This week on View from the Gutters our topic work is The Sixth Gun, by Cullen Bunn and Brian Hurtt. The series takes place some years after the Civil War. It centers around 6 mystic guns, each of which grants a unique power to its wielder. It follows the adventures of two such wielders, as they battle a succession of foes both mundane and mystical who are attempting to seize the weapons for themselves.
In our recommendation section our hosts nominated Ant Colony, Jem and the Holograms, One Punch Man, Starlight, and Star Wars: Shattered Empire for discussion on our next episode, and our selected title is Jem and the Holograms, Vol. 1 & Annual.
If you missed our prior announcements, Joe recently sat down as a guest host on Radio vs. The Martians to talk about Batman and Tobiah sat down with Arc Reactions to talk about the Netflix series Jessica Jones.
Our hosts for this episode are Tobiah Panshin, Joe Preti, Kayleigh Fleeman, and Adam Panshin.
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The original mythic crossroads is in the skies. It’s the place where the plane of the ecliptic — the band of the constellations which is the celestial “Earth” — crosses either the Milky Way or the imaginary lines of the equinoxes and gives the mythic traveler access to the heavens above or the underworld below. (It is, for example, the location on the shore of the world-circling Ocean where Odysseus summons the spirits of the dead.)
Also, as a note to Adam, seeing caves as a route to the underworld was not just a thing in the Americas. The best known Western example is the Greco-Roman site of “Pluto’s Gate” in Turkey, but it was far from the only one. There’s a more comprehensive roundup here.
And there were certainly ley lines in the Americas — of which the Nazca Lines are only the best known. All these things are remnants of a single, prehistoric, globe-spanning system of belief.
I dug out a couple more links concerning underworld sites for anyone who’s interested. One in Israel that was associated with Demeter and the other in Sicily.
And one more that I couldn’t come up with earlier. Gary Urton’s At the Crossroads of the Earth and the Sky: An Andean Cosmology, which attests to the importance of crossroads imagery in Peru. See review here.