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The Meaning Of Crocodiles

THIS IS NOT A METAPHOR...

Crocodile kills Ethiopian pastor during lake baptism

A crocodile has killed a Protestant pastor who was baptising followers near a lake in southern Ethiopia.

Docho Eshete was conducting the ceremony for about 80 people on Sunday morning at Lake Abaya in Arba Minch town's Merkeb Tabya district.

Residents and police told BBC Amharic a crocodile leapt from the water during the baptism and attacked him.

Pastor Docho died after being bitten on his legs, back and hands.

"He baptised the first person and he passed on to another one. All of a sudden, a crocodile jumped out of the lake and grabbed the pastor," local resident Ketema Kairo told the BBC.

Despite huge efforts, fishermen and residents could not save pastor Docho, policeman Eiwnetu Kanko said.

They used fishing nets to prevent the crocodile from taking the pastor's body into the lake.

The crocodile escaped.


Source:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-44366360

...but it certainly could be. A figurative instantiation of pre-civilised life emerges from the baptismal waters and seizes the priest!
 
THIS IS NOT A METAPHOR...

Crocodile kills Ethiopian pastor during lake baptism

A crocodile has killed a Protestant pastor who was baptising followers near a lake in southern Ethiopia.

Docho Eshete was conducting the ceremony for about 80 people on Sunday morning at Lake Abaya in Arba Minch town's Merkeb Tabya district.

Residents and police told BBC Amharic a crocodile leapt from the water during the baptism and attacked him.

Pastor Docho died after being bitten on his legs, back and hands.

"He baptised the first person and he passed on to another one. All of a sudden, a crocodile jumped out of the lake and grabbed the pastor," local resident Ketema Kairo told the BBC.

Despite huge efforts, fishermen and residents could not save pastor Docho, policeman Eiwnetu Kanko said.

They used fishing nets to prevent the crocodile from taking the pastor's body into the lake.

The crocodile escaped.


Source:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-44366360

...but it certainly could be. A figurative instantiation of pre-civilised life emerges from the baptismal waters and seizes the priest!

This Thread needs a song.

 
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This news item resonates with this thread's theme ... Even when / where protected, crocodiles may become the objects of vengeful massacres. Every time a croc kills a human by doing what crocs are hard-wired to do, other humans are quick to push for a 'final solution' (i.e., eradication). In this case the croc victim was apparently foraging in the crocodiles' preserve, and no crocs encroached into human territory.

Indonesia mob slaughters nearly 300 crocodiles in revenge killing
A mob of villagers has killed nearly 300 crocodiles at a sanctuary for the animals in the Indonesian province of West Papua.

The slaughter was in retaliation for a local man thought to have been killed by one animal from the site.

Officials and police said they were not able to stop the attack and may now press charges.

The killing of a protected species is a crime that carries a fine or imprisonment in Indonesia.

The local villager was killed on Friday morning while gathering vegetables on the crocodile farm's breeding sanctuary.

"An employee heard someone screaming for help, quickly went there and saw a crocodile attacking someone," the head of Indonesia's Natural Resources Conservation Agency in West Papua said.

After the funeral on Saturday, several hundred angry locals went to the sanctuary, armed with knives, shovels, hammers and clubs.

Local media cite officials saying the mob first attacked the office of the crocodile farm and then went on to slaughter all 292 reptiles at the sanctuary.

The farm was operating on a licence to breed protected saltwater and New Guinea crocodiles both for preservation and to harvest some of the animals.

SOURCE: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-44844367
 
This news item resonates with this thread's theme ...

It certainly does.

'Endangered species' is a modern concept; 'club the brutes to death before they get another of us--it's only a matter of time'--is somewhat more deep-seated.

The target here was not the particular crocodile that carried out the first attack but Crocodylia in general; an attack on any is an attack on all, like chopping off a different head of Lotan. For all the reasons discussed above, Crocodiles represent chaos--pre-modern, pre-civilisational, pre-eccelesiastical (perhaps even pre-human) chaos. Their very presence serves as a tacit threat and a reminder that the veneer of civilisation can be stripped in minutes: an orderly village becomes an atavistic Gadarene mob, and the law be damned.

