Friday, March 6, 2009

Further LaFleur Musings

There's often a Lost thread over at Fark.com under their "showbiz" tab most weeks and, while it's often an enjoyable thing to peruse, this week it had quite a few good thoughts I'd thought I'd share (some of these were in the comments section of the review, but there's more and I thought they deserved their own post).

First off, some quotes on the statue, Richard and Egypt-
"Statue was cool. It definitely looked like Anubis, the half-man half-jackal god of the Egyptians. Considering the prevelance of the Ankh in this episode, and the fact that Anubis is shown with 4 toes on his hind foot, seems likely."

"I just had an interesting thought: could Richard Alpert be Egyptian? It would tie in to the statue, ankhs, and temple hieroglyphs, not to mention his love of eyeliner."

"Anubis, if I remember, was also God of the Underworld. And what do the hieroglyphs from the Swan Countdown Timer translate into? Underworld."
I love the Richard as Egyptian thing to explain his eyeliner. And I also love the Anubis/Underworld tie in. But an alternate theory of the statue's identity also emerged:



Meet Taweret (Taueret) - The Great Female - was the ancient Egyptian goddess of maternity and childbirth, protector of women and children. Like Bes, she was both a fierce demonic fighter as well as a popular deity who guarded the mother and her newborn child.
Now take a look at the LOST statue again (biggie pic):



As you can see, while the ankhs that the statue is holding give credence to the Taweret suggestion (along with the possibility this goddess has something to do with the Island's childbirth problem), but the statue doesn't quite fit. Taweret is naked (and female), while the Island statue clearly wears a skirt (and is likely male), much like Anubis wears. Perhaps it's a completely fictional god with aspects of both. There's certainly a connection there. My question now is if Smokey is some form of Anubis on the Island - he takes the form of dead people (Yemi) and comes out of the Underground. Who knows, perhaps there were dueling Egyptian gods on the Island and Smokey won...

Couple other things from the thread:
A neat point my girlfriend brought up last night. Charlotte probably knows Korean because Jin taught it to her as a kid!
Oh yeah. I so should have seen this.

And the other possibility that was brought up was that Rose and Bernard were actually Adam and Eve. While I think this is possible (and would certainly be a convenient way of writing them out of the story), I've always thought Adam and Eve were going to be someone more, well, significant. But it's still something to chew on. :)

Have a great weekend, everyone!

1 comment:

Capcom said...

Good posts for the episode!

I really like the Taweret idea going around. Especially because it's the only deity that I've seen so far that has a boxy "hat" on like the statue on the island. All the others have cones, orbs, or horns mostly. And it could be that TPTB just didn't feel like portraying a giant naked hiney, since they were giving us a peak at the statue from behind, and just put clothes on it. :o) Or, that it would be easier for us to assume that it was Egyptian if they put the usual skirt on it.

But it doesn't have to be a deity I suppose, it could also be a human ruler since the Egyptians sometimes made giant statues of them as well.