C.E. Martin's Blog

Arthur's Other Sword?

Arthur's Other Sword?
When many people hear the term "Legendary Weapon" they probably think of one of the most famous of all Legendary (ie, possibly real) weapons of all time: Excalibur, the sword of King Arthur. But was that the son of Uther Pendragon's only famous sword?
There are many, many different versions of the story of King Arthur. Each has the King wielding a magical sword, but other versions include a second, or rather, first sword: the sword in the stone.
In his story Merlin, Robert de Boron has Arthur taking the throne after pulling a sword from an anvil, sitting atop a stone, from a churchyard--on Christmas Eve. This version of events later becomes the more familiar tale of Arthur pulling the sword from a stone itself and securing the throne. In most tales, Arthur is later given his magical sword by the Lady of the Lake, a Fae entity interested in seeing Arthur continue his rule over the land. When Arthur is dying he then wishes to return the sword (in some tales) and enlists assistance in throwing it back into the lake from which it came--the Lady catching it and carrying it into the depths.
While mostly known by the name Excalibur today, Arthur's famous sword has also been called Caledfwlch in Welsh; Calesvol in Cornish (in Modern Cornish: Kalesvolgh), Kaledvoulc'h in Breton; and Caliburnus in Latin (which may mean cut through steel, in French). Generally speaking, the magical bade was unbreakable, a sword of unparalleled might. 
Chrétien de Troyes' late 12th-century Old French tale, Perceval, has Sir Gawain carrying Escalibor, a sword said to be able to "slice through iron as through wood". That may sound like a tall tale, but Damascus Steel blades, made in Syria from Indian wootz steel, from the 3rd to 18th centuries, were often said to be able to slice through rock and lesser steel. German scientists in 2006 reported finding "nanowires and carbon nanotubes" in a blade forged from Damascus steel--possibly accounting for the legendary properties of such blades. 
And speaking of a sword in stone,  at the Rotonda at Montesiepi, near the ruins of the Abbey of Saint Galgano, the handle of a sword said to have belonged to San Galgano, protrudes from stone. Testing of the metal confirms it is of the same type as a sword from Galgano's area. Formerly a ruthless man, Galgano repented and became a Holy man after having visions of the Archangel Michael. 
As the legend goes, Galgano was told in his vision that he was to renounce material possessions. The future-Saint countered that this would be as easy as splitting a rock and thrust his sword into the ground as if to prove a point. Instead, the sword pierced the the stone easily, then became fused in place. After his death, Galgano was cannonized in 1185 and a Monastery built over where his sword still stands. 
Was Excalibur really Arthur's sword? Was it his only magical weapon? 
A Middle English poem, Morte Arthure, dating from around 1400 A.D., retells the story of Arthur, and mentions Clarent, a sword meant for knighting and ceremonies rather than battle, but which Mordred (Arthur's infamous nephew) stole and used to kill Arthur.
In fact, tales of magical swords possessing supernatural abilities are very common in folklore and fiction. 
Whether inspired by Saint Galgano's tale, Welsh or even Nordic folklore, one thing remains certain: the legend of King Arthur and his mystical swords lives on, to the extent you can even purchase replicas on Amazon. NOTE: No one really knows what Excalibur looked like and most replicas are based on swords of the time.

A to Z Blogging Challenge 2020

Since 2015, Punch the Rabbit (formerly know as the Stone Soldiers blog) has annually celebrated the A to Z Blogging challenge, citing the people, places, and things of the Stone Soldiers universe. 
While the series is in hiatus, possibly to return in 2020, the challenge endures. For this year, Punch the Rabbit celebrates Legendary Weapons of history--many of which have been described or featured in the Stone Soldiers series. 
Check back daily for a brief description of mythical weaponry, some familiar, some all new...

Author's Notes: The Nine Worlds

For the A to Z Blogging Challenge 2019, Punch the Rabbit delves deep behind the scenes with a series of Author's Notes related to the Stone Soldiers, Spectral Ops, and Shadow Detachment series. 

Author's Notes: Magical Prohibitions

For the A to Z Blogging Challenge 2019, Punch the Rabbit delves deep behind the scenes with a series of Author's Notes related to the Stone Soldiers, Spectral Ops, and Shadow Detachment series. 

Author's Notes: LEMs and Lunar Ruins

For the A to Z Blogging Challenge 2019, Punch the Rabbit delves deep behind the scenes with a series of Author's Notes related to the Stone Soldiers, Spectral Ops, and Shadow Detachment series. 




