April 24, 2020 • 57 mins
Haftober Monsterfest continues with Robert and Joe's 2019 discussion on the origins of Dungeons and Dragons’ ultimate demon lord, the interdimensional beast from “Stranger Things” and an enigma of translated texts and gnostic mysticism.
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
At length. The universal hubbub, wild of stunning sounds and voices,
all confused, borne through the hollow dark, assaults his ear
with loudest vehemence. Thither he plies, undaunted to meet there
whatever power or spirit of the nethermost abyss might in
that noise reside of whom to ask which way the
(00:29):
nearest coast of darkness lies bordering on light. When straight
behold the throne of Chaos and his dark pavilion spread
wide on the wasteful deep, with him enthroned, sat sable,
vested night, eldest of things, the consort of his reign,
And by them stood orcas and eighties and the dreaded
(00:51):
name of dim Rumor next, and chants and tumults and confusion,
all embroil'd and dis gourd with a thousand various mouths.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, A production of
I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, Welcome to Stuff
(01:19):
to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and
I'm Joe McCormick, and I'm so excited. It's my favorite
time of the year. It's October, which is my favorite
month of the year anyway, but it's also my favorite
time of the year at work, because it's Monster Month
here on stuff to blow your mind. That's right, when
we devote the entire month of October and sometimes a
little change two topics that are either obsessed with monsters
(01:41):
or or darkness or horror or terror. Is there anything
even remotely HALLOWEENI We just fully embrace it. It's the
most wonderful time of the year. And so and you know,
as we were coming up with episodes to record this year,
where we you know, our minds turned to things we've
covered in the past. So on one hand, there's an
old episode of the show about the mind flares of
(02:03):
Dungeons and Dragons, uh, and it's led various folks to
request another episode dealing with something from the world of
Dungeons and Dragons. And likewise, last year we did an
episode on the Great Basilisk where we talk about this
concept of not only the monstrous Basilist, but this kind
of uh, you know, tech world futuristic vision of an
(02:27):
all powerful, malevolent AI. And so we decided we we'd
up the Anti this year and discuss uh an entity
that kind of combines both of these themes. And so
we're going to talk about the demogorgan. Now, I would
not be surprised for the largest portion of you out
there are familiar with the idea of a dem ogorgan,
primarily from the recent Netflix show Stranger Things. I guess
(02:50):
it's mainly the first season of that, right, Yeah, I
mean the creature it keeps popping up as well, but
it's mainly that that first excellent season of Stranger Things.
And uh, and think that's a good place to start.
Like the most recent pop culture incarnation of the democ organ,
it's probably one of the best new cinematic monsters that
we've encountered in recent years. Uh, you know, this category
(03:11):
confusion entity that's at once humanoid and be steal but
at times these bipedal and other times it's crawling around
on all fours. It's like a venus flytrap minotaur. Yeah,
that's the other cool aspect of it. It's it's it's
head at times looks like a featureless mask of flesh,
but then it opens up in these these flower petals,
these kind of uh you know, razor toothed flower petals
(03:35):
around this gaping maw. But I also like that it's
a dimension hopper, right, which kind of means it's always
it could pop up anywhere. Yeah, it travels through dimensions, though,
though I'm uncertain if that's part of its natural abilities,
because we see it feeding on an egg in its
own dimension at one point. Uh. And perhaps it takes
to hunting in our world due to the weakening of
(03:55):
the connection between the two. Uh, you know, due to
mad science of course. Um. But if this is the case,
it's still quite proficient a traveling between the worlds through
those rips and tears to acquire food. Right, So it
could actually be a rather mundane predator in its own world.
It's just that Matthew Modine and his psychic projects unleashed
(04:15):
this predator into it made it an invasive species in
our world. Right. Yeah, yeah, like it, like it. It
does pretty well in its own world, but here it
can really go at it, you know, like a Superman
with the yellow sun. Yeah. But of course, in Stranger Things,
we also learned that the kids in the in the story,
they name this creature the democ Organ because they are
actively playing Dungeons and Dragons and they and they are
(04:38):
playing a campaign that involves the democ Organ. Uh. This,
this Prince of Demons is mighty demon lord of just
immense power. Now, Robert, I know that you have a
reputation as a quite cruel dungeon master yourself. So do
you subject to your adventuring travelers to a democ Organ
every now and then? No? Not not no, not yet.
(04:58):
And it's not the kind of thing would you would
inflict on your adventures in a haphazard fashion. It is
one of the most powerful entities in the game, So
it's it's the kind of thing you cap off an
entire campaign with that you would only throw at, you know,
a higher level, like really high level characters. Um. I mean,
I guess you could throw it in haphazardly if you
(05:20):
have just kind of a very casual game where people
have like just immensely powerful characters. In each week you
just battle some things that are tremendously powerful to just
see how it all shakes out. But um, for instance,
in the campaign Out of the Abyss, which is a
campaign that I've been playing in my group that I've
been a dungeon mastering for about four years now, we
are almost at the point where the dem Ogorgan may
(05:43):
be encountered. Yeah, so we've been building up to it.
Do you have Demogorgon que music ready to go when
it happens. Basically, I mean, it's a it's a big deal.
It's uh, you know, we have an enormous figuring that
we've been putting together. It's a it's huge. Okay, Well,
in the Dungeons and Dragons world, what is this demogorgon creature?
It's obviously nothing like what's in Stranger things like that.
(06:05):
It's not a venus fly trap minotaur, right, So in
Dungeons and Dragons, the Demogorgon dates back to nineteen seventy six.
That's when this entity um originated in a supplement titled
Eldric Wizards by Gary Gygax himself and Brian Bloom. And
if you look around online you can find this in
PDF form and it has some you know, some adorably
(06:28):
kind of crude illustrations of what the various creatures would
look like. Those those those the illustrations, and Dungeons Dragons
have come a long way, like the most like the
earliest version of the Demogorgon that is illustrated in this
book is just crude sketch of this, uh, this kind
of two headed, tentacle armed, chicken footed thing with baboon heads, right, yeah,
(06:50):
with baboon heads. But the like it's cute. I mean,
it's like, it's kind of like the monsters in the
Ranking and Bass Middle Earth, and and of course, you know,
part most the big thing Abou Dungeons and Dragons is
that it does take place in the mind, and especially
early on they did, they didn't have elaborate illustrations. You're
supposed to, you know, come up with it yourself. Today
(07:11):
we have elaborate illustrations. The most recent fifth edition illustrations
of the democ Organ are just absolutely beautiful, where it
seems like there's like a burning sun inside of the creature.
But I want to read just a quick description from
that original nineteen seventy six supplement to to properly describe
what the creature looks like, because the basic description has
(07:32):
not changed. Okay, melt my mind with terror. Okay, quoth
Guy GaX and bloom here. Uh. It is contended by
some that this demon lord is supreme and in any event,
he is awesome in his power. This gigantic demon is
eighteen tall and reptilian. His skin is plated with snake
(07:52):
like scales. His body and legs are those of a
giant lizard. His twin necks resemble snakes, and his thick
tail is fort Dimcgorgan has two heads which bear the
visages of evil baboons or perhaps mandrils. Rather than having arms,
he has great tentacles. His appearance testifies to his command
of cold blooded things such as serpents, reptiles and octopi.
(08:17):
And Robert, you brought in a glorious figurine that I
now hold in my hand. It's uh, it's very nice. Yeah,
this is a small one. The big one I couldn't
even bring in because it's just it's it's too enormous.
It would alarm people. Uh and they would they would
wonder what was about to befall them. So so yeah, basically,
this description, though, holds up. It's been tweaked a little bit.
I think at one point the heads were more hyena
(08:38):
like because, as I mentioned earlier, we've had various editions
of dungeons and dragons were on addition five at this point.
Uh and uh and in each edition has brought about
various changes to the rules, the mechanic, to the lore.
And we'll get into some of that in a minute.
As it relates to de mcgorgan um and then the
art who has mostly gotten just tremendously better over the years.
(08:59):
And again the most recent fifth edition art is absolutely
splendid to behold. But of course, another thing to keep
in mind is that the democ organ is a demon,
a demon lord. And given the moral panics surrounding supposed
Satanists and the the the quote unquote dangers of D
and D back in the nineteen eighties, the various demons
and devils in the game Lore lost their titles at
(09:22):
one point. UM. So when I originally started playing back
in the nineties, Uh, these various devils and demons were
known as uh the tanari uh instead of actually referring
to them as demons. So it's a rebrand. Yeah, it
was a rebrand because everyone was freaking out about imagined Satanist,
(09:43):
which I think we've discussed on the show before. The
Satanism as presented in the Satanic Panic of the eighties,
Uh did not exist, no one, No one has actually
no ritual um you know, sacrificial uh worship of Satan
has has occurred in human history. Uh, certainly not on
(10:07):
the organized scale that uh that you see described in
some of these moral panics. But but anyway, Yeah, then
the demonic edge was taken off the game for a while,
and if you wish to invoke such entities you had
to you had to bust out an older monster manual. Thankfully,
the Demons of the Abyss and the Devils of the
Nine Hells have made the return, and Demcgregan himself is
(10:31):
is not only back, but he's a he's a cover batty,
you know, he's he's there on the cover of Out
of the Abyss and is the uh the creature that
you battle at the very end, and you know he's
he's not only fearsome physically, he's also a highly intelligent entity.
He has an intelligent score of twenty, which is you know,
like like top of the d Twentykay, how high does
(10:53):
it go? Is twenty the most intelligent? Yeah, twenty is
is is tremendously impressive. So a John von Neumann kind
of thing, Like it's I think like a ten is
is more in keeping with like, you know, sort of
average human intelligence. This thing is beyond that, Like eighteen
is is like really high for a starting character in
(11:15):
in Dungen'son Dragons starting mortal character. But the dem o
Gorgon does not use this intelligence for the good of humankind.
The de m Ocgorgan is gonna, what is gonna design
the most nefarious financial instruments that have ever been uh imagined?
Oh yeah, I mean he's he's completely chaotically evil. Um.
He's also known as the Sibilant Beast and the Master
(11:35):
of the Spiraling depths. And uh. But in those two heads,
each one has a name in dungeons and dragon's lore,
one is Annual and the other is Hathoradia. Uh. I
guess I don't know that anyone ever actually speaks to
one head or the other. You just kind of speak
to the de m Ocgorgon. Maybe that's the way to
beat it. You get them fighting each other. Maybe, I
don't know. I mean it basically, he's this wonderful embodiment
(11:59):
of like chao us and disorder, and I you know,
I think he wonderfully you know, embodies the sense of
maddening division. Kind of a perfect demon for modern times especially.
And I also like to think of the two heads
is representing like the different hemispheres of the brain. Okay,
so maybe only one of them can do a complex language.
Maybe so. Yeah, But but also I like the idea
(12:22):
that the demon lords like are these mighty things, but
perhaps they exist because they're they're like the accumulated runoff
of all like human inequity, you know. And of course
there are other demon lords as well, and they all
plot against each other and war eternally. They represent different
depths of moral sin. So Demogorgan's most prominent rivals are Orcus,
(12:43):
the demon Lord of undeath, as well as the demon
Lord of perversion gras It, and the Master of Lies
fraz are Blue. But he's also opposed by Bahamat, you know,
Gou and then of course Jubilex and Zuktimi, who we've
mentioned in passing on the show before. Wait, so one
of the rivals as Orcus, and now we began this
episode with a reading from John Milton's Paradise Lost, in
(13:05):
which the name Orcus is invoked. They don't really explain.
Milton doesn't go into who Orcus is there, but uh
so I didn't expect Orcas to come back. Also in
the D and D lawre here, Yeah, I mean Orcus
was a Roman god of the underworld who punished oathbreakers.
And oh and by the way, he also has his
own designated trans Newtonian object in zero four a two Orcas.
(13:30):
Not all demon lords can make that claim that they
actually have some sort of cosmic body named after them.
