Behelit myth

Everybody seemed to like my previous mythical whargarble. Here’s more!

This is a short period in a melon’s life where the halfway-empathic adolescent wunderkind turns inward somehow, like a caterpillar in a chrysalis, and emerges transformed into a ruthless god-king with the mandate of heaven. If the eternal high school myth was a novella, then this myth is a chapter or a short story. It represents only a small part of the melonhead life cycle. You don’t see it portrayed very often, and certainly not honestly very often, because it’s not a pleasant myth at all. I named it after the Berserk version because I think it gets closest to the heart of the matter.

Fictional examples:
-Griffith’s apotheosis inside the Behelit during the Eclipse in Berserk
-Sephiroth’s reading spree in Nibelheim in FFVII.
-Fou Lu’s resurrection in Breath of Fire IV
-(Lots of examples in Dragon Ball Z, actually- every time Goku goes somewhere and comes back with SO MUCH POWER LEVEL)

Historical examples:
-Alexander the Great
-Napoleon
-Gilgamesh

Here is the basic trajectory: A superlatively talented adolescent, who seems to pass through impossible obstacles with ease, has been drifting lazily to the top of the current world order. But this wunderkind doesn’t understand who or what he is aside from wondering about why he’s different in a vague, directionless way. Something blows his cool around the age of 20- maybe a challenging truth or a triggered genetic memory or a setback of some kind. The wunderkind retreats into absolute solitude to settle the nagging question of his real purpose in life.

During this period, the wunderkind learns some great truth about how he’s inhuman- maybe he’s the child of a god, or a product of genetic engineering- and functionally a Nietzschean superman. It’s common to see a lot of accompanying imagery that is evocative of birth symbols: eggs, entwined serpents or double-helical DNA strands, amniotic fluid, blood, etc. When the ubermensch emerges from his Behelit, he is a fundamentally transformed person. A bunch of people immediately die in a big sacrificial rite of some kind. He has absolute, perfect confidence in his heavenly mandate to destroy and remake the earth in his own image. Calling this confidence would be categorically incorrect, because the new god king seemingly can’t fathom any other possibility than his absolute right to rule over everyone else. If you suggested otherwise, he might pause to laugh at the absurdity before killing you (having just proven yourself unworthy to be his servant).

Now, some odd things that happen afterward, which are suggested by a dream I had about this once: it seems that when the god king emerges, there are already a few fanatical, devoted, powerful servants ready to help him get started with the conquering and despoiling, possibly due to a prophecy. It’s sort of a perverse version of the three wise men. It also seems important for the god king to come under immediate attack from the current world order, which is threatened by his existence. The god king escapes this initial attack and hits the road, quickly gathering a huge mass of half-insane supporters (I think True Believers is the usual term) who are attracted to his supernatural charisma. This might just be video game and space opera logic, but he goes about overturning the current world order according to a very alien sort of logic. His actions seem absolutely crazy except that they always seem to work.

Something a little more light-hearted tomorrow. Thal girls!