Peter Howard is Wintermute, mythologist

Artorius Rex-tended

23July2004 [directLink] [myth]

(Excuse the lame pun). Wrote some more about King Arthur… For now it’s basically reiterating what I already said with some extra thoughts on Pelagius.

Some interesting ideas have come up though - about the Christianity in Arthurian mythology, so I hope to explore it at some stage…

Crazy Irish-Catholic terrorists

23July2004 [directLink] [myth]

The news shows some of the hijackers getting through airport security and people get mad. But it’s only post-911 that security can get away with stopping and strip-searching anyone looking vaguely Middle Eastern.

I realise that if I was living 20-30 years ago, I’d perfectly fit the ‘racial profile’ for a terrorist of the time - I embrace the Irish and Catholic in my heritage, I’m young and idealistic, with vaguely socialist tendencies… (I work with a guy from Ireland who was in his 20s back when the IRA were the terrorists, and he was regularly stopped at airports).

It strikes me that the terrorist profile today is so different, which makes it so much more abusive. When the Irish were the terrorists, you couldn’t stop and abuse everyone looking vaguely Irish, as you might inadvertantly offend a decent Englishman. But nowadays it’s safe to stop anyone looking Mid-Eastern, as it doesn’t matter when you abuse non-Whites.

Five and a half pages

23July2004 [directLink] [myth]

You’d think that only 12 years after going to war with a country, and barely more since the US gave them WMDs, we’d keep better tabs on that country. Yet now, the Flood Report in Australia and similar inquiries in Britain and the States are finding that intelligence was inadequate, incomplete, and flimsy at best.

The intelligence ‘failures’ in regards terrorist groups are more understandable, but I thought there’d have been spies all over the Middle East. Now they’re saying not enough people even knew Arabic! (And “only 4 per cent of DIO’s analysts had a foreign language”!)

When America was threatening to invade Iraq and trying to convince the world Saddam had WMDs, I knew the intell they were showing wasn’t convincing, but didn’t think they’d be so stupid as to push for war without knowing a lot more than they wanted to say!

SMH 23Jul2004

now the banks are beating the scammers at their own game

21July2004 [directLink] [links]

Got a phishing email - one of those ones apparently from Westpac, with a link asking you to login to confirm your account - the real link was to http://korretoro.com. I visited it to take a look and was redirected to westpac.com.au

Weird…

I knew he was stupid, but really…

16July2004 [directLink] [myth]

Alexander Downer, clever fellow that he is, today admitted that “poverty, disadvantage (and) hopelessly entrenched political impasses” are “long-running and endemic features of life throughout the Middle East”, but made the ridiculous claim that “fixing them will not fix anything else”.

Admittedly, Osama and his ilk are hardly driven by poverty, but they recruit from the huge number of young people for whom these are major problems…

I’d have thought this stuff was obvious… Can anyone think of a better reason to vote this government out?

SMH 17Jul2004

Artorius Rex

16July2004 [directLink] [myth]

I’ve wanted for years now to make a film about King Arthur - when I heard about the new version I thought I’d have to postpone that, especially given it was going back to historical roots, something I also wanted to try - but after seeing it this evening I’m just in more of a hurry to make my own version.

The history is straightforward enough - Arthur is a Roman-Briton who leads his knights, defeats some Saxons… There are a couple of different locations for the myth though - the movie sets it in the North, at Hadrian’s Wall. The alternative version sets it in the south-west - Wales and Cornwall (the location of Tintagel).

Not a lot actually happened in the movie - bad enough; but what really bothered me was their approach to/myth of Christianity… First off was an obsession with pushing Pelagius - Arthur, the only decent Christian in the movie, goes on about Pelagius’ doctrines of “free will and equality”, and frees slaves to prove his worth. Unfortunately, Pelagius was a heretic who denied Original Sin and Christ’s subsequent Redemption.
(Catholic Encyclopedia - the first couple of paragraphs are the important information)

On top of the only decent Christian being the follower of a heretic, there was the usual smattering of evil/corrupt/weak ‘Christians’ - only one kid seemed vaguely decent, but that’s probably because he didn’t open his mouth a lot.

Then what appeared to be the main ‘theme’ of the movie, at least in relation to Arthur: at one stage Arthur offers his life, Christ-like, as a sacrifice for his friends… But by the end of the film God betrays Arthur, taking instead his friends - on the battlefield at the end Arthur cries out to God: “it wasn’t supposed to be like this”, and proceeds to marry Guinevere in a pagan ceremony, with no Christian symbolism whatsoever, which I couldn’t help but read as Arthur rejecting God (and Christianity) after God rejected him.