But this gets to the point that that d n
D is this wonderful mix of influences, fusing various twentieth
century fantasy and sci fi works with the mythology and
flow in folklore to create its worlds. So that's so
(13:51):
Orcus obviously comes from Roman mythology. Uh, there are other
creatures we mentioned Bahammed. Bahama is the entity that the
Knights Templars were accused of shipping in the fourteenth century
and we're subsequently eradicated for uh. So you know that's
where that name comes from. But then there's dem Ogregan
to consider, and uh and obviously the name predates dungeons
(14:12):
and Dragons because it pops up in Paradise Lost. Yeah,
so you would I think, obviously expect given the word demogorgon,
that this is something from Greek mythology, right, just sounds
like something straight out of Greeks were of course, like
like Medusa, So you might think, oh, well, this is
some this is some Greek monster that gets turned into
(14:33):
a god at some point. But despite what you would
think from the name, you will not find the Demogorgon
in ancient Greek mythology. You flipped through the works of Homer,
labors of Hercules, myths of Antalympus, cults of Athena or Apollo,
you're gonna find no Demogorgon anywhere. So where does this
beast come from? Well, we've we've considered pop culture, and
(14:55):
we've considered, uh, you know, a current twenty first century
Netflix show. We've considered a twentieth century role playing game.
So what we're gonna do is we're gonna dive deeper
and we're gonna go into the literary world and continue
to follow follow the shadow of Demogorgan through the spiraling depths.
But first we're going to take a break. Alright, we're back,
(15:18):
all right. So we've been talking about the monster, the
demon lord, the dem o organ as it is represented
in Dungeons and Dragons, and Robert has some experience with that.
But we now have said that we need to go
deeper because we're trying to figure out where this monster
came from. If it doesn't come from what you would
guess based on its name Greek mythology, right, and our
next step is to look at its very the way
(15:40):
its name is invoked in various works of literature. So
one of the books I was looking at on this
count was a book called Dangerous Games. What the Moral
Panic over role Playing Games says about play, religion, and
imagined worlds, by Joseph P. Lacock, And uh, this is
this is an interesting looking book that I really want
to read more from. Uh. But the author mentions that
(16:02):
Demcgorgan pops up in a number of early modern and
Romantic works. Uh. Interestingly enough, Leacock also highlights an author
and RPG named that I've brought up on the show before.
You may are Barker, Um, you know the this is
this guy who is known for creating these books and
this role playing world of Tucamel, which is this fantasy.
(16:24):
It's the sci fi fantasy world that depends less, far
less on Western models of of history and religion and
uh and myth and more on East Asian models. So uh, there,
if you're into fantasy, I recommend picking up those books.
There are a little old fashioned in some respects, like
they're very much in the mold of like kind of
(16:44):
a swashbuckling, uh you know, male centered adventure. But the
world that he created is really something to behold. But anyway,
he he points out quote, the prominence of original fantasy
religions in D and D as opposed to adaptations of
Christian saints and demons can be attributed largely to the
influence of M. A. R. Barker. Uh, because of Barker
(17:07):
was was very active in that whole scene at the time,
these various individuals like Gygax and others who were creating
these role playing worlds. But as should be clear from
us talking about John Milton, the demo organ is not
something that is a purely created, uh you know, fantasy
religion creature. It actually does have more of a history.
It goes back into Christian mythology in some way. So again,
(17:32):
whence the demo organ? Can we trace it back through literature? Yeah, well,
let's look at some of the key examples of literary
demogorgon that pop up. Well, let's start with Milton's Paradise Lost.
We read that fantastic quote from it in our cold
open Uh. Paradise Losses, of course, the masterpiece of John Milton,
who lives sixteen o eight through sixteen seventy four, and
(17:53):
which he sets no higher goal than to quote justify
the ways of God demand which I I always love that,
like they just just really going for it with this work,
you know. Um. And to achieve this lofty goal, he
retells the creation and the angelic fall and the fall
of man, and in doing so creates a Satan that
(18:15):
is uh, in some people's eyes, problematically uh, sympathetic and tragic. Now,
I think you can easily say that Milton was not
like sympathetic towards Satan. He was a devout, devoted Protestant Christian.
But I've seen I've seen that criticism leveled at him,
particularly in when I was growing up reading some particularly
(18:38):
various like Christian fundamentalists of views of demonology and the
treatment of demons and angels, and literature that would charge
another like, oh Milton made uh, he made Satan way
too likable. Yeah. I mean, I think if you've got
no tolerance at all, uh, then then yeah, might might
go too far for you. But I think one thing
he sets up to achieve and does impaired. I was
(19:00):
lost as he shows sin as as going astray, you know,
as folly as like following, uh, following a misguided path
and not always just kind of this like uh indefinable
miasma of horrible nous. People often like to think of
the devil is like something you can't even look at.
(19:20):
But Milton's devil. I mean the kind of scary thing
about the devil in classic conceptions of it is that
he's seductive and that he makes good arguments. Yeah again,
I mean de mcgregan and dn D has that intelligence
of twenty wisdom of seventeen. Uh, you'd expect as much
at least from Satan. Yeah. Now, in Paradise lost, of course,
(19:41):
Satan ultimately he loses a war in Heaven. He falls
down with his demons. They get cast into Hell. They
have a big debate about what to do about this.
Some demons counsel that they should, you know, take up arms.
I think Malok says, let's go fight again. Some say,
you know, we're down here, we can just let's make
the best of it. You know, Hell's not so bad.
And but but Satan gets to this idea He's going
(20:02):
to get revenge by by corrupting God's favorite creation, the human.
And spoiler, he pulls it off. But yeah, this epic poem,
you can see, you can almost think of it as
kind of a reboot or kind of like an amazing
piece of of biblical fan fiction where he fleshes out
this idea of a war in heaven and he adds
(20:25):
in all sorts of dramatic and gnarly details. One I
always liked is that he forges a sword for the
Archangeel Michael, uh, that is powerful enough to cut through anything,
including the flesh of other angels. God forges the sword,
you mean? Yeah? Yeah, who did I say forged it? Oh?
I thought it sounded like you're saying Satan did. Okay, Well,
I say, I'm probably thinking Saranto because we just did that, right,
(20:47):
But to be clear, God made the sword. Yeah that's good. Well,
I mean, I feel like there's so much stuff in
Paradise Lost. And we were talking before we came into
the studio here about Dante as well, where there are
these great of literature within the Christian literary tradition that
get incorporated into people's theology, like they forget that stuff
(21:08):
that's just in Paradise Lost isn't actually in the Bible, right, Yeah,
And and we can thank Dante for the pretty much
the whole concept of of purgatory becoming so prominent in
when in Western traditions. But but yeah, so so in
creating Paradise Lost, Milton he drags in a number of
names and develops a more demon names that do pop
(21:29):
up in the Bible, like the Elzeba, Belial, Mammon, Moloc.
But then he also drags in Orcus and dim Ogorgon,
and then there are seemingly new creations like most must
saber Uh, the architect of Pandemonium, the capital of Hell.
So dim mcgorgan is mentioned in book two and we
heard it at the start of this episode described and
(21:51):
this is a section of Paradise Lost that describes Satan's
voyage out of Hell with sin and death. So the
dem Ogregan is basically a back ound player. It's texture. Yeah,
just add a little texture to the scene as Satan
crosses the wilds of chaos and night that spanned the
void between Heaven and Hell. And there are other literary
invocations of the Demogorgon that I would say are basically
(22:12):
the same. They use the demogorgan not as a major
figure of significance, but something is sort of texture to
establish that a place is sort of ultimately abandoned by
God and and wretched, you know, like it's just really horrible.
And another great example of this is the way the
demogorgan is invoked in Edmund Spencer's The Fairy Queen. Uh So,
(22:34):
if you've never read it, The Fairy Queen is also
it's like Paradise Lost an English epic poem. It's from
the sixteenth century, so it's earlier than Paradise Lost, and
it's this really long poem about virtues and the adventures
of chivalrous nights. It's one of those that's, uh, you know,
to modern readers. I think it has a whole lot
of interest in it, and there is some great poetry
(22:55):
in it, but also it can be very long and
ponderous and kind of stuffy in some ways, because I mean,
you can only read so much about piety and shipp um.
But it's long been interpreted as containing a lot of
allegorical representations of present figures and politics from the Elizabethan era.
When it was written, I think I was reading about
how Spencer um he secured himself a really nice pension
(23:18):
from the Elizabethan court. By presenting the poem to Queen Elizabeth.
But again, the Demogorgon here does not appear as a
main character, but sort of as a bit of character
for the landscape. So just to read one stanza in
which it is invoked. Therefore desirous the end of all
their days to know and them to enlarge with long
extent by wondrous skill and many hidden ways to the
(23:42):
three fatal sisters house. She went far underground from tract
of living, went down in the bottom of the deep abyss,
where dim Ogorgan, in dull darkness, pent far from the
view of God's in Heaven's bliss. This hideous chaos keeps
their dreadful dwelling. Is so this character is going She's
(24:02):
going down into a into a dark, godforsaken place. And
how do you signal places dark and god forsaken? How
do you show places evil and far from God? Well,
you mentioned it's where the demogorgan hangs out. So if
the Red Cross Night stands for piety and holiness, the
Demogorgon stands for unholiness and satanic chaos. Now another work
that's uh that's often invoked that mentions the demogorgan is
(24:26):
another sixteenth century work. It's an Italian epic poem by
uh Lodovico Ariosto, a titled Orlando Furioso, which is a
poem that concerns the night Orlando, who is known in
French traditions as Roland Uh. Now, at least in some
versions and translations, it does mention Demogorgon quote the ruler
(24:51):
of fates. But as far as I could tell, again,
he's just background. He's just texture that's added to this,
to a particular scene. All right. So this gets us
back to the fifteenth sixteenth century UM. And so we
see by then that the democ organ is being invoked
in UH literature written by Christians as some kind of
(25:12):
infernal demons, some bad thing. Maybe it has something to
do with fate, maybe it has something to do with chaos.
And there's an earlier source that came across that's a
hundred years or so before this UH, the fourteenth century
Latin encyclopedia of pagan gods and their relationships, known as
Boccaccio's Gena Loggia deorum Gentilium or the Genealogy of the
(25:34):
Gods of the Gentiles. This was written by the Italian
poet Giovanni Boccaccio, and Boccaccio apparently was commissioned to sort
of like put together this, this compendium of all the
bad old gods, you know, the pagan stuff back then,
and show the relationships to each other to make a
family tree. I found an addition and analysis by Ernest Hatch.
(25:55):
Wilkins actually could not find an English translation of this.
I think there might be one out there somewhere, but
maybe it's not available online. Um but but anyway, Wilkins,
in this nineteen edition from the University of Chicago Press,
was discussing what is covered in this book and apparently
in attempting to create a family tree of all pagan gods.
(26:19):
Boccaccio regards the dem o organ as the original pagan deity,
like the great great grandfather of Jupiter or Zeus, from
which all other pagan deities are descended. So the family
tree just starts right at the top Demogorgon. Alright, So
if you're if you're looking at various pagan gods from
(26:40):
a from this Christian standpoint, where pagan gods are a
bad thing and perhaps are actually demons, then later that's
where we getting the idea that the demogorgan is something
primal and perhaps uh vile in nature, the very first God.
How strange. Now, it turns out this isn't the first
reference to a demogorgan and Christian literature, and we will
(27:03):
find an earlier mention of it later on. But before
we move on to that, I wanted to talk about
what I think is one of the most interesting literary
depictions of the Demogorgon, definitely the most interesting I've come across,
and it's in Percy bish Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. This is,
of course Mary's husband, Yes, yes, the husband of the
(27:24):
author of Frankenstein. Percy Bis Shelley was an English Romantic poet.
