Angelic Genitalia

You read that right! This is an entire blog post dealing solely with the question of the existence of sexual organs on the heavenly host. Why, you might ask? Well what got me thinking about this subject was actually director Kevin Smith’s 1999 comedy Dogma. In the movie Dogma angels are depicted as being “as anatomically impaired as a Ken doll,” as the angel Metatron (Alan Rickman) eloquently puts it. Despite how the rest of their body may appear physically the angels and other supernatural beings in Dogma are repeatedly depicted and described as being both sexless and incapable of sexual activity.

However, this is not always the case. On the other end of the Hollywood spectrum is the 1996 film Michael in which the archangel Michael (John Travolta) is introduced with all his sexual organs intact - albeit concealed beneath his boxer shorts. He is also seen throughout the film engaging in casual sex with a number of different human women.

Then there are those films that opt for a thoroughly different approach. The award-winning HBO miniseries Angels in America (2003) envisions angels as hermaphrodites. In Tony Kushner’s original play of the same name The Angel of America (Emma Thompson in the mini-series) is described as “possessing many phalli and a multitude of vaginas” and engaging in sexual congress with newly ordained prophet Prior Walter.

Likewise the archangel Gabriel (Tilda Swinton) in the movie Constantine (2005) is depicted as androgynous, as is the devil (Rosalinda Celentano) in Mel Gibson’s religious blockbuster The Passion of the Christ (2004). Constantine was based on the DC/Vertigo comic book series “Hellblazer” so its interesting to note that while angels in the DC Universe are depicted in the same genitalia-less manner as those in Dogma they are mysteriously also seen as capable of engaging in sexual intercourse (See “Hellblazer” #46 and “Lucifer” #50 for two examples).

Of course, there are a vast number of films about angels where the subject of angelic sexual anatomy never comes up at all. We have no idea what the sexual status of Clarence (Henry Travers), the iconic angel of the yuletide classic It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), is.

But which of the above views is right?

Well considering the fact that angels are mythical beings to begin with, all views maybe seen as in some sense correct. Asking whether or not angels possess genitalia can be seen as tantamount to asking whether or not unicorn horns are hollow – you would first need to obtain a unicorn (living or dead) before you could proceed. Taking this into account then perhaps the question we should be asking is not which “view is right” but which view mirrors the classical conception of angels as found in ancient near-eastern myths and legends.

Though scholars are still in dispute over exactly where the idea of angels came from, for all intents and purposes it is generally agreed that the beings which we today identify as angels first appear in the religious myths of the Jewish people some 6,000-years-ago. In the Hebrew Bible and other related non-canonical literature angels are depicted as being all male[1], something which may come as a surprise to people who are used to seeing angels depicted as female whether it be on greeting cards or in Victoria’s Secret catalogs.

In Hebrew the term for angel (Heb: mal'akh, lit. ‘Messenger’) is masculine, furthermore angels are referred to in the books of Genesis, Numbers, Job, and Psalms as the “sons of God” (Heb: bene ha-elohim). Whenever an angel appears before someone in the Hebrew Bible they are always described as appearing as a “man.” Also all named angels have masculine names: Michael, Gabriel, Raphael (Tobit), Uriel (1st Enoch), etc… and are described as holding what where at the time seen as male jobs: Michael is a soldier, Gabriel a messenger, Raphael a doctor, etc…

Then there is what maybe one of the most controversial passages in the Hebrew Bible. In Genesis 6:1-2 & 4 we read of how in the days before the flood of Noah “the Sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them.” The implication here being that angels are capable of sexual intercourse with human women. This theme is further elaborated on in two apocryphal texts; 1st Enoch (c. 2nd BCE to 1st cent. CE) and Jubilees (c. 2nd cent. BCE). Both texts tell of the Watchers (Heb: irin, Lit: “those who watch” or “those who are awake”) a group of angels sent to earth to watch over mankind but whose unbridled lust for human women forces them to abandon heaven so that they may engage in sexual intercourse with them.

