These are fragments of stories and images that led me to call my website ‘www.myleviathan.wordpress.com’.
Leviathan is a cultural myth. Here are some references to the leviathan:
References to the leviathan in the bible:
One account says that the leviathan eats a whale a day, and that the fish that swallowed Jonah was itself nearly swallowed by the leviathan.
Isiah 27: ‘The Lord will punish with his fierce great powerful sword, the leviathan, the gliding serpent, leviathan, the coiling serpent; He will slay the monster of the sea.
Described by Job 41:33: ‘Nothing on Earth is his equal – a creature without fear.’
Psalm 104:25-26: ‘There is the sea, vast and spacious, teeming with creatures beyond number-living things both large and small. There the ships go to and fro, and leviathan, which you formed to frolic there.’
Other cultural myths:
Still another account describes it as a sea serpent that encircles the world, bringing it into alignment with other cultural myths, such as the Greek Ouroboros and the Norse Midgard Serpent.
Reports that the leviathan matches the ancient dinosaurs like the pliosaurus and mosasours or kronosaurus come from the ‘Young Earth Creation Club’.
Sightings of the leviathan:
Sightings of the leviathan include this from Captain Georg von Forstner on July 30th 1915: ‘…it was about 60 feet long, was like a crocodile in shape and had four limbs with powerful webbed feet and a long tail tapering to a point.’
Some references to the leviathan in literature:
Moby Dick was inspired by the true story of George Pollard, captain of the whale ship Essex. The name of the whale was inspired by real life events. In 1839, Melville read a story in a magazine about an albino sperm whale famed for its deadly attacks on whaling ships trying to hunt it down. This whale killed off the coast of Chile near Mocha Island, was called Mocha Dick.
Moby Dick, or the whale, a subspecies of the leviathan (as given in the study of whales or cetology), was the allegorical novel about Captain Ahab’s search to kill a great white whale. Born in 1819 author Melville grew up during the peak of American dominiance of the whaling industry, roughly the period between 1820 and the start of the civil war.
‘Leviathan’ written by Thomas Hobbes is a treatise on the Commonwealth. With chapters as follows:
First Part: Of Man
Part 1: Of Sense
Part 2: Of Imagination
Part 3: Of the Consequence Or Train Of Imaginations
Part 4: Of Speech
Part 5: Of Reason and Science
Part 6: Of The Interior Beginnings Of Voluntary Motions
In reference to the book ‘Leviathan’ written by Paul Auster: ‘An article produces a unitary leviathan from the multitude of contradictions where a leviathan (is from the hebrew leviath: what is joined or tied together) has found the unifying principle, and brings all the broken pieces together.’
From Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis: ‘So close behind the same promontory lie, the huge leviathans to attend their prey, And give no chase, but swallow in the fry, which through their gaping jaws mistake the way.’
From Paradise Lost: ‘That sea beast leviathan, which God of all his works created hugest that swim the ocean stream. There leviathan, hugest of living creatures in the deep, strectched like promontory sleeps or swims, and seems a moving land; and at his gills, draws in, and at his breath spouts at the sea.’
Some references to the leviathan in film:
‘Leviathan’, the newest major film to take on the suffering of animals in the production of food…shot on and around the former whaling town from which the Pequod departed in Moby Dick…transform a mundane much filmed activity in industrial fishing into something apocaliptic and unfamiliar.
And here are some pictures:
So now you know a little more about the leviathan in ‘myleviathan’.
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