Hello everyone, and welcome to LukeLore. A quick deep dive into a folklore topic, where I share some of the stories from around the world that have piqued my interest.
We're taking a break from the three part themed series to do something of a tangential movie tie in. Alien: Romulus is about to release, and while at the time of writing I have not seen the movie (although I will definitely be there for its first weekend) I am aware of some plot details. As such, I am aware of some of the significance in using the name Romulus. I will be saying nothing more specifically about the movie, but I will be sharing the story of Remus and Romulus to help give the reference used some added context. From there, I will use it as a jumping off point for tales of mythological familicide.
So join me now, on a tourney of legendary murder in the family, as a lead in to the new movie using this first story as subtext.
SECTION BREAK – The Wolf Children of Rome
The story of Romulus and Remus begins a little before they were born, the sequence of their lives and lineage being said to be the necessary fated chain reaction leading to the birth of an Empire. Their mother Rhea Silvia was a descendant of Aeneas, the Prince of Troy whose adventures were told by Virgil in The Aeneid. She was the niece of Amulius, who overthrew her father Numitor and killed all of Rhea's brothers. Rhea was spared, however, and forced into becoming a Vestal Virgin: a priestess of the Roman goddess of the hearth Vesta. Within the temple of Vesta, tending to its sacred flame, she was supposed to be at no risk of having any male heirs who could challenge Amulius, but this plan fell afoul of the general horniness of the GrecoRoman pantheon of Gods. The only surprise here is that it wasn't Jupiter, the Roman analogue for Zeus, who was to blame. It was instead Mars, the god of war, who visited Rhea and led to her giving birth to twin boys.
This immediately leads to contemplations of murder. A Vestal Virgin who betrays her vows of celibacy is supposed to be buried alive, and Amulius has already killed his way through every other living heir, newborn babies not being a problem for him as they can't even fight back. The problem was risking the wrath of Mars. Rhea was locked up in isolation, and the babies were taken away to be left outside in the elements until exposure or hunger killed them – the idea being that they technically weren't killed by anyone that way, nature did it and the specifically relevant gods should fight that one out among themselves.
A basket containing the newborns is placed into the Tiber River, were the unamused river god Tibernus calms the waters before safely depositing the basket at the roots of a sacred fig tree found at the base of Palatine Hill in the Velabrum swamp. This could, and probably should, have still resulted in the planned hands-off deaths of the helpless babies with them now being left at the mercy of nature... But animals sacred to Mars appeared to care for them. A she-wolf suckled the twins, and fended off other wild animals. A woodpecker, which I presume is tied to Mars because of how it relentlessly attacks trees with its face-knife, also appeared to help feed the two newborns. The godsent animals kept the twins alive long enough for a shepherd and his wife to find the boys. From there the children are named Romulus and Remus, to be raised in the same profession as their adoptive father.
What should have led to peaceful, if miraculous in origin, lives could not escape the weight of fate. Once they had grown to young men, while they were tending to their sheep, the twins fell afoul of shepherds loyal to none other than their erstwhile uncle King Amulius. Being loyal to an unrepentant monster appears to have rubbed off on the roaming band of thug sheps, so a fight inevitably broke out. Being outnumbered, the twins got a beatdown and Remus was captured, leading to a meeting with his uncle that neither understood the significance of. Romulus rounded up his own posse of rowdy shepherds, and managed to free his brother, while also managing to kill the usurper king.
What I'm taking from all this, is that shepherds are built different, and probably shouldn't be messed with.
In all this chaos, the true identity of the twins got revealed, and they were offered the crown of Alba Longa by its citizens. They declined that offer, reinstating their grandfather to the throne, and with knowledge of their both noble AND divine bloodline they set off to found their own city. The two return to where they were rescued as children, and immediately begin to argue about where best to place this new city. Romulus was attached to the idea of using Palatine Hill, where the river deposited them and the animals sacred to Mars protected them. Remus instead wanted to move over to Aventine Hill, a location he thought would be better even though it didn't have the same connection to them being found and saved.
