#aidoneus

An Olympian Family Tree. I wanted to make a color and style guide for myself that I could reference whenever I drew an Olympian, and in true me fashion it got completely out of hand. Greek Gods take all sorts of shapes and sizes and there is no “right” way to depict them, but for this I used what little descriptions were provided by writers in classical sources, as well as referencing colors from ancient frescoes.

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The first four songs are live!! These include a new Overture, two remastered tracks, and an entirely new song called Pluto Ascending!! 🖤🖤 After this, a new song will be released every two weeks from now!

Oh, sweet God of the dead, protect my soul

Your darkness consumes all and keeps us whole

Aidoneus, giver of wealth, the one unseen

Keeper of the departed, our endings foreseen

Rolling waves, leading to your tender embrace

Oh, the fear of your presence is misplaced

A respectable, fatherly being

Your watchful eye and doting, oh-so-freeing

Your eternal black, revered by the moon and stars alike

The realm of Hades’ where there is only night

Lost souls, wallow and pray

You are the light to lead our way

The lingering smoke of a candle wick burnt

You, to which our spirits will return

May their trepidation turn to serenity

As they learn, you are not our enemy

Mortal life is far too brief

Though I know you’ll bring comfort to our grief

Your Kingdom, mysterious and homely

How I know your arms will hold me

Oh, praise be to Hades and His arcane caress

There will be a day I must feel the kiss of death

And in His domain, there will be no rain

For I will know I am loved

So the soul king has an actual name now and it's apparently Adnyeus(?*)[アドナイェウス] which at a glance I thought was some kind of weird mashup of Hebrew Adonai[אֲדֹנָי] and Latin deus as a kind of play on Yhwach's name being based on the tetragrammaton. But actually it's just the name Aidoneus[Ἀϊδωνεύς] which was an old epithet for the Greek Hades, supposedly meaning "The Unseen" which somewhat superficially fits for the Soul King as a king of the dead/underworld.

*(I have no idea where anyone is getting these romanizations I see flying around...)

It's actually not the first time the name has come up. some eagle eyed fans caught that what appears to be "ADNYEUS" was shown back in episode 6 of TYBW in Ryuuken's notes, above the illustration of the castle Silbern. And then at the end of the previous season the anime added a chant to Yhwach's Auswählen that ran:

Kakageyo Gin no Monshou, Haiiro no Sougen, Hikari ni Uzumoreta, Enkan no Michi, Menou no Gankyu, Ougon no Shita, Zugai no Sakazuki, ADNYEUS no Hitsugi. Kakageru mono wa, Omae no Shinzou: AUSWÄHLEN [掲げよ 銀の紋章 灰色の草原 光に埋もれた円環の途 瑪瑙の眼球 黄金の舌 頭蓋の盃 アドナイェウスの棺 掲げるものは お前の心臓 聖別(アウスヴェーレン)] "Raise up Crest of Silver, Ash-colored(gray) Meadow, Circular Road hidden in (the) Light, Eye(s) of Agate, Tongue of Gold, Grail* of Skull, Coffin of Adnyeus. That which is Raised up is Your Heart: Auswählen."

*notably in one of Uryuu's German chants, the Japanese word for a [杯]:"sake cup" was paired with the German word Gral:"Grail", and [盃] and [杯] are alternate kanji for the same word. At the most literal the chant in Japanese just uses the word for "sake cup" like the one he uses for the schrift eucharist, but I feel like the more implicitly western imagery evoked by "skull Grail" or maybe "...chalice" is more in line with the ongoing aesthetic of Quincy spells

I'm not actually in a position to go doing a real deep dive on this but it does seem like at a glance there are associations with that alternate title with a specific incongruous variation of the god of the underworld--that is to say: characterizations of him under this epithets are not consistent with other more common interpretstions-- where he's actually got a lot of strong sun iconography. This of course maps almost perfectly with a bunch of stuff I've ranted on about a few different times in my Bleach ramblings.

Incidentally it is also the scientific namesake of the Papilio aidoneus... a black butterfly... In the first place Bleach's hell-butterflies were already a play on the real world association of butterflies and death, often either as psychopomps or themselves the souls of the dead. That they tie back in to the Soul King himself isn't too big a stretch.

As for this "triplet world" thing... We were already told that Hueco Mundo isn't actually it's own formal realm, it's the interstitial realm that just naturally exists in the space between one world and the next. So it kinda annoys me that this feels like it's really only being acknowledged because after the fact it's just where a big chunk of Bleach's plot happened, rather than actually being cosmologically on par with the other two.

Anyway the translations going around I notice are a little sloppy, mostly in that a few are clearly just machine translated and so ignored the use of Bleach specific terminology, like "reishi" and "kishi" so here's my quick breakdown of it (thank god it's short...)

原初の海から分かたれた尸魂界,現世, 虚圏の三つの世界。 The Three Worlds of Soul Society, This (the mortal) World, Hueco Mundo divided* from the Sea of Origin. 遍く魂魄の流れを司る礎であり, かつ世界の楔たる存在によって, The universal flow of spirits is the foundation to control, as well as the lynchpin of the world which is due to existence, 霊子の世界,器子の世界,砂の楽土の三世界が分離され, the Three Worlds of The World of Reishi, The World of Kishi, The Paradise of Sand are detached*, 『生』と『死』が隔てられた。 "Life" and "Death" were isolated*.

*so interestingly all three of these different words could be translated into english as "separated" but seem to be fairly distinct contextual differences: the first means like cutting one big thing up into smaller things the "A came from B" dynamic being the focus, the second means to be separated out almost like being categorized, and the third is to be isolated or alienated.

So first it's saying the three worlds came from one sea of origin, and that the flow of spirits between those three worlds is the key to existence being what it is, which is to say three distinct realms where death and life are these things that can never coexist. All of which is stuff we really already knew.

Also we're supposed to have just completely forgotten about Hell since it's not the current plot line, I guess? If anything the Three Worlds should be Soul Society, the Material World, and Hell, with Hueco Mundo as the interstitial void/aether, like it was originally defined as. That would at least map more sensibly onto the buddhist 3 realms of

Form(Humans & animals: those bound by their physicality)

Formless(Deva & Asura: those who exist in a hightened mental/spiritual state)

Desire(Preta & those in Hell: those defined by their strong need for what they lack)

Maybe that only real point of interest is the reference to Hueco Mundo as suna no rakudo[砂の楽土], a "paradise of sand." In this voice I think the idea is that if life and death being separate realms is a bad thing that Yhwach seeks to rectify, then by being an inbetween realm, Hueco Mundo is a paradise, because it's a place of neither life nor death? But if it is a place of rest and comfort then I wonder if that doesn't validate my thoughts on the Vastolorde being the natural path of development for a soul in reincarnation afterall?

Also this is the same statue drawn in my style:

Reference:

Valentine’s offering to King Father Hades 🖤💜❤️