Dance With The Taker

TWO HOURS EARLIER:

SO I’M READING WAY TOO DEEP INTO THINGS AGAIN, BUT.

This book. THIS BOOK. (For those who can’t make it out, it says in shiny metal letters “Ministerium Ex Acerbus” over ‘Taker’s sigil.) I caught it in a gif and something about it struck me as weird. 

I will preface this by saying I took Latin in university. I will amend that by saying I took one course, and it was such a ridiculous learning experience that none of us could actually translate a sentence by the end of it. But I think I know a bit of it. 

Enough to know that ‘Acerbus’ isn’t ‘Darkness’, and ‘ex’ doesn’t mean ‘of’ in the sense you’d think. Hell, ‘Ministry of Darkness’ could be a two-word phrase: Ministerium Tenebrae. You just use what is called the ‘genetive’ case - ‘cause in Latin, they hate you enough to make you essentially conjugate nouns AND verbs AND adjectives too - to make it ‘of’ or ‘belonging to’ the noun. ‘Ex’ is more like ‘from’, ‘out from’, or ‘out of’. Calling it ‘The Ministry Out From Darkness’ doesn’t particularly make a lot of sense, since they spent most of their time in darkness.  

The thing about conjugating nouns is that means word order almost doesn’t matter in Latin. There are also a lot of different words for ‘darkness’. So, if they didn’t want ‘Ministerium Tenebrae’, they could’ve gone with ‘Noctis Ministerium’, which sounds cool as hell IMO. What I’m getting at here is they had a lot of options to write out ‘Ministry of Darkness’. They took none of them. Acerbus does not mean ‘darkness’. It doesn’t mean anything close to darkness. Now, you might think, ‘Jay, shut up, it’s for a prop, it doesn’t have to be accurate’. ‘You must be new here,’ I say, taking your hand and leading you to the refreshments. 

In all seriousness, if it wasn’t meant to be understood, why go to the trouble in the first place, and why have Paul carry it like that, where it’s on full display? And you would think that if I, a 23-year-old yokel who studied Latin once like five years go, can look at it and go ‘hey, that doesn’t say darkness’, WWF/E should’ve been able to figure it out, too. So I think it’s intentional. That’s been squared away, so let’s move on to ‘Acerbus’.

One of the interesting things about Acerbus is that it’s an adjective. More importantly, it’s an adjective that doesn’t agree with its noun. Some of you may speak languages like French, where words have genders and such, and adjectives have to match so you know what’s being applied to what. ‘Cette femme est beau’ doesn’t sound right, both because my French is rusty as hell and because ‘beau’ is a masculine word. 

Ministerium is a singular gender-neutral word. It can be translated as ‘ministry’, but is also often read as ‘service’. When it ends in -um, it can either be nominative (the subject of a sentence), accusative (the direct object of a verb), or vocative (a direct address, eg ‘O Death’ or something of the sort). 

Acerbus is singular, but it’s not neutral. It’s singular and masculine, and it only ends in -us if it’s nominative/the subject. (Or Vocative, to be fair.) So it’s not “Acerbus from the Ministry”, it’s “The Ministry from Acerbus”.

Another important note to consider is that adjectives often take the place of nouns in Latin. Sounds weird until you realize we do the same thing in English. “Hey there, beautiful”, “feed the hungry”, or, for western fans, “the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”. In these cases, the unspoken noun is ‘person’ or ‘people’ or something of the sort. This also explains the use of ‘ex’. Wouldn’t make much sense if ‘Acerbus’ applied to ‘Ministerium’. It’s its own noun, and it’s referring to a single man. 

Some of you might know the word ‘acerbic’ in English. If you don’t, it basically describes a bitter taste, like eating a lemon. “Ministry from (the/a) Bitter Man” is kinda weird, but kinda sad in a way. But I thought, hey, Latin’s weird, let’s double-check the meaning. There are three usually applied to ‘acerbus’. The first is bitter, usually in terms of a taste, but hey, metaphors are metaphors. So that checked. It can also mean violent or brutal if used to describe a person. And the third meaning, less common than the others, is ‘oppressive’. 