It is decided that the best way to solve this dispute is augury, divination through the study of bird behaviour. Each brother spent time on their chosen hills looking for signs to show whose idea has the favour of the gods. Meeting after their agreed upon time, Remus proudly declared he had seen six vultures, birds held as sacred to Mars because of how they would feed upon the fallen on the battlefield. Romulus retorted he had seen twelve vultures, beating Remus by six whole sacred birds. Annoyed by this very sibling one-upping, Remus said he saw his vultures first anyway so it doesn't matter how many Romulus saw. The two fall out, continuing to argue while at a standstill.
Eventually Romulus gets sick of the stalemate, and storms off to start digging trenches and building up walls around his chosen hill of Palatine. While only a starting point to get established, this is enough to make Remus jealous, and instead of starting his own work he begins to tease and harass his brother. Remus would constantly make fun of the walls his brother had begun, eventually jumping over it to mock Romulus for having made a feeble start no one would respect. This was apparently the final straw that broke the camel's back, and Romulus beat his brother to death with a shovel in a fit of rage. Immediately afterwards, Romulus was filled with regret, but he would continue to found and raise the city with a growing band of followers, naming it Roma after himself.
Roma and its ruler would go on to have something of a worrying start in its rise to an empire. Its numbers would swell with an influx of outcasts and runaways; an assortment of fugitive criminals, escaped slaves, and people exiled from other communities who had heard of the foundling city and its god touched ruler. This had the unfortunate consequence of forgetting that a functioning city would need women and, from there, children – which was something Romulus decided to fix with abduction raids for wives from neighbouring settlements. The whole mess seems pretty unpleasant, but after a few wars followed by some prosperous peace, Roma would grow into the germ of a history defining global power. Romulus would eventually go on to die in a freak whirlwind incident; which is either some strange punchline to a long cosmic joke, or else some god got sick of his ongoing shenanigans so gave him a quick smiting.
And so the city grew to change the world around it, after Romulus killed his brother Remus to found it.
This next thing probably isn't relevant, but it IS interesting in its own right and if the filmmakers really run with these mythological references it could yet go somewhere, so lets end this section by skipping ahead in time some centuries. Rome would go on to grow to the point it covered the seven surrounding hills of Aventine, Caelian, Capitoline, Esquiline, Palatine, Quirinal, and Viminal. In addition to this rendering the dispute between the twins pointlessly petty to a fresh new level of irony, as Aventine Hill became a part of Rome in the end anyway, this goes on to be a key detail for the Christian Book of Revelation. In its original historical context Revelation is not a prophecy of the end times yet to come, it is instead a coded resistance against Roman rule, and the Seven Headed Great Beast of that Book is the seven Hills of Rome. The legendary figures of Romulus and his brother are an overt and specific reference the movie will make use of, but I'm wondering if this being a monster movie at its heart they have designs upon making use of references to the Great Beast going forwards.
We shall have to wait and see how much mythological subtext we do get, both short term and much later in any potential sequels. I'm excited any which way, and will hopefully have seen Alien: Romulus by the time you hear this!
SECTION BREAK – The Hungry Titan
We've started off with some Latin fratricide, as well as a Royal uncle getting offed, but let's move on to some really dramatic mythologic family feuding.
Let's talk about the Titan Cronus.
In Ancient Greek tradition, before the Olympian pantheon of the gods who would come to be known, there was the marriage of the earth goddess Gaia and the sky god Uranus. They would go on to have three distinct sets of offspring. First there were the three Cyclopes, giants who looked like the gods but only had a single eye each. Then the equally monstrous three giant Hecotonchieres, also known as Centimanes, hundred handed and fifty headed giants were born. Each set of these children Uranus would banish to Tartarus in the underworld out of fear they could unseat him as the heavenly king, something which hurt Gaia because she loved all her children. They then gave birth to the twelve Titans, much closer to their godly parents in form, but they too would all be cast down into the underworld by their paranoid father.
