seamonster: in sum
forever trying to scaffold order upon the abyss
...And I thought of the albatross,
And I wished he would come back, my snake.
For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.
And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
-D.H. Lawrence, 'The Snake'
.PART IIX: why do we like this story so much

Sky vs. sea; bird vs. reptile; chaos vs. order – however you care to articulate it, it seems rather hardwired into us.
Truthfully, after my 8,000+ year review1 of humankind’s obsession with the sky vs. sea vendetta, I am not sure why it captivates us so. Your thoughts?
In part it may be through the sheer act of repetition. It’s an incredibly ancient myth; we have regurgitated it in enough contexts and through enough characters for it to develop new resonances over time. There’s something captivating about myths once they begin to echo, ricocheting off different historical circumstances and returning to our ears changed yet deeply the same. And once they start to reverberate in our subconscious the urge to retell them again in new clothes is even stronger.
But there must be something about the myth itself that makes it interesting enough to be retold for thousands of years.
Perhaps we desire to partake of some great mythic battle, good vs. evil, God vs. Devil, Jedi vs. Sith, democracy vs. tyranny/terrorism/fascism/autocracy, science vs. magic, celestial vs. chthonic. Dualism certainly has its intoxicatingly simple narrative appeal.
Or perhaps this myth embodies the basic terror of being alive, how we are forever trying to scaffold order, meaning, sense upon the yawning, terrifying, chaotic abyss. And forever failing. That damn seamonster will not die. Death and nothingness and meaninglessness are right there, close enough to smell and taste, threatening to engulf us at any moment.
Or perhaps the nearly 10,000 years of telling this story, weaving through all of the earth’s major religions and art forms, just came from people sitting on a cliff watching a storm rumble over the sea; as lightning flares and fizzles across the water and the waves spit and roil upward, they say, Damn looks like the sea and the sky are really getting into it… wonder what that beef is about…
And with that, here’s the SEAMONSTER SERIES table of contents:
an inventory of seamonsters
a history of the Near East lineage of seamonsters resulting in Leviathan
By no means exhaustive or worldwide. I focused on a particular Egyptian-Ugaritic-Canaanite-Hittite-Hurrian-Mesopotamian-Babylonian-Greek lineage of this story. The world’s seas are full of legendary monsters; perhaps I’ll explore their histories another time.











Yes! Water dragon 🐉 energy is really really present and active right now. I saw an AI Insta reel from the pov of riding a flying dragon underwater through the ruins of Atlantis into a golden light resurrected version of the beautiful architecture, and had a cathartic upwelling that flashed me to the info that now is time remember our original coding. Which is older than Atlantis, as are dragons, but linked. Dragons of the four elements are key holders of the ancient energy of Gaia and got a bad rap, like the intuitive, sentient, energetic intelligence channels in us. Feels like our limbic brain is upleveling along with the rest of us
having sat on a cliff and watched storms wash over wild ocean, i can see why so many myths would come from that!