This is a lyric drama, so it's a drama sort
of written in verse. The play is a response to
the Greek myth of Prometheus, and Shelly first published it
in eighteen twenty and he explicitly presented it as this
as a response to the play Prometheus Bound by the
(27:48):
ancient Greek playwright Escalus. So the myth of Prometheus you
might know it well, but just to refresh, it goes
something like this, Prometheus was one of a race of
deities in ancient Greek legion known as the Titans, and
the Titans came before the gods of Olympus. The Titans
were offspring from the union of Uranus the heavens and
(28:10):
Gaea the earth, and they ruled the earth until Chronus,
the king of the Titans, was dethroned and his allies
were defeated by his son Zeus and the Olympian gods.
This is the War of the Titans, or the titanum
achi um. So Prometheus was one of the Titans, the
son of the Titan Yapidus, but he took the side
(28:31):
of Zeus in the war between the Olympians and the Titans,
so he's still around among the Olympian gods. And Zeus,
of course, is a creep. As a place Zeus is,
you just set your watch to it. He's going to
be a creep in a jerk. Zeus doesn't want mortal
humans down on earth like us, to have power and
knowledge like the gods, so he takes this crucial step
(28:54):
in this myth of hiding fire from the humans. He
takes fire from the earth. He hides it a Mount Olympus.
He says human can't have it, and Prometheus, the Titan
instead is sympathetic to humans, and so what he does
is he steals fire from where Zeus had hidden it
on Olympus, and he takes it down to share with
the mortals below. And this is a trope that we
(29:16):
see in various mythologies. So, for instance, there's a there's
a nearly identical role in Chinese myth of the fire driller,
who essentially does the same thing. And then we see
this again in so many stories. There's some sort of
knowledge of you know, some sort of generally, it's basically
technological in nature, and it is taken from the gods
(29:36):
one way or the other, borrowed from the gods, and
bestowed either bestowed to humans by some benevolent identity like Prometheus,
or it is just straight up stolen from the gods
by mortals. Well, I think I like the Chinese version
even better because in that the god who brings the
fire doesn't it explicitly brings the technological means to make fire,
(29:59):
not just the fire itself. So the fire drill. Of course,
you know, if you ever used a bow drill, it's
not so easy, but you can make fire that way.
I think Prometheus is usually depicted as bringing like a
burning branch or something that. Yeah, something like that, And
granted that makes for a much better sculpture of painting,
right this naked Titan with the with with this highly
symbolic you know, a flaming torture branch. But through the
(30:23):
years Prometheus's gift to the humans, I think it is
more often interpreted along the lines of the fire Driller,
where he's it's not just fire. Prometheus symbolizes the power
from the heavens who betrays the leader God and brings
down general technology and knowledge and power and succor to
(30:43):
the humans, which which it's interesting that I mean Prometheus
and the figure of Prometheus and the figure of of
Satan have a lot in common, right, oh kind of yeah,
because I mean, yes, Satan. One of the things that's
interesting about the story of Satan in the Garden of
Eden is that Satan does not lie to the humans.
You know, he's presented as doing bad, but he he
(31:04):
encourages them to uh to violate God's law in the
garden and eat from the tree that is forbidden to them.
But he says, you can eat from this tree and
you will not die as you've been told you will
and it It turns out it's true. They eat and
it doesn't kill them, except you could make the argument
that maybe, well maybe it makes them mortal in the
long run. But I mean, basically, he's a disruptor, to
put it in like Silicon Valley terms, right, Like he's
(31:26):
he's trying to disrupt creation. Um. But so in the
Greek myth, of course, Prometheus being nice to the humans
and betraying Zeus, both the mortals and Prometheus are punished
for this. The punishment for humans is a sequence of
events that leads to the opening of Pandora's Box, out
of which flow all the hardships and frailty of human life.
(31:47):
You get plague, you get toiled to survive all that stuff,
and a little bit of hope left over. I guess yeah.
In the bottom uh, Prometheus is punished in a more
explicit way. He is bound to a rock in the
Caucasus Mountains, and not only has he chained up, but
Zeus sends a nasty eagle to peck out his liver
(32:08):
each day, and unfortunately Prometheus is immortal, so his liver,
as an immortal liver, just keeps regenerating and the eagle
can fly back and peck it out and eat it
again the next day. It sounds like a bad deal. Yeah,
it's a bad deal, But I don't know as far as, like,
you know, offending Zeus goes. I guess it could have
been worse. I guess. So. Now, in response to this myth,
(32:29):
Shelly Percy Bis Shelley in his play takes up the
banner of Prometheus, and he makes him a heroic figure
in the play. And I would say this is not surprising,
because you could definitely say that Percy Shelley was of
a revolutionary temperament theologically, politically, and in literature. He was
very against the old ways and the old powers and
(32:51):
the authorities, and for sort of disruption and revolution and
doing things in a new way. Now, the plot of
Shelley's play is kind of abstract and of loaded with
characters and images of ponderous meaningfulness. So, uh so I'm
gonna try to do a short summary, leaving aside all
the stuff that takes us in other directions and focusing
on how the democ organ comes in. So Prometheus is
(33:14):
we find him in this state where he's bound up
by Zeus. It's Jupiter in this play, but this is
the same figure the King of the Gods, bound up
and tortured by Jupiter for bringing knowledge to the mortals,
and in Shelley's version it is explicitly not just fire
but general knowledge and aid. And there are two other
deities who are sympathetic to Prometheus and they want to
(33:35):
help him. These are the sisters Asia and Panthea, and
they attempt to free Prometheus from his bondage. Asia is
a c nymph who is actually the beloved of Prometheus,
and Panthea is her sister. Led by a dream, the
two of them venture into the underworld and they meet
a character called the democ Organ, who is portrayed as
(33:56):
a kind of supremely powerful but also strangely pass of
and kind of inert force of fate and nothingness, who
is also the son of Jupiter. Now, when they first
come across uh the dem o Organ, the character of
Panthea describes him this way. She says, I see a
mighty darkness filling the seat of power, and rays of
(34:19):
gloom dart round as light from the meridian sun, ungazed
upon and shapeless, neither limb nor form nor outline. Yet
we feel it is a living spirit. This is very
different from the D and D demigorgan, right, Yeah, this
is more like a primordial soup of the deity. Yeah.
So they say that they since there is a living
(34:40):
presence down in the abyss with them, and there's a
mighty darkness, there's something in the gloom, but they can't
see that it has any kind of shape or body.
And then Panthea and Asia have a consultation with the Demogorgon.
They asked him questions and the demogorgan reveals to them
that Jupiter created the world with all the good and
the bad that it entails, and also that even Jupiter
(35:04):
himself is not all powerful, because, in the words of
the demogorgan quote, all spirits are enslaved, which serve things evil.
And he says to Asia, thou knowest if Jupiter be
such or No. Of course, Asia knows that even though
Jupiter is the chief god, Jupiter still does things that
are evil. He serves evil, So there must be some
(35:26):
kind of power over him, because all things that serve
evil have some power over them. So what is even
Jupiter subject to? Well, the demo organ answer is that too, quote,
if the abyssum could vomit forth its secrets, but a
voice is wanting the deep truth is imageless. For what
would it avail to bid the gaze on the revolving world?
(35:47):
What to bid? Speak fate, time, occasion, chance, and change?
To these all things are subject but eternal love. Love.
That's the fifth element. I guess it is. So even Jupiter,
the ultimate god of everything, is subject to the power
of love. Uh, sounds kind of cheesy. But then but
then Asia is like, Okay, well, I love Prometheus, so
(36:10):
when will he be freed? Like wind? Shall the destined
hour arrive for Prometheus to be to be freed? And
the de m o organ just says, behold exclamation point.
So then immediately the Demogorgon travels to heaven where Jupiter
is the Jupiter, the chief god, is in the middle
of a big speech about how awesome he is, and
the dem ogorgan appears and then he just he just
(36:33):
messes up Jupiter. He casts him down, He destroys the
tyrant creator god, and then Prometheus can be freed by
Hercules and reunited with Asia. That's quite a climax. Well,
but it's not the climax. Somehow, this is not the
end of the play. This is like act three of
a five act play. After this, it seems I've never
read the thing in full. I admit I've read some passages.
(36:54):
It seems like after this there is a lot of
like sort of um windy pontificateing about love and virtues
and what is good and right. But anyway, I think
the Demogorgon's role in this story is very interesting. He's well, so,
I kept saying he, but the Demogorgan. Actually, one thing
that's been pointed out by scholars is that the democ
organ has never given a gender uh in in Percy's
(37:18):
play uh In. In other sources it is, I think,
assumed to be a he, but there's no there's no
gender in Prometheus Unbound. So the Demogorgan, whoever they are,
whatever they are, is depicted as in some kind of
infernal phantom of the underworld, but also a liberating force
for positive good, overthrowing the tyrannical order of creation at
(37:40):
the appointed hour uh Though interestingly, I would say the
demogorgan doesn't really seem to act out of their own volition.
It's almost as if, um they are somehow triggered into
this act by the visit from Asia and Panthea, like
it's the love for Prometheus from Asia that was faded
to proceed the appointed hour of Jupiter's destruction and the
(38:01):
liberation of the world. Another thing that's interesting here about
Shelley's work, So we talked about how the Demogorgon does
not actually come from Greek mythology, even though he's being
retro insurgent into like classical mythology here Greek and Roman
kind of blended mythology here. Um, what would the word
DeMorgan mean if it actually were a Greek word. Well,
(38:23):
you've got the apparent roots demos and gorgon, like the
people's gorgon, like democracy, and then gorgon again, the monster
the of which Medusa is a member of the species.
But actually the gorgon name for Medusa that has a
root in Greek too. It's from the word gorgos, which
means something like terrible or grim, you know, terror inducing.
(38:46):
So the demogorgan could literally be translated as the people's terror,
like the terror of the masses of people, which is
a very interesting intersection with the idea of like a
long faded revolution to dethrone tyrant kings and unword the
gods and of course we know, uh, Percy Shelley was
a supporter of the French Revolution. He believed in atheism,
(39:07):
he believed in republicanism, not to be confused with like
the Republican Party of today, like in the context of
the time, that was representative government as opposed to monarchy. Um.
And so I think it could be tempting to think
of like the French Revolution as Shelley's demigorgon the people's terror,
like this inevitable swell of justice that washes tyrants from
(39:28):
their thrones, but at the same time contains a terrifying
and mighty darkness that can't really be seen or understood.
I like that the people's terror. I mean, yeah, I
don't know. I don't know if if Shelley himself would
have seen that, uh seen that comparison, because I think
he may have had a more, I don't know, a
(39:50):
less nuanced view of the guillotine saying. And of course
this introduces the idea of the devic organ as as
being like potential like political candidate, perhaps in in our
upcoming elections. If if you're if you're inclined to use
a right in candidate, go demogorgan the just rage of
the people, that is without form or shape. Now one
(40:13):
more example of demogorgan popping up in uh in in
in a work of literature. Uh is is a story
essentially a short story from Voltaire Voltaire Live through seventeen
seventy eight. And I've never read this one before I'd
read I'd read some works of Voltaire in the past,
(40:34):
but at anyway, this one is titled Plato's Dream, in
which the Demogorgon is presented as a genie who witnesses
the initial creation um of the world by this primordial
force called the demi urge, and along with its fellow genies. Uh.
The dem Ogregan is granted a portion of the creation too,
(40:55):
then uh you know, to then finish into a functioning world.
The demogorgan is given the task of creating Earth and
uh and is then critiqued and criticized by his fellow
genies for making such a mixed up planet. And so
there's a part here I want to quote where the
demogorgan responds to his critics and says, quote, it is
(41:17):
an easy matter to find fault, good folks, said the genie.
But do you imagine it is so easy to form
an animal who, having the gift of reason and free will,
shall not sometimes abuse his liberty. Do you think that,
in rearing between nine and ten thousand different plants, it
is so easy to prevent some few from having noxious qualities?
(41:38):
Do you suppose that with a certain quantity of water, sand,
and mud, you could make a globe that should have
neither seas nor deserts. As for you, my sneering friend,
I think you have just finished the planet Jupiter. Let
us see now what figure you make with your great
belts and your long nights with four moons to enlighten them.