Gaia approached her Titan children in their prison, and begged them all in order from the oldest down to youngest to please rise up and overthrow their cruel father, but each in turn refused until she reached the youngest: Cronus. He agreed to fight his father, and so his mother crafted for him a sickle out of flint. Taking up this sickle, Uranus was castrated in an ambush Gaia helped set up. Where the blood hit the earth the Erinyes, the Giants, and the Meliae all sprang forth. The god of the sky's genitals were then thrown into the sea, where they would dissolve into the ocean foam to form the goddess of love Aphrodite, and with this castration the heavens and the lands of the earth were separated. Uranus was unthroned as a consequence of being unmanned, and in a rage cursed Cronus with the prophesy that he in turn would be treated by his children like he had treated his father – which was pretty bad sour grapes considering how Uranus could have gotten around all this by just being a better father.
Cronus was elevated to the leader of his older siblings becoming the god of time, fertility, and the harvest. He would go on to marry his Titan sister, another Rhea of mythology, and when they in turn gave birth to the Olympians the curse of his father would begin to haunt Cronus. The castration of his father had left the youngest Titan the ruler of the universe, ushering in a Golden Age of gods and humans alike, but the prophesy hung over him.
There is a powerfully haunting painting inspired by what would follow, 'Saturn Devouring His Son' by Spanish painter Francisco Goya. It's a horrific image of cannibalism from the 14 'Black Paintings' Goya decorated his house with after his mind was broken by the horrors of war and the actions of the Spanish Inquisition, later transferred to canvas where it could be saved to terrify future generations. The subject glares out at the observer with a mad stare, biting down on the remaining arm of the decapitated corpse it is wrenching apart in its grip. It's certainly a work of art that sticks with you once you have seen it, and me being me I saw it a bit too young and have had it living rent free in my head my whole life. The myth itself is a little less visceral in the devouring, thankfully.
What would happen instead, to preserve his power, is that Cronus would swallow up whole every baby his wife would birth, subverting the prophesy by allowing no children around to treat him like he treated his father. So he would eat in turn Hestia, Hades, Demeter, Poseidon, Hera, and he would think he devoured sixth and final child from his wife Zeus – although he had been tricked by her into eating a rock swaddled in blankets, a plan Gaia and the castrated Uranus helped to concoct. Rhea would spirit Zeus away to Mount Ida in Crete, where he would grow in secret.
Now, Cronus was no pushover. Considered to be virtually omnipotent, holding sway over all new life as the god of the harvest and equally holding the absolute power to take it back away again as the god of time, defeating him took several steps. Zeus liberated the Cyclopes and Hecatoncheires, who Cronus had forced back into Tartarus again at some point copying his father. As well as having these powerful allies, Zeus was also given a potion by his grandmother Gaia to force the Titan to vomit back up his other children in reverse order, starting with the rock he had been tricked into devouring instead of the youngest son who now came to overthrow him exactly like Uranus cursed to come to pass. This war of the new gods to finally defeat Cronus was the Titanomachia, and even after his defeat the Titan remained a significant deity of Ancient Europe.
When all was said and done, Cronus ended up back in Tartarus where he started, the paranoia he went on to inherit from his father leading to the prophesy fulfilling itself, with his own youngest son in turn overthrowing him to become the new king. These older pantheonic gods were far from perfect, and offered a lot of moral teaching moments by demonstrating what NOT to do, this definitely being a strong hint to break free of cyclical trauma (although the mistakes of Zeus during his term as divine ruler is its whole own other thing).
SECTION BREAK – The First Murder
So far this has all been the gods squabbling among themselves, but human hands are hardly clean of blood. Within the Old Testament of the Abrahamic tradition comes the tale of the first murder, the story of Cain and Abel.
