We’re writing a book about alterhumans, and you can be part of it! For this part of the project, we want to hear from otherkin in particular. In the Otherkin Community Survey, we’re gathering data about otherkin experiences and understandings of themselves and their community. If you participate, the survey asks about your kintypes, how you personally define the word otherkin, and about your experiences. It’s about ten minutes long. This survey is open to anyone who is physically at least 18 who identifies with the label “otherkin” or other synonyms with that word. One response per physical body, please.
This survey will close March 31st, 2024. We will collect data from the survey, which we will publish online afterwards and use for research purposes. Any identifying information that participants submit will be made anonymous or removed entirely. This is part of a series of surveys for our book about alterhumans, by House of Chimeras (@liongoatsnake), Orion Scribner (@frameacloud), and Page Shepard (@who-is-page). If you’re interested in this project, please join our mailing list to get notifications of updates, additional surveys, and other events!
The Dead Mountain team are thrilled and delighted to announce the profound Canis Ovis has partnered with us, allowing the use of their breathtaking Werewolf Tarot to represent the poignant myths and legends in this Chronicle.
“Fighting tooth and nail against the suffocating shroud of depression has cultivated within me a deep, repeating connection to death. It is this relationship with death that has guided my work to the primal divinity of Nature and its innate cycles of death and rebirth. Observing and depicting its processes and wild magic has always been a touchstone for me in a lifetime of struggles with a manufactured style of living in a society that often feels meaningless and empty.”
“I can’t find fear for the dark parts of the natural world when I look into the blackest forests or darkest oceans, only reverence and love. The transformative power of death is beautiful. The way fungi grow on the old dead bones, flesh, and roots of Nature and transform it into something new, something different, is beautiful. The thought that nothing, form nor identity, is permanent is reassuring.”
This artist’s sentiment is one that perfectly encapsulated the ethos of Dead Mountain. It challenges the notion that death is itself evil, but rather presents itself as an essential component of extant life.
“Difficult and painful transformations within myself have long drawn me to external representations of beasts that stalk the forests of the mind; particularly werewolves. They are outsiders looking in, fierce and feared, but free, self-actualized. The ways I’ve had to change myself and fight to live as a transgender individual have scarred me, but what I’ve become is meaningful. The process of becoming & unbecoming is painful, but equally beautiful and inspiring, and I’ve felt drawn to depicting it my entire life. Life is violent, but it continues. I process this as best I can through my artwork.”
There exists in this dark life so much suffering and pain, and it’s an all-too frequent occurrence for queer folk to struggle with extreme, medication-resistent depression. People that struggle with bodies they feel don’t belong to them. People that struggle to accept themselves after years of being so cruel to themselves. People that have lost families and loved ones. Grief is an incredible and powerful muse, but also one that bring with her a lot of weight the artist must carry.
Isofar as we have found, there is no greater artist that can so effectively represent the timeless pain, grief, and love of Dume'fa. We are moved to tears by the works of @canisovis and cannot state how grateful we are to have them on our team. Their tarot cards will be presented as-is, licensed with their permission.
this is a confession to the star wars fandom because I have to get this off my chest. last summer just for fun I taught myself to read aurebesh and. you fanartists have Got to Continue putting the most Hilarious stuff into the background of your art because it is literally my favorite thing
here’s a couple of excellent things I’ve read since I started keeping a list just last month:
- “I hate drawing lightsabers”
- “Idk what to put here”
- “stupid fucking sign”
- “eat paste, it’s good”
- an entire news article on a phone screen which I actually found really impressive
- a few funny misspellings but the best one so far was ahsoka somehow becoming “asock”
- wanted poster of obi wan that read “wanted for fashion crimes”. the caption translated it as “wanted for high treason”. like blatantly lying to my face. love it.
[Synoverse? In the year of our lord 2023? It’s more likely than you think! This one is in third person, set after Villains Never Retire. No idea what I’m talking about? Check out the first of the Synovus works here! I’ve still yet to do it as of posting, but both episodes of Siren Call will be on Ao3 here. Happy reading!]
A week after first arriving at her parents’ house, Minerva made the journey back to her own.
It wasn’t terribly far - a half-hour drive with no traffic, maybe - from where her parents now lived, still placed near to the coast. It wasn’t actually a ‘house’ either, more of a condo built in a line to save costs. It would’ve been cheaper to live further inland, but…
so the thing about my family is that we have two ancestors on my dad’s side who were buried in france, where I currently live. one died in the spanish civil war, and one died prior doing…we don’t know what. but he somehow managed to get buried in père lachaise.
so anyhow, my gran sends me a message like “pls put flowers on ur uncle samuel’s grave because he’s gone over a century with none and it will make the ghost mad if he hasn’t already” because my family spends time in europe but never long enough to go all the way to père lachaise and give ya boy samuel jr. his death rites. so im like “ok gran I can do that” bc im a good grandson and you do not fuck with gran she doesn’t DESERVE THAT
i figure out which plot he’s on and ask someone specifically where you can find uncle samuel jr. and they tell me where and so I arrive at the junction and.
HE GONE.
WHERE DID YOU GO UNCLE SAMUEL.
*celine dion’s smash hit “my heart will go on” playing in the distance*
in other words either someone stole my entire great great uncle samuel or he has risen again, ready to party in paris for all of eternity.
You’re pretty chill about a corpse disappearing.
My guy, my dude, he’s been dead since 1851. He could be anywhere. He does what he wants.
What a way to learn you have a Vampire in the family.
Next in the series is Lagiacrus. I always though this guy had similarities to feraligatr, only reinforced further here haha. I’ll post the other daily. This is 2 of 6.
