Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, and I, for once,
have no idea of what to talk about. Ah yes, how about the davalpa, aka the old
man of the sea from the ‘1001 nights’ cycle. Let us talk about that.
This is an old story, and it began back in the ancient
Greece, whose myths had the titans, the elder siblings (and parents, and
cousins), of the Olympian gods, and the giants, who were also the children of
Gaea the Earth, but unlike the titans, they were human above waist, but had
live snakes, (or at least snake tails) instead of legs.
The greatest of them all was Typhon, of course – a shapeless
monster, usually depicted as a winged humanoid with snake tails for legs and of
a giant size, even in proportion to his archrival Zeus. The two had fought a
number of battles, until Zeus smote Typhon with what is now known to be the
island of Sicily, pinning Typhon to the ground, and that was the end of him.
Only not, as Typhon mated with Echidna, a half-snake hybrid
herself, and the two of them became parents of many monsters; actually, of most
monsters of the Greek myths – but right now we are talking about the giants. Most
of them were nowhere as powerful as Typhon was, but what they lacked in
physical size and power, they made up in numbers – most Greek myths agree that
those ‘lesser’ giants rushed the Olympians as one, and only the assistance of
Hercules helped the Olympians win the day.
A special point of interest is how those giants were armed
and armored, or rather – how they were not. Unlike the Olympians, they had no
armor nor any forged weapons, but rather looked giant rocks and giant clubs,
maybe even entire trees… Fast forward, and we get a Medieval poem from Asia
rather than Europe, which discussed the travels and battles of Alexander the
Great, who defeated many empires and subjugated many tribes, including a tribe
of snake-legged giants, who were taller than trees, even though their legs were
like snake tails and weren’t any good, and who were armed with rocks and wooden
clubs rather than forged arms and armor… What is the point?
The point is that unlike the titans, the ancient Greek
giants were both savages and manifestations of dark, chthonic forces; mythical
analogues of the barbarians, who could not speak human language, (i.e. ancient
Greek or Latin), and who were not even human! Fast forward through the ages,
and you got the davalpa and similar entities, who look human from the waist up,
but snake-like from the waist down; who cannot speak a human language, and who
are no friends to the human race; the kaish-badzhak from Turkish mythology is
actually a cannibal djinn; so where does the old man of the sea come into this?
Firstly, the term itself is problematic: in the ancient
Greek myths, ‘the old man of the sea’ was used as a title to many lesser sea deities,
subjects of Poseidon, such as Proteus or Nereus, deities that have a little
role in mythology, and are usually appear only in one or two myths, and that’s
it. However, they are shapechangers and can speak human languages, (especially ancient
Greek), and are not particularly hostile to humans either. So what about the ‘1001
nights’ story cycle, then?
In that cycle, ‘the old man of the sea’ is encountered by
Sinbad the sailor, and he acts rather like the davalpa – it is a humanoid
monster that enslaves Sinbad by trickery; once he gets onto Sinbad’s back and
neck and shoulders, he is impossible to dislodge until Sinbad gets him drunk,
after which the old man of the sea falls of Sinbad, (and the sailor either
kills him or not). Put otherwise, this version of ‘the old man of the sea’ is
more like the demonic davalpa rather than one of the shapeshifting minor sea deities
of the ancient Greek myths. The illustrations of this story further compound
the conclusion, as in most ‘1001 nights’ illustrations, ‘the old man’ looks
precisely like that – an old man, just as human-looking as Sinbad himself, with
nary a supernatural trait. Look it up at the Internet yourself, if you care to…
Well, this is all that I want to talk about the davalpa for
now, in fact, this is it for today – see you all soon!
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