Our second clue was to the name of a moth, one of the largest in the world, called the Atlas Moth, whose wingspan can reach twelve inches, with a surface area of twenty five inches. It is generally regarded as the largest simply because its rivals are the White Witch Moth and the Attacus Caesar, which each have a larger span but a smaller surface area, and by the Hercules Moth which has a larger surface area but a smaller wingspan.
But here we have "Atlas", the mythological being, in the process of being petrified, or turned to stone, by Perseus, in this set which recounts six of the latter man`s feats. I have to say that this card makes Atlas look quite benign, and it seems that he was more hard done by than evil.
His first shaurie was with, of all people, Zeus, the King of the Gods, and that wasn`t really even his fault, he was just singled out as being the best of all the Titan warriors who had fought a war with Zeus, but as a result of that Atlas was made to carry the weight of the heavens on his shoulders. It was never, as often shown, that he had to carry the earthly realms. .
He was busy doing that when Perseus popped by and asked for rest and food, but because he was a bit slow offering it (possibly because he was busy with the heavens) Perseus gave Atlas Medusa`s head in a bag and told him to unwrap it. On doing that, Atlas was immediately turned to stone, forming the Atlas Mountains in Morocco.
However there was another side to Atlas, for he was a philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer, who taught man how to navigate by the stars with a self-invented celestial sphere, and all about farming and gardening. And from him we get the Atlantic Ocean, the lost Kingdom of Atlantis, and even an Atlas of maps, which was named in his honour by Mercator.
The strange thing about this set is that each card has a different advertisement at the top, namely :
- Persee suprend les trois Grees - "Liebig ameliore les soupes fades, corse le bouillon ordinaire, releve le gout de tous les mets"
- Persee recoit l`armature magique - "Cubes OXO donnent immediament un bon bouillon; ameliorent les potages"
- Mort de la Meduse - "Bouillon OXO l`equivalent du pot-au-feu"
- Persee petrifie Atlas - "Compagnie Liebig"
- Persee delivre Andromede - Cubes OXO economisent les legumes et la viande dans les potages"
- Noces d`Andromede - "le force du boeuf, l`arome des herbese potageres"