Am i crazy or is issue 4 of Boy Wonder the first time batlore has mentioned the idea of feeding people to the Lazarus Pit to fuel it? Because it feels obvious but seeing it on paper i feel like i've have inverted dejavu --like I should have a memory of this bit of lore existing already but instead my mind draws a blank. I've got a lot of beef with Ra's and the League of Assassins and everyone surrounding them, as characters, and as concepts, and as fixture of lore, but one of the things that always bugged me, but that I never really feel like it's the right time to bring up is the persistence of the phrase "head of the demon" and the idea that that's a coherent translation.
"Ghul" is not a/the arabic word for ""demon"" it gets conflated as such because old western orientalists were lazy and halfassed linguists who consistently took distinct cultural concepts and just pigeonholed them into vaguely, superficially similar western concepts. Not just erroneously equating the two, but using said mistake as an excuse to completely avoid explaining any of the actual cultural distinctions. Ghul, aka Goule, aka Ghoul is bit of pre-islamic arabic folklore that survived christianization and the rise of islam, and made its way west via France and translations of 1001 Arabian Nights. It's a creature(?) that digs up fresh graves to eat corpses, which is why in modern contexts it tends to be conflated with zombies, as flesh eaters.
But the ghul doesn't have any implicit undead qualities, or even expressly humanoid ones. Literally it's only key defining trait is that it eats corpses. has absolutely nothing to do with the (then) established western concept of a "demon." (And I'm not even going to start on why the western concept of a "demon" is itself a bunch of hodgepodge bullshit stitched together from half a dozen different translation errors.)
Anyway, point being, if the pit eats corpses that makes the pit itself the ghoul, and I think that's a neat justification for the stupid name, al-ghul.