These Biblical brothers were the first two children of Adam and Eve. Cain would go on to become a farmer, and Abel a shepherd. Both were great at their individual tasks, and there would come a time when they were called upon to give an offering up to God. Cain spared some of his harvest, and Abel would give the very best of his flock in sacrifice, which led to God holding Abel in high regard and Cain in none. Some interpretations point to this not being a preference of livestock over the fruit of the earth, but more being about the devotion of the brothers. Cain just gave some of what was spare, while Abel went out of his way to offer up his best.
This led to Cain being overwhelmed with anger, and he got directly addressed by God. Cain was warned to not be angry, to worry more about doing well himself, and not let in sin from where it is lurking at the door if he does not do well. Sin, now it is a part of human life following the fall from Eden, desires to overcome people and it must be mastered by them.
In his anger, the reprimand from God meant nothing. He says to Abel “Let us go out to the field”, and the younger brother is led out to where Cain does his work. Now, poor naïve Abel can't be blamed for what is about to happen here, because nothing like it had ever occurred before, so the warning signs meant nothing to him. Cain, having led his brother out to where they could be alone, picked up a rock and smashed Abel's skull in with it – the consequences of this probably surprised Cain as much as anyone else here, so he hurriedly buried the body and tried to look innocent when a suspicious God showed up to question him.
Upon being asked where his brother is, Cain answers “I do not know; am I my brother's keeper?” Sassing an all seeing and all knowing deity probably wasn't the wisest course of action, and the Lord lays into the first murderer among all of humankind. As well as straight up yelling at Cain, which is probably pretty hair-raising given the source of the bollocking, he was cursed to never again receive any bounty from the earth where he sought to hide his brother's defiled corpse, and was then furthermore given The Mark of Cain. While cast out and wandering the earth, no one may kill the murderer or else risk a sevenfold vengeance upon them, marking out Cain to be left alone suffering the consequences of his actions for many years to come. He would go on into exile East of Eden at the land of Nod, where he would settle with a wife of his own to have a son named Enoch, founding a city he would name after that child.
The Islamic version of the story adds some interesting extra details. The Devil is a part of the proceedings, appearing to Cain when he is angry at his rejected offering. It was the Devil who gives him the idea of what to do, whispering to Cain to pick up the rock and introduce it the Abel's head as hard as he can. After the murder, the Devil affirms its status as an all time peak git by immediately running to Eve to snitch on Cain. At first Eve is confused, because she has no concept of murder or even the natural death of a loved one, so the Devil delights in breaking her heart explaining to her that Abel is forever gone now:
“He does not eat. He does not drink. He does not move. That is what murder and death are.”
As she understood what the smug Devil was explaining to her, grief overwhelms Eve. She runs to Adam crying and wailing in grief, unable to speak and so pass on the horrible news she is so distraught over, ever since this being why women wail after their hearts break from losing a loved one. The Muslim tales go on to elaborate upon the final end of Cain, given how The Mark of Cain was to prevent his death at the hands of men: Cain and his family would die in Noah's flood along with the tyrants and unbelievers.
This tale from the Book of Genesis has a simpler moral to unravel than the pre-Hellenic Titanomachia: Killing someone is bad. It's sadly a lesson that never quite seems to stick for some people.
SECTION BREAK – Japan's Most Famous Ghost Story
Let's end this topic on some murders via marriage, to break up the familicide a little.
Yotsuya Kaidan was a ghost story written into a Kabuki play in 1825 by Tsuruya Nanboku IV, and it has gone on to be the single most adapted ghost story in Japan with an incredible influence on the country's ghost storytelling traditions.
