Whenever I start to think about mythology, I worry about my poetry.

After having Middle Eastern food for most of last week, I am going to make meatballs and a basic marinara sauce tonight. But we did get plenty of stuff to make more Middle Eastern food this coming week. Well, probably starting tomorrow.

I've had Typhon on the brain for the past few days. This is because I am still reading The Idea of Wilderness and am now reading about the Egyptians and the Greeks. Typhon isn't in the book, but he was Gaia's last son (by Tartarus, the big void under everything) after Zeus had driven all the Titans out of heaven. With Echidna (the worst female monster in Greek mythology ever) he fathered several major Greek monsters, including Cerberus and the Sphinx.

But I was thinking about Typhon because the book talks about several basic pairs of dynamic oppositions like:

nomad / farmer
water / land

And then it talks about shepherds and farmers in Genesis, and then I started thinking about the goats in Oman, and how in the cities and towns they often had no shepherd and just ran around eating garbage, but outside of the cities and towns they were usually accompanied by a shepherd. Often a woman.

And then I started to wonder, what animal would be considered the "Goat of the sea," and then I thought about Capricorn, which is sometimes called the "sea goat" for reasons I forget, but something to do with its position in the sky. And then there's a story of how Typhon chased Pan into the water and Pan's legs turned into a fish tail.

And Typhon is kind of associated with the sea. He sometimes causes storms or steals Zeus' thunderbolts.