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The Meaning Of Crocodiles

Long before Punch & Judy, Shakespeare has Antony pondering the crocodile:

LEPIDUS: What manner o’ thing is your crocodile?

ANTONY: It is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth. It is just so high as it is, and moves with it own organs. It lives by that which nourisheth it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates.

LEPIDUS: What color is it of?

ANTONY: Of it own color, too.

LEPIDUS: ’Tis a strange serpent.

ANTONY: ’Tis so, and the tears of it are wet.


Earlier in the scene, Lepidus has repeated the traditional belief that the crocodile was generated by the action of the sun on the mud of the Nile. Antony is teasing Lepidus with a description which is no description at all, turning the solid creature into a phantom.
 
Long before Punch & Judy, Shakespeare has Antony pondering the crocodile:


Earlier in the scene, Lepidus has repeated the traditional belief that the crocodile was generated by the action of the sun on the mud of the Nile. Antony is teasing Lepidus with a description which is no description at all, turning the solid creature into a phantom.

This could be a reference to Sobek.
Would Shakespeare have any knowledge of Egyptian deities?


In the Old Kingdom, Sobek was most often depicted as a crocodile-headed man, and occasionally in the form of a typical crocodile. Later depictions from the Middle and New Kingdoms have attributes connecting him to Horus and Ra. Sometimes his body form is a crocodile with the head of a falcon wearing a double crown. Sobek-Ra is characterized as a crocodile adorned with a sun disk and tall plumes around his head.


http://mythology.net/egyptian/egyptian-gods/sobek/
 
I would guess that the crocodile in Punch & Judy corresponds to those fearsome animal-skull creatures in the mummers' plays.

As this page about the Mari Lwyd says, Punch & Judy themselves were 18th Century imports from Italy.

The snapping jaws of the crocodile, even confined to the booth, produce screams of delight and fear in young children. The show also makes a point of breaking-the-wall when the baby is flung into the audience. Do they still include that? :eek:

Samuel Pepys wrote a review of a Punch and Judy show in 1662. He loved it.

I've seen the Professor Codman Llandudno show. Codman's family have been performing Punch for 150 years. Yes there was a routine with the baby. As I remember, Punch is trying to get the baby to walk. 'Walkie, walkie, walkie' He gets frustrated and chucks the baby down the stairs.

I've just been reading an article on the revival of Punch which concludes thusly...

The children certainly don't seem bothered by the violence. Molly O'Hanlon, six, is trying to decide which moment was her favourite. "I'm not sure," she muses. "Maybe the bit where he threw the baby on the floor."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...riangle-of-man-wife-and-sausages-7717627.html

Edit: I'm sure I've seen peformances where the Crocodile also sprays water on the audiences.
 
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Here's something for the diary...

Covent Garden May Fayre and Puppet FestivalFREE
13 May 2018
image: https://cdn.londonandpartners.com/a...ay-fayre_be9f28686172750c19b0d1d6347b7776.jpg

covent-garden-may-fayre-and-puppet-festival-at-st-pauls-church-garden_covent-garden-may-fayre_be9f28686172750c19b0d1d6347b7776.jpg

Covent Garden May Fayre
Celebrate the 356th birthday of Mr Punch with traditional puppetry and more family fun at The Actors' Church.



Join Punch and Judy enthusiasts from all over the country at the Covent Garden May Fayre and Puppet Festival in the garden ofSt Paul’s Church, Covent Garden (The Actors' Church).

The annual free family day out marks the anniversary of Samuel Pepys’ first recorded sighting of a Punch and Judy-style show in Covent Garden in 1662.

Follow the brass band procession around Covent Garden. Attend the midday church service with Mr Punch in the pulpit. And spend the afternoon watching puppet, music and dance performances.


Read more at http://www.visitlondon.com/things-t...t-st-paul-s-church-garden#lZ6BIyCCVKpOwLir.99
Read more at http://www.visitlondon.com/things-t...t-st-paul-s-church-garden#lZ6BIyCCVKpOwLir.99
 
Here is an interesting discussion on an alchemy forum.

