The Gotterdamerung of The Griffin
Ray Harryhausen was a creature effects artist who was active in films from the black and white period until 2010, three years before his death at the age of 92.
For what it’s worth, Harryhausen films take their place among the best High Fantasy productions to come out of the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s.
I say ‘for what it’s worth’ because Harryhausen films are pretty much all we’ve got to work with. They would have appeared in theaters alongside other fantasy-adventure titles, like the Hercules franchise, but hardly anyone bothers to remember those other films. By that same token, hardly anyone bothers to remember Harryhausen films.
In the ‘Sinbad’ trilogy produced by Columbia Pictures, Ray Harryhausen towers over the primitive green screen like the prodigal son of the American Kaiju Film.
Each movie is crowned with an epic duel between some of Ray Harryhausen’s most awesome creations:
In the 1957’s ‘The 7th Voyage of Sinbad‘, Sinbad and Love Affair escape by the skin of their teeth. The two monsters that are pursuing them become distracted by one another, forgetting about smaller prey and turning their blood-lust on each other.
In the 1977’s ‘Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger‘, Sinbad and the crew make it to the extreme northern realm of Hyperborea. Here, they befriend an ancient humanoid and are stalked by a sabertooth tiger. The cat and the hominid get into a fight inside some kind of icy pyramid.
The epic monster battle in 1973’s ‘The Golden Voyage’ is framed in Manichean terms. This time, the Crew enjoys a ring-side view of the eternal conflict between the forces of Good and Evil.
The enigma our heroes will face in ‘The Golden Voyage‘ is decoded by a fiery ifrit earlier in the film. The Oracle of All Knowledge guides them on their journey with this ambiguous prophecy:
Destiny is invisible and yet visible, and men may try to hide, yet its waters mark you clearly like a rainbow in the sky.
Destiny is a place where both good and evil wait, and yet their very equality abates their power, for it is the deeds of weak and mortal men that may tip the scales one way or the other,
and then the world shall know, and you shall know, which way the fates have chosen you shall go…
You shall go...North!
I am also an oracle. I know you’re about fucking tired of my Final Fantasy III references.
…but do you think Yoshitaka Amano’s concept for Ifrit was based on the Oracle of All Knowledge in 1973’s ‘The Golden Voyage’?
Hear me out. I’ve read enough of The Arabian Nights to know that Ifrit were never described as horned beings. Ifrits also have no special relationship with fire in the canon of The Arabian Nights; meanwhile, Final Fantasy’s Ifrit is always a fire spirit. And, well… just look:
The fiery Oracle’s instructions will guide our crew to the land of Lemuria.
Sinbad of the 8th century Abbasid Caliphate, centered in modern Iraq, would have to navigate the Persian Gulf, the entire Indian Ocean, as well as the Ring of Fire to make landfall at James Churchward’s fabled Lemuria:
… I just love that they sent Sinbad to Lemuria. Pop culture was oozing occult resonance in this era.
Lemuria is a lost continent in the Pacific who’s existence was first postulated by Colonel James Churchward his book ‘The Lost Continent of Mu’, which appeared in print in 1926. His alleged career with the British military is undocumented.
He claims to have learned about Mu from ancient tablets dating back tens of thousands of years, which are being held in trust by a clendestine priesthood distributed throughout the dusky temples of India and Tibet. Sometimes Mu is cast as having brought about the downfall of Atlantis in a long-forgotten war between the two powers.
When our heroes at long last reach the Fountain of Destiny on the lost continent of Lemuria, they are too late:the dark wizard Koura has beat them to it.
Tom Baker plays the part of Koura in ‘The Golden Voyage of Sinbad’. Baker is better known to us as The Fourth Doctor in the long-running British television series Doctor Who.
Tom Baker was the longest-serving Doctor, playing the part from 1974 to 1981, making him a real icon in the Doctor Who the fandom. The tie-in is that he landed that role after impressing Brett Kells at the B.B.C with his handling of the evil Koura. It’s hard to imagine at this distance, but ‘The Golden Voyage of Sinbad‘ was a huge film.
Returning to our narrative, the fourth Doctor has restored his youth in the Fountain of Destiny and summoned a centaur.
Not just any centaur, mind you. This is a cyclopean centaur; gigantic and menacing, all primal strength devoid of compassion. In the film’s canon, this creature is evil incarnate. The crew despairs; it would appear they are caught now in the heart of the spider’s lair.