(41:59):
Let us examine you or world and see whether the
inhabitants you have made or exempt from follies or diseases.
I guess we'll just have to wait for the Europa
Probe to form us to resolve this one. Right, So,
there's not much to really I feel like uncover in
this one, but there are there's at least one detail
in this that will become critical. Uh. In our next
(42:21):
section of of the podcast, after we come back from
a break, we will get into the true abyssal origins
of the demogorgan than. Alright, we're back, So we've charted
the path of the demogorgan through much literature throughout especially
the Christian world, and its role in some interesting sort
(42:43):
of revolutionary sentiments as expressed through literature like Prometheus Unbound
or in Voltaire story. But we're trying to find the
origin of this. Where does the Demogorgon actually come from?
If it doesn't come from classic Greek mythology. Well, the
origin is discussed in a nineteen sixty four book titled
(43:03):
The Discarded Image and Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature,
written by none other than C. S. Lewis. In fact,
it was C. S. Lewis's last book before he died,
and it deals with medieval cosmology. He turns our attention
to the fourth book of the thebe A by Stadius
the First. Stadius lived uh CE forty five through and
(43:27):
this is an epic poem written in Latin about the
Theban cycle. And here the author alludes to a deity
that shall not be named, a quote sovereign of the
threefold world. And then early Christian author Lactantius, who lived
two fifty through wrote a commentary on this work and
(43:47):
stated that Stadius was referring in in fact to the
Greek Uh, demi organ this or creator quote the god
whose name and is unlawful to know. So we're talking
so demi organ from which we get Demogorgon and h.
(44:07):
And then Lewis writes the following to sum this up. Quote,
this is plain sailing the demi urge or workman being
the creator in the Timaeus. But there are two variants
in the manuscripts. One is Demogorgona, the other Demogorgon. From
the later of these corruptions, later ages evolved a completely
new deity, Demogorgon, who was to enjoy a distinguished literary
(44:32):
career in Boccaccio's Genealogy of the Gods, in Spencer, in
Milton and in Shelley. This is perhaps the only time
a scribal blunder underwent an apotheosis. Oh that's amazing, uh
and just so. In a mythological context, of course, Apotheosis
here reversed to the process of a human being being
(44:54):
deified or something being made into a higher being, like
a god or a star or heavenly object being taken
up into heaven. Ancient kings were sometimes made into gods,
and legendary heroes like Hercules, sometimes lived lives that were
so worthy or so notable, they were assumed into the
pantheon and became God. So I think that's what he's
saying here, is that somebody made a blunder in copying
(45:17):
a manuscript or in translating, in understanding what a word
meant in an older book, and through that scribal error,
we got a brand new deity such that, you know,
a thousand years later, Boccaccio would say, this deity is
the original macdaddy deity, like the number, like the Pagan
(45:38):
God before all the other ones, and it just comes
from a mistranslation or misreading of a word. And the
word that was misread or a mistranslated is the dimmy Urge,
which which curiously enough is cited in that Voltaire short story. Right,
So it seems like Voltaire was kind of on the
right track with the association here. Uh And and this
(46:01):
is great because the demi Urge is one of my
favorite characters from any mythology in the world. But but
its role is complicated and varies across different traditions, including
like Platonic schools of philosophy and religion in the you know,
in the centuries following Plato's actual teachings and in various
Gnostic religions. I'll try to give a general summary that
(46:24):
applies to multiple lines of tradition that have sort of
similar attributes, but just be aware that there are a
lot of different things that are all sort of versions
of the demi urge. The word demi urge, as uh
As Lewis mentioned, comes from the Greek. In its original form,
is just a common noun that means something like craftsmen.
You know, it's somebody who makes things, sculptor, maker, producer.
(46:47):
But within these religious points of view or in in
these philosophies and cosmologies, the demi urge is a figure
that creates the material world, is the creator. But apart
from many other religions, this does not mean that he
is the ultimate creator God or that he is good.
He is, i would say, variously portrayed as is everything,
(47:09):
ranging from kind of neutral and bumbling to actively malevolent.
And to give an example from one strain of gnosticism,
in the Gnostic text known as the Apocryphon of John,
the dimmi urge figure is this foolish, arrogant, wicked deity
called yelled Both who creates the material bodies of humans.
(47:31):
I think he also maybe creates the material world or
some aspects of it um and humans. The humans that
he created end up with souls when they are inadvertently
contaminated by a spark or a light from the higher
nobler plane of being known as the play roma, which
means something like fullness. And so you've got the ple roma,
(47:52):
the fullness, the real world, the real greater place, which
is is immaterial in nature, and then you've got the
the crappy material world that Yaldaboath made. And now we're
stuck in that thing. And Yaldaboath resents the fact that
humans have this spark from the Pleroma and tries to
fight against it. So to do so, he tries to
(48:13):
keep humans confused and in the dark, so we're always
fumbling around in this kind of baffling material hell, which
is our everyday world. And the Gnostics within this tradition
believe that you can only escape the horrors of the
material world by becoming privy to secret knowledge. That knowledge
is the noses, the secret knowledge that explains the real world.
(48:35):
And this is this is how you transcend the secret mythology,
the secret rituals that give you access to the true,
fuller reality behind this material illusion that controls our lives.
And you can actually see a connection to Platonic philosophy.
Even if this sounds like a very kind of strange,
complicated theological take on on the creation of the world,
(48:56):
it sounds a lot like Plato's cave, right, Yeah, yeah,
it does. I mean also that the basic spirit of
this is also reflected in other faiths. I mean, the
idea of there being a secret reality of their of
there being some sort of cycle that we need to
break free from. I mean you see that in say,
you know, Hindu and Buddhist traditions, and this idea of
the spark of something more divine being like trapped in
(49:19):
the mud of our bodies. How you see that also
reflected in even more recent creations like scientology. Oh totally,
I think, yeah, absolutely. I would say gnostic theology reflects
something that is a very common belief among humans, and
you can see how often it appears, not just in
other religions, but in all kinds of pop culture. I mean,
echoes of the gnostic worldview bounce around constantly even through
(49:43):
contemporary culture, whether we're conscious of it or not, and
whether the creators of these pieces of culture, or conscious
of it or not. If I mean, if you've seen
the matrix, you already have a sort of baseline understanding
of gnostic cosmology. You just replace the evil computers and
the agents with cosmic realms and wicked ar cons like
the demi Urge. The demmy Urge sort of created a
(50:05):
material matrix for us to live in, when in reality
we are beings from this better immaterial world and we
have to find ways to escape and get back to it.
So you're saying we are star dust, we are golden,
we are billion year old carbon, and we have to
find our way back to the garden. Yes, but you
can only get back to the garden if you teach
your children well, because it is the secret knowledge that
(50:28):
is required to get you there. And most people are
never going to be let in on the secret. They're
just sort of going about there, you know, their everyday life,
toiling after material things without understanding that the material world
is bad and fake. But I love this idea that
the demmy Urge being this creator of the material world
who's at the at the very least bumbling and at
(50:51):
worst some kind of devilish thing that that hates us
and wants to trick us into living bad, wrong lives.
I could see this mistrans lation leading to the creation
of the demo organ figure being an excellent modern reworking
of the Gnostic theology and being a part of that
demi Urge's plan, like the demi Urge hides the true
nosis about its wicked role in creating the material world
(51:14):
and these filthy bodies of ours by causing a scribal
error that hides its existence, and instead it gets everybody
focused on this fake illusory demon or primordial god, the Demogorgon,
And then you're scared of the Demogorgon or you're in
all of its primeval darkness and shapeless presence, so you
forget that you need to be seeking the nosis to
(51:34):
escape this wretched unreality. Uh and uh yeah, yeah, I
mean if you're ultimately if you're trying to envision the
ultimate evil power in a in a in a fantasy world.
Uh yeah, this this sounds like the This is the
Prince of Demons right here. You know. I weirdly kept
thinking about the demi urriage when we were recently talking
(51:55):
about that book I read by Philip Ball about quantum
mechanics that it's called Beyond Weird. It's a great book.
It's a new book from this year last year about
quantum mechanics. And one of the things that I think
is really great about the book is it doesn't let
you off the hook. It doesn't just let you say, wow,
quantum mechanics sure does seem weird and then kind of
shake your head and move on. Like it. It tries
(52:17):
to force you to look at it. It does the
thing from like Clockwork Orange where it holds your eyelids
open and says, no, look at this and pay attention.
And you know, one of the things that you walk
away from that with is that, Okay, you know, I'm
not saying that physical reality isn't real, but it it
makes you think that whatever way we're interacting with the
(52:40):
world on a day to day basis, you know, the
kind of reality we perceive with like objects you can
touch and and see and know their place and all that,
that is not the ultimate like arbiter of what reality is.
Like your perception of reality is not necessarily the most
accurate way of understanding reality, even though it, you know,
(53:00):
it seems to work good enough to get you through life,
So how could it be wrong? But yet we you know,
we do experiments in physics all the time. Now that
that just show you over and over again that the
way you have of making sense of the world is
some kind of derivative, second order kind of grasp of physics,
or you have no intuitive way of understanding quantum reality,
(53:23):
you know what happens before decoherence and everything, so that
ultimately there is this there is this deeper truth in
the universe that that we are not inherently privy to.
We're only privy to it via uh technology, via science.
Uh these are essentially gnostic tools of elevation. That that's
(53:44):
how you get the noses as you do a double
slit experiment. Well, I've enjoyed this, uh, this journey that
we've taken, you know, because it feels, i mean, part
of it seems like the natural destination for an exploration
of the Demock organ that it would tie back to
this primordial being that's wrapped in gnostic mystery. But on
(54:04):
the other hand, I love that it also hinges incredibly
upon just a scribal blunder. You know that it's a
it's it's this thing that was actually you know, it's
never really real in the way that we uh we
might you know, attribute it as having been. It was
never actually UH an entity that was worshiped or even
(54:25):
factored into any actual myth cycle. No, it is wholly
without shape and out of the darkness. It is the
figure that Asia and Panthea go to visit, and you know,
it just waits there until it's hour comes round at last. Yeah. Yeah,
And I also love how we got to let's see
if we got to to turn to Joni Mitchell, Crosby
Stills and Nash uh C s Lewis, Um Milton and
(54:48):
of course Gary Gygax to understand it all a wonderful
motley crew for those wooden ships on the water. All right, well,
we're gonna close it out right there. But obviously I
imagined in am of you have thoughts about the demogorgan,
either the Netflix version or the Dungeons and Dragons incarnation,
or perhaps some of the literary UH incarnations that we've
(55:09):
discussed here as well, and of course we would love
to hear from you. But stay tuned, because again this
entire month of October, he's going to be UH Halloween
themed as it has been in the past. Uh, We're
gonna have all new monstrosities to consider. Uh, tying in
as much science as we possibly can. Have we ever
(55:30):
done an episode on the science of Medusa? Snakes for hair?
Is there something there? Something I don't know? I mean,
I've I've covered at least blogged about Medusa back in
the day, and I think I did maybe a monster
science video about Medusa. But that would be an interesting
one to to to explore again, because the Medusa is
a is a fascinating monster, and then some of the
(55:51):
things we've done with the Medusa are kind of monstrous.
Uh yeah, I could. I would be up for a
Medusa exploration. Bring it all right. In the meantime, if
you want to support the show, the best thing you
can do is make sure you have subscribed, and then
rate and review us wherever you have the power to
do so. And don't forget about invention. Monsters are great,
but the real monster is always human endeavor and human invention.
(56:15):
And that's what we explore. Invention is a journey through
human techno history. Really, it's a it's a celebration, or
at least a contemplation in some in many cases of
the fire of Prometheus. Yeah, the things we made, how
they made us, where they came from. Yeah, So make
sure you have checked that show out as well, and
(56:35):
make sure you subscribe. Rate and review helps us out huge,
thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.