Oiwa is an outstandingly beautiful woman who is unfortunately for her married to the ronin Tamiya Iemon. The disgraced samurai doesn't give a damn about Oiwa herself, he just wants to enjoy her family fortune and the prestige of having a good looking wife to parade about. The play begins with Iemon arguing with Oiwa's father Yotsuya Samon, whose attempt to protect his daughter results in Iemon killing the man in a rage. Another man is then introduced to the story, Naosuke, who wants to possess Oiwa's sister Osode – a prostitute married to Sato Yomoshichi. Naosuke is humiliated by Yomoshichi and the brothel's owner when he cannot afford to pay for Osode's services, which leads to the drunken murder of Naosuke's former master. The two killings linked to the same family both occur at the same time, tying the two killers together. They will meet, and conspire together to fool the sisters into believing their father was killed by a bandit, helping them both manipulate the women into what the villainous men want: Oiwa to reconcile with Iemon, and Osode to agree to marry to Naosuke, in return for their father apparently being avenged.
Enter the further complication of Oume, the granddaughter of physician Ito Kihei. She wants to get Oiwa out of the way so she can have the ronin Iemon for herself, and because Oiwa is so beautiful comes up with a plot to send her toxic face cream. This goes off as planned, and Oiwa is disfigured in a way she doesn't immediately realise, her face is mutilated and her left eye begins to droop, only due to the nature of the toxin she doesn't feel it. Iemon is repulsed by her now, which opens the way for Oume to seduce him. Now needing a divorce, Iemon convinces his friend Takuetsu to attack his wife in a way that could be used to frame her for infidelity.
When Takuetsu breaks in to assault Oiwa, he is stopped by how horrific the toxic face cream has left the poor woman looking. Unable to speak, he just hands Oiwa a mirror to see how she looks for herself, which leads to her attempting to cover up the disfigurement in a panic. This becomes a sensationally outstanding moment in the play that shapes the future of Japanese horror yet to come: The actress will sit before a mirror, wearing her horrific kabuki mask, and brush at her hair. An out of sight stagehand will keep passing more and more loose prop hair to the actress, allowing long black strands to keep on piling up for the gruesome scene. When you see hair going everywhere as a vengeful Onryō spirit appears in J-horror, or if you see the sagging left eye on a character, THIS is what is being referenced.
The scene ends with Takuetsu able to speak again, explaining everything to Oiwa who in a fit of hysterics runs a sword through her own throat. In her final moments she curses Iemon's name through the blood that drowns her. Previous wife out of the way, Iemon and Oume get married, which is where the ghost of Oiwa begins to quite rightly harass Iemon. He starts to see her disfigured balding face in paper lanterns that he starts lashing out at with his sword, leading to Iemon accidentally cutting down both his new bride Oume and her grandfather that supplied the toxic face cream, the Onryō beginning to exact its revenge.
Having taken steps to kill off Oume's family, the play then takes a small diversion to wrap up the Naosuke and Osode sub plot. Osode ends up killed for debauchery due to false allegations spread because she refuses to have sex with her new husband Naosuke, who in turn discovers she refused to have sex with him because she was his long lost sister and Naosuke kills himself out of shame. The story ends with Iemon being driven mad by Oiwa haunting him, hiding in a mountain cave unable to tell the difference between hallucinations and reality, eventually being tracked down and killed by Sato Yomoshichi for ruining the lives of the innocent sisters.
It's a bit of a convoluted five act play, but is well worth bringing up while we were on the topic of legendary murders in the family. Yotsuya Kaidan had a massive impact upon Japanese ghost stories, and from there the wider horror story world as movies like The Ring and The Grudge would become global hits. I need to catch a live performance of this some day! I especially want to see the mirror scene in person.
SECTION BREAK
This was something of an unusual tie in episode for a new movie release, but an interesting topic in its own right and it will hopefully help give some extra depth to the references being made in Alien: Romulus for anyone looking to watch it.
The next episode will be the third and final entry in my somewhat silly linked theme, I will be revealing what I was up to as a part of that episode so you can all groan along together at home. A second person managed to guess what I was up to in the Spotify comments, so great job AnitaPepita in catching me out.
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Goodbye for now.
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