Bebop spike2/18/2024 Meanwhile, in Cowboy Bebop, Jet’s nickname is “The Black Dog,” and he’s Ein’s de-facto caretaker throughout the series. But he doesn’t bring up the magician-king’s more tenuous link to birds (Varuna “knows the track of birds that fly within the air,” Odin has two raven servants that fly around the world spying for him), or the priest-king’s ambivalent association with dogs (the priests appointed by Numa were not allowed to touch or name dogs, the Norse god Tyr lost his arm to a wolf, the Celtic Nuada is always pictured with a dog). Dumezil spends a lot of time talking about the magician-king’s association with horses. Spike, on the other hand, punishes people who have violated natural law: Harmonica boy, Pierrot… I devoted a whole post to this tendency here.Ĭowboy Bebop even reflects some aspects of the Mitra-Varuna archetypes that Dumezil doesn’t cover! Take the animal symbolism, for instance. So Jet gets payback for his arm when he kills his partner, he makes restitution to Alisa, he fulfills his obligation to Mei’s father. (I’ve been talking about Spike and Jet’s magic/science binary all along - I just didn’t realize until I read Dumezil that they were representing stone-age archetypes.) Both of Dumezil’s archetypes are associated with contracts and debts, although in rather different ways: the priest-king oversees debts that are paid, the magician king punishes debts that are unpaid. Spike guesses the Space Trucker’s name (a magical, fairy-tale gesture), consults with fortune tellers, intuits the nature of the demon harmonica player’s bargain while ignoring Jet’s attempts to get at the same thing by science… Jet, on the other hand, tries to understand things rather than simply knowing them: he talks about the temporal matrix in harmonica boy’s ring, he tracks down Londes in the hospital. We might fairly say that Mitra governs techne while Varuna governs gnosis (INT and WIS respectively, for my D&D chuckleheads out there), and sure enough, throughout the series, Spike has an affinity for magic and intuition, and is subtly opposed to technology, while Jet is a hacker and a mechanic who takes offense at supernatural mumbo-jumbo. The BeBop is Jet’s ship, he has the final word about where they go and when, but when it comes to fighting, it’s Spike that sets the agenda. Priest-kings rule in times of peace, magician-kings in times of tumult. In Cowboy Bebop, Jet protects the characters he has interactions with (such as Mei and Alisa), while Spike tends to teach them things and get them killed (Rocco, Gren). *Tiwaz has been getting too old for this $#!+ since the late neolithic.Īnd oh my GOD do they ever describe Spike and Jet.įor instance, Priest-kings are associated with “conservation,” magician-kings with “fecundity,” which for Dumezil seems to mean death, growth, and rebirth. (The takeaway here is that proto-Indo-European religion was metal as f_k.) All of these, claims Dumezil, are reflections of an older pair of proto-Indo-European deities, *Tiwaz, the priest-king, and *Wodhanaz, the magician-king. In Rome, there were actually three pairs: the gods Dius Fidius and Jupiter, the legendary kings Numa and Romulus, and the military heroes Gaius Mucius Scaevola and Horatius Cocles. Nuada of the Silver Hand and Lugh Samildanach in Ireland. I like this idea, and think that it should be applied outside of linguistics, so that you’d get things like *understated-Nicolas-Cage-performance and *reasonable-discussion-of-politics-on-the-internet.)ĭumezil’s most famous claim is that Indo-European society had two complementary concepts of political leadership, which are represented in ancient cultures by a linked pair of kings or gods. (The asterisk, by the way, means that we think a word like this ought to exist, but it’s never been observed in real life. His big idea was that you can figure out Proto-Indo-European religious and political structures through the same process that lets us use the similarities and differences between the Latin, Old Norse, and Sanskrit words for mother - māter, móðir, mātár - to derive the Proto-Indo-European word that they all derive from: *meHtér, however that’s pronounced. Georges Dumezil devoted his career to reconstructing proto-Indo-European society through comparative readings in folklore and mythology. (If you need an introduction or a refresher, click here.) If you’re feeling ambitious, you also might want to read Georges Dumezil’s philological treatise Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-European Representations of Sovreignty. (It’ll probably take you a couple of weeks - no worries, I can wait.) Okay, you’re back? Good. There would be no point in reading this unless you’re already familiar with Cowboy Bebop.
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