Miriam-Webster defines ‘oppression’ as follows:

oppression

noun

op·​pres·​sion | \ ə-ˈpre-shən

1a: unjust or cruel exercise of authority or power

So we have ‘The Ministry from the Oppressive Man”. A Ministry pulled from one man’s cruel authority and power. And the word meaning ‘cruel power’ is right over Taker’s sigil. There are two ways you could take this:

1. The Undertaker is the man in the title. The one exercising his authority. On the surface, this makes sense. He is the most outwardly powerful member of the Ministry, and he is the one we see calling the shots pretty often. But I don’t buy this. I buy option two: 

2. It’s real fuckin’ symbolic that ‘[the man who is] oppressive’ is over the Undertaker. The Ministry out of the man exerting his power over the Undertaker.

This might seem like a bit of a stretch, granted, but I’ve written thinkpieces on why I subscribe to the theory that Taker was brainwashed to hell and back leading up to the Ministry. But let’s look at this bit in particular. Undertaker is not leading the Ministry out, Paul is. You can actually see Taker behind Paul’s shoulder there. Paul’s in front, Paul’s in charge. 

But okay. You want more. Here’s why I really think it symbolizes power over Taker:

That’s not his book. 

It’s Paul’s book. 

Here’s the thing: ‘Taker doesn’t use spellbooks. We’ve seen him do everything from control the house lights and make microphones explode to teleport, summon lightning, come back from the dead, and open up portals to Hell all without a book. We’ve even seen him do chants without a book, run rituals without it. He doesn’t use one.

And speaking of chants: His chants are, as we discussed earlier, ancient Gaelic. Not Latin. Ancient. Gaelic. The chants in the Ministry theme are Gaelic, and the ones in sketches either are Gaelic or are made to sound Gaelic. (For the record: I don’t speak Ancient Gaelic. I don’t speak modern Gaelic. But the accent and pronunciation sounded similar enough to my ears.) Whether or not he speaks Latin, I can’t say. But he definitely doesn’t use it in his personal craft. His language of choice for magic is Gaelic.

He doesn’t use Latin. He doesn’t use a book. 

That’s not his. 

I, personally, think it’s Paul’s. He’s carrying it, he’s got it on display, and, by his own admission, he lived in the Spook House for years. It’s not a stretch to think he picked up a thing or two, especially since he was gonna help ‘Taker with the rituals regarding Steve Austin and Mideon. And you know what else? Given the title, and how close he keeps it to himself, I wouldn’t doubt for a second if that’s the grimoire he used to mindwipe good ol’ Taker. It really is a ministry born from Paul’s cruelty. Servitude from a man’s brutality.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/12981579

1) The current AU I’ve been thinking the most about: what if Undertaker told Stephanie everything (that her brother & father were involved, the Corporate Ministry, the Higher Power stuff, all of it) while he had her captured? I’m imagining him, the first time she was captured and left in the boiler room, whispering in her ear, “Everything is not as it seems….” (because he loves to be a cryptic fuck) and of course she has no idea what that means — until the limo incident and then they’re able to be alone, and he just spills everything. Because he’s in love with her, and whether he was already interested in her before this (which is an idea I like to play around with) or it happened in the middle of this, doesn’t really matter, just that he’s fallen for her, hard, and he doesn’t give a shit about the rest of the McMahons, and that vow he talks about is to her, and only her, but of course Vince & Shane can’t know that, they think he’s just going alone with their bs plan.  And of course she’s confused, disbelieving, and pissed (”They would never put me through anything like this! How dare you!”) but he’s got receipts, probably phone call recordings, notes — maybe Vince even calls right there and Stephanie listens silently, even more confused, heartbroken, and not just pissed but enraged. And now she wants revenge, which she’ll get, but it’ll be a long con  — and she’ll falling love with Taker along the way because ofc.