It concerns the way apothecaries' premises were decorated by suspended crocodiles - it was almost a sign of the trade.

Some way down the page, it is suggested that these preserved animals may have been distributed by wholesale dealers and importers of medicines and potions, perhaps as free gifts to loyal customers. :)
 
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Seeing as Wimbledon's on, there's also the Lacoste Crocodile.

It was during one of René’s tennis games in the early 1930s, before the brand Lacoste has emerged. He had spotted a crocodile skin suitcase in the store window of a nearby shop, and set his heart on the item. So he made a bet with the captain of the French Davis Cup team, where if he should he win the game, they would buy it for him.

Unfortunately, René lost the match, so didn’t get his crocodile skin suitcase, but he did get a nickname. Both the press and the public continued to refer to René with the nickname “crocodile” and in a matter of weeks it had stuck. René had a crocodile embroidered onto his court blazer; and then when he founded Lacoste clothing, it was obvious what he wanted the logo to be.
 
Having been a zookeeper specializing in reptiles I can say that certain ones do get tame and enjoy human contact. I knew an Aldaberan giant tortoise called Esmeralda who was dog tame and love to be stroked and have her neck and chin tickled. A big male green iguana loved to be petted like a dog.

I wonder why most people fear reptiles but not birds who are, literaly dinosaurs.

Evidence: https://i.imgur.com/8mqk0di.gifv

Of course, once he started, finishing would have meant death--he's still doing it now.
 
That was a bloody good article and does indeed suggest that the crocodile pre-dated Peter Pan. In Neil Gamien's Punch and Judy graphic novel he intimates that the crocodile was orgionaly a dragon but I've not heard this elsewhere.

I've seen some articles suggesting that the Dragon featured in medieval miracle and mystery plays. One of which would have featured St. George.
 
My take on crocodiles is that they may represent the future of humanity. Certain groups of species, such as sharks or crocodiles, persist for hundreds of millions of years almost unchanged when other species (including dinosaurs) change beyond all recognition. Once we attain mastery over our genetic blueprint we might decide to change ourselves into some similar kind of long-duration body-type.
Here is the Snark - a human derived long-term species, designed to persist for at least the next hundred million years or so.
http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4b9d1c357006f
med_snark.JPG

Inspired by Milan Circovic's essay "Permanence" - An Adaptationist Solution to Fermi's Paradox?
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0408521
 
It's not a body type ideally suited to technology, is it?
 
I wouldn't be so sure about that.

I believe the following Canadian /Bulgarian drama-documentary to be 'based on real events'.


Roboshark

A great white bites a UFO aircraft (sic) in the Pacific and turns into a robo/shark hybrid.


An alien ship comes into earth orbit to drop a probe . The probe lands in the ocean only to be eaten by a Great White. Soon he turns into RoboShark much to the dismay of a Nuclear Sub in the area. Once finished he heads to Portland , (reality is Seattle) where he is already being tweeted of his actions , while RoboShark's actions are being followed by a news crew , while the daughter of the reporter he follows is the very same daughters whose tweet he is following. Now the US NAVY is after RoboShark while he burrows away through rock as well as water to the delight of his tweeters. Causing damage along the way only to have a final confrontation with the Navy at the iconic symbol of Seattle, the Space Needle.

 
And then, there is this guy, who seems to prove all the apparent cold-bloodedness of crocodiles wrong... so far.
Sadly, I fear he will be like a lot of people who feel they can have an emotional relationship with a large predator.
:skull:

 
Certain groups of species, such as sharks or crocodiles, persist for hundreds of millions of years almost unchanged when other species (including dinosaurs) change beyond all recognition.
The notion that 'crocodiles' have remained 'virtually unchanged' for hundreds of millions of years is somewhat overstated. In fact the order Crocodilia only emerged towards the end of the Cretaceous, and their ancestors explored many avenues in the struggle for survival.
 