In some ways this premises is also revisited in the 1998 film City of Angels in which the angel Seth (Nicholas Cage) falls in love with a mortal woman but must first “fall” and become human in order to be with her.[2] While the angels in 1st Enoch and Jubilees don’t become human after leaving heaven they do manage to spawn the world’s first giants and teach humans the secrets of the occult. Lastly it should be noted that a careful reading of Jubilees 15:27 also seems to suggest that in addition to being fully equipped sexually angels are also created circumcised.

The idea of angels as sexually endowed and potent beings continued on until the 4th-Century C.E. Early Christians apparently shared in the myths found in Genesis 6, 1st Enoch and Jubilees as reference to them can be found in the New Testament. Most notable is the epistle of Jude who quotes from 1st-Enoch directly (see Jude 1:14-15) but also Paul who states in 1st Corinthians (11:10) that women should restrain from vanity least they entice the angels to sin again. However, as Christianity continued to grow as a religion the need to distance itself from both Judaism and Greco-Roman paganism (with its own hypersexual Olympian gods and goddesses) became more apparent. One way of doing this was to redefine angels as celibate.

In the 13th-Century, Catholic theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas declared in his Summa Theologica (1266-73) that angels were without both sex and gender and that though they can assume bodies, as human’s possess, they do not exercise the functions of life in them. This line of thinking about angels has been continued right on through to present day and appears in Protestant evangelist Billy Graham’s best selling book Angels: God’s Secret Agents (1975).

Medieval art likewise portrays angels as androgynous and it is not until the Renaissance that depictions of both male and female angels being to appear. It is interesting to note, however, that while Christian theologians and artists appear to have been troubled by the notion of sexually defined angels they had no problem with the concept of sexually defined demons. Myth, folklore, theology, and art all testify to the pervasive medieval belief in both incubi and succubi; male and female demons whose infernal job was to tempt their human sexual opposites with, well, sex.[3]

As for the tales of Genesis 6 and its related apocryphal texts Christianity saw these stories as best left forgotten. Those theologians who did bother to address these scriptures either explained the story of the “Sons of God” and the “daughters of men” away as the work of fallen angels/demons or reinterpreted the “Sons of God” as referring to the righteous descendents of Seth, Adam and Eve’s third son, and the “daughters of men” as being from the wicked line of Cain; the first murderer. Today many Christian resources on angels, such as Kenneth Boa and Robert M. Bowman Jr.’s book Sense and Nonsense about Angels and Demons (2007), don’t even mention Genesis 6.[4]

In the end, the question of sexuality amongst angels is perhaps one that will never be fully resolved. As was demonstrated at the start of this essay storytellers over the past 20-years have seen fit to reimagine the sexuality of angels in all kinds of new, old, and bizarre ways. Some like Kevin Smith, who is a practicing Catholic, will continue to reinforce the Christian notion of sexless and genderless angels while others will look back to Genesis 6, 1st Enoch, and Jubilees for their cues. In each and every case, however, it is important to remember that some statement is ultimately being made about how we as a culture view our own sexuality….

Bethany: “Sex is a joke in heaven?”

Metatron: “The way I understand it it’s mostly a joke down here too.”

- Dogma

Pictures:

At Top: The Metatron (Alan Rickman) maybe the Voice of God in Dogma (1999) but he's still “as anatomically impaired as a Ken doll.”

Middle: Unlike some angels Seth (Nicholas Cage) has no problem getting down with the ladies.

Films: It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) directed by Frank Capra, The Prophecy (1995) directed by Gregory Widen, Michael (1996) directed by Nora Ephron, City of Angels (1998) directed by Brad Silberling, Dogma (1999) directed by Kevin Smith, Angels in America (2003) directed by Mike Nichols, The Passion of the Christ (2004) by Mel Gibson, Constantine (2005) directed by Francis Lawrence.