Lagiacrus
Type: Electric/Water
Ability: Swift Swim
Moves: Volt Tackle, Razor Shell, Soak, Rain Dance
In the past I’ve shared other people’s musings about the different interpretations of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Namely, why Orpheus looks back at Eurydice, even though he knows it means he’ll lose her forever. So many people seem to think they’ve found the one true explanation of the myth. But to me, the beauty of myths is that they have many possible meanings.
So I thought I would share a list of every interpretation I know, from every serious adaptation of the story and every analysis I’ve ever heard or read, of why Orpheus looks back.
One interpretation – advocated by Monteverdi’s opera, for example – is that the backward glance represents excessive passion and a fatal lack of self-control. Orpheus loves Eurydice to such excess that he tries to defy the laws of nature by bringing her back from the dead, yet that very same passion dooms his quest fo fail, because he can’t resist the temptation to look back at her.
He can also be seen as succumbing to that classic “tragic flaw” of hubris, excessive pride. Because his music and his love conquer the Underworld, it might be that he makes the mistake of thinking he’s entirely above divine law, and fatally allows himself to break the one rule that Hades and Persephone set for him.
Then there are the versions where his flaw is his lack of faith, because he looks back out of doubt that Eurydice is really there. I think there are three possible interpretations of this scenario, which can each work alone or else co-exist with each other. From what I’ve read about Hadestown, it sounds as if it combines all three.
In one interpretation, he doubts Hades and Persephone’s promise. Will they really give Eurydice back to him, or is it all a cruel trick? In this case, the message seems to be a warning to trust in the gods; if you doubt their blessings, you might lose them.
Another perspective is that he doubts Eurydice. Does she love him enough to follow him? In this case, the warning is that romantic love can’t survive unless the lovers trust each other. I’m thinking of Moulin Rouge!, which is ostensibly based on the Orpheus myth, and which uses Christian’s jealousy as its equivalent of Orpheus’s fatal doubt and explicitly states “Where there is no trust, there is no love.”
The third variation is that he doubts himself. Could his music really have the power to sway the Underworld? The message in this version would be that self-doubt can sabotage all our best efforts.
But all of the above interpretations revolve around the concept that Orpheus looks back because of a tragic flaw, which wasn’t necessarily the view of Virgil, the earliest known recorder of the myth. Virgil wrote that Orpheus’s backward glance was “A pardonable offense, if the spirits knew how to pardon.”
In some versions, when the upper world comes into Orpheus’s view, he thinks his journey is over. In this moment, he’s so ecstatic and so eager to finally see Eurydice that he unthinkingly turns around an instant too soon, either just before he reaches the threshold or when he’s already crossed it but Eurydice is still a few steps behind him. In this scenario, it isn’t a personal flaw that makes him look back, but just a moment of passion-fueled carelessness, and the fact that it costs him Eurydice shows the pitilessness of the Underworld.
In other versions, concern for Eurydice makes him look back. Sometimes he looks back because the upward path is steep and rocky, and Eurydice is still limping from her snakebite, so he knows she must be struggling, in some versions he even hears her stumble, and he finally can’t resist turning around to help her. Or more cruelly, in other versions – for example, in Gluck’s opera – Eurydice doesn’t know that Orpheus is forbidden to look back at her, and Orpheus is also forbidden to tell her. So she’s distraught that her husband seems to be coldly ignoring her and begs him to look at her until he can’t bear her anguish anymore.
These versions highlight the harshness of the Underworld’s law, and Orpheus’s failure to comply with it seems natural and even inevitable. The message here seems to be that death is pitiless and irreversible: a demigod hero might come close to conquering it, but through little or no fault of his own, he’s bound to fail in the end.
Another interpretation I’ve read is that Orpheus’s backward glance represents the nature of grief. We can’t help but look back on our memories of our dead loved ones, even though it means feeling the pain of loss all over again.
Then there’s the interpretation that Orpheus chooses his memory of Eurydice, represented by the backward glance, rather than a future with a living Eurydice. “The poet’s choice,” as Portrait of a Lady on Fire puts it. In this reading, Orpheus looks back because he realizes he would rather preserve his memory of their youthful, blissful love, just as it was when she died, than face a future of growing older, the difficulties of married life, and the possibility that their love will fade. That’s the slightly more sympathetic version. In the version that makes Orpheus more egotistical, he prefers the idealized memory to the real woman because the memory is entirely his possession, in a way that a living wife with her own will could never be, and will never distract him from his music, but can only inspire it.
Then there are the modern feminist interpretations, also alluded to in Portrait of a Lady on Fire but seen in several female-authored adaptations of the myth too, where Eurydice provokes Orpheus into looking back because she wants to stay in the Underworld. The viewpoint kinder to Orpheus is that Eurydice also wants to preserve their love just as it was, youthful, passionate, and blissful, rather than subject it to the ravages of time and the hardships of life. The variation less sympathetic to Orpheus is that Euyridice was at peace in death, in some versions she drank from the river Lethe and doesn’t even remember Orpheus, his attempt to take her back is selfish, and she prefers to be her own free woman than be bound to him forever and literally only live for his sake.
With that interpretation in mind, I’m surprised I’ve never read yet another variation. I can imagine a version where, as Orpheus walks up the path toward the living world, he realizes he’s being selfish: Eurydice was happy and at peace in the Elysian Fields, she doesn’t even remember him because she drank from Lethe, and she’s only following him now because Hades and Persephone have forced her to do so. So he finally looks back out of selfless love, to let her go. Maybe I should write this retelling myself.
Are any of these interpretations – or any others – the “true” or “definitive” reason why Orpheus looks back? I don’t think so at all. The fact that they all exist and can all ring true says something valuable about the nature of mythology.
ALT