True, but the Crocodyliform clade goes right back to the Early Triassic. I don't know how accurate this reconstruction is, but it looks pretty crocodilian to me;
640px-Protome_batalaria.jpg
 
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True, but the Crocodyliform clade goes right back to the Early Triassic. I don't know how accurate this reconstruction is, but it looks pretty crocodilian to me;
640px-Protome_batalaria.jpg
Granted, crocodilian ancestors seem to have looked very much like modern crocodiles, and a statement that they have remained similar over a long period of time has plenty of merit (although it's hard to be sure to what degree the above reconstruction has been inspired by modern species, of course). But I think the way it's presented, and generally inferred, is that crocodiles essentially found a morphology and didn't deviate from its perfection, when in fact not only have they continued to evolve, but early relatives exhibited a wide variety of bizarre and specialised forms. If I had time, I'd dig out a couple of youtube videos on the subject, not so much to prove any point but because they're fascinating and present aspects of crocodile evolution in a way rarely seen.
 
The notion that 'crocodiles' have remained 'virtually unchanged' for hundreds of millions of years is somewhat overstated. In fact the order Crocodilia only emerged towards the end of the Cretaceous, and their ancestors explored many avenues in the struggle for survival.

You are technically correct, of course, but for psychological purposes, they need only have a genealogy with few changes that massively outruns that of Homo Sapiens, which they clearly do. Your 'only' stands out as slightly odd. No doubt there are older species that have undergone fewer alterations, but the Cretaceous was quite a while back.

My old Etonian housemate told me when his alma mater was founded, and I remarked that my own school was 'only' established in the 16th Century. Neither was exactly last week.
 
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You are technically correct, of course, but for psychological purposes, they need only have a genealogy with few changes that massively outruns that of Homo Sapiens, which they clearly do. Your 'only' stands out as slightly odd. No doubt there are older species that have undergone fewer alterations, but the Cretaceous was quite a while back.

My old Etonian housemate told me when his alma mater was founded, and I remarked that my own school was 'only' established in the 16th Century. Neither was exactly last week.
Ha, of course, looked at that way the word 'only' does sound strange. It slipped out because, while writing that post, I had in the back of my mind the voices of so many friends quoting to me the factoid that 'crocodiles haven't changed since before the dinosaurs'. And, as I've said, from a popular science point of view there's merit in that, but the actual evolution of the clade is far more varied and fascinating to be so flippantly ignored.
 
Have been considering the Churchill Crocodile, a 1943 modification on the Churchill Infantry Tank from the stable of Hobart's funnies. Its defining feature was that it mounted a flamethrower with 120-yard range.



"Considered it inhuman"

It saw action throughout the Normandy Campaign, across NWE and later in Korea, and was particularly effective at clearing bunkers and other occupied defensive positions; indeed, it was so feared and hated as barbarous weapon by the Germans that initial ranging shots were often enough to induce surrender, and captured crews sometimes summarily executed.

For our purposes, the name is perhaps an echo of the primal simplicity of its weapon. The fear of fire--as of ancient lizards--is instinctive and evokes subconscious dread. Whoever named it may either have been trading on this association or tapping into the shared qualities of two associated and ancient archetypes.
 
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I'm going to post an extract to an article about sharks here as it carries much of the same message that I've been pushing about crocodiles:

In 1749, a tiger shark prowling Cuba’s Havana Harbour bit off the foot of a 14-year-old English boy and changed the course of art history. Three decades later, a depiction of the horrifying event by the victim’s friend, the Anglo-American painter John Singleton Copley, caused a stir when it was first exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1778. Copley’s painting, Watson and the Shark (the boy, Brook Watson, later became the Lord Mayor of London) suspends the instant just before a member of a rescue boat thrusts his harpoon into the pouncing fish’s slippery side. The image would forever fix the shark in popular culture as a primal power - one ceaselessly surging to the surface.

