When Mythology Meets Reality: Babi, Twrch Trwyth and Talos
Ancient mythology often becomes more understandable when we stop treating its characters as isolated inventions and consider the world that surrounded the people telling their stories. Animals that seem entertaining to us from the safety of a screen could be dangerous real-life neighbours, hunting could involve a genuine contest between a person and an animal capable of killing them, and exceptional craftsmanship could inspire ideas that crossed the boundary between technology and magic.
Three very different Mythopouch characters demonstrate this particularly well. Babi takes the formidable behaviour and physical presence of a real animal and turns those qualities into supernatural power. Twrch Trwyth (Tro the Boar) transforms an already dangerous wild boar into something capable of challenging Arthur and his warriors. Talos goes in another direction, imagining a bronze guardian able to patrol an island and act independently against intruders.
Babi: Why Would You Want a Frightening God on Your Side?
Ancient Egyptian Mythology
For someone who has only encountered baboons in photographs, zoos or wildlife documentaries, the idea of a fearsome baboon deity might initially seem unusual. An adult male hamadryas baboon gives a very different impression when seen confronting a rival.
This BBC footage is useful because it shows what a photograph cannot. Hamadryas society is intensely hierarchical, and adult leader males maintain access to females through dominance, displays and sometimes outright violence. The heavy silver mantle makes the males look even more substantial, while their long muzzles conceal formidable canine teeth. Smithsonian researchers observing wild hamadryas baboons in Ethiopia describe a leader male yawning to expose those canines as a clear threat before charging a younger challenger. The encounter ends with the younger male forced onto his back in submission.
Knowing that behaviour gives us a much better starting point for understanding Babi.
Babi was not important because the Egyptians thought baboons were simply sacred or amusing animals. The most revealing evidence for him comes from Egyptian funerary literature, where he can be threatening in one passage and a source of extraordinary strength in another. That apparent contradiction is the key to understanding him.
In the Pyramid Texts the king can identify himself with Babi, who is given the title "Bull of the Baboons", yet another spell orders Babi to keep his distance. Later Coffin Texts take the identification much further. One spell is specifically concerned with **becoming Babi in the realm of the dead**. The transformed deceased is described as so formidable that other beings fear him and people tremble before him. A scholarly study of this spell concludes that identification with the fearsome baboon served as protection against beings that might otherwise threaten the dead.
That changes the question completely. Instead of asking why an Egyptian would worship something frightening, it is more useful to ask why an Egyptian facing an uncertain journey after death might want something frightening on their side.
Babi did not need to become gentle before he could protect anyone. His aggression was precisely what made him valuable. If the deceased could take on Babi's identity and power, then whatever was waiting in the darkness was no longer confronting an ordinary human being. It was confronting the "Bull of the Baboons", an entity whose presence was itself capable of causing fear.
This principle appears again when Babi is associated with dangerous boundaries in the afterlife. Chapter 17 of the *Book of the Dead* describes a frightening guardian connected with a bend of the Lake of Fire and gives several possible identifications for him. One of those names is **Baba**, a form of Babi, who is described as guarding that western boundary. The same composition is concerned with the deceased successfully passing places of fire, slaughter and supernatural danger without becoming their victim.
The Lake of Fire should not simply be imagined as the Egyptian version of a later Christian Hell. Egyptian afterlife literature is filled with dangerous places and beings whose effects depend heavily on who encounters them and whether that person possesses the correct status, knowledge or protection. A destructive force directed against an enemy could become protective when placed between that enemy and you.
Babi's strange sexual symbolism makes more sense within the same framework. Ancient Egyptian funerary texts are remarkably explicit about his virility. In the Pyramid Texts, Babi's phallus is associated with the bolt that opens the sky, while later Coffin Texts allow the deceased to identify with Babi's sexual potency directly. One spell even contains the remarkable statement that "Babi is the deceased person's protection".
This is not an irrelevant piece of crude mythology added to an otherwise serious god. Sexual potency represented vitality, generative power and the continuation of bodily abilities beyond death. The Egyptian afterlife was not ideally a state in which a person became a vague, powerless ghost. The deceased hoped to eat, drink, move, speak, recognise others and continue to possess the qualities associated with being fully alive. Babi represents those qualities in exaggerated form, combining aggression, physical dominance and virility into an almost excessive concentration of life force.
