorphic, and with some small exceptions (Tishpak, whose skin is in one case described as green and scaly; Ishtaran, who might have been depicted with the lower body of a snake) didn’t even have any animal body parts. However, deified animals are nonetheless also attested - multiple examples of divine bulls are the main example, obviously (for instance Indagara, Buru, the borrowed Hurrian Sheri and Hurri, possibly Magiru, “obedient”), as expected divine lions also pop up every now then, but that’s not all.

There’s a number of deified birds, though most of them occur only in Early Dynastic sources which do not provide any real insights about their character. One example that comes to mind is the deity Kiki or Ninkiki (“lady of the kiki); we have no clue what sort of bird the kiki was though, other than that it was loud enough to be compared to the storm. Nirah is a deified snake.

Deified invertebrates are much less common but it’s still worth bringing up Eḫ, a member of the court of Nungal whose name is pretty semantically similar to English “bug” (though it might also specifically refer to a louse. There is also an either divine or demonic centipede, Ḫallulaya. Among the numerous ancestors of Enlil there is a pair named Engiriš and Ningiriš, “lord butterfly” and “lady butterfly”. It is often claimed that Uttu, the goddess of weaving, was portrayed as a deified spider, but the evidence is at best limited, see here and here for details. Peterson doesn’t list her among deified animals.

A mythical creature listed in enumerations of Ninurta’s enemies, kulianna (“friend of heaven”), might be a supernatural dragonfly, though it’s also possible it was imagined as something else altogether and the link to dragonflies is just the result of homophony with Akkadian kulīlu, “dragonfly”. For more detail see here, p. 89. In art there’s a fair number of depictions of animals behaving like humans, but the full context of such works remains poorly known. There’s a brief overview here from p. 237 onward. 

Especially in Assyria wild animals were customarily hunted by kings, and trophies acquired this way served as a way of showing off the extent of their dominion. It has been suggested that they could eventually acquire apotropaic qualities, as evidenced by the preparation of protective statues  of the apsasîtu, the burḫiš and the nāḫiru, sometimes interpreted as water buffalo, yak and whale. However, the meaning of these three terms remains uncertain, for some recent considerations see here.

[r0entgen]

Ok it took me two hours to watch just one ep because my internet sucks, but I had forgotten just how plain Hannibal looked in that first episode. Only ONE fancy suit, and the rest of the outfits weren't fitted??? My man was committed to the normal psychiatrist part

I have decided. I'm gonna watch Hannibal again

[willgrahamsadface]

Hannibal 3x03, Secondo

Taking a closer look at Lecter Dvaras heraldic arms, we can see it features a snake at the center and two standing animals on both sides, that could likely represent two mongooses attacking the snake (could also be foxes or dogs, but which animal is particularly known for being a snake-hunter?).

So what Hannibal says to Will during their motel breakfast - and the sudden serious turn of the conversation - has a more concrete connotation, knowing that the snakes actually slithered under Hannibal's house at some point in his childhood.

Hannibal 1x01, Apéritif

He's immediately inclined to see Will as a protector, a potential part of his hunting pack. There are two "mongooses" guarding the only thing he's ever cared about: his family.

Maybe Hannibal is hoping he finally found the other one.

[grahamcore]

I FORGOT HANNIBAL SAID THIS WHY IS HE SO STRANGE

MY FRIEND JUST STARTED HANNIBAL IM FUCKINGF SCREAMING WE GOT HER

[tethered-heartstrings]

happy “mongoose I want under the house when the snakes slither by” monday

[garnishedcarnist]

Imagine asking your crush how he sees you and he says a mongoose that went under the house when the snakes slither by. No wonder Will made that face because wtf??