Sources: The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Vol. 1 & 2 (1985) translated by James H. Charlesworth, 1 Enoch: A New Translation (2004) translated by George W.E. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam, Angels A to Z (1996) by James R. Lewis and Evelyn Dorothy Oliver, The Lost Bible: Forgotten Scriptures Revealed (2001) by J.R. Porter, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (2003) by Tony Kushner, Sense and Nonsense about Angels and Demons (2007) Kenneth Boa and Robert M. Bowman Jr., & “Can angels have sex with people?" at http://www.carm.org/

Special Thanks to Dr. Barbra Thiede for pointing out Jubilees 15:27 and to Brent Starnes for pointing me towards Faraway, So Close!

_______________________________________________________
[1] The idea that angels are all male is a concept that Hollywood also seems to find aesthetically pleasing. Considering the numerous films made over the years featuring angels the only two which I could find which feature decidedly female angels were the 1993 German film Faraway, So Close! and Hellboy II: The Golden Army, though interestingly in the latter’s case the angel in question was portrayed by actor Doug Jones. The long running American TV series Touched by an Angel (1994 to 2003) also featured decidedly female angels.
[2] Also released in 1998, The Prophecy II depicts angels and humans as capable of interbreeding. This was the sequel to the 1995 film The Prophecy which stared Christopher Walken as the archangel Gabriel.
[3] Interestingly Fr. Ludovico Maria Sinistrari, in his book Demoniality; or Incubi and Succubi (1879), describes the incubi as; “corporeal angels who allowed themselves to fall into the sin of lewdness with women.” a line which seems to call back to tales of Genesis 6, 1st Enoch, and Jubilees.
[4] A common Christian justification for the view that angels are both sexually undefined and impotent are the gospels of Matthew (22:30) and Luke (20:34-36) in which Jesus tells his followers that in the kingdom to come the resurrected dead will “neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.” However, as common sense, and some apologetists, will tell you marriage has never been a prerequisite for sex.

East Meets West: A Christian Take on Journey to the West

As some of my readers may remember back in June I did a post on Monkey: Journey to the West, the contemporary Chinese opera based on the famous 16th-Century Chinese legend. When I saw Monkey back in June at the Spoleto Arts Festival in South Carolina I was blown away. Having been a big fan of the original Journey to the West myth I have almost always been thrilled by anything – from comics to film – that even made reference to Sun Wukung the Monkey King; the tales’ titular hero. That being said it should come as no surprise to anyone that I was naturally quite excited when a friend of mine showed me a graphic novel he had recently picked up which featured the Monkey King as a prominent character.

The graphic novel in question was Gene Luen Yang’s award-winning, critically acclaimed American Born Chinese (2006) which tells the tale of Jin Wang, a teenager living in San Francisco who is ethnically Chinese but was born and raised in America, just like the book’s author. American Born Chinese is primarily a story about the struggle that every teenager goes through in trying to find out who they are. In Jin’s case, coming to terms with what he sees as a conflict between his ethnicity and nationality. It is also a story about racism and a good portion of the book deals with a character called Chin-Kee; the living embodiment of every negative Asian stereotype one can possibly imagine and the novel’s most controversial character. However, in addition to the exploits of both Jin and Chin-Kee, American Born Chinese also stars the Monkey King as the book’s third protagonist and it was this aspect which originally drew my attention to the novel itself and kept it there.

American Born Chinese actually opens with a retelling of the Monkey King’s origins – ‘born from a stone atop the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit’ – before spinning off into the modern-day tales of Jin and Chin-Kee. Periodically, the book’s narrative would return to the Monkey King’s tale explaining how he was the greatest warrior in all the land and master of numerous mystical martial arts from cloud surfing to shape-shifting. Eventually, the Monkey King grows so powerful that he becomes uncontrollable and begins to run amok terrorizing the other gods, goddesses, demons and spirits of China.