On July 20, 1976, Viking 1 set down on the surface of Mars… and a lot of us were disappointed. We weren’t sad that the USofA had landed a probe on Mars, we were sad that there weren’t any aliens. For several years before this momentous occasion, we had been led to believe, by Richard Hoaglund and his “Enterprise Mission”, that not only was there a face on Mars, but several pyramids. When Viking 1 started sending back photos of nothing but a barren, desolate landscape, it was pretty disappointing.
Fast forward a few decades, and while reading about the ruins anew, trying to find a way to fit them into a Stone Soldiers story, I learned something shocking: it wasn’t just Mars that Mr. Hoaglund believed had ancient, possibly alien ruins on it—the Moon did too!
This was pretty shocking. I remembered watching some of the Moon landings—or at least programs about them, I was only 2 when Apollo 11 touched down. No one had ever said anything about towers and structures on the far side of the Moon back then. At least, not on TV.
Fast forward to the 21st Century and you can find all kinds of crazy ideas via Google, or Yahoo—stuff Jeeves never told us about.
Combined with the information I’d learned about the Moon god al-ilah, this was clearly a story in the making—a story about a Fallen Angel with Nephilim servants, striking at Earth from the safety of the ultimate high ground.
If you haven’t ever heard about the Moon ruins, fear not, Mr. Hoaglund’s Enterprise Mission has info, and blurry pics about them!
But back to our story. Sure, there could be ruins on the Moon no one’s ever seen—the far side of the Moon (erroneously called the “Dark Side”) is always facing away from Earth, the rotation of the Moon matched by the time it takes it to complete an orbit around us. The real question was to figure out how I would get my team of Stone Soldiers to the Moon.
As it turns out, the Apollo program was actually terminated before the last three missions could be launched. Apollo 18, 19, and 20 were scrubbed. Some conspiracy theorists claim it’s because the Apollo crews were warned not to come back, but I didn’t really care why. I was excited to learn that three Lunar Expedition Modules (landers) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canceled_Apollo_missionswere still in existence! That’s right, there are still three vessels in the world capable of carrying men to the Moon (if all the guts and electronics were put back in them).

Author's Note: The Kabaa and the Magic Space Rock

For the A to Z Blogging Challenge 2019, Punch the Rabbit delves deep behind the scenes with a series of Author's Notes related to the Stone Soldiers, Spectral Ops, and Shadow Detachment series. 




For those Muslims who aren’t throwing homosexuals off rooftops, crashing planes into buildings, or tearing down ancient, pre-Islamic historical sites, there is a pretty important part of their daily regimen, demanded of their faith: praying to Mecca.
For years, I wondered what this was all about. What even is Mecca? I wondered. I turned to the Internet, and first found fairly mundane explanations for this Islamic holy site. But, Google never fails to include the more bizarre bits of information you’ve never heard of, and I learned so much more…
Pre-Islam, there was a Temple in Mecca, to the fortune-telling god of divination, Hubal. When Muhammed and his followers took over the city, they removed all signs of the false god and decided to turn the temple into a sign of their faith: the Kabaa. Every year, Muslims from around the world make a long pilgrimage to this site, just as the Bedouins before them had, hoping to touch the Kabaa. On the face of it, this doesn’t seem so unusual. Lots of cultures have replaced the meaning of former religious sites, incorporating them into the conqueror’s religious practices. But what makes the Kabaa so special isn’t the fact very few are allowed to be inside it, it’s the what’s on the Eastern corner of the special building: the Black Stone.
Believed to be meteorite, the Black Stone has its part in Islam—for one, it’s alleged to have had the power of speech, and actually spoke to Muhammed. Yes, it’s a magic stone. From space.
In 683, the stone’s powers of speech didn’t protect it from physical harm—it was broken apart by another stone, fired from a catapault by invaders attempting to seize the city. In the aftermath, the stone’s fragments were fused back together and set in silver.
Again, a relic inspiring the Holy isn’t that unusual. But there is more.
In 1901, archaeologist Hugo Winckler proposed that it wasn’t “Allah” the Muslims were praying to, but rather “al-ilah” a pre-Islamic Moon god. Today, there are many claims on he internet that the higher ups in Islam won’t deny that al-ilah and “Allah” are one and the same, or that they are the Moon God, looking own from on high. And recall that the flag of Islam always seems to bear a crescent moon and a star—perhaps the falling star of the Black Stone?
This is all a pretty fantastic bunch of conspiracy theories, but when I read them, I knew this was L Ron Hubbard-worthy fiction that I was going to embrace and combine with some other far-out Moon mythology on Stone Soldiers #11, One Dark Step .
Is any of this true? Or is it right up there with the faces of Mars? Maybe you should do some Googling, then read One Dark Step and decide for yourself…

Author's Notes: Jumping into Danger

For the A to Z Blogging Challenge 2019, Punch the Rabbit delves deep behind the scenes with a series of Author's Notes related to the Stone Soldiers, Spectral Ops, and Shadow Detachment series. 