This also explains why the word "revered" needs some care when discussing him. Babi was not necessarily revered in the same way as one of Egypt's enormous public cult gods like Osiris or Horus. What survives most clearly is a being who was feared, invoked and sometimes deliberately assumed as an identity. Egyptian funerary religion did not require every useful supernatural force to be friendly. Some were useful because they were formidable.
That idea is more interesting than simply saying the Egyptians worshipped a baboon because baboons were dangerous. They had observed a real animal with a striking social hierarchy, impressive teeth, obvious sexual characteristics and the ability to turn from calm to violent very quickly. Religious imagination then took those qualities far beyond the natural animal.
An adult male hamadryas could intimidate another baboon with a display of his teeth. Babi could intimidate the inhabitants of the realm of the dead.
For an Egyptian hoping to survive that journey, there were circumstances in which being feared might be considerably more useful than being harmless.
Twrch Trwyth (Tro the Boar): Imagine What a Really Big Boar Could Do
Arthurian Mythology
Wild boar are familiar enough that their physical capabilities can easily be underestimated. A mature animal is low to the ground, heavily muscled and armed with canine teeth that continue growing throughout its life. Animal Diversity Web records adult wild boar reaching as much as 272kg, approximately 599lbs (pounds), with total lengths of up to 2,400mm, or about 94.5" (inches). They can stand around 900mm, or 35.4" (inches), at the shoulder, while the upper canine teeth can measure approximately 50-100mm, or 2-4" (inches). Wild boars generally have around 3% body fat, compared to farmed pigs which are around 15% - so this is a lot of active muscle. These are upper-range figures rather than the dimensions of an ordinary European boar, but they demonstrate just how substantial the species can become.
Watching a boar move is probably more useful than simply reading its measurements. The weight is carried close to the ground, the body is compact and powerful, and the animal can move far more quickly than its shape suggests. Encountering one at close quarters with medieval hunting equipment would have been very different from seeing one safely behind a barrier.
This provides an excellent real-world starting point for Twrch Trwyth (Tro the Boar), represented in Mythopouch as Tro the Boar.
Twrch Trwyth (Tro the Boar) appears first in an early Arthurian context and receives his great hunt in the Welsh tale "Culhwch and Olwen". Culhwch is required to complete a long series of apparently impossible tasks before he can marry Olwen, whose father, the giant Ysbaddaden, knows that his daughter's marriage will bring about his own death. Among those tasks is retrieving a comb, razor, and shears carried by Twrch Trwyth.
The objects sound almost comical when removed from their context, but obtaining them becomes one of the largest and most destructive episodes in the story. Culhwch cannot accomplish the task alone, so King Arthur and a remarkable collection of warriors, hunters, hounds and supernatural helpers become involved. Arthur's forces pursue the boar from Ireland into Wales, losing men during a hunt that becomes less like sport and more like a military campaign.
Twrch Trwyth (Tro the Boar) is far beyond any natural boar. His bristles are dangerous, his speed is supernatural, he can cross the sea, and repeated attempts to contain or kill him fail. Even after Arthur's company finally manages to retrieve the objects, the boar is not neatly slain as the final act of the adventure. He escapes into the sea and disappears.
That makes the connection with the real animal more interesting than simply saying that medieval people exaggerated the size of a pig. The storytellers did not have to invent the basic premise that a boar could be dangerous to armed men. A sufficiently large boar already demanded caution and skill from hunters. The mythology begins by taking an existing threat and gradually stripping away its natural limits.
A real wild boar can approach 272kg, 600lbs (pounds) at the extreme end of the recorded range. It can have canine teeth several inches long and carry that weight on a body standing less than a metre high at the shoulder. Once those realities are understood, imagining what storytellers might do with the animal becomes easy. Make it larger, faster and more aggressive, give its bristles supernatural properties, allow it to cross seas and refuse to let even King Arthur kill it.
Twrch Trwyth (Tro the Boar) then stops looking like a random giant animal inserted into an Arthurian tale. He becomes the mythological expansion of an animal that people already had very good reasons to respect.
Talos: How Ancient Greece Imagined an Artificial Guardian
Ancient Greek Mythology
Talos gives us a different connection between mythology and reality because there is no dangerous animal behind him. His modern comparison comes from progression in engineering.