What is supposed to happen at this point in the story is that the goddess Guan-Yin calls upon the help of the Buddha. The Buddha appears and challenges the Monkey King to a bet, saying that he can not jump across the entire breath of heaven. Sun Wukung arrogantly accepts the bet and takes a mighty leap, landing at what he believes to be the far end of heaven where nothing exists except for five mighty pillars. To prove that he has actually been to the edge of heaven the Monkey King takes a leak on the pillars and then leaps back to the feet of the Buddha who then shocks him by revealing that not only did he fail to leap across heaven, he never even left the Buddha’s palm. The five pillars that the Monkey King saw (and soiled) were actually the Buddha’s own fingers.

Now, I say that this is what is supposed to happen because on page 67 of American Born Chinese something rather different begins to happen instead, as can be seen below:

At first I wasn’t sure what to make of this sudden abrupt deviation from the original legend. Perhaps I was looking at an alternate version of the tale that I had not heard before but with which the author was more familiar. However, as I stared at the page and the four “emissaries of Tza-Yo-Tzuh” something weird occurred to me. I knew these four creatures from somewhere else, from a different mythological system. The lion, eagle, ox and man (here a woman) were classical symbols of the Judeo-Christian god. They appeared in both the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel (1:10) and the New Testament Book of Revelation (4:7). They were also representative of the four gospels, each one personifying a different aspect of Jesus Christ’s nature: the man his humanity, the eagle his divinity, the lion his regality and the ox his servitude. In fact, to make matters weirder, the same week I was in Charleston to watch Monkey I had toured one of the city’s historical churches and seen these same four creatures carved into the frame of the church’s front door.

Then there was this mysterious Tza-Yo-Tzuh character whose name the page’s footnote told me meant “He Who Is” in Chinese. It was a name that I not only didn’t recognize from the traditional Chinese pantheon of deities, but one which sounded hauntingly similar to the infamous “I Am Who I Am” declaration made by the Jewish god Yahweh in the Bible’s Book of Exodus (3:14).

The next page then introduced me to Tza-Yo-Tzuh who with his flowing red robe, long white beard and shepard’s staff looked like a Chinese version of Moses. I continued to read as Tza-Yo-Tzuh confronted the Monkey King and challenged him to same bet that the Buddha does in the original legend. Like the original the bet plays out the same way; Sun Wukung attempts to leap to the end of the universe, finds the pillars, pees on them and then returns to the feet of Tza-Yo-Tzuh only to discover that he never even left the opposing deities’ hand.

Following this on page 80, Tza-Yo-Tzuh then inform the Monkey King that he is the creator of the universe, of all life, of all things – even Sun Wukung. It was at this point that I knew for certain who this guy was; he was the god of Judeo-Christianity reimagined as a Chinese deity. What confirmed it for me wasn’t simply his declaration of being the maker and shaper of the universe but the fact that he did it by essentially quoting Psalm 139 straight out of the Bible. You can take a look for yourself below:

As I finished the chapter, which ended with Tza-Yo-Tzuh trapping the Monkey King beneath a mountain in the same way the Buddha had in the original myth I decided to flip to the back of the book and take a look at the author’s bio which was printed on the inside flap of the back cover. There I learned that author Gene Yang was not only an independent comic book writer and artist, but also a computer science teacher, a resident of San Francisco, a husband, a father and a Roman Catholic. My suspicions confirmed I immediately returned to reading wanting to see where this decidedly Christian variation on the story of the Monkey King was heading next. In the original myth, the Monkey King is freed from the mountain by the goddess Guan-Yin who enlists him as the bodyguard of the monk Tripitaka who has been sent on a ‘journey to the west’ to retrieve the Buddhist scriptures and bring them back to China. In American Born Chinese, however, it is the monk who frees the Monkey King after having been tapped by the four emissaries of Tza-Yo-Tzuh and told he has been chosen for a sacred mission of an undisclosed nature. No surprises this time, the entire thing was laced with Christian ideas and phraseology and it had become apparent that the author had decided to almost completely break away from the original Monkey King myth.