If you have any feedback on this episode and we'd
like to share it with us, If you'd like to
get in touch just to say hi or suggest a
topic for the future, you can email us at contact
at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to
(57:05):
Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeart Radio's How
Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit
the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
At length. The universal hubbub, wild of stunning sounds and voices,
all confused, borne through the hollow dark, assaults his ear
with loudest vehemence. Thither he plies, undaunted to meet there
whatever power or spirit of the nethermost abyss might in
that noise reside of whom to ask which way the
(00:29):
nearest coast of darkness lies bordering on light. When straight
behold the throne of Chaos and his dark pavilion spread
wide on the wasteful deep, with him enthroned, sat sable,
vested night, eldest of things, the consort of his reign,
And by them stood orcas and eighties and the dreaded
(00:51):
name of dim Rumor next, and chants and tumults and confusion,
all embroil'd and dis gourd with a thousand various mouths.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, A production of
I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, Welcome to Stuff
(01:19):
to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and
I'm Joe McCormick, and I'm so excited. It's my favorite
time of the year. It's October, which is my favorite
month of the year anyway, but it's also my favorite
time of the year at work, because it's Monster Month
here on stuff to blow your mind. That's right, when
we devote the entire month of October and sometimes a
little change two topics that are either obsessed with monsters
(01:41):
or or darkness or horror or terror. Is there anything
even remotely HALLOWEENI We just fully embrace it. It's the
most wonderful time of the year. And so and you know,
as we were coming up with episodes to record this year,
where we you know, our minds turned to things we've
covered in the past. So on one hand, there's an
old episode of the show about the mind flares of
(02:03):
Dungeons and Dragons, uh, and it's led various folks to
request another episode dealing with something from the world of
Dungeons and Dragons. And likewise, last year we did an
episode on the Great Basilisk where we talk about this
concept of not only the monstrous Basilist, but this kind
of uh, you know, tech world futuristic vision of an
(02:27):
all powerful, malevolent AI. And so we decided we we'd
up the Anti this year and discuss uh an entity
that kind of combines both of these themes. And so
we're going to talk about the demogorgan. Now, I would
not be surprised for the largest portion of you out
there are familiar with the idea of a dem ogorgan,
primarily from the recent Netflix show Stranger Things. I guess
(02:50):
it's mainly the first season of that, right, Yeah, I
mean the creature it keeps popping up as well, but
it's mainly that that first excellent season of Stranger Things.
And uh, and think that's a good place to start.
Like the most recent pop culture incarnation of the democ organ,
it's probably one of the best new cinematic monsters that
we've encountered in recent years. Uh, you know, this category
(03:11):
confusion entity that's at once humanoid and be steal but
at times these bipedal and other times it's crawling around
on all fours. It's like a venus flytrap minotaur. Yeah,
that's the other cool aspect of it. It's it's it's
head at times looks like a featureless mask of flesh,
but then it opens up in these these flower petals,
these kind of uh you know, razor toothed flower petals
(03:35):
around this gaping maw. But I also like that it's
a dimension hopper, right, which kind of means it's always
it could pop up anywhere. Yeah, it travels through dimensions, though,
though I'm uncertain if that's part of its natural abilities,
because we see it feeding on an egg in its
own dimension at one point. Uh. And perhaps it takes
to hunting in our world due to the weakening of
(03:55):
the connection between the two. Uh, you know, due to
mad science of course. Um. But if this is the case,
it's still quite proficient a traveling between the worlds through
those rips and tears to acquire food. Right, So it
could actually be a rather mundane predator in its own world.
It's just that Matthew Modine and his psychic projects unleashed
(04:15):
this predator into it made it an invasive species in
our world. Right. Yeah, yeah, like it, like it. It
does pretty well in its own world, but here it
can really go at it, you know, like a Superman
with the yellow sun. Yeah. But of course, in Stranger Things,
we also learned that the kids in the in the story,
they name this creature the democ Organ because they are
actively playing Dungeons and Dragons and they and they are
(04:38):
playing a campaign that involves the democ Organ. Uh. This,
this Prince of Demons is mighty demon lord of just
immense power. Now, Robert, I know that you have a
reputation as a quite cruel dungeon master yourself. So do
you subject to your adventuring travelers to a democ Organ
every now and then? No? Not not no, not yet.
(04:58):
And it's not the kind of thing would you would
inflict on your adventures in a haphazard fashion. It is
one of the most powerful entities in the game, So
it's it's the kind of thing you cap off an
entire campaign with that you would only throw at, you know,
a higher level, like really high level characters. Um. I mean,
I guess you could throw it in haphazardly if you
(05:20):
have just kind of a very casual game where people
have like just immensely powerful characters. In each week you
just battle some things that are tremendously powerful to just
see how it all shakes out. But um, for instance,
in the campaign Out of the Abyss, which is a
campaign that I've been playing in my group that I've
been a dungeon mastering for about four years now, we
are almost at the point where the dem Ogorgan may
(05:43):
be encountered. Yeah, so we've been building up to it.
Do you have Demogorgon que music ready to go when
it happens. Basically, I mean, it's a it's a big deal.
It's uh, you know, we have an enormous figuring that
we've been putting together. It's a it's huge. Okay, Well,
in the Dungeons and Dragons world, what is this demogorgon creature?
It's obviously nothing like what's in Stranger things like that.
(06:05):
It's not a venus fly trap minotaur, right, So in
Dungeons and Dragons, the Demogorgon dates back to nineteen seventy six.
That's when this entity um originated in a supplement titled
Eldric Wizards by Gary Gygax himself and Brian Bloom. And
if you look around online you can find this in
PDF form and it has some you know, some adorably
(06:28):
kind of crude illustrations of what the various creatures would
look like. Those those those the illustrations, and Dungeons Dragons
have come a long way, like the most like the
earliest version of the Demogorgon that is illustrated in this
book is just crude sketch of this, uh, this kind
of two headed, tentacle armed, chicken footed thing with baboon heads, right, yeah,
(06:50):
with baboon heads. But the like it's cute. I mean,
it's like, it's kind of like the monsters in the
Ranking and Bass Middle Earth, and and of course, you know,
part most the big thing Abou Dungeons and Dragons is
that it does take place in the mind, and especially
early on they did, they didn't have elaborate illustrations. You're
supposed to, you know, come up with it yourself. Today
(07:11):
we have elaborate illustrations. The most recent fifth edition illustrations
of the democ Organ are just absolutely beautiful, where it
seems like there's like a burning sun inside of the creature.
But I want to read just a quick description from
that original nineteen seventy six supplement to to properly describe
what the creature looks like, because the basic description has
(07:32):
not changed. Okay, melt my mind with terror. Okay, quoth
Guy GaX and bloom here. Uh. It is contended by
some that this demon lord is supreme and in any event,
he is awesome in his power. This gigantic demon is
eighteen tall and reptilian. His skin is plated with snake
(07:52):
like scales. His body and legs are those of a
giant lizard. His twin necks resemble snakes, and his thick
tail is fort Dimcgorgan has two heads which bear the
visages of evil baboons or perhaps mandrils. Rather than having arms,
he has great tentacles. His appearance testifies to his command
of cold blooded things such as serpents, reptiles and octopi.
(08:17):
And Robert, you brought in a glorious figurine that I
now hold in my hand. It's uh, it's very nice. Yeah,
this is a small one. The big one I couldn't
even bring in because it's just it's it's too enormous.
It would alarm people. Uh and they would they would
wonder what was about to befall them. So so yeah, basically,
this description, though, holds up. It's been tweaked a little bit.
I think at one point the heads were more hyena
(08:38):
like because, as I mentioned earlier, we've had various editions
of dungeons and dragons were on addition five at this point.
Uh and uh and in each edition has brought about
various changes to the rules, the mechanic, to the lore.
And we'll get into some of that in a minute.
As it relates to de mcgorgan um and then the
art who has mostly gotten just tremendously better over the years.
(08:59):
And again the most recent fifth edition art is absolutely
splendid to behold. But of course, another thing to keep
in mind is that the democ organ is a demon,
a demon lord. And given the moral panics surrounding supposed
Satanists and the the the quote unquote dangers of D
and D back in the nineteen eighties, the various demons
and devils in the game Lore lost their titles at
(09:22):
one point. UM. So when I originally started playing back
in the nineties, Uh, these various devils and demons were
known as uh the tanari uh instead of actually referring
to them as demons. So it's a rebrand. Yeah, it
was a rebrand because everyone was freaking out about imagined Satanist,
(09:43):
which I think we've discussed on the show before. The
Satanism as presented in the Satanic Panic of the eighties,
Uh did not exist, no one, No one has actually
no ritual um you know, sacrificial uh worship of Satan
has has occurred in human history. Uh, certainly not on
(10:07):
the organized scale that uh that you see described in
some of these moral panics. But but anyway, Yeah, then
the demonic edge was taken off the game for a while,
and if you wish to invoke such entities you had
to you had to bust out an older monster manual. Thankfully,
the Demons of the Abyss and the Devils of the
Nine Hells have made the return, and Demcgregan himself is
(10:31):
is not only back, but he's a he's a cover batty,
you know, he's he's there on the cover of Out
of the Abyss and is the uh the creature that
you battle at the very end, and you know he's
he's not only fearsome physically, he's also a highly intelligent entity.
He has an intelligent score of twenty, which is you know,
like like top of the d Twentykay, how high does
(10:53):
it go? Is twenty the most intelligent? Yeah, twenty is
is is tremendously impressive. So a John von Neumann kind
of thing, Like it's I think like a ten is
is more in keeping with like, you know, sort of
average human intelligence. This thing is beyond that, Like eighteen
is is like really high for a starting character in
(11:15):
in Dungen'son Dragons starting mortal character. But the dem o
Gorgon does not use this intelligence for the good of humankind.
The de m Ocgorgan is gonna, what is gonna design
the most nefarious financial instruments that have ever been uh imagined?
Oh yeah, I mean he's he's completely chaotically evil. Um.
He's also known as the Sibilant Beast and the Master
(11:35):
of the Spiraling depths. And uh. But in those two heads,
each one has a name in dungeons and dragon's lore,
one is Annual and the other is Hathoradia. Uh. I
guess I don't know that anyone ever actually speaks to
one head or the other. You just kind of speak
to the de m Ocgorgon. Maybe that's the way to
beat it. You get them fighting each other. Maybe, I
don't know. I mean it basically, he's this wonderful embodiment
(11:59):
of like chao us and disorder, and I you know,
I think he wonderfully you know, embodies the sense of
maddening division. Kind of a perfect demon for modern times especially.
And I also like to think of the two heads
is representing like the different hemispheres of the brain. Okay,
so maybe only one of them can do a complex language.
Maybe so. Yeah, But but also I like the idea
(12:22):
that the demon lords like are these mighty things, but
perhaps they exist because they're they're like the accumulated runoff
of all like human inequity, you know. And of course
there are other demon lords as well, and they all
plot against each other and war eternally. They represent different
depths of moral sin. So Demogorgan's most prominent rivals are Orcus,
(12:43):
the demon Lord of undeath, as well as the demon
Lord of perversion gras It, and the Master of Lies
fraz are Blue. But he's also opposed by Bahamat, you know,
Gou and then of course Jubilex and Zuktimi, who we've
mentioned in passing on the show before. Wait, so one
of the rivals as Orcus, and now we began this
episode with a reading from John Milton's Paradise Lost, in
(13:05):
which the name Orcus is invoked. They don't really explain.
Milton doesn't go into who Orcus is there, but uh
so I didn't expect Orcas to come back. Also in
the D and D lawre here, Yeah, I mean Orcus
was a Roman god of the underworld who punished oathbreakers.
And oh and by the way, he also has his
own designated trans Newtonian object in zero four a two Orcas.
(13:30):
Not all demon lords can make that claim that they
actually have some sort of cosmic body named after them.
