Stratovania

The line "release the kraken" from the commercials for the Clash of the Titans remake seems to have caught the attention of the nation, especially among people who think the phrase sounds like a euphemism for doing number two. I never saw the first Clash all the way through, and I'll probably wait until the remake comes out on video to see that. I do know that neither movie is really all that accurate to the original myths, so I'm sure it surprises no one that the kraken is not a part of Greek mythology. The monster that Perseus killed in order to save Andromeda is referred to as a "ketos," or in Latin form, "cetus." This appears to simply mean "sea monster" in Greek, but according to Wikipedia, the mythical monsters were portrayed as giant fish with some serpentine features.

The term has since been applied to whales, with our word "cetacean" obviously deriving from the Greek. There are several species of whale inhabiting the Mediterranean, and most of them are the toothed kind rather than the baleen variety (the fin whale is an exception), so I suppose they could theoretically eat a person. This also calls to mind the creature that swallowed Jonah, referred to as a "great fish" in the Hebrew, but popularly called a whale. I have no idea whether the author of Jonah would have known that whales weren't fish, or whether he had any particular species in mind for Jonah's captor.


The constellation Cetus is found among several others from the story of Perseus, so it's presumably supposed to be seen as the one slain by the hero. The group of stars is now typically called "the whale," although as with with most constellations, it really doesn't look like much of anything.

Still, its association with a sea monster is an old one, with ancient Babylonian astronomers identifying it with Tiamat.


The kraken actually comes from Norwegian folklore, and there are a few different indications as to what it might be. It appears that the earliest known mentions of the monster are from the eighteenth century, and refer to the kraken as a crab-like monster the size of an island, which eats smaller fish, but also nurtures their growth with its excrement. In popular culture, however, the kraken is generally thought of as a gigantic octopus, possibly based on the real giant squid. As with most mythical sea monsters, encounters with them are incredibly dangerous and usually fatal.

While I don't know about the new Clash film, the monster in the old one doesn't at all resemble an octopus or even a crab, so I guess they just used the name "kraken" because it's more familiar to modern audiences than "cetus."

In honor of the discovery of water on the Moon, I thought I'd look into the mythology of Earth's favorite natural satellite. (Yeah, I know it's our ONLY natural satellite.) The best known mythological conception of the Moon is probably that of Greco-Roman lore, in which both the Sun and Moon are gods riding in chariots across the sky. In earlier mythology, these gods are the Titans Helios and Selene, but they are gradually replaced by members of the Olympian pantheon. Apollo came to be associated with the Sun, which means that his twin sister Artemis took over the Moon. There is some speculation that the Moon was represented by a woman because of the connection between the lunar phases and the menstrual cycle, but apparently male lunar deities were actually more common. The interesting thing, however, is that the Sun and Moon were pretty much inevitably opposite genders. In Norse mythology, for instance, Sol (the Sun) and her brother Mani (the Moon) are pursued across the sky by wolves. The Sumerians, however, seem to have considered both heavenly bodies to be male.



Some versions of the myth of Hercules and the Nemean Lion say that the lion, who in this telling was the son of Zeus and Selene rather than Typhon and Echidna, fell from the Moon. That seems to indicate that, at some point in the history of the ancient Greeks, they started thinking of the Moon as a location instead of just a chick in a chariot. What different ancient cultures thought about the size of the Moon, and how many of them thought the Moon actually was a person as opposed to there being a person living IN the Moon, would definitely be an interesting subject of study. I have to admit I don't know a whole lot about it, but the concept of the Man in the Moon suggests that said Man lived there, rather than actually BEING the satellite itself. The Man in the Moon is an example of pareidolia, the phenomenon in which humans see pictures where none were intended. The human mind is particularly fond of faces, and the full moon does resemble a person's face, with Mare Imbrium and Mare Serenitatis as the eyes. Other interpretations, however, saw the image of a person carrying something. Variations on this theme identify the figure as the guy stoned to death for picking up sticks on the Sabbath (see Numbers 15:32-36), a sheep or tree thief, Cain carrying a pitchfork, a witch carrying wood, and an old man with a lantern. Many of these associations are to Judeo-Christian culture, but it's said that the Haida of modern-day northwestern Canada and Alaska saw the moon-person as a disobedient boy gathering wood.



In Asian cultures, it seems to have been more common to see a toad or a rabbit in the Moon. I remember being intrigued when, in junior high school, I read a mention in Jorge Luis Borges' Book of Imaginary Beings to a Lunar Hare that kept the herbs used to make the elixir of immortality. The association of the Moon with immortality elixir appears to be pretty common. Hindu mythology holds that the life-granting elixir known as soma was stored in the Moon, and the satellite waned because the gods were drinking it. A Chinese myth involves Chang'e, who swallowed the immortality pill meant for her husband, and ended up living on the Moon with a rabbit companion. According to Wikipedia, the command center at Houston referred to Chang'e (as Chang-o) in a conversation with the Apollo 11 astronauts. The rabbit or hare himself was also sometimes said to manufacture elixirs.



Before we leave the Moon for the time being, I'd like to look at one more ancient belief about the Moon, which is that it's made of green cheese. Not surprisingly, the evidence suggests that no one ever actually DID believe this, but rather made fun of other people by claiming that THEY did. It was sort of a quick and easy reference to hoaxes and superstitions in general. So why green cheese? The Moon certainly doesn't LOOK green, after all. That, at least, might well have an easily explained answer. In 1546, John Heywood recorded the proverb, "The moon is made of a greene cheese," but "greene" probably actually meant new and unaged.

In the year 2006, astronomers made two significant chances in the nomenclature of our solar system. Pluto was downgraded to a dwarf planet (I'm still not over that, mind you), and a slightly larger Kuiper Belt object that was previously known as "Xena" was given the official name Eris. But does this name really fit the usual naming rules for planets and planetoids? The names we use for the six planets visible with the naked eye come from the Romans. They're all named after gods, and while the fact that the Romans appropriated much of Greek mythology means that all of these gods had their Greek counterparts (Hermes for Mercury, Aphrodite for Venus, Ares for Mars, etc.), it was the Latin names that became the standard ones for our Sun-orbiting neighbors. When William Herschel discovered Uranus in 1781, he called it "Georgium Sidus" after the King of England, but its current name became the most commonly used one in the following century. While I'm not entirely sure of this, I've seen it suggested that the reasoning behind the name Uranus is that, in Greco-Roman mythology, Jupiter is the father of Mars and Saturn of Jupiter, so it only made sense to name the next planet after Saturn's own father. The odd thing about that, however, is that the Latin name for the primordial Greek sky deity was Caelus, with "Uranus" simply being a Latinized version of the Greek name Ouranos. Similarly, Eris is also a Greek name, with her Latin equivalent being Discordia. I believe the only rule for planet-naming is that they have to have the names of Greco-Roman gods, so these don't technically break that rule, but it seems like giving them the Latin names would have made things somewhat neater. The names of other planet-like objects have a mixture of mythological names and others, and I have to say it's a little unfair that significant deities like Juno and Minerva get no more than asteroids. Incidentally, both Vulcan (okay, actually "Vulcano") and Romulus, which were used for planets in other star systems in the Star Trek universe, are also both asteroid names.



Incidentally, according to the International Astronomical Union, stars don't officially have names, just catalog numbers. These are mostly determined based on constellations, which is a rather geocentric method, but I'm sure any other would be too insanely complicated. Traditional names are still in use for the brighter stars, however, many coming from Arabic, but others from Latin,Babylonian, and Chinese. There are also companies that name stars after people for money, but these are in no way official.