Jumping into Danger
It was only a few months ago that I watched the movie Aquaman for the first time. In one scene, Arthur Curry and Princess Mera leap from an airplane flying over the desert—without any parachute. As I watched this, I thought for sure they would pass through some magical barrier over a sea, making it resemble a desert. But, no, they just slammed into the ground boom, boom—and were unharmed.
I’m sure a lot of people watching this movie might have wondered about that, assuming, as so many people do, that the height of a fall is what makes it dangerous. That is not entirely true, as I learned several years ago when I wrote a very similar scene in Stone Soldiers #4, Shades of War . In this scene, Detachment 1039’s most-human character, Josie Winters, finds herself thrown into free fall without a parachute. Her grandfather, Colonel Kenslir, then dives out after her, intent to rescue the girl—but also without a parachute.
This scene was written after a lot of research about skydiving—not just the sport, but the military’s use of it as a way to deploy troops onto a battlefield.
Firstly, it might surprise you to learn that the concept of parachuting soldiers onto a battlefield was first envisioned by Benjamin Franklin in 1784. It wasn’t until 1927, in Italy, that this idea was finally, successfully executed. In the decades that followed, armed forces around the world embraced the idea of Airborne troops, and innovations and practices ave continued to be developed, such as HALO (High-Altitude, Low-Opening).
Amidst all the ever-advancing technology though, there remains a very valid question: do you really need a parachute? Generally, the answer is “yes”, but there have been several incidents of skydivers surviving a jump without a working parachute (although there are far less of these survivors than people who have died when their parachute failed to open).
As it turns out, anything falling in the earth’s atmosphere reaches what is called terminal velocity. This means that once the object (a person, pallet, or vehicle) reaches a certain speed, it will not fall any faster—no matter how high it is dropped from. This is in part due to wind resistance and the non-changing gravitational pull of the Earth. For humans, terminal velocity is, in freefall position (spread-eagled, with arms and legs extended), 120 miles per hour.
That may sound pretty fast, and in far too many cases it is. But, as I stated above, sometimes, even at this speed, people have survived. In many of the cases, survivors had their parachutes partially open, thereby slowing their descent to less deadly speeds like 50 mph. It’s also important to realize that different surfaces such a falling person strikes might play an important part in surviving. At high speeds, even water will feel like a solid. In the case of Luke Aikins, who, in 2016, plummeted 20,000 feet to a special safety net, and survived, uninjured.  
In Aquaman, Arthur Curry and friend plummet onto sand. It doesn’t seem to have the shock-absorbing properties of a suspended net, but maybe the half-Atlantean didn’t need them, given that earlier in the film, we see he’s bulletproof.
Think about cats. A study done on the subject of falling cats determined a freefalling feline could survive a fall even after reaching a velocity of 60 mph. Cats aren’t bulletproof. They aren’t even BB gun-proof. But they can withstand falls significantly better than people can. This is clearly due to their body mass v. density ratio—made of the same flesh and bones as people, but weighing significantly less.
In Shades of War I reached the same conclusion, and determined that Mark Kenslir, being a superhuman (albeit not bulletproof), could withstand a fall that would kill a human. The writers of Aquaman clearly reached a similarly conclusion, deciding that Arthur Curry would have a similar terminal velocity to a human, given he is the same weight and volume as a normal man, but being made of tougher stuff.
Of course, this is all just conjecture, until a superhuman comes along in real life that is willing to jump out of an airplane without a parachute.

Author's Notes: Ica Stones and Extant Dinosaurs

For the A to Z Blogging Challenge 2019, Punch the Rabbit delves deep behind the scenes with a series of Author's Notes related to the Stone Soldiers, Spectral Ops, and Shadow Detachment series. 


