#hellequin

They designed their OC (Hellequin, the little guy in stripped pants) and I doodled mine next to it :D (I'm in green btw)

His Fair Assassin love interests (3/4) — Balthazaar

Well actually Black Mask Goro can symbolize many things. I initially thought that the sole meaning of Goro’s Black Mask outfit is that Goro is a prisoner to his fate just like Ren, except that Goro’s heart isn’t free and he was being manipulated and controlled. Which explains why his Black Mask outfit is striped with belts strapped around him.

But thanks to this Youtube comment I found, I discovered that there’s more meaning to Goro’s Black Mask outfit. The Black Mask outfit also represents a harlequin.

I tried to do some research about harlequins and here’s what I know from it: A harlequin is a type of jester, which connects to the term “trickster”. Goro wears his black mask outfit when he uses his Loki persona, and Loki is a TRICKSTER god. Therefore, this could mean that the reason why his black mask outfit is a one-piece suit with a striped pattern, is because jesters like harlequins wears one-piece suits with a pattern on them.

I also discovered about the origin of the word “harlequin”. According to this source, the word “harlequin” came from the old French words, “herlequin” or “hellequin“. Hellequins are emissaries of the devil whose job is to chase down the souls of evil people to Hell. In other words, harlequins (which are derived from hellequins) were originally depicted as mischievous demons. Mischievous demons huh?

The physical appearance of a hellequin is the reason why harlequins around the 16th and 17th centuries usually wear red-and-black masks or just a black mask. I think that explains why Goro’s mask looks reddish-black in the engine room.

Speaking of Goro’s mask, his mask also has two curved pointy ends

I can’t help but think that it reminds me of a type of hat with two curved ends that jesters and harlequins would sometimes wear.

Idk if I’m completely right or wrong about all this but I just felt like expressing what I discovered. So yeah, just like how Ren is a prisoner of fate, Goro is a prisoner of fate too. AND just like how Ren is a trickster associated with “Joker”, Goro is also a trickster associated with “harlequin”.

They both really are two sides of the same coin 😌

Just a thing I drew showing what it would look like if I was a stand user in Jojo’s Bizzare adventure. 

I’m pretty sure you can tell which one is the stand and which one is the stand user. 

The stand’s name is Nightwish (after my favourite metal band, obvciously). 

I didn’t come up with too much about it, other than that it’s appearance is based on the user’s emotions. If the user is feeling negative emotions, it’s appearance changes to look more terrifying. If the user is feeling positive emotions, it will look more cuter, and otherwise, it looks normal. 

It also likes to chase people in it’s scary state. 

The “familia Herlequini” or “la mesnie Hellequin” is a term which, as Claude Lecouteux has shown in “Phantom Armies of the Night”, might encompass a wide variety of disparate phenomena, such as the wild hunt (die wilde Jagt) and the wild horde (das wilde Heer). The familia Herlequini represented a troop of the dead: the earliest explicit reference to the familia Herlequini is in Orderic Vitalis’s Ecclesiastical History (1130s).

Orderic told the story of a Norman priest called Walchelin, who describes his encounter on New Year’s night in 1091 with a mysterious procession of knights, ladies, priests, monks, and commoners, “like the movement of a great army,” among whom he recognized “many of his neighbours who had recently died.” At one point Walchelin says to himself, “Haec sine dubio familia Herlechini est” [Without a doubt this is Herlequin’s household]. At one point Walchelin grabs one of their horses by the reins and experiences an intense burning, and at another, one of the knights seizes him by the throat, leaving a scar which he carries to the grave. All the members of the procession suffer penitential torments for their former sins: one of the knights, for instance, tells Walchelin: “The arms which we bear are red-hot, and offend us with an appalling stench, weighing us down with intolerable weight, and burning with everlasting fire”.

In this description, Herlechinus appears as a giant who raise a huge club.

The other early description of Herlequin’s ride, written some fifty years later, is from Walter Map’s "De Nugis Curialium". Here a Welsh king called Herla encounters a diminutive Pan-like creature who predicts his future marriage and then strikes a bargain with him: he will attend Herla’s wedding on condition that the king help him celebrate his own wedding a year later. This creature, who is never named, turns out to be royal and shows up at Herla’s wedding with a splendid retinue bearing lavish gifts. The return visit, which involves passing through “a cave in a high cliff”, is equally successful, but when the time comes for him to leave, Herla’s host presents him with a small dog, with the instruction that none of his retinue is to dismount until the dog jumps down to the ground. He returns to his kingdom only to discover that hundreds of years have passed. Inevitably, some of his company dismount before the dog jumps down and are promptly turned to dust: “The King, comprehending the reason of their dissolution, warned the rest under pain of a like death not to touch the earth before the alighting of the dog. The dog has not yet alighted. And the story says that King Herla still holds on his mad course [circuitus vesanos] with his band in eternal wanderings, without stop or stay”. Later, Map refers to this band as “phalanges noctivage quas Herlethingi dicebant” [night-wandering battalions which they say are Herlething’s] or simply the “Herlethingi familia” [Herlething’s household].

Moreover, in a late thirteenth-century poem on confession, the priest is instructed to ask, “Creïs tu . . .  / Ne [le luiton] ne la masnée / Herllequin, ne genes ne fees?” [Do you not believe . . . in the goblin, in the household of Herlequin, in witches, and fairies?], and an early fourteenth-century Dominican redaction of the Elucidarium, known as the Second Lucidaire, makes a similar association when it speaks (in the early sixteenth-century English translation) of “elues, gobelyns, & helquins þe whiche men se by nyght, as men of armes trottynge on horsebacke with grete assembles.” Another fourteenth-century author, Raoul de Presles, commenting on Augustine’s discussion of incubi demones in The City of God, recommends that his readers consult William of Auvergne on the topic, “and also he speaks in that place of Hellekin’s household and of Dame Habonde and of the spirits that they call fairies, which appear in stables and woods”. Finally, when the author of Richard the Redeless, referring no doubt to the duketti created by Richard II in 1397, writes, “Oþer hobbis Ϟe hadden / of Hurlewaynis kynne,” he explicitly associates Herlequin with hobs or fairies.

In Adam de la Halle’s brilliant farce “Le Jeu de la feuillée” (ca. 1255), the action of the play takes place in Arras on a feast day (perhaps May Day or possibly Midsummer’s Eve) and concerns a banquet held in honor of the fairies. The sound of bells leads a character called Gillot to anticipate the imminent arrival of “le maisnie Hellekin,” and when another character asks, “will the fairies be following him?” [venront dont les fees après], Gillot assures her that they will. In the event, Hellequin himself does not appear but later sends a messenger to Morgan (one of the three fairies who do) with a love letter; at first she spurns his offer, but after learning that her current beau, the Arrageois Robert Sommeillons, has been cheating on her, she regrets having rejected so peremptorily “the greatest prince in fairyland” [le graigneur / Prinche ki soit en faerie]. He is described, therefore, as a king and shown to be in some sense the leader of a fairy troupe.

How to start worshipping Hellequin?

See:

- https://elegantshapeshifter.tumblr.com/post/170758896566/historically-attested-offerings-for-the-major

- https://elegantshapeshifter.tumblr.com/post/171876985371/how-to-make-offerings-to-the-major-spirits-ie

- https://elegantshapeshifter.tumblr.com/post/171332375001/the-sabbath-or-ludus-bonae-societatis#notes

Sources:

- Richard Firth Green’s “Elf Queens and Holy Friars: Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church”