But this gets to the point that that d n
D is this wonderful mix of influences, fusing various twentieth
century fantasy and sci fi works with the mythology and
flow in folklore to create its worlds. So that's so
(13:51):
Orcus obviously comes from Roman mythology. Uh, there are other
creatures we mentioned Bahammed. Bahama is the entity that the
Knights Templars were accused of shipping in the fourteenth century
and we're subsequently eradicated for uh. So you know that's
where that name comes from. But then there's dem Ogregan
to consider, and uh and obviously the name predates dungeons
(14:12):
and Dragons because it pops up in Paradise Lost. Yeah,
so you would I think, obviously expect given the word demogorgon,
that this is something from Greek mythology, right, just sounds
like something straight out of Greeks were of course, like
like Medusa, So you might think, oh, well, this is
some this is some Greek monster that gets turned into
(14:33):
a god at some point. But despite what you would
think from the name, you will not find the Demogorgon
in ancient Greek mythology. You flipped through the works of Homer,
labors of Hercules, myths of Antalympus, cults of Athena or Apollo,
you're gonna find no Demogorgon anywhere. So where does this
beast come from? Well, we've we've considered pop culture, and
(14:55):
we've considered, uh, you know, a current twenty first century
Netflix show. We've considered a twentieth century role playing game.
So what we're gonna do is we're gonna dive deeper
and we're gonna go into the literary world and continue
to follow follow the shadow of Demogorgan through the spiraling depths.
But first we're going to take a break. Alright, we're back,
(15:18):
all right. So we've been talking about the monster, the
demon lord, the dem o organ as it is represented
in Dungeons and Dragons, and Robert has some experience with that.
But we now have said that we need to go
deeper because we're trying to figure out where this monster
came from. If it doesn't come from what you would
guess based on its name Greek mythology, right, and our
next step is to look at its very the way
(15:40):
its name is invoked in various works of literature. So
one of the books I was looking at on this
count was a book called Dangerous Games. What the Moral
Panic over role Playing Games says about play, religion, and
imagined worlds, by Joseph P. Lacock, And uh, this is
this is an interesting looking book that I really want
to read more from. Uh. But the author mentions that
(16:02):
Demcgorgan pops up in a number of early modern and
Romantic works. Uh. Interestingly enough, Leacock also highlights an author
and RPG named that I've brought up on the show before.
You may are Barker, Um, you know the this is
this guy who is known for creating these books and
this role playing world of Tucamel, which is this fantasy.
(16:24):
It's the sci fi fantasy world that depends less, far
less on Western models of of history and religion and
uh and myth and more on East Asian models. So uh, there,
if you're into fantasy, I recommend picking up those books.
There are a little old fashioned in some respects, like
they're very much in the mold of like kind of
(16:44):
a swashbuckling, uh you know, male centered adventure. But the
world that he created is really something to behold. But anyway,
he he points out quote, the prominence of original fantasy
religions in D and D as opposed to adaptations of
Christian saints and demons can be attributed largely to the
influence of M. A. R. Barker. Uh, because of Barker
(17:07):
was was very active in that whole scene at the time,
these various individuals like Gygax and others who were creating
these role playing worlds. But as should be clear from
us talking about John Milton, the demo organ is not
something that is a purely created, uh you know, fantasy
religion creature. It actually does have more of a history.
It goes back into Christian mythology in some way. So again,
(17:32):
whence the demo organ? Can we trace it back through literature? Yeah, well,
let's look at some of the key examples of literary
demogorgon that pop up. Well, let's start with Milton's Paradise Lost.
We read that fantastic quote from it in our cold
open Uh. Paradise Losses, of course, the masterpiece of John Milton,
who lives sixteen o eight through sixteen seventy four, and
(17:53):
which he sets no higher goal than to quote justify
the ways of God demand which I I always love that,
like they just just really going for it with this work,
you know. Um. And to achieve this lofty goal, he
retells the creation and the angelic fall and the fall
of man, and in doing so creates a Satan that
(18:15):
is uh, in some people's eyes, problematically uh, sympathetic and tragic. Now,
I think you can easily say that Milton was not
like sympathetic towards Satan. He was a devout, devoted Protestant Christian.
But I've seen I've seen that criticism leveled at him,
particularly in when I was growing up reading some particularly
(18:38):
various like Christian fundamentalists of views of demonology and the
treatment of demons and angels, and literature that would charge
another like, oh Milton made uh, he made Satan way
too likable. Yeah. I mean, I think if you've got
no tolerance at all, uh, then then yeah, might might
go too far for you. But I think one thing
he sets up to achieve and does impaired. I was
(19:00):
lost as he shows sin as as going astray, you know,
as folly as like following, uh, following a misguided path
and not always just kind of this like uh indefinable
miasma of horrible nous. People often like to think of
the devil is like something you can't even look at.
(19:20):
But Milton's devil. I mean the kind of scary thing
about the devil in classic conceptions of it is that
he's seductive and that he makes good arguments. Yeah again,
I mean de mcgregan and dn D has that intelligence
of twenty wisdom of seventeen. Uh, you'd expect as much
at least from Satan. Yeah. Now, in Paradise lost, of course,
(19:41):
Satan ultimately he loses a war in Heaven. He falls
down with his demons. They get cast into Hell. They
have a big debate about what to do about this.
Some demons counsel that they should, you know, take up arms.
I think Malok says, let's go fight again. Some say,
you know, we're down here, we can just let's make
the best of it. You know, Hell's not so bad.
And but but Satan gets to this idea He's going
(20:02):
to get revenge by by corrupting God's favorite creation, the human.
And spoiler, he pulls it off. But yeah, this epic poem,
you can see, you can almost think of it as
kind of a reboot or kind of like an amazing
piece of of biblical fan fiction where he fleshes out
this idea of a war in heaven and he adds
(20:25):
in all sorts of dramatic and gnarly details. One I
always liked is that he forges a sword for the
Archangeel Michael, uh, that is powerful enough to cut through anything,
including the flesh of other angels. God forges the sword,
you mean? Yeah? Yeah, who did I say forged it? Oh?
I thought it sounded like you're saying Satan did. Okay, Well,
I say, I'm probably thinking Saranto because we just did that, right,
(20:47):
But to be clear, God made the sword. Yeah that's good. Well,
I mean, I feel like there's so much stuff in
Paradise Lost. And we were talking before we came into
the studio here about Dante as well, where there are
these great of literature within the Christian literary tradition that
get incorporated into people's theology, like they forget that stuff
(21:08):
that's just in Paradise Lost isn't actually in the Bible, right, Yeah,
And and we can thank Dante for the pretty much
the whole concept of of purgatory becoming so prominent in
when in Western traditions. But but yeah, so so in
creating Paradise Lost, Milton he drags in a number of
names and develops a more demon names that do pop
(21:29):
up in the Bible, like the Elzeba, Belial, Mammon, Moloc.
But then he also drags in Orcus and dim Ogorgon,
and then there are seemingly new creations like most must
saber Uh, the architect of Pandemonium, the capital of Hell.
So dim mcgorgan is mentioned in book two and we
heard it at the start of this episode described and
(21:51):
this is a section of Paradise Lost that describes Satan's
voyage out of Hell with sin and death. So the
dem Ogregan is basically a back ound player. It's texture. Yeah,
just add a little texture to the scene as Satan
crosses the wilds of chaos and night that spanned the
void between Heaven and Hell. And there are other literary
invocations of the Demogorgon that I would say are basically
(22:12):
the same. They use the demogorgan not as a major
figure of significance, but something is sort of texture to
establish that a place is sort of ultimately abandoned by
God and and wretched, you know, like it's just really horrible.
And another great example of this is the way the
demogorgan is invoked in Edmund Spencer's The Fairy Queen. Uh So,
(22:34):
if you've never read it, The Fairy Queen is also
it's like Paradise Lost an English epic poem. It's from
the sixteenth century, so it's earlier than Paradise Lost, and
it's this really long poem about virtues and the adventures
of chivalrous nights. It's one of those that's, uh, you know,
to modern readers. I think it has a whole lot
of interest in it, and there is some great poetry
(22:55):
in it, but also it can be very long and
ponderous and kind of stuffy in some ways, because I mean,
you can only read so much about piety and shipp um.
But it's long been interpreted as containing a lot of
allegorical representations of present figures and politics from the Elizabethan era.
When it was written, I think I was reading about
how Spencer um he secured himself a really nice pension
(23:18):
from the Elizabethan court. By presenting the poem to Queen Elizabeth.
But again, the Demogorgon here does not appear as a
main character, but sort of as a bit of character
for the landscape. So just to read one stanza in
which it is invoked. Therefore desirous the end of all
their days to know and them to enlarge with long
extent by wondrous skill and many hidden ways to the
(23:42):
three fatal sisters house. She went far underground from tract
of living, went down in the bottom of the deep abyss,
where dim Ogorgan, in dull darkness, pent far from the
view of God's in Heaven's bliss. This hideous chaos keeps
their dreadful dwelling. Is so this character is going She's
(24:02):
going down into a into a dark, godforsaken place. And
how do you signal places dark and god forsaken? How
do you show places evil and far from God? Well,
you mentioned it's where the demogorgan hangs out. So if
the Red Cross Night stands for piety and holiness, the
Demogorgon stands for unholiness and satanic chaos. Now another work
that's uh that's often invoked that mentions the demogorgan is
(24:26):
another sixteenth century work. It's an Italian epic poem by
uh Lodovico Ariosto, a titled Orlando Furioso, which is a
poem that concerns the night Orlando, who is known in
French traditions as Roland Uh. Now, at least in some
versions and translations, it does mention Demogorgon quote the ruler
(24:51):
of fates. But as far as I could tell, again,
he's just background. He's just texture that's added to this,
to a particular scene. All right. So this gets us
back to the fifteenth sixteenth century UM. And so we
see by then that the democ organ is being invoked
in UH literature written by Christians as some kind of
(25:12):
infernal demons, some bad thing. Maybe it has something to
do with fate, maybe it has something to do with chaos.
And there's an earlier source that came across that's a
hundred years or so before this UH, the fourteenth century
Latin encyclopedia of pagan gods and their relationships, known as
Boccaccio's Gena Loggia deorum Gentilium or the Genealogy of the
(25:34):
Gods of the Gentiles. This was written by the Italian
poet Giovanni Boccaccio, and Boccaccio apparently was commissioned to sort
of like put together this, this compendium of all the
bad old gods, you know, the pagan stuff back then,
and show the relationships to each other to make a
family tree. I found an addition and analysis by Ernest Hatch.
(25:55):
Wilkins actually could not find an English translation of this.
I think there might be one out there somewhere, but
maybe it's not available online. Um but but anyway, Wilkins,
in this nineteen edition from the University of Chicago Press,
was discussing what is covered in this book and apparently
in attempting to create a family tree of all pagan gods.
(26:19):
Boccaccio regards the dem o organ as the original pagan deity,
like the great great grandfather of Jupiter or Zeus, from
which all other pagan deities are descended. So the family
tree just starts right at the top Demogorgon. Alright, So
if you're if you're looking at various pagan gods from
(26:40):
a from this Christian standpoint, where pagan gods are a
bad thing and perhaps are actually demons, then later that's
where we getting the idea that the demogorgan is something
primal and perhaps uh vile in nature, the very first God.
How strange. Now, it turns out this isn't the first
reference to a demogorgan and Christian literature, and we will
(27:03):
find an earlier mention of it later on. But before
we move on to that, I wanted to talk about
what I think is one of the most interesting literary
depictions of the Demogorgon, definitely the most interesting I've come across,
and it's in Percy bish Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. This is,
of course Mary's husband, Yes, yes, the husband of the
(27:24):
author of Frankenstein. Percy Bis Shelley was an English Romantic poet.
This is a lyric drama, so it's a drama sort
of written in verse. The play is a response to
the Greek myth of Prometheus, and Shelly first published it
in eighteen twenty and he explicitly presented it as this
as a response to the play Prometheus Bound by the
(27:48):
ancient Greek playwright Escalus. So the myth of Prometheus you
might know it well, but just to refresh, it goes
something like this, Prometheus was one of a race of
deities in ancient Greek legion known as the Titans, and
the Titans came before the gods of Olympus. The Titans
were offspring from the union of Uranus the heavens and
(28:10):
Gaea the earth, and they ruled the earth until Chronus,
the king of the Titans, was dethroned and his allies
were defeated by his son Zeus and the Olympian gods.