Ica Stones and Extant Dinosaurs
Mkele Mbembe, the Ropen, the Kasai Rex, Nessie… these are all cryptids believed to exist, and believed to be dinosaurs that have survived into the modern era. Like Nessie, we know of many dino-cryptids because of eyewitness reports.
In Stone Soldiers #5, BlackKnight Down , the Shadow Detachment finds themselves fighting ancient, antediluvian beings who are able to create simulcrums of the ancient beasts that walked the Earth when they did. Deciding exactly what beasts they would choose was a challenge. The antediluvian Titanshad been in suspended animation for millennia, missing the 29th Century, which is when most dinosaur species’ fossils were discovered. They wouldn’t know about T-Rex Triceratops, or the Apatosaurus… or would they?
In addition to eyewitness sightings of extant dinos, there are a number of ancient carvings around the world that depict animals thought to have died out long ago. These carvings are alleged to be centuries old, putting them long after the dino extinction, but also quite a while before paleontology became a thing. How then did the people who made these carvings know what to carve?
The most intriguing of the dino carvings are the Ica Stones—thousands of smooth, round stones etched with dinosaurs and people, and found in the Ica region of Peru. The stones were first discovered (in modern times) in the 1960s by a farmer named Basilio Uschuya. Collected by Javier Cabrera Darquea the stones were revealed to the world and now reside in museum.
In the 1970s, Uschuya admitted in an interview he had made many of the stones himself—but his claim is questionable for the simple fact he couldn’t have made the thousands of stones collected by Mr. Cabrera. And for the fact he soon after began selling stones to tourists that he did indeed make.
If the Ica stones are really remnants from ages past, they support a Creationist view of the Earth, where, pre-Flood, man and dinosaur lived side-by-side.

Author's Notes: Haint Blue and other Colorful Superstitions

For the A to Z Blogging Challenge 2019, Punch the Rabbit delves deep behind the scenes with a series of Author's Notes related to the Stone Soldiers, Spectral Ops, and Shadow Detachment series. 


HAINT BLUE, AND OTHER COLORFUL SUPERSTITIONS


If you’ve ever been to the American South—particularly, the Carolinas—you might have noticed a lot of white houses with a kind of sky-blue door or porch. I never paid this much mind, assuming the light blue just went well with the other bright colors. But recently, while researching alternative names for ghosts & spirits, I stumbled across Haint Blue.
Haint blue is a color—that light, sky-blue (as I call it) color I just mentioned. It is an official color, which is even carried by Sherwin Williams on their website.
Sherwin Williams even explains the origins of the color: how Southern superstition holds that ghsts, or haints as they are sometimes called in the region, are repelled by the color, mistaking it for water, which ghosts are believed to not be able to cross.
I was rather shocked to learn this. I’d never heard about a color repelling spirits. I’d heard how many believe sage does the same thing. And then there’s the Old Testament story of Passover, where the Jews in Egypt marked their doorways with lamb’s blood, protecting them from God’s wrath when a Heavenly Host descended and unleashed some vengeance on the land. But a bucket of latex keeping ghosts at bay? Can ghosts even see colors? Do they even “see” in the conventional sense—they don’t have eyeballs. How do we know they don’t use some kind of sixth sense to navigate the world?
I set out to find any other colorful superstitions. There are lots of meanings and symbolism behind colors, but repelling anything? A few websites mention an old belief that the color red could repel witches: drawing a red line around a barn to keep a witch out (the Pennsylvania Dutch), tying a charm in a red cloth hung from the neck protects from bewitchment (Bohemia), braided red ropes of cords hung in barns compel a witch to stop and count the threads before harming any animals… there are a variety of uses of the color red.
Okay, so if blue is the only color that repels spirits, why? Is the color itself special? Maybe it is, if one believes that until modern times, humans couldn’t even see the color.
According to 1800s scholar William Gladstone, Homer never used the word “blue” to describe the ocean in the Odyssey, instead referring to it as "wine-dark" or other hues. Lazarus Geiger also propounded this belief, noting that the word for the color blue never appears in Icelandic, Hindu, Chinese, Arabic, and Hebrew texts. Etymologists claim that the first use of a word for blue came from the Egyptians, who also, coincidentally, were the only culture able to produce blue dyes.
It might seem a stretch to believe that blue hasn’t always been around. But, in 2006, Jules Davidoff, a psychologist from Goldsmiths University of London, published a study detailing work he did with the Himba tribe of Namibia. Davidoff learned that the Himba had no word for blue, and didn’t even distinguish between green and blue.
Maybe blue actually is special. It’s often the color used to signify royalty—probably because blue dye was so expensive. But what about the connection with ghosts?
As it turns out, there is another instance of blue having a correlation with spirits: Ghost Eyes. I’m not referring to a ghost’s eyes here, but rather, the pale blue eyes of certain breeds of dogs.
I learned about ghost eyes when my family got an Australian-Shepherd mix dog about ten years ago. Sunnie, our faithful canine companion, had strange, blue eyes, different from a Husky’s, and almost white. Not all Aussies have these blue eyes, and according to breeder websites, the term ghost eyecomes from Native Americans who believed the dogs both sacred and to be avoided.
Coincidentally, blue eyes in people were once very unnerving to those not familiar with them, but now account for 8 percent of the population (green eyes are the rarest, coming in at 2 percent of the population). Geneticists believe that everyone with blue eyes has a common ancestor, who lived as much as 10,000 years ago.
Whether you paint your porch blue, or get a dog with blue eyes, one thing is for sure—it’s nothing to be blue about, unless you’re spirit.