Great stuff.
 
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By chance I am currently re-reading J. G. Ballard's masterpiece, The Drowned World, and it strikes me that his menacingly brooding iguanas, busily reasserting mastery over humanity's sunken cities, serve the same purpose as those crocodiles to De Quincey's fevered mind. So what, then, are the crocodile and the iguana? No doubt the orientalist would have something to squawk about the 'civilisation' of the west Vs the 'barbarity' of the east; no doubt he would invoke the 'fear of the other', but are both creatures perhaps infected with some kind of Jungian significance beyond the fears of the colonialist? I personally think so...

As I have a digital copy to hand, I may as well make the reference explicit:

Screen Shot 2019-01-18 at 21.30.23.png


J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World (1962). Chapter 2: The Coming of the Iguanas.
 
Interesting concept for a thread, Yith, had you perchance been indulging in some of De Quincey's favourite tipple when you wrote the OP?

I can see what people are getting at with the "unrelatability" of crocs/reptiles and their similarity to automata. I don't feel fear or revulsion towards reptiles or sharks generally, though, clearly if a large, predatory, member of either group approached me in the wild, it would be a different matter. I feel much the same fear and disgust towards arachnids, insects and other arthropods; at the same time, this is tempered with a fascination. It's also relative, large spiders cause a mild amount of fear and close-ups of spiders' "alien" faces can be appalling but a tiny spider observed without magnification is endearing, I find those rotating, jumping zebra spiders' movements funny and cute.

I don't know the extent to which is his fear is innate and to which it is learned, for example, I've long had revulsion to spiders but would only escalate centipedes to similar status after watching a British TV programme on the most dangerous animals which featured one species of giant centipede which was extremely poisonous. I was in my late teens/early twenties and unaware of this animal until then, it seems to have coloured my perceptions of all centipedes since, I think learning how dangerous the giant ones were was part of it but it the size alone may have been enough to change my thinking - they are 18 inches or so.
 
We should get some new action on the crocodile trope here:

After Disney's copyright on Winnie the Pooh lapsed, Rhys Frake-Waterfield decided to make a brutal horror adaptation of Christoper Robin's adorable stuffed bear with Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey. Not content with turning Winnie the Pooh into a nightmare fuel, Frake-Waterfield now has his sights set on Peter Pan.

If you like sadistic and twisted turns on classic tales, then you'll love this news! The director of the upcoming Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, Rhys Frake-Waterfield, will be developing and working on a horror-based take on another fairytale classic, Peter Pan, titled Peter Pan: Neverland Nightmare.
Frake-Waterfield hasn't stated whether he'll directly use any of J.M. Barrie's works as inspiration for his movie ...

Granted, this isn't the first time Pan has been conjured as a monster in fiction, but given Frake-Waterfield's ability to generate horror by subverting our memories of Disney's Winnie the Pooh, we can probably assume he'll do the same with Disney's Peter Pan.

https://boingboing.net/2022/11/04/s...peter-pan-is-getting-a-horror-movie-next.html

 
Peter Pan is a horror character.

He embodies the amorality of children.

He ill treats his loyal (I suspect in the hostile environment of Never land they have to be) Lost Boys and there is definatley something sexual going on between him and Wendy.

He is lovable and scary.
 
Peter Pan is a horror character.

He embodies the amorality of children.

He ill treats his loyal (I suspect in the hostile environment of Never land they have to be) Lost Boys and there is definatley something sexual going on between him and Wendy.

He is lovable and scary.
He's a man child who takes no responsibility for his actions or for any impact they have on those around him. His constant attempts to get others to stay in never never land are pathetic attempts to justify his world-view and self-identify. He probably went to a minor public school, didn't really do well academically but had terrifically rich and emotional distant parents who let him do anything he liked. Now his life's f*cked and the implacable march of time will chew his legs off. He had it coming.
 
Crocodilians as a group have been around for a long time, but they have not all been the water-skulking ambush predators that are still with us today.