Ancient traditions differ over exactly what Talos was and where he came from. In the "Argonautica" of Apollonius of Rhodes, he belongs to the bronze race and was given to Europa as the guardian of Crete.
Another ancient tradition made him a gift from Hephaestus, which places him more clearly among the extraordinary manufactured beings associated with the divine craftsman.
What makes Talos remarkable is not merely that he has a bronze body. Apollonius describes him travelling around Crete three times each day as its guardian. When an unwanted ship approaches, he tears rocks from the cliffs and hurls them towards it, preventing the crew from landing. This is a being assigned to a territory, moving around that territory and responding physically when an intrusion occurs.
The comparison with modern robotics needs to be made carefully. The Ancient Greeks did not invent robots in the engineering sense, and there is no reason to pretend that Talos somehow predicted electronics, artificial intelligence or modern automation. The interesting part is that storytellers could already imagine a manufactured or metallic being performing an assigned task without a person walking beside it and controlling each movement.
That ancient idea is much easier to appreciate now that machines can actually do some of these things. Boston Dynamics describes its current Atlas humanoid as an autonomous industrial robot able to perceive its surroundings, perform material-handling tasks and adapt to changing environments with minimal supervision. It can even navigate to its charging station, replace its own depleted battery and return to work.
Atlas is not Talos, and Talos is not an ancient Atlas. Putting the two beside each other simply shows how unusual the Greek idea was - for the time. One is modern engineering built through motors, sensors, software and decades of research. The other existed entirely in imagination, in a culture for which a life-sized autonomous metal guardian was technologically impossible.
The end of the Talos story makes the comparison even more interesting. His bronze body is overwhelmingly difficult to attack directly, but he possesses a vulnerable point near his ankle associated with the vessel containing his life-giving ichor. Medea recognises that simply trying to overpower him is not the answer. Ancient versions differ over exactly how his destruction occurs, but the critical vulnerability near the ankle remains central to the story. In Apollonius, Talos grazes it against a jagged rock after Medea has brought her power against him, the ichor pours out, and the enormous bronze figure loses its strength and collapses.
There is something unexpectedly modern in that problem. The heroes are confronted by a system whose external strength makes conventional attack ineffective, yet the whole system still depends on one critical component remaining intact. Finding that weakness matters more than being physically stronger than the machine.
Perhaps the modern comparison is hydraulic fluid on which almost all machinery operates, like excavators and tractors. Hydraulics is the use of a confined, pressurised liquid to multiply force and move heavy loads. If all hydraulic fluid is lost (leaked) then there would be no movement.
We should not retrospectively turn Greek mythology into science fiction, but neither should we overlook what is unusual about Talos. Greek storytellers imagined a metallic being able to move independently, patrol a defined area, identify an unwanted arrival and act against it. Modern robotics does not prove that Talos was a prediction of future technology. It simply gives us a real-world reference point that makes the ancient imagination behind him easier to appreciate.
Mythology Was Never Created in a Vacuum
Babi, Twrch Trwyth (Tro the Boar) and Talos come from very different traditions, yet each becomes more interesting when we consider the experiences and ideas that existed around the people telling their stories.
The Egyptians could observe the intimidating behaviour of baboons and develop a supernatural figure whose aggression, dominance and vitality could be feared or deliberately appropriated for protection.
Welsh storytellers began with an animal that could already be dangerous to hunters and expanded it until one boar could occupy Arthur and his warriors across an enormous legendary pursuit.
Greek storytellers looked at craftsmanship and imagined a metallic guardian that did not merely resemble a living being but could move through the world and fulfil a purpose of its own.
None of this reduces mythology to simple explanations such as "people saw a baboon and invented Babi" or "Talos was the first robot". Myths develop through religion, symbolism, storytelling, ritual and generations of retelling, and the surviving texts rarely give us one simple explanation for why a figure existed. The real world does, however, give us another way into those stories. Once we understand the animal, danger or idea beneath the mythology, something that initially appears bizarre can begin to feel surprisingly logical.
When mythology meets reality....
When mythology meets reality at Mythopouch, you discover the stories, then look at the world around you and see where the myth may have begun.
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