Just then, like the eagles coming to the rescue of Frodo Baggins and Sam, a majestic griffin steps in.
Gaius Julius Solinus, writing in the 3rd century CE, said of the griffin:
‘[they] are extremely ferocious birds, and have a rage worse than madness. Owing to the necessity of facing the griffin’s cruelty, approaching visitors are rare. Indeed, the griffins mangle anyone they see, as though born to punish the rashness of greed.’
By the time of Gaius Solinus, the Legend of the Griffin had been gestating for over eight hundred years. In the Christian era, a cult developed around the lore of the griffin which saw in them the instruments of divine punishment.
The first mention of griffins in the historical record comes down to us by way of Greek writer Herodotus. In his Histories, a work of the 5th century BC which is regarded as the first systematic attempt to organize and corroborate long chains of historical events on a factual basis, he tells us:
“It is clear that it is the northern parts of Europe which are richest in gold, but how it is procured I cannot say exactly. The story goes that one-eyed Arimaspians steal it from the griffins who guard it; personally, however, I refuse to believe in one-eyed men who in other respects are like the rest of men. In any case it does seem to be true that those countries which lie on the circumference of the inhabited world produce the things which we believe to be the most rare and beautiful.”
In other words, the legend of the griffin is as old as history itself.
In the film, we have a one-eyed centaur beating the ever-living piss out of a griffin on the island of Lemuria. If any country lies on the ‘circumference of the inhabitted world’, it’s Lemuria. And what could be more rare and beautiful than the Fountain of Destiny?
The minds at work behind the scenes of ‘The Golden Voyage of Sinbad’ didn’t stop at Herodotus, though. To get a full picture of why the final battle in ‘The Golden Voyage’ is definitely solid gold robbed from the clutches of the fierce and noble griffins, we have to turn to a 5th century play (falsely?) attributed to that god among dramatists, Aeschylus:
But now listen to another and fearsome spectacle. Beware the sharp-beaked hounds of Zeus that do not bark, the Griffins, and the one-eyed Arimaspian folk, mounted on horses, who dwell above the flood of Pluto’s Stream that flows with gold. Do not approach them’
Do you see it? The rivers of gold in the realm of Pluto; that is, underground.
One-eyed horsemen. Guardian griffins representing the Will of Zeus; that is, the Will of God, if God is equal to Good, on earth.
It’s all there at the end of ‘The Golden Voyage’. The only thing that’s missing is the gold, unless you count the golden sextant which was the primary quest object and namesake of the Golden Voyage.
Or Caroline Munro.
Suddenly,
Tom Baker’s hand flashes out from behind a pillar.
The wizard drives a knife shaped like an oversized talon into the griffin’s flank. This god-like beast had drawn the chariots of both Oceanus and Apollo, and now it’s dying at our feet. We can only look on in impotence as the cold hand of the fourth Doctor tips the scales of Good and Evil.
The one-eyed Arimaspian centaur moves in to deal the killing blow. There is a struggle, but the griffin is overpowered. When the griffin’s head hangs limp on its broken neck, the murderous hands of the cyclopes rudely discard its corpse.
I’m mortified, but too numbed out by this point to care about what happens next. This movie sucks, and they brutalized my favorite puppet.
In Harryhausen movies, the people feel like puppets a lot of the time.
Per the laws of stop motion animation, the objects in many of the scenes exist frames apart in time and space. Even if your eyes don’t notice the effect, your soul does. It feels cold. It is not life, but an illusion of life produced by manipulation of the gestalt. The fur and feathers of the griffin had offered us an oasis of visual and textural warmth in a desert of stock characters and stock situations ad-libbed by a winged homonculus pulling buzzwords out of a capsized turban.
When griffin dies and it’s soul departs, it seems to carry away that perception of warmth with it.
Gotterdamerung is a German word that describes events such as The Death of King Arthur and the Nordic End-Times Vision of Ragnarok. It means something like, ‘Twilight of The Gods’.
‘Sinbad’s Golden Voyage’ ends in the Gotterdamerung of The Griffin. This is a metaphysical disaster on par with the silencing of the Oracle at Delphi; with the Griffin’s death, Humankind’s greed was free to run roughshod on the earth unchecked. You don’t need to imagine the results; we live in their midst.
For our consolation, we can only hope that Sinbad made it home with the Griffin’s gold.
You can watch ‘The Golden Voyage of Sinbad’ for free on Youtube:
