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bethanythebogwitch · 2 months

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Origins of legendary Pokemon: Gen III

I am doing a series of posts exploring the real-life inspirations for various Pokémon. Previously I have covered all fish Pokémon, all other aquatic Pokémon, and all starters. Currently I am working through all legendary and mythical Pokémon. It has been a few months since I last updated this series but I’m back now. Today I’m covering gen III. For previous posts see gen I and gen II.

Starting off with the legendary golems, I decided I’ll cover the gen III and gen XIII golems together. All of them are based on, well, golems. In Jewish folklore, a golem is a creature made of inanimate material that has been magically animated. The most famous story about golems, and the one that most modern depictions draw from is the golem of Prague. Dating back to the 16th century, the story goes that Rabbi Loew (a real person) built the golem out of clay and animated it by inserting a clay tablet inscribed with the name of God (a shem) into its mouth. The golem protected the Prague ghetto from pogroms. Every Friday, the Rabbi took the shem out of the golem’s mouth to deactivate it for the sabbath. Eventually the golem went on a violent rampage for reasons that vary depending on who tells the story. Sometimes the Rabbi forgot to take the shem out before the sabbath, other times the golem fell in love and was rejected. Either way, the rabbi eventually managed to pull the shem out, causing the golem to fall apart. The pieces were then stored in the attic of the synagogue, where it can be revived if ever needed again. The attic does exist, but is closed to the public. The idea that golems are animated through certain words either held in the mouth or inscribed on the forehead is common. In some stories (including some variants of the Prague story), the word used is “emét” (אמת) meaning “truth” and the golem can be deactivated by removing the final letter, changing the word to “mét” (מת) meaning “dead”. All of the regis are golems made from some mind of inanimate material: stone for Regirock, ice for Regice, metal for Registeel, electricity for Regieleki, and crystallized dragon energy for Regidrago. Like golems, they needed to be made by an already exiting being, in this case Regigigas. The unique sequence of dots on each regi represents the word carved on a golem’s head to bring it to life. Each regi also represents a historical time period. Regirock represents the stone age, Regice the ice age, Registeel the iron age, and Regieleki the moderm or electric age. Regidrago is harder to pin down since the only dragon age is a series of video games. It could represent the middle ages, with medieval Europe having plenty of dragon legends, or maybe a more general age of myths.

(Image: a statue of the golem of Prague, found in Prague. It is a brownish, mostly-featureless humanoid with several cracks on its body held together by rivets. End ID)

The eon duo are weird. They’re dragons with elements of birds and airplanes (the latter more visible in their mega evolutions). The biggest hint to what they’re supposed to represent might come from both being the eon Pokémon and explicitly brothers and sisters. Eon could just indicate they’ve been around for eons, but it also could come from aeon, a concept in Gnosticism. Gnosticism was a group of early Christian sects that were very different from modern Christianity and are pretty much extinct now. In Gnostocism, aeons were divine beings that were emanations from the true God. You can think of the as the Gnostic version of angels except they’re more like less perfect derivations of God who can in turn make their own even less pure derivations and so on. It’s weird and complicated. In one of the most popular Gnostic sects, Valentinianism, aeons come in complementary male/female pairs called syzygies.

This is one of the simpler diagrams of how the aeons and syzygies are related to each other. Yeah. (Image: a diagram of the relations between aeons in Valentinianism, consisting of pairs of spheres connected with lines. Sourced from Histoire critique du Gnosticisme by Jacques Matter)

Latias and Latios being male and female counterparts could make them a syzygy of two (a)eons. They might also draw from the Chinese concept of yin and yang, opposing but complimentary forces. Yin is usually associated with femininity and passivity and fits Latias while yang is masculine and more passionate, fitting Latias. The pair’s ability to levitate and bird-like feathers may draw from the martlet, a legendary bird with no legs that spends its entire life flying. Martlets are often depicted with tufts in place of legs like the two tufts that the latis have. Finally, the name of the latis comes from the latin “lateō” which means “I conceal” or “I am hidden”, which fits both the two using illusions to stay hidden.

(Image: a heraldic depiction of a martlet, shown as the silhouette of a bird with two tufts where the legs should be. End ID)

The big names of gen III are of course the super-ancient weather trio of Groudon, Kyogre, and Rayquaza. They each represent one of the “spheres” of Earth. Groudon represents the lithosphere, the outer layer of rock that makes up the planet’s crust. Kyogre represents the hydrosphere, all of the planet’s water in solid, liquid, and gas forms. Finally, Rayquaza represents the atmosphere, the gasses that are trapped on the planet by its gravity. As mythical beasts representing the land, sea, and sky, the trio draw from a trio of creatures in Jewish mythology that were passed down to Christianity and Islam. These creatures are behemoth, leviathan, and ziz, who were primordial beasts that dwelled in and represented land, sea, and sky. Of the three, behemoth and leviathan get most of the representation while ziz remains fairly obscure. This is likely because they are both described in the old testament/Tanakh’s Book of Job as part of what is essentially God spending several passages bragging about how powerful he is and saying therefore he can be as much of an asshole as he likes. Behemoth is a grass-eating swamp-dweller likely inspired by a hippo or elephant while leviathan is a scaly, armored carnivore that (once you strip away all the fantastical elements) was probably inspired by a crocodile. Ziz is usually depicted as a colossal bird or griffon. Behemoth and leviathan are often depicted as mortal enemies who will kill each other in a battle at the end of time, fitting with Groudon and Kyogre being enemies that nearly destroyed the world with their battle.

(Image: a depiction of behemoth, leviathan, and ziz. Behemoth is shown as a red bull. Leviathan is depicted as a brown fish. Ziz is situated above the other two and resembles a griffon with no front legs. End ID. Sourced from the Ambrosiana Bible)

The designs of the three Pokemon draw from animals or mythical creatures who live in their associated biome. The lines covering them may also draw from the Nazca lines of Peru, though only Kyogre has a direct counterpart in the lines with the whale geoglyph.

(Image: the whale Nacza line, seen from above. it is a geoglyph in the form of a whale, drawn in a line lighter than the surrounding desert. End ID)

Kyogre is based on an orca. It’s fitting that the Pokémon who created the ocean is based on the ocean’s most badass animal. Leviathan is usually depicted as a sea serpent nowadays, but it has historically been depicted as a fish or whale (and a lot of ancient cultures didn’t realize that whales aren’t fish). Groudon is based on outdated depictions of theropod dinosaurs that had them standing upright and dragging their tails on the ground like Godzilla. The spikes on its side and tail may come from dinosaurs like Ankylosaurus. It also visually resembles molten or superheated rock (moreso in its primal reversion), a reference to volcanoes and their role in raising islands out of the ocean. Rayquaza is based off of the serpentine, wingless eastern dragons while it having front legs but no hind legs comes from the European lindworm dragons (though lindworms being strictly serpentine dragons with only front legs is a more recent thing). Asian dragons often had power over weather, which Rayquaza has with its ability to negate all weather conditions. it being specifically a dragon that lives in the upper atmosphere and occasionally comes down to earth might come from the draconid meteor shower, which itself is named after the constellation Draco. Oh, and to keep the ancient Judaism origins going, Rayquaza’s name might come from the Hebrew word “rāqī́aʿ”which means “firmament”. The firmament is a giant crystal dome that covers the earth and makes up the sky, found in many different mythologies including ancient Judaism.

Moving over to the mythicals we have this generation’s Mew clone: Jirachi. It being associated with a certain comet and having the ability to grant wishes is a big shout-out to the idea of wishing on a star. Its head is shaped like a star and shooting stars (the ones you usually wish on) are actually meteors. Many meteors are composed of iron, likely why Jirachi is steel-type. Jirachi is also based on Tanabata, a Japanese festival based on mythology and astrology where two deities, represented by the stars Vega and Altair, are only allowed to meet once a year. During Tanabata, people will write wishes on pieces of paper called tanzaku and hang them on bamboo or trees. Three tanzaku are present on Jirachi’s head.

(image: a branch with a paper chain and multiple tanzaku on it. The Tanzaku are multicolored, rectangular strips of paper with Japanese writing on them. End ID)

The connection to Tanabata is more explicit in the anime, where the movie featuring Jirachi has a festival celebrating the return of the comet that awakens Jirachi every thousand years. Lots of comets have very elliptical orbits that only bring them to the inner solar system once every several decades or even centuries. While comets are usually depicted with one tail, they actually have two, generated by the sun’s heat and solar wind. One tail is formed from dust while the other is formed from gas. The two streamer or tail like things coming from Jirachi’s back probably represents the two tails of a comet.

(Image: Comet Hale-Bopp, showing the large, white dust tail and the smaller, blue gas tail. End ID)

Deoxys is the first mythical to be un-mythicaled when it showed up in ORAS as a normally-catchable mon in the postgame. Shame they didn’t keep that up. Anyway, Deoxys is an alien, specifically a virus that mutated while falling into Earth’s atmosphere. The idea of a virus or alien falling from the sky is common in science fiction. Think The Andromeda Strain (book and movie, not the shitty miniseries) or The Blob, or if you want a Japanese example, Space Amoeba. Deoxys is also heavily associated with DNA. Its name comes from the full name of DNA: deoxyribonucleic acid and its tentacles in normal form take the same double helix shape that DNA strands do. Its original 3 forms also come DNA: defense, normal, and attack. Speed form messed this up when it came out. I would have called it rapid form so at least it can reference RNA. The x-shaped silhouette of Deoxys also looks like a chromosome. Deoxys also draws from the idea of mutation, which is the result of changes in the structure of DNA. It is a mutated virus and it can mutate itself into specialized forms. The crystal in its chest (which in the movie continuity is the real Deoxys, with the body being an extension of the crystal) probably comes from the sci-fi trope of silicon-based alien life. Silicon is the next element down from Carbon on the periodic table and also has 4 valence electrons, leading to speculation that alien life could use silicon as a basis instead of carbon. Silicon-based aliens are often depicted as living crystals.

(Image: a drawing of a cell, zoomed in to show a chromosome, zoomed in to show a DNA strand. The cell is a blue blob, the chromosomes are blue, globular, and shaped like the letter x. The DNA is two blue strands arranged in a double helix structure connected by small rods. End ID. Source).

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