Nevertheless, surprises or not, as I kept reading I began to find myself growing more and more irritated with the author’s rewriting of the Journey to the West. Soon irritation turned into anger and I began to find myself upset that Gene Yang would dare to bastardize what was arguably the most important story in the history of China. Wasn’t this book, American Born Chinese, supposed to be about coming to terms with your ethnicity and embracing your native culture? If so, why was Yang rewriting the legend of the Monkey King turning it into something decidedly non-traditional, non-Buddhist, non-Eastern? By this point I was so angry, I was seriously considering not finishing the book at all. I told my friend who had given me the book about the problems I was having with it and he told me to calm down and finish it, that it would all make sense in the end.

Well, he was right.

I’m not going to tell you exactly how American Born Chinese ends because I think everyone should go out and read it for themselves. I will tell you that, in the end, all three characters – Jin, Chin-Kee, and the Monkey King – do end up meeting in a spectacular closing scene. I’ll also tell you that the author makes no apologies regarding his Christian take on Journey to the West. The story remains unabashedly Christian to the end, going so far as to even change the goal of the heroes’ journey altogether:

However, the book is never preachy and at no point – even when I was upset with it – did I feel like Gene Yang was trying to force his faith on me. You see, what I realized in the end was that American Born Chinese is not just about Jin trying to reconcile his Chinese ethnicity with his American nationality, it also about the author trying to reconcile his own ethnicity and nationality with his religious faith, and the way he manages to do so is devilishly clever.

After reading and re-reading American Born Chinese as well as several interviews with the author – including one where he humbly and cleverly defends his right to write a Christian version of Journey to the West – I have come to really love this book and have already recommended it to several people. It is a book that will challenge you on many levels and hopefully lead you to think about some of the bigger and harder questions in life regarding not only the role of faith and myth, but also about racism, ethnicity and nationality and how all these things effect our lives and our cultures.

Also check out Gene Yang's essay on American Born Chinese and his Monkey King fan-site.

All comic pages posted above are taken from American Born Chinese (2006), by Gene Luen Yang, all rights reserved.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

“We die – and the world will be poorer for it.”, laments elven Prince Nuada, towards the end of Hellboy II: The Golden Army. The “we” he is referring to is that of the magical denizens – elves, fairies, trolls, demons, angels, gods – who make up the very fabric of mankind’s mythological understandings of the world around them. It is a very sad and profound moment in the film and one which helps to define the theme of the entire picture. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

This past Friday (July 11th) was a long awaited day for me as it marked the premier of Hellboy II: The Golden Army, a sequel to one of my all time favorite films, 2004’s Hellboy, based on my all time favorite comic of the same name, and directed by the amazingly talented Guillermo del Toro (The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth). I went to a midnight showing of the film on Thursday but, unfortunately, have been unable to blog about it until now…

Hellboy and I: A Short History

For those of you who don’t know, next to my obvious love of mythology, folklore and legend, my second biggest interest has always been art. In particular sequential art, which is just a fancy way of saying ‘comic book art.’ However, despite my love of the comic book genre I have never really cared for the medium’s most prominent subject matter – superheroes. Call me crazy, but there is just something about the idea of guys who fly around in spandex and capes saving the world that I find utterly ridiculous on every level. So needless to say, it has always been a bit of a challenge for me to find comics that I actually wanted to read.

Part of this problem was resolved in 1993 when DC Comics created their mature readers imprint VERTIGO which specialized in mostly non-superhero themed comics, the most famous of which is undoubtedly Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series of which I am also a fan. VERTIGO helped to pave the way for other non-superhero themed comic books and later that same year Darkhorse Comics published the first issue of Hellboy.

Hellboy is the creation of Mike Mignola, an amazingly talented artist and writer of whom I am constantly in awe. I first heard about Hellboy and Mr. Mignola back in 2003 on an NPR news radio show on comic books – which had become the new big thing in Hollywood since the success of Bryan Singer’s 2000 X-Men movie. On the show the guest – whose name has long since left me – was asked what his current favorite comic was. He responded that it was Hellboy and then went on to explain that it was a series about a demon who fought monsters and that the stories in it were basically retellings of Old English folktales. The name and premise stuck with me and it wasn’t long after that I started hearing that there was going to be a Hellboy movie in 2004.

Well, 2004 came and I saw that movie and it was… good. It was a fun, quirky and slightly absurd (which is, in my book, a good thing since one of the key foundations within the realm of mythology is a very palpable level of absurdity). The first movie didn’t blow me away, I liked how it was filmed and the way the characters looked and the references to both history and myth scattered within. It was a few weeks later then, that Free Comic Book Day rolled around and I decided to stop by one of the local comic shops to see what they had. It was then that I saw the first collected volume (or trade) of the Hellboy comic sitting on the shelf. I looked through the book, recognized a lot of stuff from the film, and thought the art was really great and decided to buy it. Like the movie, the first volume of the comic didn’t blow me away, but it was still good.

Anyway, to make a long history short I eventually ended up picking up the second Hellboy trade at Barnes and Noble and that was the book that solidified my loyalty as a die hard Hellboy fan. The second volume was thoroughly amazing between its art, story, and its references to vampires, witches, Greek mythology, the Baba Yaga and Elizabeth Bathory. I was, to say the least, ecstatic. It wasn’t long after that that I began to collect every volume of the Hellboy series and then hunt down all the comics that hadn’t yet been placed into trades. Today, I own nearly every single issue of Hellboy either as single issues or in the form of trades. I also am the proud owner of the Hellboy actions figures, t-shirts, lunch boxes, collector’s books, original novels, animated films, posters and both the original and director’s cut of the first film.

And for the past four years I have eagerly been awaiting the debut of Hellboy II: The Golden Army.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army: Review

What follows is not a conventional movie review. The first thing you should know, and probably don’t need to be told at this point, is that as a fan of Hellboy this review is going to be overwhelmingly positive and undoubtedly bias. Also in this review I don’t so much intend to review the film as a film but rather as a modern testament to the power of mythology. So if you are look for an actual critical review of the film I suggest you hop on over to Rotten Tomatoes, who have already collected nearly 200 overwhelmingly positive reviews from critics across the country.

For past six months or so I have seen numerous critics and film writers try to sum up the plot of Hellboy II, and for some reason, unlike every other film, they seem to be unable to do it in less than a paragraph. For me, the premise of Hellboy II is not a complicated affair. Hellboy II features the return of demonic do-gooder Hellboy (Ron Pearlman), as well as aquatic sidekick Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) and pyrokinetic girlfriend Liz Sherman (Selma Blair), who this time must protect humanity from a slew of monsters and a robotic clockwork army that has been unleashed by the villainous elf, Prince Nuada (Luke Gross). Simple as that.

But the truth of the matter is that Hellboy II is not simple. It is a complex story with a deep – though not quite heavy handed enough – point. That we, mankind, have endangered ourselves by destroying our own mythologies and our own cultures via modern technology and convenience.

“It is said that at the dawn of time…Man, Beast, and all Magical Beings lived together under Aiglin, the Father Tree…” intones Prof. Bruttenholm (John Hurt) at the opening of the film. Prof. Bruttenholm continues to tell of how man, “in his infinite greed”, sought dominion over the entire Earth and with it the eradication of all magical beings. There are those who will, from this set-up, mistake the film’s message for an environmental one (like in Wall-E) or a social one (like in Narnia 2). But del Toro and Mignola, who wrote the script, are not talking about either racism or the destruction of the natural world. Rather they are talking about the destruction of our mythologies, our imaginations as noted by del Toro in a recent interview with MTV; “We live in a world right now [where] everything not provable, nonlogical, nonlinear, not supported by science or technology, is a childish concern, and we are destroying things that we find tangible.”

