Fate, Mythology, Eyeballs, and the Smoke Monster

So I've been thinking about what the "purpose" of the smoke monster that we last saw destroy Mr. Eko in "The Cost of Living", and I've come up with a couple of theories, stumbled across a couple of interesting parallels, and wound up someplace totally unexpected....  Discuss!

The short version:  The "monster" is Fate.  Fate with a capital F.  We saw it confront Eko and deliver its judgement.  Its got a "personality" if you want to call it that, as we saw when it was manifesting as Yemi ("You speak to me as if I were your brother.")

Thinking that sounds good, I started doing a bit of off-the-cuff Wikipedia research, and came up with this... Namtar.

In Mesopotamian mythology Namtar was a hellish deity, god of death, and the messenger of An, Ereshkigal and Nergal.

Namtar was considered responsible for diseases and pests, because it was said that he commanded sixty diseases in the form of demons that could penetrate different parts of the human body, and offerings to him were made with the purpose of preventing those illnesses. It is thought that Assyrians and Babylonians took this belief from the Sumerians after conquering them. To some the they were the spirit of fate, and therefore of great importance. This being was regarded as the beloved sons of Bêl. Apparently they executed the instructions given him concerning the fate of men, and could also have power over certain of the gods. In other writings they were regarded the personification of death, much like the modern concept of the Grim Reaper.

Whoa! Interesting is the first sentence, no? Could there a be a connection there between the smoke and the so-called "disease?"  Could the "sacrifices the island demands" be the offerings keeping our castaways immune to it?  And of course we've seen the "personification of death" aspect....

Now, digging a little more into the "Fate" concept, I came across some Norse mythological references, specifically the Norns.

The Norns live beneath the roots of Yggdrasil, the world tree at the center of the cosmos (although some accounts have it that they dwell above the arch of the Bifrost Bridge), where they weave the tapestry of fates. Each person's life is a string in their loom, and the length of the string is the length of the person's life.

Good stuff, that.  If you really wanted to get weird you could even draw a nice parallel to Eko's standing underneath that wicked-looking spidery tree right before the monster took him.  Maybe that's a reach, but that's one of the first things I thought of.

Consider too the "weaving the tapestry of fates."  The entire show is based upon this premise, that all (ok, some) of our characters seem to have crossed paths at least once in their past, and they've wound up here on the island.

AND, tie in the Norse-ness of it all with the Others' funeral rite we witnessed in "The Cost of Living."  Sending a burning funeral pyre out to sea is about as Viking as it gets!

And it gets better, remember Mr. Eyepatch, and the recollection that the tailies found a glass eye back in the Arrow station?  Read on about The Well of Urd, connected to our Norns...

The Well of Urd (ON: Urðarbrunnr) is from Norse Mythology as the well in Asgard which fed one of the roots of the Yggdrasil. Also near the well in a hall are three Norns (or Nornir) that tend the well - Urd, Verdandi, and Skuld, personifications of fate. They engrave the fate of all humans onto the trunk of the Yggdrasil and attend to the needs of the tree. Odin, the Poetry god, dropped his eye into the well to gain the "Gift of Knowledge." Odin completed two other tasks to gain the "Gift of Poetry" and the "Mysteries of Nature."

(Big emphasis mine.) Oooh.  Now either I'm going off the deep end in connecting my symbolism or somebody else has been doing their research as well.  Maybe another bit of straw-grasping, but you could even connect the physical configurations of the Pearl and Swan stations to be like "wells."  So which Norn is Desmond, keeper of his "well"?

Is any of this relevant?  Hell, I dunno.  It's just damned interesting that every time I go on one of these information hunts, one thing leads to another and we end up someplace unexpected.

Something to think about.

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