A lineage can be traced from Copley’s sensational painting (hailed by one critic at the time as “a perfect picture of its kind”) to its distant descendant, Spielberg’s Jaws, two centuries later. Predating mankind by over 400 million years, sharks lurk deep and archetypally in our psyche as a prototype of unmitigated malevolence. To be drawn to their primeval energy, as visitors were to Copley’s canvas in 1778 (and moviegoers to Spielberg’s film in 1979), is to tempt to the surface of consciousness one’s nethermost fears - to plumb the impossible depths of not being.

Full Article
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170804-why-sharks-make-us-fear-death

Compare with J G Ballard:

Nothing endures for so long as fear. Everywhere in nature one sees evidence of innate releasing mechanisms literally millions of years old, which have lain dormant through thousands of generations but retained their power undiminished. The field rat’s inherited image of the hawk’s silhouette is the classic example - even a paper silhouette drawn across a cage sends it rushing frantically for cover. And how else can you explain the universal but completely groundless loathing of the spider, only one species of which has ever been known to sting? Or hatred of snakes and reptiles? Simply because we all carry within us a submerged memory of the time when the giant spiders were lethal, and when the reptiles were the planet’s dominant life form.

Full Book:
http://www.unife.it/letterefilosofi...co/J. G. Ballard- The Drowned World- 1962.pdf

Not sure about his information on spiders, but the point stands. Sharks--like crocodiles--evoke deep subconscious reactions in us.
 
From sharks, I'm thinking of serpants more generally... As well as the reptile/bird relationship that's been coming out a bit as well.

In Ellis-Davidson's lovely Gods And Myths Of Northern Europe, she writes about the significance of Yggdrasil, the Norse 'world tree'.

"Even the creatures that are said to inhabit Yggdrasil can be paralleled in the myths and legends of other regions. The eagle at the top and the serpant at the foot have been traced back to prehistoric monuments. In South Borneo where the tree represents the cosmos in its entirety, the feminine principle is represented by the serpant, and this battles continually with the masculine principle, the eagle. [...] Hostility between the serpent and the bird is also found I. Pre-Homeric Greece.
[...]
It's value as a symbol is obvious: the eagle, bird of heaven, and the serpant, creature of the earth, are fundamentally in opposition."

There's lots more interesting stuff in there. I've cut it for brevity!

Thinking about crocodiles in these 'alchemical' terms links them to another of the traditional elements - water.
 
I've a feeling he would have been quite chuffed by this
Crocodile Lemmysuchus named after Motorhead's Lemmy

_97263264_mediaitem97262803.jpg

British scientists have named the fossil of a fierce giant crocodile from the Jurassic era after the former lead singer of Motorhead, Lemmy.

Like the hell-raising rock star, the 19ft (5.8m) long beast now called Lemmysuchus was no shrinking violet.

The fossil needed to be renamed after University of Edinburgh scientists realised it had been wrongly classified.

The Motorhead frontman died at the end of 2015.

His band had a run of top 40 hits between 1978 and 1982, were best known for the rock anthem Ace of Spades and toured the world for 40 years

The crocodile terrorised coastal waters around Britain more than 145 million years ago.

Etc...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-40870977
 
And then, there is this guy, who seems to prove all the apparent cold-bloodedness of crocodiles wrong... so far.
Sadly, I fear he will be like a lot of people who feel they can have an emotional relationship with a large predator.
:skull:


There is no end to peoples foolishness. Animals such as crocodiles, grizzly bears, etc. aren't dogs - cats. When the bugger gets bit or worse yet torn to pieces he can only blame himself.

BTW despite being coldblooded crocs are the most intelligent of reptiles and unlike many other reptiles learn by trial and error. This is the main reason so many people fall prey to them. They silently observe humans, get familiar with their habits and often wait for just the right time to attack. Some species of crocodiles are much more aggressive - vicious than others, i.e.: the Nile and Estuarine Crocodiles.
 
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