Author's Notes: Golems

For the A to Z Blogging Challenge 2019, Punch the Rabbit delves deep behind the scenes with a series of Author's Notes related to the Stone Soldiers, Spectral Ops, and Shadow Detachment series. 



If you’ve read the whole Stone Soldiers series, you know there’s a former Nazi Hunter-turned-Stone Soldier on the team: Yadid Greenberg, code-name: Golem.
Yes, it’s a little hack to call the petrified Jewish guy on the team Golem, but this is a military series, and political correctness or empathy is often not part of the equation. What might seem like  denigrating nick name to outsiders is often bestowed within units as a way to find  little humor. And let’s face it, if you were in a military unit fighting unspeakable evil forces of darkness, you’d need a lot of humor.
But really, what is a Golem?
As a youth, my full extent of knowledge of the subject revolved around a single story of a Rabbi bestowing life on a man-shaped mass of clay, to fight Nazis. I couldn’t even tell you where I first heard this story, as it’s almost a trope now in fiction—even the show Supernatural had a story with a Nazi-fighting Golem (Episode 13, Season 8).
The genesis of the Stone Soldiers idea partly came from this modern bit of folklore—along with a dose of Marvel Comics' It: The Living Colossus and Benjamin J. Grimm. But rather than imbue my stone soldiers with life, I liked better the idea of turning soldiers to stone (thank you, Mr. Grimm).
Around the time I first decided to bestow the character of Yadid with his team name, I realized I didn’t really know what a Golem was. I set out to correct that and found some interesting lore.
First off, animating the unliving isn’t just the domain of Rabbis. Ghosts/Spirits are often attributed with this ability (apparently, it’s Child’s Play) as a kind of possession of the inanimate. What’s more, the Latin term for spirit, or breath of life, was Anima, or animus—as in animated.
Putting aside tales of any homunculus (small, human like objects, e.g. Pinocchio), folklore is replete with all sorts of tales of physical objects being brought to life—kind of the opposite of Medusa’s ability to turn the living into inanimate objects.
Talos is a Greek tale of a giant automaton made of metal, who protected the Island of Europa—circling the island three times a day and driving off any hostile, would-be invaders. And when speaking about man-created life, one mustn’t leave out Frankenstein’s Monster, a more modern telling of the inanimate being brought to life.
But what about Golems?
Some might say Adam was a Golem, created by God in the Garden of Eden. Fashioned from clay, he was brought to life—a story mimicked in Pinocchio and the Wonder Woman movie of 2017.
While there are older Jewish legends of Golems, one of the earliest historical accounts I could find much detail on was that of Judah Loew ben Bezalel, a 16th century Rabbi of Prague credited with creating a Golem from clay from the river Vltava. In this story, the Golem was credited to defend the people of the Prague ghetto (but not from Nazis, as it pre-dates that).
Other legends abound of Rabbis and Golems, and there are countless uses of the story in fiction, but what does the word Golem really mean? What about the term ties it to Judaism? What makes a living creation a Golem, and not a Homunculus? 
The word appears once in the Bible (Psalm 139:16; golmi; my golem), and describes "my light form", referring to an unfinished human. Another origin has the word in the Mishnah, meaning an uncultivated person. A more modern etymological origin from Modern Hebrew, has the term meaning dumb or helpless.
Whatever it’s origins and meanings, the term golem has, thanks to fiction, come to mean an animated being of Jewish origin. It definitely sounds better than Frankenstein, as well.