I mean, just look at the Poposauroidea - many different dinosaur-like species, including various two-legged forms; sail-backed herbivores; and timid little creatures with beaks. Then there were lots of four-legged wolf-like pursuit predators that ran on their toes, like Prestosuchus or Saurosuchus.

If anything, the meaning of crocodiles might be that one should try many different ways of life; one niche or another will always be in demand!

Edit: Whoops! It looks like recent cladistic analyses have shown phytosaurs to be more closely related to modern crocodilians after all. The diversity of the larger group remains, though.
 
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Crocodilians as a group have been around for a long time, but they have not all been the water-skulking ambush predators that are still with us today.

I mean, just look at the Poposauroidea - many different dinosaur-like species, including various two-legged forms; sail-backed herbivores; and timid little creatures with beaks. Then there were lots of four-legged wolf-like pursuit predators that ran on their toes, like Prestosuchus or Saurosuchus.

If anything, the meaning of crocodiles might be that one should try many different ways of life; one niche or another will always be in demand!

Edit: Whoops! It looks like recent cladistic analyses have shown phytosaurs to be more closely related to modern crocodilians after all. The diversity of the larger group remains, though.
The last "land croocidile", Mekosuchus is a genus of extinct Australasian crocodiles within the subfamily Mekosuchinae. They are believed to have been made extinct by the arrival of humans on the South Pacific islands where they lived" was wiped out by the natives several thousand years ago.
 
We should get some new action on the crocodile trope here:

After Disney's copyright on Winnie the Pooh lapsed, Rhys Frake-Waterfield decided to make a brutal horror adaptation of Christoper Robin's adorable stuffed bear with Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey. Not content with turning Winnie the Pooh into a nightmare fuel, Frake-Waterfield now has his sights set on Peter Pan.



Granted, this isn't the first time Pan has been conjured as a monster in fiction, but given Frake-Waterfield's ability to generate horror by subverting our memories of Disney's Winnie the Pooh, we can probably assume he'll do the same with Disney's Peter Pan.

https://boingboing.net/2022/11/04/s...peter-pan-is-getting-a-horror-movie-next.html

How these films are good for creativity in general. But no crop top for Pooh.

WHEN THE TRAILER for Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey hit the internet last year, it produced a mild viral hysteria.

The angriest Pooh fans accused director Rhys Frake-Waterfield of invading their childhood psyches, the creative equivalent of napalming 100 Aker Wood. When the film was released in theaters, critics mauled it, agreeing “this Pooh stinks.” Others—50 percent of the audience on Rotten Tomatoes and a profitable proportion of Mexico—appreciated its gruesome absurdity.

Beneath the opprobrium lies an interesting legal question: How was a filmmaker whose previous movies included Croc!, Dinosaur Hotel, and Easter Bunny Massacre: The Bloody Trail able to twist one of Britain’s most beloved bears—a character associated with Disney for decades—into a honey-dribbling serial killer? The simple answer, of course, is that some of the bear’s copyright protection had expired. But the deeper, subtler point is that Pooh flogging Christopher Robin with Eeyore’s severed tail is good for the health of creativity in America.

English author A. A. Milne published the first Pooh book, Winnie-the-Pooh, in 1926. Its forest of cutesy critters was intended, famously, to entertain Milne’s son, Christopher Robin. Disney first began licensing Pooh in 1961, dropping the original hyphens and introducing new characters, like Gopher, who first appeared in Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree. In 2001, the company paid $350 million for the rights to Pooh. But that first book—which contains 10 stories, including classics in which Eeyore loses his tail and Pooh has an unfortunate bee encounter—entered the US public domain in January 2022, making way for Blood and Honey.

Frake-Waterfield explains that making his Pooh was a two-stage process. First, he could work only from the 1926 book, not any of Milne’s three later works (which will trickle into the public domain in the coming years), and certainly not from anything Disney added in its adaptations. So he cleared his mind of Pooh-related childhood memories. He couldn’t use Gopher—or Tigger—and he certainly couldn’t trap victims with a game of Poohsticks. Also, the bear had to be naked: It was Disney that decked him out in his delightful red crop top. ...

https://www.wired.com/story/winnie-the-pooh-blood-and-honey-copyright-fair-use/
 
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