The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

So I have been a big Hellboy fan since before I was a Pagan.  Specifically of the comic, of which I only read those illustrated by Mignola or Fegredo, because they are beautiful and because I'm a snob.  For those of you not familiar with Hellboy, the premise is basically that the titular character is the Beast of the Apocalypse but doesn't want to be, so instead he goes around solving people's supernatural problems using mostly his fists and lots of cigars and sarcasm.  Throw in some Nazi occultists, some Pagan Gods, some H.P. Lovecraft, and I think you'll have a pretty good picture of it.

But what I want to talk about today is the Pagan Gods part.  Many of Hellboy's super-villian equivalents are actually Gods and (mostly) Goddesses that many Pagans revere, and that the average U.S. citizen has never heard of (a potentially dangerous combination).  The biggest ones that come to mind are Hecate, the Baba Yaga, and the Morrigan.  It's been a little while since I last read these, so I'm having a hard time coming up with specific quotes and whatnot.  I know Hecate's depiction is very strange and confusing to me - she often appears with a snake body and/or snakes for hair, and later travels around in an iron maiden (although that last bit is due to some conflation with a human woman killed by an iron maiden that featured in one of the plot lines, if I recall).  But Hecate was an early villain, back when the comic was still developing pretty rapidly.  The Morrigan, who appears much later, and has a super epic plot line, is very interesting to me (slight spoilers in this paragraph, by the way).  She is shown first as Nimue (the Lady of the Lake), and later "becoming" the Morrigan, or something like that.  She is shown as, yes, a Goddess of war, but also as the one time Queen of Witches, who the witches were so afraid of that they cut her up and locked the pieces of her body in various prisons scattered around the world.  She is shown as exceedingly cruel and terrible, and yet I found the imagery around her to be very beautiful.  See here some pictures of her:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ZP-guoj9l2k/UIyooKiTBjI/AAAAAAABgXE/qh1NE6GTWB0/s1600/n1.PNG

http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/hellboy/images/3/30/Nimue_002.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20140824011030

http://www.fybertech.com/4thread/co_11768979/1254272607272.jpg

So at the end of the day, I'm not really sure what to make of it in light of being Pagan and coming in with some reverence for these entities.  I honestly have a tendency to really like them - although I have always been a villain person.  Has anyone here read the Hellboy comics?  What do you guys think of these depictions of Goddesses?

Also, would anyone be interested in discussing them issue by issue (the comic book type of issue, not the SJ type of issue)?

First off to say, major Hellboy fangirl here! I even cosplayed as a female version of him. Secondly, Mignola's depictions of Baba Yaga, Nimue, and Hecate are his interpretations of them. It's pop culture. So, unless it has a personal impact on you for whatever reason, it's not that big a deal. If you're a Pop Culture Pagan and want to view these deities as such, go ahead. Mignola also depicts the Dagda in the comic, and I think that version is awesome as well.

I think we have to remember that mythological descriptions of deities have always changed to fit societal conditions anyway, especially those where the tradition has been primarily passed down orally.  So this could be seen as merely another facet of that process.

There's the question of if the Gods and Goddesses mind.

Finally, I think there's an issue of whether this could cause problems for Pagans on a social scale.  I don't see much evidence that this kind of depiction is doing so, but I might feel differently if I was a Pagan living in the Bible Belt.  (Though I suspect the Christian right probably aren't going to be influenced by something like Hellboy, as they're likely to be wholly hostile to it anyway).

But I'm always up for discussing comics and their depiction of magic/deities in an in-depth manner.

If you haven't yet, I'd recommend you take a look at The Wicked and the Divine by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie.  The art and the story are both topnotch and it's a really interesting exploration of the role of deities in the modern world.

Hi, Marjie. It's a very borderline case of fair use, so I think I'll have to say no to anything that involves posting scans in the forums. I'm not sufficiently versed in the ins and outs of such things to explain in any detail, though, so I've asked TC's 'resident librarian' to come in and elaborate; she should be along shortly with a post.

Sunflower
TC Forum Staff

(Not the only resident librarian, I think, Sunflower, but the one whose done the most copyright education, I think.)

Marjie - posting portions of copyrighted work [1] is a complicated sort of area that falls under what's called 'fair use'.

The problem is that fair use is not actually a clear set of guidelines - it's something that can be used as a defence in court. There have been times that judges have ruled that a sentence or two of text isn't fair use (because of what specifically was used, and how) and times that pages of text is fine. (Images are even more complicated in some ways.)

The basic factors for fair use are: the purpose and character of the use (educational uses get more leeway than profit-based ones), the nature of the work, the amount (and how critical it is) of the portion you use, and the effect on the potential market.

So, generally, anything that would *replace* a potential sale is likely not fair use (like copying the entire comic). But there have been cases where making a key piece (like a key scene, or the paragraph or two that sum up the rest of the work, or whatever) has been deemed by the courts to not be fair use.

Since this is so incredibly murky, and since most people are not intellectual property lawyers, most discussion sites tend to err on the side of 'don't post it' or 'be very limited'.

Linking to images other people have posted doesn't hit copyright issues, and can be an alternative in some cases. (Note that this doesn't mean the sources are ethically provided, and some people choose not to do that too.)

This is also why you'll generally see things like "Don't post more than 250 word of text from a book-length work" - this is a limit that generally hasn't been challenged in court (but sometimes has been), but with images it's often even harder to tell what a key piece of the work is.

Likewise, there are some different guidelines for educational purposes that apply for limited teaching (i.e. materials only available to students in a class while it's going on: the people I've talked to about this have thought it *would* cover, say, coven classes or something else with a settled sort of schedule and limited people, but wouldn't cover "I'm doing this one-off workshop at a festival." But again, there is a lot of murkiness in the law, and generally, it's easier to look at alternatives. [2])

[1] As a starting rule of thumb, if you assume that anything created since 1923 and not explicitly in the public domain is under copyright, and check from there, you will be on the side of least legal risk. The actual details are more complicated than that: the Stanford Copyright and Fair Use Center is good - if very detailed - source for this kind of thing.

[2] I have a bunch more resources on my blog, including a bunch of links to Nancy Sims, who is the Copyright Librarian at the University of Minnesota (and a lawyer, which I am not, and she does this stuff all the time and is funny about explaining it beside)