mythology – lesley's headspace

Scylla and Charybdis diorama

I made this in one day, so that should reassure me of the speed of my work and remind me that I don’t have to panic and that I can do anything. It’s about the size of an A6 sheet, working smaller because it’s just a draft. I’m thinking of incorporating dioramas into my bookmaking process, along with fortune telling and the grotesque as a medium to convey monsters like Scylla and Medusa. I have yet to flesh this out properly but it feels like all the pieces are slowly, slowly coming together, even if I can’t tell how that will happen.

Janus

In ancient Roman religion and myth, Janus (/ˈdʒeɪnəs/; Latin: Ianus, pronounced [ˈjaː.nus]) is the god of beginnings and transitions,[1] and thereby of gates, doors, doorways, passages and endings. He is usually depicted as having two faces, since he looks to the future and to the past. It is conventionally thought that the month of January is named for Janus (Ianuarius),[2] but according to ancient Roman farmers’ almanacs Juno was the tutelary deity of the month.[3]

Janus presided over the beginning and ending of conflict, and hence war and peace. The doors of his temple were open in time of war, and closed to mark the peace. As a god of transitions, he had functions pertaining to birth and to journeys and exchange, and in his association with Portunus, a similar harbor and gateway god, he was concerned with travelling, trading and shipping.
— Wikipedia

So I’ve decided to take duality as a starting point in my final year project and I’ve taken a leap into other mythological figures besides Castor and Pollux as a way of exploring that. I decided not to lock myself into Gemini on the basis of research, because I’m interested in duality and dichotomies as a whole and whether dichotomies are necessary or just helpful tools for understanding a kind of worldview.

There’s a logical fallacy known as the false dichotomy that presupposes only two alternatives to a situation when in fact there could be more than two. This is rather common to many kinds of discussions and arguments that I’ve seen, where the two most obvious positions from which to argue are taken to be the only two positions from which to argue.

I’m examining Janus because of the imagery (I still want to work towards doing something vaguely anatomical) and the potential for coming up with really good illustrations related to duality or the idea of having two faces.

This Janus Cat was illustrated by Craig Horky for a t-shirt design I found online. There’s actually a real-life Janus cat that’s the product of a disorder known as diprosopus, where parts of the face, or the whole face, are duplicated in other areas on the head. Cats with this condition really are referred to as Janus cats which is pretty interesting. Distortion of the body has been a recurring theme with me in my personal work so I might come up with some Janus creatures myself as well.

What is my project all about?

Castor and Pollux, in classical mythology, twin heroes called the Dioscuri; Castor was the son of Leda and Tyndareus, Pollux the son of Leda and Zeus. They were brothers to Helen and Clytemnestra. Castor excelled as a horseman and Pollux as a boxer. They were great warriors and were noted for their devotion to each other. In one version of the legend, after Castor was killed by Lynceus, Pollux, in accordance with the classical tradition that one of every set of twins is the son of a god and thus immortal, begged Zeus to allow his brother to share his immortality with him. Zeus arranged for the twins to divide their time evenly between Hades and Heaven, and in their honor he created the constellation Gemini. According to another legend, Castor was killed by Idas. The Dioscuri were widely regarded as patrons of mariners and were responsible for Saint Elmo’s fire. They were especially honored by the Romans, on whose side they were said to have appeared miraculously during the battle of Lake Regillus.

Read more here.

The myth of Castor and Pollux forms the basis of my project in that there are several interesting points to do with time in that one story about the twins of the Gemini constellation. Firstly the dichotomy between mortality and immortality, with one twin having a vastly different perception of the passage of time from the other. The potential of death for one versus the enduring existence of the other, when both twins are physically (and presumably biologically) identical, where the second dichotomy lies – undeniably similar, yet vastly different. It seems almost paradoxical to me that two people devoted to one another should be so divided by relative lifespan. The division of time between Hades and Heaven may also be an interesting thing to explore, though my primary concern is the differing lifespans of the twins themselves.

This is just the conceptual basis. I haven’t yet decided what direction to move in beyond that of an illustration-based project with possible video documentation being one of the outcomes.

Other sources of inspiration that I will draw on to conceptualize the final outcome will be astrology and the zodiac (star charts, birth charts, the Zodiac Man) as well as the traditional tarot deck. I like the illustration style used in all these esoteric things and the depth of meaning that these objects can have. Nautical illustration may also be relevant since the twins are patrons of mariners (as above), which is a lovely twist for me because I rather like nautical illustration and marine cryptids (the kraken, etc.).