This is the War of the Titans, or the titanum
achi um. So Prometheus was one of the Titans, the
son of the Titan Yapidus, but he took the side
(28:31):
of Zeus in the war between the Olympians and the Titans,
so he's still around among the Olympian gods. And Zeus,
of course, is a creep. As a place Zeus is,
you just set your watch to it. He's going to
be a creep in a jerk. Zeus doesn't want mortal
humans down on earth like us, to have power and
knowledge like the gods, so he takes this crucial step
(28:54):
in this myth of hiding fire from the humans. He
takes fire from the earth. He hides it a Mount Olympus.
He says human can't have it, and Prometheus, the Titan
instead is sympathetic to humans, and so what he does
is he steals fire from where Zeus had hidden it
on Olympus, and he takes it down to share with
the mortals below. And this is a trope that we
(29:16):
see in various mythologies. So, for instance, there's a there's
a nearly identical role in Chinese myth of the fire driller,
who essentially does the same thing. And then we see
this again in so many stories. There's some sort of
knowledge of you know, some sort of generally, it's basically
technological in nature, and it is taken from the gods
(29:36):
one way or the other, borrowed from the gods, and
bestowed either bestowed to humans by some benevolent identity like Prometheus,
or it is just straight up stolen from the gods
by mortals. Well, I think I like the Chinese version
even better because in that the god who brings the
fire doesn't it explicitly brings the technological means to make fire,
(29:59):
not just the fire itself. So the fire drill. Of course,
you know, if you ever used a bow drill, it's
not so easy, but you can make fire that way.
I think Prometheus is usually depicted as bringing like a
burning branch or something that. Yeah, something like that, And
granted that makes for a much better sculpture of painting,
right this naked Titan with the with with this highly
symbolic you know, a flaming torture branch. But through the
(30:23):
years Prometheus's gift to the humans, I think it is
more often interpreted along the lines of the fire Driller,
where he's it's not just fire. Prometheus symbolizes the power
from the heavens who betrays the leader God and brings
down general technology and knowledge and power and succor to
(30:43):
the humans, which which it's interesting that I mean Prometheus
and the figure of Prometheus and the figure of of
Satan have a lot in common, right, oh kind of yeah,
because I mean, yes, Satan. One of the things that's
interesting about the story of Satan in the Garden of
Eden is that Satan does not lie to the humans.
You know, he's presented as doing bad, but he he
(31:04):
encourages them to uh to violate God's law in the
garden and eat from the tree that is forbidden to them.
But he says, you can eat from this tree and
you will not die as you've been told you will
and it It turns out it's true. They eat and
it doesn't kill them, except you could make the argument
that maybe, well maybe it makes them mortal in the
long run. But I mean, basically, he's a disruptor, to
put it in like Silicon Valley terms, right, Like he's
(31:26):
he's trying to disrupt creation. Um. But so in the
Greek myth, of course, Prometheus being nice to the humans
and betraying Zeus, both the mortals and Prometheus are punished
for this. The punishment for humans is a sequence of
events that leads to the opening of Pandora's Box, out
of which flow all the hardships and frailty of human life.
(31:47):
You get plague, you get toiled to survive all that stuff,
and a little bit of hope left over. I guess yeah.
In the bottom uh, Prometheus is punished in a more
explicit way. He is bound to a rock in the
Caucasus Mountains, and not only has he chained up, but
Zeus sends a nasty eagle to peck out his liver
(32:08):
each day, and unfortunately Prometheus is immortal, so his liver,
as an immortal liver, just keeps regenerating and the eagle
can fly back and peck it out and eat it
again the next day. It sounds like a bad deal. Yeah,
it's a bad deal, But I don't know as far as, like,
you know, offending Zeus goes. I guess it could have
been worse. I guess. So. Now, in response to this myth,
(32:29):
Shelly Percy Bis Shelley in his play takes up the
banner of Prometheus, and he makes him a heroic figure
in the play. And I would say this is not surprising,
because you could definitely say that Percy Shelley was of
a revolutionary temperament theologically, politically, and in literature. He was
very against the old ways and the old powers and
(32:51):
the authorities, and for sort of disruption and revolution and
doing things in a new way. Now, the plot of
Shelley's play is kind of abstract and of loaded with
characters and images of ponderous meaningfulness. So, uh so I'm
gonna try to do a short summary, leaving aside all
the stuff that takes us in other directions and focusing
on how the democ organ comes in. So Prometheus is
(33:14):
we find him in this state where he's bound up
by Zeus. It's Jupiter in this play, but this is
the same figure the King of the Gods, bound up
and tortured by Jupiter for bringing knowledge to the mortals,
and in Shelley's version it is explicitly not just fire
but general knowledge and aid. And there are two other
deities who are sympathetic to Prometheus and they want to
(33:35):
help him. These are the sisters Asia and Panthea, and
they attempt to free Prometheus from his bondage. Asia is
a c nymph who is actually the beloved of Prometheus,
and Panthea is her sister. Led by a dream, the
two of them venture into the underworld and they meet
a character called the democ Organ, who is portrayed as
(33:56):
a kind of supremely powerful but also strangely pass of
and kind of inert force of fate and nothingness, who
is also the son of Jupiter. Now, when they first
come across uh the dem o Organ, the character of
Panthea describes him this way. She says, I see a
mighty darkness filling the seat of power, and rays of
(34:19):
gloom dart round as light from the meridian sun, ungazed
upon and shapeless, neither limb nor form nor outline. Yet
we feel it is a living spirit. This is very
different from the D and D demigorgan, right, Yeah, this
is more like a primordial soup of the deity. Yeah.
So they say that they since there is a living
(34:40):
presence down in the abyss with them, and there's a
mighty darkness, there's something in the gloom, but they can't
see that it has any kind of shape or body.
And then Panthea and Asia have a consultation with the Demogorgon.
They asked him questions and the demogorgan reveals to them
that Jupiter created the world with all the good and
the bad that it entails, and also that even Jupiter
(35:04):
himself is not all powerful, because, in the words of
the demogorgan quote, all spirits are enslaved, which serve things evil.
And he says to Asia, thou knowest if Jupiter be
such or No. Of course, Asia knows that even though
Jupiter is the chief god, Jupiter still does things that
are evil. He serves evil, So there must be some
(35:26):
kind of power over him, because all things that serve
evil have some power over them. So what is even
Jupiter subject to? Well, the demo organ answer is that too, quote,
if the abyssum could vomit forth its secrets, but a
voice is wanting the deep truth is imageless. For what
would it avail to bid the gaze on the revolving world?
(35:47):
What to bid? Speak fate, time, occasion, chance, and change?
To these all things are subject but eternal love. Love.
That's the fifth element. I guess it is. So even Jupiter,
the ultimate god of everything, is subject to the power
of love. Uh, sounds kind of cheesy. But then but
then Asia is like, Okay, well, I love Prometheus, so
(36:10):
when will he be freed? Like wind? Shall the destined
hour arrive for Prometheus to be to be freed? And
the de m o organ just says, behold exclamation point.
So then immediately the Demogorgon travels to heaven where Jupiter
is the Jupiter, the chief god, is in the middle
of a big speech about how awesome he is, and
the dem ogorgan appears and then he just he just
(36:33):
messes up Jupiter. He casts him down, He destroys the
tyrant creator god, and then Prometheus can be freed by
Hercules and reunited with Asia. That's quite a climax. Well,
but it's not the climax. Somehow, this is not the
end of the play. This is like act three of
a five act play. After this, it seems I've never
read the thing in full. I admit I've read some passages.
(36:54):
It seems like after this there is a lot of
like sort of um windy pontificateing about love and virtues
and what is good and right. But anyway, I think
the Demogorgon's role in this story is very interesting. He's well, so,
I kept saying he, but the Demogorgan. Actually, one thing
that's been pointed out by scholars is that the democ
organ has never given a gender uh in in Percy's
(37:18):
play uh In. In other sources it is, I think,
assumed to be a he, but there's no there's no
gender in Prometheus Unbound. So the Demogorgan, whoever they are,
whatever they are, is depicted as in some kind of
infernal phantom of the underworld, but also a liberating force
for positive good, overthrowing the tyrannical order of creation at
(37:40):
the appointed hour uh Though interestingly, I would say the
demogorgan doesn't really seem to act out of their own volition.
It's almost as if, um they are somehow triggered into
this act by the visit from Asia and Panthea, like
it's the love for Prometheus from Asia that was faded
to proceed the appointed hour of Jupiter's destruction and the
(38:01):
liberation of the world. Another thing that's interesting here about
Shelley's work, So we talked about how the Demogorgon does
not actually come from Greek mythology, even though he's being
retro insurgent into like classical mythology here Greek and Roman
kind of blended mythology here. Um, what would the word
DeMorgan mean if it actually were a Greek word. Well,
(38:23):
you've got the apparent roots demos and gorgon, like the
people's gorgon, like democracy, and then gorgon again, the monster
the of which Medusa is a member of the species.
But actually the gorgon name for Medusa that has a
root in Greek too. It's from the word gorgos, which
means something like terrible or grim, you know, terror inducing.
(38:46):
So the demogorgan could literally be translated as the people's terror,
like the terror of the masses of people, which is
a very interesting intersection with the idea of like a
long faded revolution to dethrone tyrant kings and unword the
gods and of course we know, uh, Percy Shelley was
a supporter of the French Revolution. He believed in atheism,
(39:07):
he believed in republicanism, not to be confused with like
the Republican Party of today, like in the context of
the time, that was representative government as opposed to monarchy. Um.
And so I think it could be tempting to think
of like the French Revolution as Shelley's demigorgon the people's terror,
like this inevitable swell of justice that washes tyrants from
(39:28):
their thrones, but at the same time contains a terrifying
and mighty darkness that can't really be seen or understood.
I like that the people's terror. I mean, yeah, I
don't know. I don't know if if Shelley himself would
have seen that, uh seen that comparison, because I think
he may have had a more, I don't know, a
(39:50):
less nuanced view of the guillotine saying. And of course
this introduces the idea of the devic organ as as
being like potential like political candidate, perhaps in in our
upcoming elections. If if you're if you're inclined to use
a right in candidate, go demogorgan the just rage of
the people, that is without form or shape. Now one
(40:13):
more example of demogorgan popping up in uh in in
in a work of literature. Uh is is a story
essentially a short story from Voltaire Voltaire Live through seventeen
seventy eight. And I've never read this one before I'd
read I'd read some works of Voltaire in the past,
(40:34):
but at anyway, this one is titled Plato's Dream, in
which the Demogorgon is presented as a genie who witnesses
the initial creation um of the world by this primordial
force called the demi urge, and along with its fellow genies. Uh.
The dem Ogregan is granted a portion of the creation too,
(40:55):
then uh you know, to then finish into a functioning world.
The demogorgan is given the task of creating Earth and
uh and is then critiqued and criticized by his fellow
genies for making such a mixed up planet. And so
there's a part here I want to quote where the
demogorgan responds to his critics and says, quote, it is
(41:17):
an easy matter to find fault, good folks, said the genie.
But do you imagine it is so easy to form
an animal who, having the gift of reason and free will,
shall not sometimes abuse his liberty. Do you think that,
in rearing between nine and ten thousand different plants, it
is so easy to prevent some few from having noxious qualities?
(41:38):
Do you suppose that with a certain quantity of water, sand,
and mud, you could make a globe that should have
neither seas nor deserts. As for you, my sneering friend,
I think you have just finished the planet Jupiter. Let
us see now what figure you make with your great
belts and your long nights with four moons to enlighten them.
(41:59):
Let us examine you or world and see whether the
inhabitants you have made or exempt from follies or diseases.