Likewise, in the film elven Prince Nuada – who wishes to remind mankind “why you once feared the dark” – declares that “the humans have forgotten the gods, destroyed the Earth – and for what? Parking lots – shopping malls – greed has burned a hole in their chests that can never be filled. They will never have enough…”

All this naturally creates a very large dilemma for Hellboy. Though Nuada and his ilk are “Sons of the Earth” while Hellboy is a “Son of the Fallen One” both are still part of the race of magical invisible beings. As Nuada frequently reminds Hellboy; “You have more in common with us than with them…” the “Sons of Adam”, mankind.

For me, del Toro and Mignola, have brought up, in this film, a very real concern. Here in the modern western world we have slowly but surely begun to destroy everything that we once held sacred, whether that sanctity be pagan or Christian. This was the concern expressed in folklorist Jane Yolen’s 1981 book Touch Magic and it is still a concern today as can be seen, from a more religious perspective, in Stephen Prothero’s 2007 best seller Religious Illiteracy. Having created a culture of high-tech toys – Ipods, camera phones, satellite TV – which can provide us with often mind-numbing instant gratification and entertainment we no longer feel the need to exercise our minds and imaginations and explore the world around us. Ask big questions, think deep thoughts, ponder that which is absurd and nonsensical.

And it is perhaps in this light why a movie like Hellboy II is so important. Early this year, movie goers saw another blockbuster comic book movie called Iron Man. For me, Iron Man is the embodiment of everything that Hellboy II tells us to be wary of. It is a film about high-tech, wiz bang toys and the billionaire who builds and owns them. It’s a film that asks no deep or meaningful questions and attempts to shed no light on human culture, it just says “Look at this! Ain’t it cool!! You should own one too!!!”

The Mythology Behind Hellboy II

So what is some of the mythology that is once again brought to life in Hellboy II? A man after my own heart (or perhaps that should be the other way around), Mike Mignola loves his mythology. Whether that mythology is Greek, Roman, Celtic, Russian, Polynesian, Christian, or Lovecraftian matters not; in the Hellboy comics he makes reference to it all.

The same can be said for director Guillermo del Toro, and in Hellboy II del Toro drops more than a few names and pays plenty of homage to the myths and legends of old. In addition to your standard trolls, goblins, and ogres Hellboy II gives us elves with names plucked strait out of Celtic mythology – Nuada, Nuala, and King Balor –, some particularly nasty “tooth fairies”, and an Angel of Death who acts like she has just stepped out of a Jewish folktale and who looks like something one would find on a Medieval woodcut. There is also the elves’ subterranean homeland of Bethmoora – a name taken from the 19th-Century writings of Lord Dunsany – and the infamous “troll market” which is essentially a beefed up version of poet Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market.” Also, lets not forget the gigantic forest god who appears midway though the picture and in whom one can see more than a little reference to Hayao Miyazaki’s own god of the forest from his 1997 film Princess Mononoke. I could go on all day about the number of references one can find in this amazing film – such as how the entire thing has a very Hieronymus Bosch type aesthetic about it – but there are other things worth mentioning as well.

For starters, Hellboy II is just a great film. It’s a great story that is both cool and exciting, funny and entertaining, emotional and thought provoking. It is beautiful to look at and great to listen to. It is a movie that everyone needs to see, pay attention to, and then go see again. And then after you have done that why don’t you put down the Ipod, go outside and try see if maybe the Sons of the Earth are still there, waiting in the shadows, waiting to be remembered.

Top: Hellboy, Abe, Liz and new commer Johann (Seth McFarland) return to save mankind, who really don't deserve it.

Center: He may have snow white skin but Prince Nuada is about as far from conventional fairy-tale elves as you can get.

Bottom: The Angel of Death, with eyes on her wings, is just one of the many mythological creatures who appear in the film.

Sources: Hellboy II: The Art of the Movie (2008), Edited by Katie Moody and Dave Land.