I guess we'll just have to wait for the Europa
Probe to form us to resolve this one. Right, So,
there's not much to really I feel like uncover in
this one, but there are there's at least one detail
in this that will become critical. Uh. In our next
(42:21):
section of of the podcast, after we come back from
a break, we will get into the true abyssal origins
of the demogorgan than. Alright, we're back, So we've charted
the path of the demogorgan through much literature throughout especially
the Christian world, and its role in some interesting sort
(42:43):
of revolutionary sentiments as expressed through literature like Prometheus Unbound
or in Voltaire story. But we're trying to find the
origin of this. Where does the Demogorgon actually come from?
If it doesn't come from classic Greek mythology. Well, the
origin is discussed in a nineteen sixty four book titled
(43:03):
The Discarded Image and Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature,
written by none other than C. S. Lewis. In fact,
it was C. S. Lewis's last book before he died,
and it deals with medieval cosmology. He turns our attention
to the fourth book of the thebe A by Stadius
the First. Stadius lived uh CE forty five through and
(43:27):
this is an epic poem written in Latin about the
Theban cycle. And here the author alludes to a deity
that shall not be named, a quote sovereign of the
threefold world. And then early Christian author Lactantius, who lived
two fifty through wrote a commentary on this work and
(43:47):
stated that Stadius was referring in in fact to the
Greek Uh, demi organ this or creator quote the god
whose name and is unlawful to know. So we're talking
so demi organ from which we get Demogorgon and h.
(44:07):
And then Lewis writes the following to sum this up. Quote,
this is plain sailing the demi urge or workman being
the creator in the Timaeus. But there are two variants
in the manuscripts. One is Demogorgona, the other Demogorgon. From
the later of these corruptions, later ages evolved a completely
new deity, Demogorgon, who was to enjoy a distinguished literary
(44:32):
career in Boccaccio's Genealogy of the Gods, in Spencer, in
Milton and in Shelley. This is perhaps the only time
a scribal blunder underwent an apotheosis. Oh that's amazing, uh
and just so. In a mythological context, of course, Apotheosis
here reversed to the process of a human being being
(44:54):
deified or something being made into a higher being, like
a god or a star or heavenly object being taken
up into heaven. Ancient kings were sometimes made into gods,
and legendary heroes like Hercules, sometimes lived lives that were
so worthy or so notable, they were assumed into the
pantheon and became God. So I think that's what he's
saying here, is that somebody made a blunder in copying
(45:17):
a manuscript or in translating, in understanding what a word
meant in an older book, and through that scribal error,
we got a brand new deity such that, you know,
a thousand years later, Boccaccio would say, this deity is
the original macdaddy deity, like the number, like the Pagan
(45:38):
God before all the other ones, and it just comes
from a mistranslation or misreading of a word. And the
word that was misread or a mistranslated is the dimmy Urge,
which which curiously enough is cited in that Voltaire short story. Right,
So it seems like Voltaire was kind of on the
right track with the association here. Uh And and this
(46:01):
is great because the demi Urge is one of my
favorite characters from any mythology in the world. But but
its role is complicated and varies across different traditions, including
like Platonic schools of philosophy and religion in the you know,
in the centuries following Plato's actual teachings and in various
Gnostic religions. I'll try to give a general summary that
(46:24):
applies to multiple lines of tradition that have sort of
similar attributes, but just be aware that there are a
lot of different things that are all sort of versions
of the demi urge. The word demi urge, as uh
As Lewis mentioned, comes from the Greek. In its original form,
is just a common noun that means something like craftsmen.
You know, it's somebody who makes things, sculptor, maker, producer.
(46:47):
But within these religious points of view or in in
these philosophies and cosmologies, the demi urge is a figure
that creates the material world, is the creator. But apart
from many other religions, this does not mean that he
is the ultimate creator God or that he is good.
He is, i would say, variously portrayed as is everything,
(47:09):
ranging from kind of neutral and bumbling to actively malevolent.
And to give an example from one strain of gnosticism,
in the Gnostic text known as the Apocryphon of John,
the dimmi urge figure is this foolish, arrogant, wicked deity
called yelled Both who creates the material bodies of humans.
(47:31):
I think he also maybe creates the material world or
some aspects of it um and humans. The humans that
he created end up with souls when they are inadvertently
contaminated by a spark or a light from the higher
nobler plane of being known as the play roma, which
means something like fullness. And so you've got the ple roma,
(47:52):
the fullness, the real world, the real greater place, which
is is immaterial in nature, and then you've got the
the crappy material world that Yaldaboath made. And now we're
stuck in that thing. And Yaldaboath resents the fact that
humans have this spark from the Pleroma and tries to
fight against it. So to do so, he tries to
(48:13):
keep humans confused and in the dark, so we're always
fumbling around in this kind of baffling material hell, which
is our everyday world. And the Gnostics within this tradition
believe that you can only escape the horrors of the
material world by becoming privy to secret knowledge. That knowledge
is the noses, the secret knowledge that explains the real world.
(48:35):
And this is this is how you transcend the secret mythology,
the secret rituals that give you access to the true,
fuller reality behind this material illusion that controls our lives.
And you can actually see a connection to Platonic philosophy.
Even if this sounds like a very kind of strange,
complicated theological take on on the creation of the world,
(48:56):
it sounds a lot like Plato's cave, right, Yeah, yeah,
it does. I mean also that the basic spirit of
this is also reflected in other faiths. I mean, the
idea of there being a secret reality of their of
there being some sort of cycle that we need to
break free from. I mean you see that in say,
you know, Hindu and Buddhist traditions, and this idea of
the spark of something more divine being like trapped in
(49:19):
the mud of our bodies. How you see that also
reflected in even more recent creations like scientology. Oh totally,
I think, yeah, absolutely. I would say gnostic theology reflects
something that is a very common belief among humans, and
you can see how often it appears, not just in
other religions, but in all kinds of pop culture. I mean,
echoes of the gnostic worldview bounce around constantly even through
(49:43):
contemporary culture, whether we're conscious of it or not, and
whether the creators of these pieces of culture, or conscious
of it or not. If I mean, if you've seen
the matrix, you already have a sort of baseline understanding
of gnostic cosmology. You just replace the evil computers and
the agents with cosmic realms and wicked ar cons like
the demi Urge. The demmy Urge sort of created a
(50:05):
material matrix for us to live in, when in reality
we are beings from this better immaterial world and we
have to find ways to escape and get back to it.
So you're saying we are star dust, we are golden,
we are billion year old carbon, and we have to
find our way back to the garden. Yes, but you
can only get back to the garden if you teach
your children well, because it is the secret knowledge that
(50:28):
is required to get you there. And most people are
never going to be let in on the secret. They're
just sort of going about there, you know, their everyday life,
toiling after material things without understanding that the material world
is bad and fake. But I love this idea that
the demmy Urge being this creator of the material world
who's at the at the very least bumbling and at
(50:51):
worst some kind of devilish thing that that hates us
and wants to trick us into living bad, wrong lives.
I could see this mistrans lation leading to the creation
of the demo organ figure being an excellent modern reworking
of the Gnostic theology and being a part of that
demi Urge's plan, like the demi Urge hides the true
nosis about its wicked role in creating the material world
(51:14):
and these filthy bodies of ours by causing a scribal
error that hides its existence, and instead it gets everybody
focused on this fake illusory demon or primordial god, the Demogorgon,
And then you're scared of the Demogorgon or you're in
all of its primeval darkness and shapeless presence, so you
forget that you need to be seeking the nosis to
(51:34):
escape this wretched unreality. Uh and uh yeah, yeah, I
mean if you're ultimately if you're trying to envision the
ultimate evil power in a in a in a fantasy world.
Uh yeah, this this sounds like the This is the
Prince of Demons right here. You know. I weirdly kept
thinking about the demi urriage when we were recently talking
(51:55):
about that book I read by Philip Ball about quantum
mechanics that it's called Beyond Weird. It's a great book.
It's a new book from this year last year about
quantum mechanics. And one of the things that I think
is really great about the book is it doesn't let
you off the hook. It doesn't just let you say, wow,
quantum mechanics sure does seem weird and then kind of
shake your head and move on. Like it. It tries
(52:17):
to force you to look at it. It does the
thing from like Clockwork Orange where it holds your eyelids
open and says, no, look at this and pay attention.
And you know, one of the things that you walk
away from that with is that, Okay, you know, I'm
not saying that physical reality isn't real, but it it
makes you think that whatever way we're interacting with the
(52:40):
world on a day to day basis, you know, the
kind of reality we perceive with like objects you can
touch and and see and know their place and all that,
that is not the ultimate like arbiter of what reality is.
Like your perception of reality is not necessarily the most
accurate way of understanding reality, even though it, you know,
(53:00):
it seems to work good enough to get you through life,
So how could it be wrong? But yet we you know,
we do experiments in physics all the time. Now that
that just show you over and over again that the
way you have of making sense of the world is
some kind of derivative, second order kind of grasp of physics,
or you have no intuitive way of understanding quantum reality,
(53:23):
you know what happens before decoherence and everything, so that
ultimately there is this there is this deeper truth in
the universe that that we are not inherently privy to.
We're only privy to it via uh technology, via science.
Uh these are essentially gnostic tools of elevation. That that's
(53:44):
how you get the noses as you do a double
slit experiment. Well, I've enjoyed this, uh, this journey that
we've taken, you know, because it feels, i mean, part
of it seems like the natural destination for an exploration
of the Demock organ that it would tie back to
this primordial being that's wrapped in gnostic mystery. But on
(54:04):
the other hand, I love that it also hinges incredibly
upon just a scribal blunder. You know that it's a
it's it's this thing that was actually you know, it's
never really real in the way that we uh we
might you know, attribute it as having been. It was
never actually UH an entity that was worshiped or even
(54:25):
factored into any actual myth cycle. No, it is wholly
without shape and out of the darkness. It is the
figure that Asia and Panthea go to visit, and you know,
it just waits there until it's hour comes round at last. Yeah. Yeah,
And I also love how we got to let's see
if we got to to turn to Joni Mitchell, Crosby
Stills and Nash uh C s Lewis, Um Milton and
(54:48):
of course Gary Gygax to understand it all a wonderful
motley crew for those wooden ships on the water. All right, well,
we're gonna close it out right there. But obviously I
imagined in am of you have thoughts about the demogorgan,
either the Netflix version or the Dungeons and Dragons incarnation,
or perhaps some of the literary UH incarnations that we've
(55:09):
discussed here as well, and of course we would love
to hear from you. But stay tuned, because again this
entire month of October, he's going to be UH Halloween
themed as it has been in the past. Uh, We're
gonna have all new monstrosities to consider. Uh, tying in
as much science as we possibly can. Have we ever
(55:30):
done an episode on the science of Medusa? Snakes for hair?
Is there something there? Something I don't know? I mean,
I've I've covered at least blogged about Medusa back in
the day, and I think I did maybe a monster
science video about Medusa. But that would be an interesting
one to to to explore again, because the Medusa is
a is a fascinating monster, and then some of the
(55:51):
things we've done with the Medusa are kind of monstrous.
Uh yeah, I could. I would be up for a
Medusa exploration. Bring it all right. In the meantime, if
you want to support the show, the best thing you
can do is make sure you have subscribed, and then
rate and review us wherever you have the power to
do so. And don't forget about invention. Monsters are great,
but the real monster is always human endeavor and human invention.
(56:15):
And that's what we explore. Invention is a journey through
human techno history. Really, it's a it's a celebration, or
at least a contemplation in some in many cases of
the fire of Prometheus. Yeah, the things we made, how
they made us, where they came from. Yeah, So make
sure you have checked that show out as well, and
(56:35):
make sure you subscribe. Rate and review helps us out huge,
thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.
If you have any feedback on this episode and we'd
like to share it with us, If you'd like to
get in touch just to say hi or suggest a
topic for the future, you can email us at contact
at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to
(57:05):
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